Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

The Times Literary Supplement was born in January 1902. Its first ever front page bashfully stated that ‘during the Parliamentary session Literary Supplements to “The Times” will appear as often as may be necessary in order to keep abreast with the more important publications of the day’. Fortunately, the question of necessity was not left in the hands of literary journalists (who, we can imagine, might occasionally push for a holiday or two), and the title became a weekly one. A few years later, the TLS split entirely from The Times .

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FICTION

The Voyage Out

Night and Day

Jacob’s Room

Mrs Dalloway

To the Lighthouse

Orlando

The Waves

The Years

Between the Acts

NON-FICTION

The Common Reader Vols 1 and 2

A Room of One’s Own

Flush

Three Guineas

Roger Fry

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by TLS Books in 2019

Preface copyright © Ali Smith 2019

Introduction copyright © Francesca Wade 2019

Illustration copyright © Ella Baron 2019

Cover illustration by Ella Baron

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008361884

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008355739

Version: 2020-11-05

Two things I mean to do when the long dark evenings come: to write, on the spur of the moment, as now, lots of little poems to go into P.H. : as they may come in handy: to collect, even bind together, my innumerable T.L.S. notes: to consider them as material for some kind of critical book: quotations? comments? ranging all through English literature as I’ve read it and noted it during the past 20 years.

Virginia Woolf, 1938

1 Cover

2 About the TLS

3 Works by Virginia Woolf

4 Title Page

5 Copyright

6 Epigraph

7 Contents

8 Preface

9 Introduction

10 Frontispiece

11 Charlotte Brontë

12 Hours in a Library

13 George Eliot

14 The Letters of Henry James

15 John Evelyn

16 On Re-reading Novels

17 How it Strikes a Contemporary

18 Montaigne

19 Joseph Conrad

20 Notes on an Elizabethan Play

21 Thomas Hardy’s Novels

22 Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister

23 Aurora Leigh

24 The Captain’s Death Bed

25 A Note on the Text

26 About the Author

27 Enjoyed the book?

28 Also from TLS Books

29 About the Publisher

Landmarks CoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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By Ali Smith

Genius and ink : the phrase that gives this book its title has been notched out of ‘On Re-reading Novels’, one of the essays by Virginia Woolf written over two decades as a reviewer and critic for the Times Literary Supplement . Ostensibly a consideration of Percy Lubbock’s 1921 publication The Craft of Fiction , the real focus of ‘On Re-reading Novels’ is the beginnings of the critical attempt towards a fuller understanding of the novel as form. Woolf wrote it at a time when ideas about the shape of the novel were about to defy all former imaginings. James Joyce’s Ulysses had been serialized and passed around in bits and pieces for the preceding four years and was finally published in its entirety in early 1922; and Woolf’s own transformatory work had begun with her first truly great experimental novel Jacob’s Room , which she published three months after this essay appeared. You might say the whole notion of what a novel could be was being re-read.

So what makes a novel a novel, then? ‘Obviously there must be a process, and it is at work always and in every novel’, she writes in July 1922. ‘We must have been aware that a novelist, before he can persuade us that his world is real and his people alive, must solve certain questions and acquire certain skill. But until Mr. Lubbock pierced through the flesh and made us look at the skeleton we were almost ready to believe that nothing was needed but genius and ink.’ Thank you, Mr. L, she says, for the helpful attention paid to the concept of process, meanwhile she quietly infers that his splaying-open of the form is also a kind of killing.

When it comes to literary form and its relation to concepts of reality, or concepts of literary/literal aliveness in the form of the novel, Woolf would ask something a lot more vital from critical response. This collection lets its readers trace the formation of her own critical voice, through her responses to a range of classic (and not so classic) writers and literary forms. It charts a timeline of pieces via which her open, wry and intuitive reading of a work or a writer shifts in potency from an early brilliance that’s conscious of (and still a bit beholden to) deference to tradition, to the finding of a formidable vital intelligence of voice and critical form, one which would revolutionize the possibilities of critical writing.