Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

Bruce Richmond quickly came to consider Woolf his jewel in a cohort of reviewers that included T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Gissing and Andrew Lang. In November 1905, Woolf breezily told a friend that the TLS ‘sends me one novel every week; which has to be read on Sunday, written on Monday, and printed on Friday. In America, as you know, they make sausages like that.’ She loved the rhythm and routine of these assignments: the feeling of alchemy as an essay ‘expands under my hands’, the satisfaction of hearing that a respected editor was ‘delighted to accept my charming article’, the excitement, on occasion, of visiting Richmond himself at the TLS office in Printing House Square, breezing past carts waiting to transport fresh bales of papers to the newsagents (‘carrying my manuscript to the Times I felt like a hack much in keeping’). At other times, when she was up against her deadline, it was an even greater frisson to find that the TLS would come to her:

I write & write; I am rung up & told to stop writing; review must be had on Friday; I typewrite till the messenger from the Times appears; I correct the pages in my bedroom with him sitting over the fire here.

‘A Christmas number not at all to Mr Richmond’s taste,’ he said. ‘Very unlike the supplement style.’

‘Gift books, I suppose?’ I suggested.

‘O no, Mrs Woolf, it’s for the advertisers.’

At first, she reviewed anything Richmond tossed her, covering cookery books and travel guides, poetry and swathes of debut novels. But in 1920, exhausted by the commitment, she decided to dictate her own terms – ‘only leading articles, or those I suggest myself’ – and felt a triumphant release ‘like a drunkard who has successfully resisted three invitations to drink’. Even when she was writing only on subjects she had chosen, she sometimes resented having to compromise with an editor: when Richmond reprimanded her for calling Henry James ‘lewd’ (‘Now poor dear old Henry James – at any rate, think it over, & ring me up in 20 minutes’), she resolved furiously to work with no one who ‘rewrites my sentences to suit the mealy mouths of Belgravia’. She wondered anxiously whether the best form of criticism was that spoken ‘over wine glasses and coffee cups late at night’. But Woolf never stopped writing for the TLS , even after she became established as a novelist and publisher and began to complain in her diary at the drudgery of ‘1,500 words by Wednesday’ which eroded the time she had for other writing. The TLS was far too integral a part of her life as a writer for her to abandon its pages. Across these decades, it provided a crucial testing-ground for radical new ideas; the books she wrote on, the authors she examined, became Woolf’s personal canon.

Each of these pieces is a gem in its own right, and deserves to be read purely for itself. Yet it is also fascinating to read these essays in conjunction with Woolf’s other work, to trace the way she grappled across projects with knotty existential questions and put her principles into practice. While she was stuck on her 1919 novel Night and Day , feeling frustrated at her inability to eschew the confines of realism, she was busy analysing the state of postwar fiction and calling for ‘new forms for our new sensations’. By the time she published ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’, her great assessment of the stakes for literature in ‘an age of fragments’, she had completed Jacob’s Room , her formal breakthrough, and was looking ahead to Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , in which she would address the present upheaval through her experiments with structure and language. In January 1919, she began ‘reading through the whole of George Eliot, in order to sum her up, once and for all, upon her anniversary’; that same year she opened a fresh notebook to gather her thoughts on her father’s friend Thomas Hardy, in response to a request from Richmond to ‘be ready with an article on Hardy’s novels whenever the evil day comes’. She worked sporadically on the piece (‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’) for the next ten years. ‘I pray he sits safe & sound by his fireside at this moment’, she wrote guiltily in December 1921, having failed to finish a new draft; it was eventually published on his death in 1928. Her ongoing attempt ‘to discover the broad outlines of his genius’ was the backdrop to all her work in this formative decade.

But of all Woolf’s books, it is perhaps A Room of One’s Own (1929) that bears the closest relationship with her TLS reviews. Her sparkling essays on Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are rich case studies in that book’s major theme: the way women’s lives have been, throughout history, narrowed and curtailed by pernicious social expectations. Barrett Browning’s early life shared certain features with Woolf’s own: the early deaths of a mother and beloved brother, periods of illness, a tyrannical father, and an ability to take comfort in reading ‘profusely and privately’, using books as ‘a substitute for living’. Woolf’s sympathy is palpable when she describes Barrett Browning locked in her bedroom engrossed in stories of ‘immortal improprieties’, starved of conversation or intellectual impetus. The essay ‘Aurora Leigh’ is a powerful denunciation of what it means for anyone to be forced to live inside their own mind, rather than out in the world:

She raced through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics with live men and women … It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreparable damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, guessing at what was outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within.

Browning’s poem Aurora Leigh , Woolf concludes, is ‘a masterpiece in embryo’: ‘a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some pre-natal stage waiting the final stroke of creative power to bring it into being’.

A Room of One’s Own was published thirteen years after Woolf’s TLS piece on Charlotte Brontë, a decade after that on George Eliot, but its citation of both writers as powerful examples of astonishing female creativity nonetheless circumscribed by social norms is testament to Woolf’s long, ongoing engagement with their work, sparked decisively in these early reviews. She planned to return to this theme in her final project, begun in autumn 1940 as bomber planes soared over her Sussex home. This was to be an idiosyncratic history of English popular culture, in which Woolf intended to examine not only ‘the germ of creation’ in writers but also the social forces that stymied imagination. Her insistence that a work cannot be understood without knowledge of the circumstances of its creation was the defining feature of her scheme, extending the principles she had developed in her biographical essays to the story of literature, and of England, in its entirety. The project was the triumphant culmination of decades of research, languishing within her ‘innumerable TLS notes’: in the surviving synopsis lie the vestiges of the year she spent devouring Elizabethan playwrights, her insatiable fascination with ‘obscure lives’, her belief in the importance of an intimate relationship between artist and audience. That work – sure to have been artful, esoteric and radical – was never finished, but these essays reveal the contours of all that might have been.

Books, Woolf insisted, come alive on encountering a reader, and change with them. Our impressions of the same book across a lifetime, she wrote, could form our own autobiography: art can only survive if new generations discover it afresh and find new pleasure in it. Woolf’s reviews richly deserve to be celebrated as works of literature worth reading and re-reading in themselves. But once this book is finished, she sends us back to the shelves, eager to see what she saw, and to discover what we feel for ourselves.