Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

Woolf met Richmond in February 1905, following a turbulent year in her life. On February 22, 1904, her father Leslie Stephen – whose regular rages, borne of grief at his wife’s premature death, had instilled dread into his daughters – had died. In the following months she experienced a traumatic breakdown, and moved with her siblings from their Kensington family home to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, seeking a ‘new beginning’. There, Virginia was no longer forced to perform the drawing-room pageantry of serving tea to her father’s eminent friends, but had her own private sitting-room in which to read and write, while downstairs mixed groups of friends lounged into the early hours, casually discussing philosophy, art and sex over whisky or cocoa. And this shift in domestic arrangement heralded a significant development in her public life. In December 1904, following the encouragement of a family friend, her first short article was published in a clerical women’s weekly, confusingly called The Guardian . Two months later, at a party, she was introduced to Bruce Richmond (‘a restless vivacious little man, jumping onto a chair to see the traffic over the blind, & chivvying a piece of paper round the room with his feet’). Richmond had been appointed editor of the Times Literary Supplement shortly after its foundation in 1902 as an eight-page cultural appendage to The Times . Under his aegis, its weekly circulation had already reached 20,000, and it was widely acknowledged (in the words of T. S. Eliot, a regular contributor) as ‘the most respected and most respectable’ literary periodical of its day. Richmond invited Woolf to submit 1,500 words on a couple of ‘trashy’ guidebooks to Thackeray’s and Dickens’s England. The books, she disdainfully insisted, seemed ‘the productions of a pair of scissors’; nonetheless, she worked ‘like the little Printers devil I am’ to complete the piece and dispatch it to Richmond within days. Her review was published on March 10, and soon Woolf gloated that she had received ‘another book from the Times ! – a fat novel, I’m sorry to say. They pelt me now’. Aged twenty-three, Woolf was now a writer, earning money by her pen as her father had before her. Her wage-slip arrived with her breakfast plate. ‘Now we are free women’, she declared triumphantly.

In her 1931 essay ‘Professions for Women’, Woolf recalled that thrill of transforming from ‘a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand’ to ‘a professional woman’, her opinions solicited and rewarded by wages she could spend, once rent and bills were covered, on ‘an extravagant little table’ or a ‘long coveted & resisted coal scuttle’ (money, she wrote in A Room of One’s Own , ‘dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for’). But the sense of independence afforded by this work was not purely, or even primarily, financial. When she first sat down to write a damning review of a book by a respected gentleman, Woolf was haunted by a phantom voice urging her not to criticize but to charm and flatter, to speak in the language traditionally deemed womanly. She named this spectre the ‘Angel in the House’, after Coventry Patmore’s poem about the cloying, self-sacrificing ideal of Victorian womanhood; her imagined admonishment – ‘Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own’ – nearly ‘plucked the heart out of my writing’. Conquering the urge to submit to that voice, Woolf concluded, was a prerequisite not only for writing, but for freedom in all aspects of life. The TLS ’s affirmation helped Woolf to unmake assumptions of how women should think and behave, and find a new language in which to express herself, ignoring the insistent reminder that there were things ‘which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say’. Soon after her first reviews were published, seeking respite from dull commissions (‘a nondescript book like this which really suggests nothing good or bad, is damned hard work’), she began on the novel that would become her debut, The Voyage Out . Virginia Woolf was launched.

All reviews that appeared in the TLS were published anonymously (a practice that continued until 1974). This meant that Woolf didn’t have to fear public disapproval for her forthright views, but rather was invited to speak as part of a collective authority, assuming an expertise conferred by dint of the periodical’s prestige. Though she enjoyed experimenting subversively with the power afforded by that universal ‘we’, Woolf believed essays should always be firmly rooted in their authors’ ‘personal peculiarities’, and aimed from the very beginning to find and develop her own distinctive voice: to ‘say what I thought, & say it in my own way’. She never set out to provide an impersonal, authoritative assessment of a work or author, but something ostensibly humble, yet in fact radical and generous: to ‘offer merely our little hoard of observations, which other readers may like to set, for a moment, beside their own’. She had no interest in respectable hagiography or regurgitation of received opinion: for Woolf, a book’s interest lay in the feelings it stirred in its reader, which would inevitably – crucially – be entirely personal and subjective. Her role, as she saw it, was to share her own enthusiasms with her audience, to acknowledge and celebrate the influence of her own ‘cranks’, tastes and interests as she guided them ‘to enter into the mind of the writer; to see each work of art by itself, and to judge how far each artist has succeeded in his aim’. Her loyalty always remained with her audience, whom she imagined as ‘busy people catching trains in the morning or … tired people coming home in the evening’; when she came to collect her reviews and essays into a book, in 1925, she called it The Common Reader (borrowing a phrase from Samuel Johnson).

She was not averse to the occasional hatchet-job (‘my real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things’, she once wrote), but she insisted that ‘praise ought to have the last word and the weightiest’. This was not to be saccharine – she despaired that most reviews were ‘too short and too positive’ – but enthusiasm, she wrote, is ‘the life-blood of criticism’. Her own reviewing, she mused in her diary, was an act of ‘testifying before I die to the great fun & pleasure my habit of reading has given me’. Her evident joy courses irresistibly through these pieces. Woolf’s writing imparts a remarkable sense of how it feels to read: her exhilaration on closing Jane Eyre and feeling ‘that we have parted from a most singular and eloquent woman, met by chance upon a Yorkshire hillside, who has gone with us for a time and told us the whole of her life history’; her conviction, on reading John Evelyn’s diary, that his staid remarks were a flawed attempt to conceal a far richer, more acerbic and deeply insecure psyche. As an essayist, Woolf’s erudite, conversational style can be traced back through Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Max Beerbohm and Walter Pater, yet every piece is an utterly original distillation of her personality, wit and intellect.

‘You cast a beam across the dingy landscape of the Times Literary Supplement ’, wrote Vita Sackville-West to Woolf, in the course of enumerating her lover’s most seductive qualities. No other writer would compare the experience of reading Joseph Conrad to that of Helen of Troy gazing into a mirror, sensing instantly that she was in the presence of greatness; who else would think to tell the life of naval officer-turned-novelist Captain Marryat through a series of open questions at least as engaging as any answers might be, thus revealing ‘one of the most active, odd and adventurous lives that any English novelist has ever lived’. Woolf’s work for the TLS provided a stage for her lifelong engagement with the problems and potentials of biography: she had welcomed the rise of the ‘new biography’ amid the social freedoms of the new century, which swapped lifeless panegyric for shorter, more self-aware studies, and these pieces form some of her most compelling miniature experiments in the form. She was never interested in mining works for straightforward biographical details, but sought to draw out hints at her subjects’ inner lives, through deeply sympathetic attention to the nuances of texture and atmosphere. Her character studies are imbued with the insatiable curiosity of a gossip, the insight of a novelist and the steely intellect of a great critic, whether she is imagining the young Fanny Burney and her stepsister confiding at night their secret passions, pondering whether our views on love and pain have changed since John Evelyn’s time, or lamenting the stereotype of the ‘bookish man’: ‘a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the secondhand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight’.