Things Woolfian

Attics often give shelter to what shouldn't be preserved. Rediscovered in a crinkly, yellowed state, my dreadful 1973 term paper written for Professor Frank Ryan's honors class on the "search for unity" in Virginia Woolf's novels, nephew Quentin Bell's then-new biography my only secondary source.

Throughout the thirty-two pages, Professor Ryan diligently circled my (numerous) typos:

—but gave up correcting the error of my block paragraph quotation marks early in the game, likely worn out by the task.

On the title page, in slanting blue script, he posed these questions:

Do you imply that V.W. found unity in death? Was she "ripe" and "ready for death" in a Nietzschean sense?

Any relationship between V.W's art, her life and death, and Freud's Thanatos as dominant over Eros in 1930s?

Did V.W. feel that England was dying in 1930s?

Although I accumulated points for "handling the themes" of "male/female dichotomy," "art and its limitations," "love and its limitations," "madness," and "death," Professor Ryan signed off with another question: Could more have been done with silence?—a question time has plumped with irony.

Why can't we Woolfians stop gabbing about Virginia?

As early as 1974, in her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick already bemoaned Bloomsbury rehash: "The period, the letters, the houses, the love affairs, the blood lines: These are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again." Should the reading public need reminding in 1978, that banner year for Woolf studies and publications, John Hillaby announced in a New Scientist article that "the Woolf hunt" was "still under way." In a 2015 review of Viviane Forrester's Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, reviewer Suzanne Berne used up some of her own word count to re-ask: "To the hundreds of books that have been written about Virginia Woolf, why [Berne's italics] add another? More to the point, why aren't her own books enough?"

Worthy questions, both.

Also questions that ignore the attractions of spectating a turf war composed of interpretive skirmishes, internecine bickerings, and revelations regarding who aligns with which side and why. As Jacqueline Rose reminded in her review of Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf, closest rival—in terms of influence—to Quentin Bell's 1972 account: "It is always worth asking of any biography, with whom in the story, if anyone, does the biographer identify?"

________

Thus far no Virginia Woolf biographer has identified with Sir Leslie Stephen—writer, scholar, expert mountaineer, Shreckhorn first-ascenter, Dictionary of National Biography editor. What's intriguing, from the biographical standpoint, is the similarity of his portrayal in books, essays, and criticism devoted to his daughter. About Sir Leslie's personality there seems to be neither undue argument nor abundant sympathy. A prickly, whiny, sulky man, often overwrought and constantly overly demanding of his family's attentions and concern. A patriarch soaked in self-pity, the perpetually weeping widower. A stepfather who deeply resented Stella Duckworth's leaving his household for marriage and a household of her own. A breadwinner "with an irrational fear of ending his days in the poorhouse," his operational standard a "melodramatic tyranny" (Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf). A fellow who excelled at enacting a "Victorian widower's hysterical helplessness" (Janet Malcolm, "A House of One's Own"). In penning the Mausoleum Book—"purportedly a letter to his children to memorialize their dead mother," scoffed reviewer Virginia Hyman—Sir Leslie, once again, managed to make it all about Sir Leslie. After pledging "simply to write about your mother," the memoirist amends: "In order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself." During his lifetime, Sir Leslie was obeyed—but not without resentment. After his death, Vanessa "dreamt on more than one occasion that she had murdered him," reports Frances Spalding (Vanessa Bell). Short of murdering him, Vanessa appears not to have expressed undue sorrow when she, Thoby, Adrian, and Virginia were freed of his rule and presence...