Virginia Woolf - Alexandra Harris

Over a year ago, I read Alexandra Harris's book, Romantic Moderns. I was so inspired by her survey of modernist English writers & artists that I had great plans to read more about them, especially the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Now, just to give me another nudge, Alexandra Harris has written a biography of Virginia Woolf.

This is an elegantly written, concise survey of Woolf's life & work. It would be ideal for someone who knew little about Woolf & wanted to know who she was. Harris acknowledges the magnificent biography of Woolf by Hermione Lee, which Harris called, "the book that showed me what literature can do and sent me off to study English." Woolf's life is economically described. Her happy early childhood, the summers at Cornwall that inspired To The Lighthouse, her despair & breakdown after the death of her beloved mother, Julia. Her education, directed by her father, Leslie Stephen, & the revelation of books & literature. The escape from conventionality that was only possible for Virginia & her siblings after their father's death. Life in Bloomsbury, Richmond & Sussex, marriage to Leonard Woolf. Her relationships with friends & lovers. The mental illnesses that punctuated her life & the soothing work at the Hogarth Press that helped her to recover.The last years with the threat of war & her final decision to commit suicide when she felt the mental illness returning in 1941.

I found it especially invaluable for the insights into the fiction, which I've never really been able to love, & the connections between the life & the work. I always feel at a bit of a distance from Woolf's fiction. I've read most of the novels but my real love is the Diaries. From A Writer's Diary, the selection that Leonard put together to show Virginia as a working writer (about to be reprinted by Persephone) to the complete six volumes, I loved Woolf's voice.

Woolf did not conceive her diary as a place of guarded privacy...She started to write for her older self, imagining conversations with Virginia Woolf at fifty. And she was fully aware, especially as she became more famous, that her diary might well be read by others. Reading her accounts of meetings with Yeats or T S Eliot, for example, one feels her shaping the moment for posterity. There is surprisingly little about the boredoms, humiliations, and terrors of illness. As usual, she bothered to think through the reasons for this: "I want to appear a success even to myself." The diary feels so full and expansive that it is tempting to imagine that all her life is here. It is not, but here is the version of life she wanted to remember.

I find it fascinating to pick an event from the diaries & then read the letters she wrote at the same time. As we all do, she had different voices for different people & she can write several letters about the same incident to different people, putting a slightly different slant on it each time. It's even more exciting to open A Writer's Diary as I just did & find myself reading the entry she made on October 27th 1928 when she returned from giving the lecture that became A Room of One's Own.

Thank God, my long toil at the women's lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women - that's my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine and have a room of their own. ... I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I get a sense of tingling and vitality from an evening's talk like that; one's angularities and obscurities are smoothed and lit.

I also prefer the essays to the fiction. The Common Reader books are just so full of Woolf's wide reading & Harris describes how much research & reading went into just one essay. I recently treated myself to Vol 5 of the Collected Essays edited by Stuart N Clarke which contains the second series of The Common Reader as well as the essay Women & Fiction that became A Room of One's Own & I've been reading an few essays every week.

Inspired by this biography, I did read Between the Acts last week. I admired it but it left me cold. I think I'll just have to admit quiet defeat & keep reading the essays, letters & diaries.

Virginia Woolf is a beautifully produced book. A compact hardback with almost 50 illustrations it's an example of a book that doesn't need to be a single page longer. The final chapter is a survey of Woolf's reputation since her death, & is especially good on the various feminist interpretations that portrayed Woolf as a victim of the patriarchy & the medical establishment or a lesbian feminist heroine. Alexandra Harris's version of the life is admirably balanced & gives full weight to all the aspects of Woolf's life. I enjoyed it very much.

Sorting out the new e-reader... & a bit of a ramble

My faithful e-reader, basic but easy to use, conked out a couple of weeks ago. My friend P thinks it was the CPU as I couldn't access any of the books, all I could see were little grey thumbnails (& the only excuse for grey book covers is Persephone books which these weren't). So, I decided that I would look around for a new e-reader with a few more whiz bang features.

I decided on the new Sony Touch with wi-fi. I won't go through all my struggles with Adobe not talking to the Sony Reader or the number of registration forms I had to fill in for just about every move I made. All I will say is that, after a couple of hours of me talking to the PC & the PC not talking back to me, the Sony Reader miraculously found the e-books I had stored on Adobe & whizzed them across to the Sony Reader & I somehow worked out how to get them on the new reader. Then, I needed a Bex & a good lie down. Just today (because I needed a week's recovery time), I managed to get the free e-books I had stored on my PC onto the reader so I'm feeling quite pleased. I'm not very clever with technology so this is an achievement, believe me!

The Sony Touch is smaller & much lighter than my old e-reader. I'm enjoying the increased functionality. It's much easier to move through a book (now I can type in a page number. Before I could only move through a book by increments of 5%. Awkward but it did wonders for my maths skills). I can bookmark, use the dictionary & I even tried out the wi-fi at work & was able to download a book from our e-library.

I have been reading (Alexandra Harris's excellent biography of Virginia Woolf) & I will be posting a review & a poem over the next couple of days but I need to walk away from the PC for a bit. I've started the next Julia Probyn book by Ann Bridge now that I'm e-able again & it's just as good as the previous books in the series.

I also want to mention a new feature on Blogger. I can now reply directly to a comment rather than my replies being at the bottom of the list. Anyone can reply to a comment of course but when a conversation starts as it sometimes does, it will be easier to keep track.

Some book news to end this ramble. Virago are going to reprint two novels by Angela Thirkell in December. High Rising & Wild Strawberries. I haven't read any Thirkell but I know there are many fans out there. I've always thought I should read Thirkell one day & I have an omnibus on the tbr shelves so I may be inspired this year. I'm sure I'm going to want to buy the Viragos, can't wait to see the covers.

Romantic Moderns - Alexandra Harris

When I think of the artists of the 1930s, I think of the Modernists. Art Deco ceramics & jewellery, angular, minimalist architecture & pictures. Alexandra Harris has broadened my knowledge & my definition of modernism in her new book, Romantic Moderns. The subtitle sums up the theme of the book, English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.

England in the 30s was seen as a bit of a backwater of the Modernist movement. The most innovative work was coming from Europe & the English were portrayed as being in love with the past, especially the rural past. The critic, Roger Fry, was immensely influential in this period. He had organised the famous Post Impressionist exhibition of 1910 & was responsible for shaking off the Victorian past. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group & Virginia Woolf wrote his biography after his death. The Bloomsbury artists lived in the country & found their inspiration in their houses as well as decorating them with their art & the products of the Omega workshop, another Fry initiative.

The theme of the book that I found most interesting was that these artists & writers were recording their vision of England. As the 30s drew to a close & WWII began, the desire to connect with the landscape was very powerful. As well as the abstract artists who were paring their vision down to the barest & most modern minimum, there were also artists recording their joy in traditional scenes of rural life but with a modernist twist. Stanley Spencer’s pictures of Cookham have recognisable portraits of real people but also fantastic scenes like his vision of the Judgement Day when the dead will rise from the parish churchyard. Poets like T S Eliot & John Betjeman wrote of country villages & the London suburbs. Vita Sackville-West’s poems, The Land & The Garden, were celebrations of home & a reimagining of Milton’s Eden. Her retreat to her garden as war approached was a return to Eden as opposed to Milton’s Paradise Lost. During the war, she was planning the White Garden at Sissinghurst, a little bit of defiance in the face of wholesale destruction.

The 1930s really were the last opportunity for the past to be recorded & conserved before WWII swept away so many aspects of traditional English life. Florence White was collecting the traditional recipes of England that were rapidly disappearing in an age of convenience food. Her book, Good Things in England, has been reprinted by Persephone, & is full of regional specialities that may have disappeared altogether if not for her work.

This is a very inadequate review as there is so much in Alexandra Harris’s book. I’ve just picked out a few of the artists covered in chapters on subjects like the Church, the English weather, village life & the search for a home. I haven’t even mentioned John & Myfanwy Piper, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh & the many other writers & artists with walk-on parts. As well as fascinating reading, the book is beautifully produced, with dozens of illustrations in the text. I want to read Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts & T S Eliot’s Four Quartets & more Evelyn Waugh. It’s that kind of book that sends the reader off on to new reading paths. Romantic Moderns is a fascinating look at a neglected aspect of English Modernism.