Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir, by Winifred Holtby

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir 

by Winifred Holtby

Published by Continuum International

Winifred Holtby, although herself a successful novelist, was very afraid of Virginia Woolf.  So much so that when she began to write her memoir she talked to everyone but Virginia, until she received a royal command to appear at Hogarth House to take tea.  Holtby was right to be nervous. Virginia Woolf’s first impressions of her were typically caustic;  ‘a Yorkshire farmer's daughter, rather uncouth, and shapeless’.  In a letter to a friend Woolf called her ‘an amiable donkey’. But if Woolf had ever troubled to read what Holtby wrote, she might have been very surprised indeed at the way her contemporary had understood what she was trying to achieve in her novels, as well as the contradictions of her character.

Winifred Holtby

The book is constructed as a series of essays on various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s character and writing. Written by a clever novelist, they are light and easy to read. The first, called ‘The Advantages of being Virginia Stephen’, focusses on Woolf’s birth and upbringing.  Winifred Holtby quotes the portrait of Katherine Hilbery in Night and Day, drawn from Woolf’s own childhood as the daughter of an eminent scholar and critic living at the heart of literary society.  ‘Again and again she was brought down into the drawing room to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man who sat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick’.

Woolf  lived her life at the centre of the literary hub - Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were among the formidable old men who sat in the parlour. Later she was a contemporary of TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey - the Bloomsberries, as Mansfield called them.  For Woolf, literary legends were people you met at dinner alongside Cabinet Ministers, judges and titled aristocrats.  It was a world apart, but it was also an education - as Holtby says, Woolf ‘lived among people before whom the whole range of European literature is spread like a familiar map’.

Virginia Woolf

The fact that Woolf didn’t have a conventional education (she was home-schooled) and allowed free run of her father’s library, shaped her future as a writer and critic.  Holtby, for once, gives Woolf’s critical writing equal status with her fiction.  For Woolf theory and practice were closely tied together; more people have read A Room of One’s Own than have read To the Lighthouse or The Waves, and her critical essays - Three Guineas, Letter to a Young Poet, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, have had considerable influence on her successors and are still relevant.

But Holtby, writing in 1931, is quick to point out their underlying prejudices - ‘Every second Englishman reads French’, was a ridiculous thing to say, at a time when only 15% of the English were educated beyond the age of 14.  Woolf  didn’t understand the uneducated.  Whenever she tries to draw a working class character, Holtby writes, ‘she loses her way. They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen.’

Holtby also writes about Woolf’s complex relationship with suffragism.  Many women involved in the Suffrage movement were her friends.  They appear in her novels and their ideals are expressed in Woolf’s non-fiction. Characters like Orlando in the novel of the same name change gender, revealing prejudice and hypocrisy.  In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf  coined the expression ‘reflecting men at twice their normal size’.  But she did not take part in the campaign herself and, in most of her essays and reviews, she uses the male pronoun as convention demanded. The artist/writer is always ‘he’.

Winifred Holtby not only discusses Woolf as a woman and a writer, but also Woolf as a reader - the author of pithy reviews and essays of writerly instruction. Even though her own books were consumed by a literary elite, Woolf knew who the ‘Common Reader’ was, though she erred on the gender.  ‘The Common Reader differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge.’  This is the person that we are all writing for - someone of only average education, neither a scholar nor a critic, reading for pleasure, and sometimes also a woman. (Statistically more often than not)

According to Woolf there are strict rules.  Ideas, morality, historical lessons, can only be presented in terms of character and plot.  Any research has to be invisible.  ‘Whatever facts, emotions and experiences the artist tastes, he must digest completely . . . There must be no foreign matter unconsumed.’  And she hates novels with a message that seem to encourage people to ‘join a society’ or ‘write a cheque’. The ‘business of the artist’, Woolf says, ‘is to provide one with a vivid and complete experience’.  There must be a reality - and reality is ‘what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of the past time and of our loves and hates ...  It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.’

Form must always serve the material - and here Woolf was extremely subversive.  ‘Mrs Woolf does not really like plots’, Holtby observes.  Nor does she like traditional ways of establishing character by description.  Woolf asks the Edwardian novelists how she should present her character Mrs Brown and gets this answer:
‘”Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.  Ascertain the rent.  Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878.  Discover what her mother died of.  Describe cancer.  Describe calico.  Describe . . .”  But I cried “Stop!  Stop!”  And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling . . . would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.’

Woolf threw plot and narrative out of the window too and explored new ways of telling stories, taking ideas from Katherine Mansfield and adopting the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique developed by Dorothy Richardson.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Winifred Holtby’s short memoir is a real delight (which is probably why it’s been re-issued) and, if I had my way, I’d put it on the list for every creative writing student in the country.  It’s one brilliant writer’s take on another - illuminating and useful.  Woolf apparently told her friends that it had made her ‘scream with laughter’, but there’s no evidence that she ever read it.

Kathleen Jones  

Orkney: Amy Sackville

Literary Fiction

After reading Peter May's dark thrillers set in the Hebrides, I was definitely in the mood for more about remote Scottish islands.  I bought Amy Sackville's Orkney a while ago, but (after one or two false starts) I hadn't got round to reading it.  The night of the Great Storm over Britain definitely provided the right atmosphere - the TV screens, even in Italy, were filled with images of surging tides and wild winds.

I loved Amy's first book, The Still Point, and really rate her writing - poetic, atmospheric prose of the kind that isn't fashionable in main-stream publishing these days.  Fortunately Amy's published by Granta who like the experimental and unashamedly 'literary'.

Orkney has no plot, only 2 main characters (a few walk-on parts) and feels as though it's written in real time.  But the prose compels and draws you in the further and further you go - rather like the sea around the island.

Richard, an elderly academic, has married one of his students after a very short acquaintance.  She has no family he is aware of and no friends.  But we only have Richard's word for that - he is obsessed with her and can't see anything very clearly outside what his young wife calls 'the frame' he has drawn around her.  In Richard's first person journal, her name is never mentioned.  She has no identity other than the one he creates for her.

Richard has brought her for a honeymoon on the Isle of Orkney - to a remote cottage where he is going to make endless love to his wife and work on his book about mythologies.  They are his speciality - particularly where they relate to women:

'Transformations, obsessions, seductions;  succubi and incubi;  entrapments and escapes . . . Curses and cures.  Folk tales and fairy tales retold.  And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia. Do I wake or sleep? Fantasy and phantasm.  Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women.  Strange and powerful women.  It's an old obsession.'

And it's one that should worry his wife.  Everyday she goes to sit on the beach to watch the sea.  And Richard watches her from inside the window.

'She's staring at the sea now.  My young wife.  There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clatter of pebbles and crabs.'

Gradually more information about her past emerges - her father had disappeared when she was a young child - perhaps lost at sea.  She is fascinated by tales of Selkies and Finfolk - men and women who come from the sea to land, but must always go back again.  She can't swim and dreams of drowning, night after night.  The novel creates a real intensity and claustrophobia as the relationship between the two is exposed within the four walls of their tiny cottage buffeted by wild Atlantic gales.

'I lay awake for hours, on my back, listening, eyes open or closed, I could not tell, an equal darkness within and without.  Our bed a berth in a boat, below deck, the sea pressing up at the window and rolling and moiling below us;  the fish swimming by the glass indifferent;  tiny shrimp coiling and stretching in meaningless Morse code;  all the sightless, glowing life of the ocean floating past. A Leviathan's eye, filling the portholes, peering in.'

I won't spoil it by writing about the ending, but I'm still speculating about just how reliable Richard is as a narrator - he has a tendency to see everything one way and can't be contradicted.  The clues to what is happening are in the fairy tales, re-told by firelight, the myths and superstitions that inhabit the abandoned hearths of the island.

Orkney
by Amy Sackville
Published by Granta