Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (Jan - April 2018)

[Susan]

This is a thread for our last Buddy Read of January, 2018

Virginia Woolf

This book will start the week 29th January 2018 - reading four chapters per week of 40 chapters in total - so will last for 10 weeks (ending on Sun 15 April 2018))

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n02/jacquel...

A review to whet the appetite!

[Susan]

Week 1: 29th January - 4th February
Part 1 - 1882-1904
Chapters 1-4: Biography, Houses, Paternal and Maternal

[Susan]

I have opened this thread, as I suspect some of us will wish to start this book at the weekend. Good timing as well, with Woolf's birthday yesterday. Happy reading everyone!

[Roman Clodia]

Thanks - I couldn't resist starting this yesterday. It's wonderfully detailed, and also deeply intelligent about... oh, everything! I love that Lee starts by thinking about what biography is. I'm only about 50 pages in but think this is going to be a favourite of the year.

[Emma]

I’m away in Orlando and decided not to drag that massive tome with me, so I’ll be starting on 5th Feb.

Really looking forward to it, there’s been lots of stuff online recently because of the anniversary of her birthday so it’s properly whetted the appetite for learning more.

[Susan]

Good to hear, RC and Emma. I have also started the book today and it is really readable. I too think I am going to enjoy this a lot.

[Susan]

One of the things that interests me about this biography is that it is not linear, but it works. I recently read a biography of Ngaio Marsh, which was set out in a similar, thematic way, but it didn't work nearly as well.

I love the first chapter, where the author muses on how she should write Virginia Woolf's biography? Through her family history, as a victim, from the point of view of her country, class or as a member of the Bloomsbury Group?

It is also interesting that she mentions the fact that Woolf, and her contemporaries, were on the cusp of biographies becoming gossipy... Containing just not facts, but honest information on the subject's lives, loves and opinions.

[Val]

The library have sent me a message to say that my reserved copy is now available for collection, so I should be able to collect it soon and read it to the schedule.

[Susan]

That's good, Val. I have read ahead, I must admit. I really did enjoy reading the first chapter on the train today.

[Roman Clodia]

I hadn't really thought before about VW being born (1882) into a Victorian household and being effectively a Victorian child - the main image I have of her is, I think, the 1920s Bloomsbury one.

I also like the way Lee is balanced in her appraisals: she's clear about the exclusionary nature of Bloomsbury, rather than just romanticising it as a group of social radicals. Loving this book!

[Susan]

Yes, she had a very Victorian childhood, didn't she? I was surprised at how many half siblings she had, from both parents. She had quite a limited childhood really and it was surprising that her father didn't send his daughters to school? Tutors are all very well, but he obviously never thought his daughters would have a career.

[Roman Clodia]

Yes, a vast extended family - I only knew about the Duckworth step-siblings, didn't realise her father had been married before as well - and to Thackeray's daughter! Plus all those numerous cousins...

Oh, and the Wilberforce connection on her father's side was new to me, too.

Just about to start the chapter on her mother's antecedents.

[Susan]

The Thackeray connection was entirely new to me! Very surprising.

[Judy]

In her novel Night and Day, there is a character who is the daughter of a famous Victorian poet and is always arranging his papers, and the house is full of memorabilia of him.

I've read that this character was based on Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, who was the sister of Woolf's father's first wife and known to her as Aunt Anny. Not sure if this character from the novel is mentioned in the Hermione Lee biography, which I read some years ago.

[Susan]

We do hear of all the various relatives, and family branches. Plus, in the second chapter, we hear of all the houses that were important to her. Talland House in St Ives, where she idealised her childhood holidays and 22 Hyde Park Gate, in particular, where she spent the first 22 years of her life (very symmetrical!).

Obviously, times were different then, and so were areas, but I think Kensington must have been a very formal place to have lived. Yes, there are Kensington Gardens, and the museums, but it is all tall houses, and railings. You would imagine that living in a large house in Central London, the family would have been very comfortable, but Leslie seems to have constantly demanded cuts and economies and, generally, made everyone very uncomfortable. The Master of his house?

[Judy]

I have just checked and I believe the character from Night and Day who I was thinking of is Mrs Hilbery, who also makes a brief appearance in Mrs Dalloway.

There is a collection of newspapers which Virginia and the other children wrote - Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper , published by Hesperus. I have been meaning to read this but haven't got round to it yet.

[Roman Clodia]

Yes, Aunt Anny and the Mrs Hilbery connection is made in the book - I don't think anything passes by Hermione Lee!

[Susan]

The Hyde Park Gate News looks interesting, Judy. I will have a look after reading this.

RC is right, she joins every line and makes every connection, but her writing is very readable. As with all great biographers, she can hide her scholarly work, so you are not wading through it.

[Judy]

RC and Susan, I read the Hermione Lee biography a few years back and remember it as excellent. You are in for a treat.

[Roman Clodia]

Definitely, I'm loving it. It's been on the shelf for years but I think I was daunted by the fact of it being a huge and unwieldy volume which I can only read at home - so glad I've finally committed to it, and it's great to be able to share the interest.

[Val]

I dipped into it briefly last night. It does look readable, but I think I was too tired to make much sense of the family relationships.

[Susan]

I find it hard to read non-fiction when I am tired, Val. I must finish off the latest Jackson Lamb this weekend as it is out later this week. I am nearly at the end and very worried about Roderick Ho at the moment!

[Nigeyb]

Oh Roddy, Roddy, Roddy...

[Roman Clodia]

... I have a wholly weird crush on JK Coe...! 😍

[Susan]

I think Catherine Standish is my favourite and my crush would be on River :)

[Nigeyb]

I'm taking this discussion over the Mick Herron thread!


https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Susan]

Yes, you are right. Back to Virginia - equally wonderful in her own way :)

[Roman Clodia]

A wonderful fourth chapter on VW's maternal ancestry and the complicated relationship she had with her mother: 'She [VW's mother] seems to have fully endorsed the Victorian models for female behaviour... she was opposed to female suffrage and thought women should only be educated for domestic careers'. Gosh!

Lee is sensitive to all the nuances of mother/daughter relationships and is so clever in linking them intellectually to themes in the books without recourse to a simplistic fiction=autobiography equation.

I can't help wondering what the impact would have been if Julia Stephen had lived longer.

[Susan]

I haven't read that yet, but I have read the 'Paternal,' chapter about Leslie. Interesting that Vanessa said that she preferred her mother and Virginia her father. Yet Leslie seemed a very difficult man.

[Roman Clodia]

Susan wrote: "Leslie seemed a very difficult man."

Yes, extremely: so awkward and irritable. I'm also fascinated at how, in the early C20th, people do things with little or no professional training - writing and editing the DNB with no more than a BA and no academic affiliation, for example. How does one research as a layman without access to archives? Fascinating!

[Susan]

Having now read the chapter on Virginia's mother I was also surprised to read that Julia was opposed to female suffrage. Her thoughts that women should be educated for domestic careers obviously never helped Vanessa, or Virginia, get the education they craved.

It was also interesting to read how often she was off nursing the sick and dying. You forget how people were born, and died, at home, rather than in hospitals then.

Laura also seems to have the one sibling that has entered the story, like the Duckworths, but that you feel very uneasy about. A story there that will never be told properly, as there is no way of knowing what her real issue was - autism, possibly?

[Susan]

Just to clarify, next weeks reading schedule, for the 5th to the 11th February will cover chapters 5-8. These are still in Part 1: 1882 - 1904 and are:

5. Childhood
6. Siblings
7. Adolescence
8. Abuses

Hmmm, intriguing chapter titles!

[Roman Clodia]

Yes, Laura is such an uneasy presence - how inhumane we were as a society not that long ago!

Leslie's attitude to her is particularly upsetting, I thought - and creates even more pressure on Virginia to be the clever daughter, in contrast. For such a sensitive child growing up in that hot-house of emotions, it's no wonder she suffered with her mental health.

[Susan]

It was stifling as well, to be always at home - educated there as well. I think both she, and Vanessa, would have benefited from going to school.

[Val]

The contrast between summers in Cornwall and winters in Kensington in the 'Houses' chapter is quite marked.

[Susan]

Yes, endless sun at the English seaside? Has never happened when I've been there...

[Val]

I think it was more about the freedom they had than the weather. The older children were allowed to spend all day doing what they wanted, they seem to have looked after the little ones and none of them were subjected to any of the repressive parenting of their London life.

[Susan]

I think that was a truly happy time for Virginia, wasn't it? A romantic idyll.

What did either of you think of the Siblings, so far. I am looking forward to reading the chapter on them next week. I am intrigued by all the various relationships within the house. They were almost like two families, with Laura someone on the outside.

[Roman Clodia]

Lee unpicks so many nuances in the sibling and step-sibling relationships - I don't want to say too much now till you've read it.

[Susan]

Funny how we think of step siblings and step mothers, etc as a fairly modern family dynamic, but it was obviously the norm, especially if people were widowed and had children.

[Roman Clodia]

Yes, those huge Victorian families were always complicated as people tended to re-marry (Victorian men clearly being unable to look after themselves domestically!), plus with the high risk of childbirth, there was always a danger of wives dying relatively young, and then the husband re-marrying partly to find someone to look after the children - think of the Wollstonecrafts/Godwins, for example, and the complicated relationships between Mary Shelley and her step-sisters.

It does help, in Woolf's case, to make clear how much her childhood roots were Victorian - I'm admiring her even more than I already did for casting off her upbringing.

[Val]

Then they were usually from second marriages after a partner had died, nowadays they are more likely to be from remarriages after divorce.
Two of my four grandparents had step-siblings, but I don't know if that was typical (a quick Google mainly brings up divorce statistics).

[Nigeyb]

I just came across this nugget on the London Fictions website..


Arnold Bennett was despised by the aesthetic, intellectual Bloomsbury Group; Virginia Woolf went so far as to give a lecture at Cambridge in 1924 mocking the prosaic nature of Bennett’s writing and his failure, as she saw it, to imagine and recreate the inner life of his characters.

I posted about it on our Arnold Bennett thread...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I'd be interested to know if this comes up in this biography. If so, please add a comment.

I am sure I've read elsewhere that Virginia Woolf was quite down on a number of writers she felt were too safe and predictable, and were not pushing the boundaries.

[Susan]

That seems a bit unfair, Nigeyb. There is surely room for all authors, who cater for all tastes of readers? I think the Bloomsbury group had their critics and Virginia criticised her family for being insular, yet the Bloomsbury group was insular, by its nature - and could be snobbish too.

[Judy]

I believe Bennett actually started this whole controversy, by criticising Woolf in an article in 1923 with the title "Is the Novel Decaying?" which claimed modern writers were not as good as those of his generation because their characters were not as memorable. He singled Jacob's Room out for criticism, though only in a brief paragraph, and Woolf was very upset.

Woolf then answered back and in turn criticised Bennett and his literary generation, at much greater length, via her lecture Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown in 1924. There is a lot more about this in an article I've just found online - I haven't yet read all of this as it is very long, but it looks interesting, moving on from the in-fighting to look at the differences in approach between the writers and at why Woolf felt that human character had changed from 1910 onwards.

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/...

[Judy]

Just to add that I really like Arnold Bennett judging by the two books by him that I've read so far - over to the Bennett thread to say more. :)

[Judy]

Judy wrote: "I believe Bennett actually started this whole controversy, by criticising Woolf in an article in 1923 with the title "Is the Novel Decaying?" which claimed modern writers were not as good as those ..."

Ah, but now I have to disagree with myself, since via a bit of further Googling I've found out that Woolf had already criticised Bennett in 1919 before he went on to criticise her:

Just found this bit on another web page:

... in her 1919 essay ‘Modern Novels’ (later reprinted as ‘Modern Fiction’), she poured scorn on the fiction of the Edwardian novelists – whom she branded ‘materialist’ for their focus on external reality and relative neglect of psychological complexity – and mentions by name three writers: H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett. Later, in the 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, she expanded on her objections to Bennett’s approach to writing novels (largely motivated by the negative review of her own novel, Jacob’s Room, which Bennett had written!).

https://interestingliterature.com/201...

So clearly there was an ongoing controversy about literature between these two great writers.

[Val]

How good was Woolf at imagining the inner lives of characters as unlike herself as Bennett's were unlike him?

[Nigeyb]

Thanks for these interesting responses.


I look forward to learning more when readers get to the appropriate section in this biography



This article in the New York Times by Wendy Lesser makes some interesting points....

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28...

I find it disturbing that Virginia Woolf, the possessor of an intense but extremely limited form of genius, should have been able, in the course of just 60 or 70 years, to crowd a great novelist like Arnold Bennett right off the literary map.

[Judy]

Surely there is plenty of room for both Woolf and Bennett - I can't agree with the writer of this piece calling Woolf's genius "extremely limited". They are both great writers, even if they didn't always appreciate one another's greatness.

While we're talking about Woolf as a literary critic, I really enjoyed The Common Reader - I think I skipped some pieces about writers I hadn't read anything by, so I must go back some time and read some more.