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.

Since then, we have prided ourselves on being the world’s leading magazine for culture and ideas. Our guiding principle for the selection of pieces remains the same as it ever has been: is it interesting; and is it beautifully written? Over the years, our contributors have included the very best writers and thinkers in the world: from Virginia Woolf to Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath to Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera to Christopher Hitchens, Patricia Highsmith to Martin Scorsese.

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London, 2019

Works by Virginia Woolf

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

Copyright

TLS Books

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London SE1 9GF

The-TLS.co.uk

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

Cover illustration by Ella Baron

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008361884

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008355739

Version: 2020-11-05

Epigraph

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

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

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.

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.

Introduction

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.’

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’.

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.

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