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  

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
Biography by Galya Diment

Koteliansky - Kot to his friends - has always fascinated me.  He hovered around on the fringes of Bloomsbury - an unlikely figure - and was influential in the lives of Katherine Mansfield and DH Lawrence.  He was also a passionate advocate of Russian literature and translated a great deal of it into English, introducing some little known authors to a western audience for the first time.

Most people were in awe of his moral integrity and passionately held principles.  'Kot was not a comfortable man,' wrote Leonard Woolf in his obituary.  Kot had a crushing handshake and such an air of 'rightness' that some people maintained it wasn't possible to tell a lie in his presence.  Lawrence nicknamed him 'Jehovah' and Katherine Mansfield said that he reminded her of an Old Testament Prophet.

Until I read Galya Diment's biography, I hadn't understood Kot's complex personality or his background and I was completely unaware of the struggle he had to establish himself in London and support himself as a refugee with no skills other than literacy.  I was also unaware of the extent of anti-semitic feeling and prejudice in England at that time.  Virginia Woolf used to refer to her husband Leonard as The Jew in public, and even in his presence - Leonard did not interpret it as a playful nickname - he was grimly aware of how he was regarded.  Virginia had told him in a letter that it was 'his Jewishness' that she disliked and which had given her second thoughts when she considered marrying him.  In her 1915 diary she wrote; 'How I hated marrying a Jew!'

There were a number of other Jews hovering around the fringes of Bloomsbury at that time - the painter Mark Gertler was one of them and he too was a close friend of Kot, regarding him as something of a father-figure.

Samuel Ivanovitch Koteliansky was born in 1880, a year before the major Pograms against the Jews began in Russia.  He was born in the Pale of Settlement, in Ukraine, where Jews had been condemned to live by Catherine the Great (hence the saying 'beyond the pale').  Kot's father was a merchant and the family owned a mill, but their fortunes were declining with those of their race.  Kot studied at Odessa and Kiev universities and was politically active as a student, earning him the nickname of 'the anarchist' in London.  Anti Jewish feeling was growing in Russia and there were massacres and surges of hatred that led to Jews being accused of murdering Russian children in order to drink their blood.  Kot fled Russia in 1911 and came to Britain where he worked at the Russian Law Bureau, helping similar refugees.  For several years he lived in one room 'above the shop'.

DH Lawrence

 Kot had violent attachments and detachments where people were concerned. He idolised DH Lawrence, believing him to be a genius.  It was on a walking holiday in the Lake District that Kot sang the Hebrew psalm that gave DHL the idea of calling his utopian writers' community 'Rananim'.  Later Lawrence portrayed Kot as 'Kangaroo' - the character in the novel of the same name.  Lawrence had a habit of casting his friends as actors in his fiction.  The biography points out that the love between Kangeroo and Lawrence's alter-ego in the novel, Somers, may well have put into words the love, un-named and unacknowledged, that existed between Lawrence and Kot.

It seems probable that, although Kot had loving feelings and attachments for women, they were not of a sexual nature and that he was actually attracted to men.  As a puritan, a Jew with a Hasidic background, these homosexual leanings could not be acknowledged.  Certainly sexual repression and loneliness were big factors in Kot's bouts of severe depression and mental breakdown.

To Katherine Mansfield he was a constant, loving friend who forgave her all kinds of misdemeanors.  After the death of Katherine Mansfield's brother in France in 1915, Katherine couldn't bear to live in her beautiful house at 5 Acacia Road.  It was sub-let to Kot and a Russian friend and Kot was to live there for the rest of his life, opening the garden occasionally to fans of Mansfield who wanted to see the pear tree which had featured in her story 'Bliss'.  

Mansfield and Kot in the garden, by Beatrice Campbell

 Kot collaborated with Katherine on Russian translations - their last meeting only a few months before she died.  When her husband John Middleton Murry published Katherine's private journals and letters to himself, Kot was disgusted and regarded it as a complete betrayal of Katherine.  He had always disliked Murry and now he hated him with the kind of energy only Kot could put into the emotion.


Kot scraped a precarious living from journalism and translating, rarely having enough money for more than a bare existence.  He was helped by generous friends - Lawrence supplying a 5,000 word introduction to one of his translations knowing that his article would sell the book;  Julian and Juliette Huxley and May Sarton all tried to help his work; and HG Wells' daughter Margery looked after him as his mental and physical health declined. 

In 1936 he had a complete nervous breakdown and in the years that followed was subjected to several episodes of electric shock treatment.  His friend Mark Gertler committed suicide in 1939, Virginia Woolf in 1941, and the horrors of the second world war weighed heavily on Kot's emotional health.  Many of his friends and relatives died in his home town in the Ukraine - victims of ethnic cleansing.  In 1947 Kot also tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.  He was unsuccessful, but his physical health never recovered from it and he was an invalid for the rest of his life.  He died from heart disease in January 1955.

This is a very well researched biography, crammed full of historical and personal detail.  It brought Kot alive for me, and gave me much more of an insight into the difficult, fragile existence of Europe's political refugees.  Our attitude to asylum seekers hasn't changed a jot.  They are tolerated, but not really accepted into our communities with a whole heart.  They live on the fringes of our society and can never feel completely secure.  Many regard them as a kind of parasite, without realising how much they have contributed - culturally and in many other ways.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:  The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
by Galya Diment

Katherine Mansfield:  The Story-teller
by Kathleen Jones