Woolf & the Aristocracy

BOOK REVIEWS Such insights as these lead me to restate my earlier question thus: does this kind of critical attention bolster Rossetti's reputation as a Woman Poet of the Victorian era at the expense of her status as an individual , as a woman, and as a poet—all of the Victorian era? In my opinion , these essays admirably evoke and invoke all of these categories and their amalgam: Christina Rossetti. B. J. Robinson North Georgia College & State University Woolf & the Aristocracy Sonya Rudikoff. Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy. Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999. xviii + 290 pp. $55.00 SONYA RUDIKOFF takes her title from Yeats's poem, "Ancestral Houses," which she places at the head of her study, along with the related "Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation." Both poems end with questions. Yeats's attitude toward the aristocracy, while admiring, was also critical. And, Rudikoff argues, much the same ambivalence characterized Virginia Woolf 's feelings. Despite the self-conscious bohemianism of the Bloomsbury lifestyle and her own liberated politics, Woolf 's view of the world was always colored by her fascination with the aristocracy—in particular, with the lives of the collection of aristocratic women who played, at one time or another, various roles in her life. Their number included Violet Dickinson, Beatrice and Katherine Thynne, Lady Eleanor Cecil, Lady Katherine Horner, Kathleen Lyttleton, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Vita Sackville-West. Ancestral Houses traces the history of Woolf 's relationships with these women. Some of what Rudikoff writes is important or at least interesting, and much of it is fun. There are times, however when one wonders just what she is actually getting at. The following extract is not atypical: The young writer often visited Lady Eleanor Cecil at Gale, in Sussex, but not the Cecils at Hatfield House. Lady Cecil introduced Virginia Stephen to her niece, Lady Gwendolen Godolphin Osborne, and the duchess of Leeds invited her to lunch, but not to any of the extensive Leeds properties (twenty-four thousand acres) in Yorkshire, Cornwall, or Buckinghamshire.... So, in the great age of "Saturday to Monday" in the well-known houses of the day, in the golden afternoon ofthat social form so often described and nostalgically apostrophized, the younger Miss Stephen was excluded from the custom of the Edwardian weekend. She was not among the guests writing letters on the heavy, creamy—perhaps crested—house writing paper, or out in the af89 ELT 44 : 1 2001 ternoon in a tweed skirt, or changing into a tea gown; she was not one of those slipping through the corridors in the middle of the night when, as Alice Keppel said, "chacun a sa chacune." The old manor houses, the Victorian, Jacobean , or Palladian creations, the Lutyens or Norman Shaw fantasies, the Gertrude Jekyll gardens—none of them was known directly by the observant young writer, who was instead reading upstairs at Hyde Park Gate, or later at Gordon Square. That Lady Cecil, herself a writer, who sought the young Virginia's advice on the novel she was writing (but never published), would invite her for a Sunday afternoon at her Sussex cottage, but not for a weekend at the Cecils' family estate in Hertfordshire, was only to be expected. But what point is Rudikoff trying to make? That the Stephens' socializing with the Cecils gave Woolf a connection to the more aristocratic side of the Cecils' life? Or that it emphasized her exclusion from it? And what did Virginia know about that "creamy—perhaps crested—house writing paper"? Did she long for those creamy pages as she read her books upstairs ? Did she even know they existed? Or is it, instead, Rudikoff's pleasure in reciting these details we confront here? For Rudikoff clearly loves her subject. And her pleasure is infectious. There is a breathless excitement in her accounts of inherited acreage and family lines. I only wish I could be sure that her subject is always Virginia Woolf and not the British aristocracy itself. Certainly there are times when we seem very far away indeed from Woolf. When Rudikoff focuses on Woolf, she addresses the important matter of...