Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

She complains repeatedly in her diaries about how little she gets paid for it, but she clearly loved writing for the TLS . She also habitually, playfully, always fruitfully, tended to baulk against or question notions of establishment and authority, especially literary establishment, so it’s no surprise to find her in her diaries yo-yo-ing between feeling ‘important & even excited’ at being sent something to review, and by turn dejected, ‘rejected’, when no books from the Times arrive, though this ‘has the result of making me write my novel at an astonishing rate. If I continue dismissed, I shall finish within a month or two’. But Woolf was also one of the earliest critics actively to defy the preconception of a divide between what’s called critical and what’s called creative writing. In her, the revolutionary novelist is still the critic, the revolutionary critic will always also be the novelist, and this open symbiosis makes for a body of work that ensures the imaginative vitality of both. She’ll invest critique with narrative. Her narrative will never not, one way or another, involve or ask critique.

As for the real, the flesh, the bones of the literary: every essay collected here relates literary nature to the larger concept of nature in the real world. What ‘real works of art’ have in common, she suggests, is that each has ‘some change in them’ with every ‘fresh reading … as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season’.

This particular natural conjunction turns up in ‘Charlotte Brontë’ (1916), the earliest essay collected here and a gentle, reasonably knee-bending though still sharp and intuitive piece (noting the ‘crudeness’, the ‘violence’ in Brontë’s work and the simultaneous force of ‘compulsion’ in it, the ‘gesture of defiance’), an essay written by a writer still new to the novel form herself, with The Voyage Out already published and the workings of Night and Day in progress. Just four years later, by the time of her coruscating and irrepressible extended critique of the novels of Henry James, Woolf has become not just a writer about to produce, herself, a new kind of fiction, but a markedly new kind of critic too, an eyebrow-raiser, a risk-taker. She senses the uses of repression in James’s narrative. She senses the unsaid, and says so – senses the ‘secret of it all’ in the writer who’s ‘shut himself up’, who’s ‘surrounded himself with furniture of the right period’. She proceeds not just to pin but merrily to skewer James the butterfly, ‘unattached, uncommitted, ranging hither and thither at his own free will, and only at length precariously settling and delicately inserting his proboscis in the thickset lusty blossoms of the old garden beds’. It’s like a wink to camera. ‘One admits a momentary malice.’ Her James essay is a piece of pure mischief – full of generosity all the same, ending as it does on an extraordinary garlanding.

Wry, warm, funny, blatant only in the sheer blatancy of its intelligence, close to (but never outright) scornful and always in the end leaving room for readers to disagree or feel differently, what her style asks and expects of us is an equally applied intelligence. Woolf the critic is a forgiving reader as well as one happy to puncture the over-inflated, to point out when something’s not working or falls short. She never short-changes what she’s critiquing and she never short-changes the act of critique. She knows in her own bones how important a generous, open reading is, especially when it comes to the difficult critiquing of ‘the people who are giving shape as best they can to the ideas within them’, the contemporary writers, the hardest to judge, of which she’s one, ‘casting their net out over some unknown abyss to snare new shapes … we must throw our imaginations after them if we are to accept with understanding the strange gifts they bring back to us’.

Stylistically, she is herself a dredger-up of gifts. She is unique in voice, even while her immersion in a writer’s writing simultaneously produces a kind of knowing ventriloquism, so that the writer or writing being channelled and unmasked through Woolf has nowhere to hide. Is it the vitality of her intuition or the perfect pitch of her literary ear, formed by a life of wide, anarchic, studied reading, that gives her one of her great gifts, an uncanny, poetically resonant use of conjunction? The ‘word-coining genius’ of the Elizabethan dramatists strikes her ‘as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping’. She hears in Thomas Hardy’s writing the workings of a resonance that’s subconscious even to him, as if ‘very far away, like the sound of a gun out at sea on a calm summer’s morning’.

Above all, this collection reveals Woolf’s preoccupation with how to make a story – whether memoir, drama, fiction – both true to life and truly alive. This is a pre-occupation which resonates socially, politically and aesthetically throughout her writing life, through all her chosen forms and her transformations of them. Take her re-evaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh : while it admits the poem’s problems and applauds as a sign of real life even the failure in Barrett Browning’s attempt to bring poetry and her contemporary world together into a working form, it also nails literary snobbery in a critiquing of the kind of literary classism which had demoted Barrett Browning ‘to the servants’ quarters’ along with a bunch of other writers rejected for being old fashioned or unacceptable. It’s also an essay fully aware of historical gender constraints, and one in which readers can trace the fruit of the recently published A Room of One’s Own and the root of the not-yet-written Flush ; because this collection also gifts its readers the pleasure of encountering, in embryo or aftermath, the books on which Woolf has been working and the books on which she will shortly embark.

Here in the form of essays, written for not-enough-money, when the newspaper deigned to send a book or ask an appraisal, is the response of the imagination to the place where the real and the imaginative meet. Even if what she ends up reading is ‘as much out of harmony with imagination as a bedroom cupboard is with the dream of someone waking from sleep’ (‘The Captain’s Death-Bed’), Woolf is a writer for whom, for instance, in To the Lighthouse , a mere cupboard, with some drinking glasses in it which suddenly clink together for what seems no fathomable reason, marks a reverberation so far away that it hardly registers on human consciousness but will all the same shake us to the core, will mean a world war, a great and terrible loss, a momentous understanding. This is a writer for whom everything is invested with life and death and the imagination it takes to read and write both.

When I finished reading this collection, I found myself wanting to go and read or re-read everything she’d read and written about here. That’s surely the whole point. ‘A great critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how should we maintain him, on what should we feed him?’ On the writings of Woolf, of course, in all its forms: flesh, bones, genius, ink.

By Francesca Wade

I do not care about writing introductions – to me a very difficult proceeding …

Virginia Woolf, 1932

When, in May 1938, Bruce Richmond retired as Editor of the Times Literary Supplement , Virginia Woolf noted in her diary her sadness at ending her ‘30 year connection’ with him and the ‘Lit Supp’. Richmond had sent her hundreds of books for review, each time receiving back a dazzling critique which might cast a familiar writer in entirely fresh light or offer a provocative manifesto for what fiction or biography could become. His early support of her writing offered Woolf her first experience of financial independence, while the ideas she developed in these pieces – on the possibilities of language, character and style; on the importance of life-writing and the limitations of gender – seeped directly into her greatest fiction and essays. Although they had never established much of a personal friendship, she reflected now that Richmond had been one of the most influential figures in her life. ‘How pleased I used to be’, she recalled, ‘when L. called me “You’re wanted by the Major Journal!” & I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House! I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; & also was made to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.’