Virginia Woolf - great writer or intellectual show-off?

[kev67]

I was watching an American literature professor on YouTube giving a lecture about Charles Dickens. He said Dickens was regarded as Britain's 2nd greatest author after Shakespeare, or maybe Austen was 2nd, but it was pretty close. That made me wonder who our 4th and 5th would be. I thought maybe George Orwell was the most significant author from the C20th, but I could not think who else would be up there. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh did not seem in the same class. I posted this on a British literature website (at least it ended in .co.uk). Someone posted he would place Virginia Woolf in the top 5. Virginia Woolf! I have only read Mrs Dalloway and the only thing I can say in its favour is that it is short. I would as rather read one of my computer programming books for entertainment value. If you want to know why there are not many stream-of-consciousness novels then read Mrs Dalloway. If you want to read a better stream-of-consciousness book, read Trainspotting. However, it appears I am being ignorant, because someone polled 82 international book critics outside the UK for their choices, and Virginia Woolf had three books in the top 25, including To The Lighthouse at number 2 and Mrs Dalloway at number 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20151204-the-25-greatest-british-novels

[JCamilo]

I had fun with Dalloway plus Orlando is a masterpiece. You can obviusly be an intellectual show off and a great writer.

[Danik 2016]

Victorian novels are predominant in this list. But I don´t think I would give the first place to Middlemarch.
As for Virginia Woolf, she is probably one of the most original English authors and the most original female author, but not every one relishes her kind of fiction.
Intelectual show off doesn´t describe her in my opinion. She was a genuine intelectual. She belonged to a highly intelectual family and also to the Bloomsbury circle.

[TheFifthElement]

Maybe Mrs Dalloway isn't the book for you. I have a mixed relationship with Dalloway, I want to like it more than I do but I don't enjoy it that much. Yet it is quite an extraordinary book. I didn't realise it straightaway, but it is one of those books which benefits from a good think about afterward. The juxtaposition of Dalloway and Septimus is quite original, particularly when you understand that PTSD and hysteria have only recently been connected as effectively the same phenomena.

To the Lighthouse is, in my view, a much better read and perhaps Woolf's best book. The Waves is her most innovative. Jacob's Room is a nice blend between the two, quite accessible yet beautifully written. Woolf's ability at 'scene-making' is second to none. There are descriptions in both Lighthouse and Jacob's Room which have etched into my memory in a way few other passages do. The old woman singing on the steps of St. Paul's. Mrs Ramsey knitting in the darkening room.

[Ana]

How about Night and Day? Has anyone read this one?

I personally liked Mrs Dalloway. I read it like it was some kind of a longer poem about doubt, nostalgia, but mainly about how one can regard life: fighting/refusing it (Septimus's choice) or embracing/loving it (Clarissa's choice). This is not an easy content for a novel, so I would say Woolf is a great + intellectual writer, not a show-off.

[kev67]

Victorian novels are predominant in this list. But I don´t think I would give the first place to Middlemarch.
As for Virginia Woolf, she is probably one of the most original English authors and the most original female author, but not every one relishes her kind of fiction.
Intelectual show off doesn´t describe her in my opinion. She was a genuine intelectual. She belonged to a highly intelectual family and also to the Bloomsbury circle.

I thought you said in another thread that you had not read Middlemarch. I do not know whether it deserves first place, but it is worth reading.

[kev67]

Maybe Mrs Dalloway isn't the book for you. I have a mixed relationship with Dalloway, I want to like it more than I do but I don't enjoy it that much. Yet it is quite an extraordinary book. I didn't realise it straightaway, but it is one of those books which benefits from a good think about afterward. The juxtaposition of Dalloway and Septimus is quite original, particularly when you understand that PTSD and hysteria have only recently been connected as effectively the same phenomena.



I am no psychiatrist but what Septimus had seemed to be way beyond PTSD. He had lost touch with reality.

[Danik 2016]

I thought you said in another thread that you had not read Middlemarch. I do not know whether it deserves first place, but it is worth reading.

I am not sure if I did. If I did I don´t remember it.

[kev67]

I feel like slagging off Virginia Woolf some more. To help me I found this article (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586663/Virginia-Woolf-makes-me-want-to-vomit.html) in the Telegraph by Philip Hensher, a professor of creative writing, no less.

[kev67]

I've been trying to read her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf) again, in which she slags off Arnold Bennett, H G Wells and John Galsworthy. I started skimming it by page 3 because the noise to signal ratio is quite high. I think Arnold Bennett asked for it because he wrote an article in which he said they weren't any first-rate, young, authors, British ones anyway. Mrs Brown is a hypothetical old woman sitting in a train whom they either ignore, belittle, patronise or misunderstand. Codswallop. I read Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tales, and although it's not a favourite, I am certain he could write little, old ladies at least as well as Woolf or any of the favoured authors she lists. She ends her essay with:

Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and
describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that
she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place;
wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she
says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have
an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.
But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her.
Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in
a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction —
we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.
But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown.

What great books were written in the 1920s? I can only think of Winnie-the-Pooh.

[Ecurb]

I read "To the Lighthouse" a couple of years ago, and it remains my sole Wolfe novel Here's what I wrote about it at the time:


"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Wolfe. Another early Modernist novel, this tells the homely tale of a family living on the Scottish coast for the summer. Nothing much happens; a brooch is lost, Beef en Daube is served at a dinner party. Then the novel skips ahead ten years -- the key character in the first part has died -- and the other characters reconvene to try to sail out to the lighthouse (which is on an island). Every scene is told from the point of view of a different character, and there is a metaphor in every other sentence. At first, I found this annoying: at one point Wolfe compares a breaking wave to the sudden shattering of broken glass. I thought, "Huh? Why compare the constant and eternal to the ephemeral? Shouldn't a metaphor work the other way around?" The metaphor did work, in the end, because Wolfe wanted to freeze certain moments in time and make them eternal. The Beef en Daube dinner party begins with all the characters thinking about how dull it is. This reader (at least) was beginning to agree with the diners -- but then something happened. Mrs. Ramsey turned on her charm, and suddenly the dinner party was bathed in the glow of, well, a lighthouse (Mrs. Ramsey, like a lighthouse, directs the travelers to safety).

Wolfe annoyed me at first, but grew on me. I wonder about the hostility toward her. Hensher seems determined to despise her. I barely glanced at his short critique, but some of it was ridiculous. An important character gets abandoned? That's true! Wolfe doesn't follow the formulas that Hensher teaches his creative writing scholars! Horrors!

[kev67]

I am slightly concerned that I don't like Virginia Woolf. Maybe that means I'm a bit thick. I've just been reading some Goodreads reviews of Tom Jones, and the people who rate that less than 3 stars seem a bit thick to me. I never really got into Shakespeare neither. I did like Moby Dick though, and that's not an easy book.

[Ecurb]

Well, you needn't consider yourself "a bit thick". Lots of smart people don't like Virginia Wolfe, including Hensher. I'd guess she's one of the most disliked "great" writers, which is one reason I never read any of her novels until a couple of years ago.

I do think that some literary tastes must be developed, especially when the authors are difficult. Of course there's no reason to suffer by reading novels that one doesn't like. But developing a taste for novels that other people of generally good taste think are great is worth SOME effort. I couldn't make it through "The Sound and the Fury" at some point last year. Maybe I should try again.

[kev67]

I have started reading To The Lighthouse, mostly because it is the only book in the top 10 of British novels, according to the BBC survey, that I have not read yet. I want the poseur points. I suppose I should not be determined not to like it. I do like it more than Mrs Dalloway, but I have liked most books I have read more than Mrs Dalloway. I am not sure whether "liking it" is the point with this sort of book. The characters in To The Lighthouse are not as busy as in Mrs Dalloway, and thus are letting their minds wander more. The problem is mine is wandering while I am reading it.

[Danik 2016]

Maybe if you read it as novel which is a very subjective account of how a certain middle class went though pre - and post II World War times it will become more interesting. It is also a good example of internal monologue. Or try Orlando, where there is more action, even if it is highly subjective too.

[kev67]

Maybe if you read it as novel which is a very subjective account of how a certain middle class went though pre - and post II World War times it will become more interesting. It is also a good example of internal monologue. Or try Orlando, where there is more action, even if it is highly subjective too.


The next Woolf book is The Waves at Number 16. Orlando is in the top 100 somewhere. The characters in Lighthouse seem like aliens to me. Society has changed a lot in the last 90 years. At one point Mrs Ramsey has the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade stuck in her head. I wonder if that poen is even taught in schools any more. I suppose Mrs Ramsey is a wife and mother to eight children, some grown up. She spends much time thinking about them. I don't have much family and don't spend much time thinking about them.

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm in a Virginia Woolf phase. I've recently re-read To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and Flush. I've got Jacob's Room on the stocks. I'm not sure I like her, but I'm intrigued.

Last time I read Orlando I thought it deeply pretentious. This time I realised it was parodic.

I like Between the Acts because I could finish it within 24 hours.

I did To the Lighthouse for A level and did well, despite the fact that in those days nobody thought to mention the words modernism or feminism. I came up with my very own revisionist account of it: Mrs Ramsey's death is in a way a liberation for her husband of her overbearing influence. Having re-read it that is not fair, but it is certainly about coming to terms with loss.

[kev67]

I saw a young woman on a train reading the book a couple of days ago. I dare say she'd have been turning the pages quicker if it had been Jilly Cooperr's Riders. I still can't see how number 2 in the top 100 British novels, according to the BBC culture list, can be so tedious. I think there must be something wrong with that list.

[Ecurb]

I just read "Mrs. Dalloway". To be more precise, I listened to it while driving to the mountains. I liked it, but perhaps my enjoyment was enhanced because the reader was a refined-sounding Brit. When she said, "Mrs Dalloway's party" it sounded to me like "Mrs Dalloway's potty". I may have been spending too much time with one and three-year-olds, but I thought that was funny.

[kev67]

I am still continuing with To the Lighthouse. I am enjoying it more than Mrs Dalloway. An advantage is that it has chapters, even if some are only five lines long. I enjoy it more if I just sort of let it was over me and I do not concentrate too much on it. I am not sure it would actually make much difference if I missed out a couple of chapters. I might not notice. I might still think I had read it all and just did not remember. Given that it was academics and critics who voted it number two in the top 100 British novels, I find that astonishing / a bit surprising / no, what I'd expect. People have made careers out of reading and teaching Virginia Woolf.

[Jackson Richardson]

Just read Jacob's Room her first experimental novel. I'd be glad to skip the experiment and get on to the later ones where she'd worked out her technique. We are told about the fleeting experiences of so many different characters, it doesn't seem so much like stream of consciousness as an omniscient narrator with a butterfly mind.

The fragments of conversation reminded me oddly of Ronald Firbank, but with him there is an overarching sense of camp innuendo, so that opacity of what the conversations are about serves a purpose. Here I just was bemused.

Virginia Woolf could do camp of course in Orlando and Flush, but not to the stratospheric heights of Firbank.

[Danik 2016]

"an omniscient narrator with a butterfly mind"

Liked the idea of the butterfly mind. I didn´t aktually read Jacobs Room, but what I remember about other of VW´s books it is exactly "the fleeting experiences of so many different characters" that matters not the contents of the dialogues. It is often so butterfliyy that one almost forgets that these people are having to cope with serious matters like war losses and adaptation to post war England, for example.

[Jackson Richardson]

Hello Danik again !

Yes, inTo Lighthousethe or Mrs Dalloway we get fleeting experiences, but they are for characters who recur in the course of the novel and there is at least half a page devoted to each at a time.

In Jacob's Room there are a multiplicity of characters many of whose inner reflections only occupy a sentence or paragraph.

I couldn't follow the fragments of overheard conversation. As I implied, with Firbank the in consequence of the conversations is itself a joke. I didn't get what was going on here.

[Danik 2016]

"I couldn't follow the fragments of overheard conversation."

Hi, Jackson,
Ill see if I find Jacob´s Room in the net and take a look at this conversation.

Only please have some patience, because I´m having difficulties posting in the forum. It seems that they are fixing the page, so error messages abound.

[Danik 2016]

Which is the chapter you are refering to Jackson?

[kev67]

I read this essay (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586663/Virginia-Woolf-makes-me-want-to-vomit.html) again by Philip Hensher, in which he tears into Virginia Woolf. I noticed he said the works of George Meredith also make him want to vomit, with which I agree, having read The Egoist. Hensher also mentioned two other writers in that essay: Kingsley Amis, who did not think her characters behaved realistically, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, who Hensher thinks was a much better writer from the period. I have recently bought one of Ivy Compton-Burnett's books, so I will see. I also bought Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils. It should at least be entertaining and unpretentious.

[Danik 2016]

Kev,
I normally wouldn't even read an article with that kind of title, because that shows a want of respect towards the author. I think a good critic should be objective in his evaluation of literature and not simply pour out his feelings.
VW is a great writer, because she had a totally new way of writing which set the peculiar atmosphere of her time. And of course it was representative of her social group.
Because it is an experimental form of narrative it is not easy to follow. The same happens with Joyce, Beckett, Kafka and Clarice Lispector.
They all have their fans and their opponents. I admire VW, but she is not my favorite author. I think anyone has a right to like or dislike any author, whether he/she is famous or not. But articles like this one are a disservice to the readers,

[Jackson Richardson]

Which is the chapter you are refering to Jackson?

Pretty well any.

[Jackson Richardson]

I read this essay (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586663/Virginia-Woolf-makes-me-want-to-vomit.html) again by Philip Hensher, in which he tears into Virginia Woolf.

He has a point about The Waves.

Dame Ivy should keep any reader on her toes unless they give up in despair.

[Danik 2016]

Ok, I´ll read the whole book and write something about it, but not immediately, because there is a reading group about Utopia starting at my other forum .
By the way, why not try this form of reading here? It might revive the forum. I see many questions about books going unanswered. A reading group would avoid that.

[kev67]

He has a point about The Waves.

Dame Ivy should keep any reader on her toes unless they give up in despair.

Gawd, The Waves is number 16 on the list. At least there are three books before it I have not read: The Good Soldier, Clarissa and Atonement. Clarissa is about ten thousand pages long, so I would not have to read The Waves for a long time.

Virginia Woolf wrote Modernist novels (so I understand), which was the literary equivalent of Modern Art, which I dare say the majority of people do not like or understand either. I like some Modern Art although I don't know much about it. I think Virginia Woolf was being experimental for its own sake. Did she ever try write a traditional novel?

[Danik 2016]

Not that I know of. But why do you have to follow a list in your reading?

[kev67]

Not that I know of. But why do you have to follow a list in your reading?

I don't. I read lots of other books too. I think the BBC's 100 best British books is actually quite an interesting list, being British myself. I just have a problem with Virginia Woolf's books being 2 and 3. I can't see what other people obviously do see in these books. They don't contain great plots, characters or dialogue. They are not entertaining, or particularly moving, or thought provoking. They are not books of ideas. They are writing experiments. Jane Austen changed the way books were written. She is often credited with inventing free indirect discourse. I think that is where the narrator reflects the state of the character's mind by dropping in words and phrases the character would think in a situation, rather than just stating baldly what the character thought. Something a bit like that anyway. That technique that was widely copied. How many stream of consciousness books are written these days? Trainspotting is the only one I remember reading. There are about as many epistolary novels.

[Danik 2016]

Yes, I know that you read a lot.
I'll try to tell you what VW means to me, specially as I also didn´t like her at once.

"I just have a problem with Virginia Woolf's books being 2 and 3. I can't see what other people obviously do see in these books. They don't contain great plots, characters or dialogue. They are not entertaining, or particularly moving, or thought provoking."
With experimental literature you have to give up the usual conventions of plot, character, dialogue, omniscient narrator, and even of a linear story, all the aspects one likes about 18 and 19C novels. They are aspects that give one a sense of security, because this fictional world has is own rules and in a sense imitates the real world. Now, experimental fiction overturns these rules by interfering not only with the content but also with the form of the novel. It is the representation of a world where World War I and later II among other things have taken away the sense of security. VW shows how it affected particularly the rich class which she belonged too

[Danik 2016]

Can´t edit the post above.
So you don´t have profound Dostoevsky kind of dialogues, what you have now is Jackson's "butterfly mind", people thinking and talking about seemingly irrelevant every day matters. In The Lighthouse you have Mrs Ramsay thinking about her family, her friends "and tomorrow we will go to the lighthouse". All very neat, ordered and boring. But what happens tomorrow? Second part happens, all of a sudden the holiday party of Ramsays and Company is swept away and there is the war. And a very curious war account the novel gives. People from the family, including Mrs. Ramsay herself, die, but the information is given as if it didn´t matter much.The focus remains on the empty land house shaken by the tempest, deteriorating. But for Brits, if I am not mistaken, a house means much more than a home: it means security, stability, status. And, in a sense, it can be taken as representing the country itself. And after the war, some people of the party came back to the house and finally got to the lighthouse.
And there is a beautiful parallel between Lily Briscoe´s picture and the book itself:
"There it was — her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." So had it seems, VW. Whether one likes it or not, this is great literature.

[kev67]

I wonder whether anyone has to like it to be great literature. The only bit that made me laugh was when one of young ladies at the dinner party said she doubted anyone really enjoyed Shakespeare, and he is considered our greatest writer.

I wonder what Lili Briscoe's painting was like. I remember she had a lot of trouble placing a tree in her picture in the first part of the book. Since it's a landscape, why didn't she just paint it where she saw it? If she didn't like the view then she should have moved her easel.

[Danik 2016]

"I wonder what Lili Briscoe's painting was like. I remember she had a lot of trouble placing a tree in her picture in the first part of the book. Since it's a landscape, why didn't she just paint it where she saw it? If she didn't like the view then she should have moved her easel."

Lili Briscoe´s art is for me very representative of VW,s art. Both are trying to represent a reality that has become very difficult to represent because it doesn´t fit in the old picture any more. So it was necessary to create a new form to represent it. There is a lot of symbolism here. I guess that moving her easel wouldn´t have helped, she would go on disliking the view.
The problem is trying to read VW literally as if she was Jane Austen.

[Jackson Richardson]

Gawd, The Waves is number 16 on the list.

Did she ever try write a traditional novel?

The Voyage Out and The Years I believe. I haven't read them.

[Danik 2016]

I startet to read Jacob´s room.

[prendrelemick]

"I wonder what Lili Briscoe's painting was like. I remember she had a lot of trouble placing a tree in her picture in the first part of the book. Since it's a landscape, why didn't she just paint it where she saw it? If she didn't like the view then she should have moved her easel."

Lili Briscoe´s art is for me very representative of VW,s art. Both are trying to represent a reality that has become very difficult to represent because it doesn´t fit in the old picture any more. So it was necessary to create a new form to represent it. There is a lot of symbolism here. I guess that moving her easel wouldn´t have helped, she would go on disliking the view.
The problem is trying to read VW literally as if she was Jane Austen.


Ok I'll write this out again as it has disappeared.
^That is excellent Danik. I got into VW through Orlando, a very funny, accessible book, that gets you on her side when you come to her other stuff. Meanwhile, look at the excerpt in Danik's post above - every phrase, every sentence is remarkable and apt. This is what she does, I have never come across a writer in the same league for precsision and effect.

[Danik 2016]

Unfortunatelly it is practically impossible to find free criticism on Virginia Woolf in the net. One has to buy most of them. I found an article, which is actually on her critical essays, but helps to understand, what she intended with her novels.
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/viewFile/8789/8151
I think, if you really want to understand the English novel as a whole, and I think at least kev has this ambition, you can´t leave WV out. And, in her case, it is not enough just reading the novels, one has to read some intelligent criticism, to know what they are about. Mind I don´t qualify that reader´s outburst which kev provided as criticism. Both of you would provide something much better, if you sat down to it.
So, and here am I defending VWs production to her own compatriots. That´s the world turned topsy turvy. If you understood her better you would be proud of her being British.

[Danik 2016]

Ok I'll write this out again as it has disappeared.
^That is excellent Danik. I got into VW through Orlando, a very funny, accessible book, that gets you on her side when you come to her other stuff. Meanwhile, look at the excerpt in Danik's post above - every phrase, every sentence is remarkable and apt. This is what she does, I have never come across a writer in the same league for precsision and effect.
Warm thanks prendrelemick.It seems we posted almost at the same time, I only saw your post afterwards. I am very glad to notice that you understand and like her.
To put you in the picture: it all started with a "critic article" about VW which kev linked to the discussion. It is really no business of mine what people think or feel about a certain author, but I couldn´t let Virginia Woolf be that much misrepresented and misunderstood, and that by Litnetters who have shown an real interest in English Literature.
By the way, Orlando is my favorite. Among other things it is for me a summing up of four or five centuries of literature in England (the changing relation between authors and critics, the ascension of the woman writers, the mass production of books, etc.) and it is probably pioneer in its presentation about the changing gender and gender roles scene.

[kev67]

Someone else does not think Virginia Woolf (or D. H. Lawrence) was much good.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/6957419/The-true-great-20th-century-novelists-who-irked-the-Bloomsbury-snobs.html
This one thinks H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy were better, and Somerset Maugham too.

VW wrote an essay titled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf). She thought Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy were ready for the knackers yard. She seemed to think Arnold Bennett either could not write or sympathise with elderly women. I thought he wrote them quite well in Old Wives' Tales. I have not read John Galsworthy. He wrote The Forsyte Saga series and I do not know what else. I have not read it, but my mother used to watch the TV series avidly in the 70s. I think H.G. Wells is a much more interesting writer than Virginia Woolf. He virtually invented British science fiction, or at least he gave the genre a very big push on its way. In his way he was at least as experimental as VW. It seems Bennett annoyed VW when he wrote that he had not read any good, new British writers, so VW put the boot in.

[Danik 2016]

Lol!Seems we are evolving to a contest for or against Virginia Woolf. Writers good and bad have and had, of course, their vanities and their preferences. Also, journalists often have to write about literature without going to deep into its, though there sometimes are excellent critics among them.

But there is a matter that made me curious, I think, you or one of you Britons could help me. In chapter III of Jacob´S Room it is stated that Jacob goes to Cambridge and that his brother studied Medicine. Now the family is very poor, their mother had to bring them up by herself, being a widow. How could Jacob get so easily into Cambridge. A friend of the mother got news that there was a vacancy, wrote a letter and, next thing, there was Jacob riding on the coach to Cambridge. The year was 1906.
Was it that easy to get into Cambrige even if you were poor? No exams of any sort?

[prendrelemick]

There's an old saying. It's not what you know - it's who you know that counts.


There have always been places for exceptional students. James Rebanks went there in the 1980's, he was a farmers son, bright but without any qualifications. He got in on the strength of one interview after an academic friend recommended him.

[kev67]

Not sure what the situation was like in 1906, but in my brother's final year at school in 1989, a pair of twins were offered places at Oxford University conditional on getting two D grades in their A levels. They were the brightest kids in their year (I think my brother was next).

Didn't Jude Fawley try but fail to go to Christminster (fictional name for Oxford) University in Jude the Obscure? I have not read the book, just watched the film. He was a working class man. He had taught himself Latin, which was a requirement to go to university then.

[Danik 2016]

So it´s really the recommendation that counted, prendre! That the boy had a farmer background wouldn' be a problem in itself, if I am not mistaken the great English professor and critic Raymond Williams has also a country background. The problem is outrunning people, that perhaps were more qualified, doing a lot of work to reach their goal.

How about female students?

[Danik 2016]

Not sure what the situation was like in 1906, but in my brother's final year at school in 1989, a pair of twins were offered places at Oxford University conditional on getting two D grades in their A levels. They were the brightest kids in their year (I think my brother was next).

Didn't Jude Fawley try but fail to go to Christminster (fictional name for Oxford) University in Jude the Obscure? I have not read the book, just watched the film. He was a working class man. He had taught himself Latin, which was a requirement to go to university then.

Jude Fawley is a very good fictional example of the opposite situation, kev. Jude is a country boy. His ambition to enter the university are stimulated by his school teacher. His few means, if I remember rightly he lost, because of his marriage and separation (don´t remember if he divorced her) to Arabela. He has studied Latin and so he goes to Christminster to get a job and study at the university. But the dons refuse even to consider his request, the nearest he gets to the university is doing some repairs to the entrance hall. This is one of the most poignant ironic and modern novel by Hardy, I think.

It seems they did a kind of head hunting for bright (male?) students. But how did this work without exams, if you consider the thousands of schools existent in whole UK? There must first have been a list of favorite schools, Eton, etc, where the kids implicidly were disputing a place in the best universities.

[kev67]

I think universities were a bit different in the old days. Originally I think they wee an arm of the church, and one of their main functions was training priests. For centuries in this country there were only two universities: Oxford and Cambridge. I don't know what exams you had to pass to get to them in 1920. I think you had to know Latin pretty well. I think you applied and they interviewed you. I remember Oscar Wilde was tested on his Greek. The dons asked him to translate a passage from Acts of he Apostles. When asked to stop, he joked that he wanted to see how it ended. The impression I get is that virtually everyone who went there was from an upper middle class background, mostly privately educated. To get in otherwise you had to be exceptional. I think there were some scholarships. George Orwell, who described his family as lower-upper-middle class won a scholarship to Eton school, but did not go to university. Other than universities, there were colleges, many of which have become universities since. George Gissing, who was the son of a dispensing chemist, went to Owens College in Manchester iirc. I think I remember reading he came top in Latin and English in his school exams across the country. Unfortunately he messed up his time at college big time, and ended up being a writer instead of an academic or classics master, which is what he should have been.

Anyway, back to defending / rubbishing VW.

[Danik 2016]

The impression I get is that virtually everyone who went there was from an upper middle class background, mostly privately educated. To get in otherwise you had to be exceptional.

That was also my impression. That´s why I was astonished, getting back to VW with due respect, how easily Jacob got into it.

By the way, did your brother make it?

[kev67]

My brother did not apply. He was possibly clever enough to go there, but you have to be very, very clever to go to either Oxford or Cambridge. I am not sure you had to be quite so clever to go there in the old days. VW's family was very intellectual. Being a girl, she could not apply to go to university herself, but I expect she would have liked to.

I have not read Jacob's Room, but your description of him and his mother reminded me of a character called Ken Widmerpool from the Dance to the Music of Time series. The character's father had been fairly successful in business but had died. His mother had sent him to Eton, where he did not quite fit in, but they did not have enough money for him to go to university. I do get the impression that university was like a finishing school for young gentlemen back then. Maybe that's unfair, but most my knowledge of it comes from fiction.

Incidentally, I recently read a biography of the author of the Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell. He went to Eton, then Oxford, then got a job in publishing for Duckworth Books, the owner or co-owner of which was Gerald Duckworth, VW's half-brother. Duckworth had a photohraph of VW on the wall. According to Powell, Gerald Duckworth was barely interested in books; it was just a business to him. Anthony Powell himself was far more influenced by the great Russian authors, and especially by Marcel Proust than by VW.

[Danik 2016]

The first three chapters of Jacob's Room are not so different from a conventional novel. Jacob is presented from the beginning as the boy that doesn't obey his mother, though he doesn't do nothing terrible. In the first chapter he wants to explore the beach and has the whole family looking for him. He is frightened by seeing a big couple lying on the beach and then he gets back. Then the community is described , time and Jacob's mother's relationship to the two men that are interested in her. Time passes: Archie, Jacob's brother is studying Medicine and Jacob is granted palace at the university. In the third chapter he is in a coach to the university. So far I've got.
I haven't read anything by Powel, but as we say here the world is small and Bloomsbury was probably very influential. But that doesn't mean that they all were artists.

[Danik 2016]

The following chapters are about Jacob in Cambridge, Jacob and his friends, Jacob on a boat wiht his friend Tim Durham meeting the family of the last, and then having an affair with the young prostitute Florinda...

But again, this is not a conventional novel. Tomy mind, Virginia is again painting with words. She is creating the particular atmosphere of the coming to adulthood of a young man, conveying pictures of him going to Cambridge without a special vocation or special talents, enjoying himself as most young men in his situation would, developing an interest in his best friend´s sister, having his first sexual encounter...I short a young man who is called Jacob, but he might be called Dick, Tom and Harry.

The dialogues (I hope Jackson is still around) are often interrupted and they are not always explicit, they imply things, thats why they are difficult to understand.

[kev67]

Sounds rather Brideshead Revisity. There seem to be two types of university novel, at least as far as the British type goes:

1) Languid, well-bred, young gentlemen, who speak archly to each other before either being sent down, achieving a 3rd, or leaving to take up a position of private secretary to a man of some importance. These people always went to Oxford or Cambridge and probably went to Eton first.

2) The campus novel: this is not set at Cambridge or Oxford, but at one of the red brick universities that popped up during the 50s and 60s. These usually involve a lot of sexual shenanigans, and maybe, but not necessarily, left wing politics.

[Danik 2016]

I read Brideshead Revisited ages ago, but don´t remember anything about it, except that I didn´t like it particularly. JR seems not to fit in either of your categories. Up to chapter 9 there is no indication whatever of Jacob taking up any job. What astonishes me is, that coming from a poor family he seems to have no money problems. The encounter with the prostitute is treated with delicacy and subtility.

[Danik 2016]

Still about Jacob´s Room:


Jacob’s Room was and is, as Leonard Woolf put it, “a strange novel.” It is a biography but certainly not written in the traditional linear, chronological way. It explores reality by looking at it in different ways, the way Braque and Picasso explored reality with cubism. It is layered with different ways of seeing and experience. In Jacob’s room we explore with Virginia Woolf what it means to be known by others through, memory, our absence, our presence, our continually meeting and interacting with new people in an outwardly formal and conventional way but simultaneously with what is going on subconsciously. What effect do we have on people we see fleetingly on a train or walking down the street? They are there one moment and then gone, never to be encountered again. She also explores what resonances a person might have at one moment in time in different places in the world to different people who know him.

https://virginiawoolfdotme.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/jacobs-room/


The novel follows Jacob’s life, but he is seen mainly at a distance, through the eyes of women who knew him more or less well, and the narrative itself is quite fragmentary, so that the reader experiences the same problem faced by Jacob’s survivors—how to piece together his life. https://modernism.coursepress.yale.edu/jacobs-room/

A reviewer that didn´t like the book but is very elegant about it:


Perhaps it is partly by the aid of the novelists that we have come to imagine our lives as sequences, but Mrs Woolf won't have that at all. She provides us with chunks of what seems arbitrary and is certainly not explicit, and leaves us to sort them. There is art in it, of course, and doubtless the unaccustomed reader permits himself to be disconcerted too much by the disjointedness. Mrs Woolf has no turn for the plausible, and scorns the canny. But she does not appear to have much interest in character except as it is manifested in the capacity to receive and record impressions.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jul/20/fromthearchives.virginiawoolf

[kev67]

He has a point about The Waves.

Dame Ivy should keep any reader on her toes unless they give up in despair.

I started reading Woolf's defeated rival, Ivy Compton Burnett's book, 'Manservant and Maidservant'. I wish I hadn't. It is nearly all dialogue. It's mainly about five children and their stingy, over-bearing father. He does not beat them, thank God, but he is constantly criticizing them and running them down, won't let them have fires or new clothes or much food. They are actually of a upper-middle class background with a butler and servants, who spend much of their time carping and criticizing. I don't see Ivy Compton Burnett making a comeback.

[kev67]

Another article (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/does-anyone-actually-like-any-of-this-bloomsbury-group-rubbish-1123461.html) slagging of Virginia Woolf, and the entire Bloomsbury group. I was disappointed the article was by Philip Hensher again. Surely there must be someone else who thinks she's overrated.

[Danik 2016]

No, not again, Kev. I definitively refuse reading another article by Philip Hensher on VW. Life is too short for certain things!

[kev67]

I read this section in the introduction (by Declan Kiberd) Of Ullysses by James Joyce. I am not expecting to understand or enjoy this book, but so far I am not hating it as much as anything I have read by Virginia Woolf:

Arnold Bennett, though impressed by the Nighttown sequence and by Molly Bloom's monologue, voiced a common English suspicion that anyone could have written of 'the dailiest day possible', given 'sufficient time, paper, childish caprice and obstinacy.' He contended that the author had failed to extend to the public the common courtesies of literature, as a result of which one finished it 'with the sensation of a general who has just put down an insurrection'. He thus linked it, at least subliminally, with the recent uprisings in Ireland. So did Virginia Woolf, who explained it as the work of a frustrated man who feels that, in order to breathe, he must break all the windows. Perhaps sensing that Joyce might have surpassed her own portrayals of quotidian consciousness, she denounced Ullysses as the work of 'a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples'.

Where does she get off? In another essay she says writers like Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy should be put out to grass because literature changed in 1910. Then she denounces Ullysses as the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples, even though his books are not as bad as hers (although I have to say Ullysses is a lot longer).

Writers didn't half kick lumps out of each other back then.