[Vwoolf] Defects aside, her writing's impact was overwhelmingly benign - The Telegraph

[Marielle O'Neill (1806529) PHD]

Dear Woolfians,

Another article on Woolf in today's Telegraph.

Warm wishes,
Marielle

Defects aside, her writing's impact was overwhelmingly benign

By Jake Kerridge

"I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighted like sugar and butter," Virginia Woolf once wrote. Camden council clearly does not agree. With her literary achievements in one pan of the scales and her character defects in the other, officials are balancing up the case for a memorial bust of Woolf in Bloomsbury to remain undisturbed.

What they seem to have missed is that Woolf's influence - not just on literature but on British society - has been overwhelmingly benign.

As a novelist she was one of the greatest delineators of the human consciousness and the fragmentary way our thoughts operate. If she has never quite received as much acclaim in this regard as her contemporaries, Proust and Joyce, this may be because some regard her focus on an upper-middle-class milieu as parochial.

But although her Mrs Dalloway, say, concentrates on a woman beset by status anxiety, there are also harrowing sections for the viewpoint of the shell-shocked Great War veteran Septimus Smith. If the moral achievement of the best novelists is to extend the reader's capacity for empathy by placing them as close as they can come to the inside of the mind of another, Woolf was in the vanguard.

She also wrote brilliant literary criticism, designed to open great books up for "the common reader" - not academics but those who were denied a university education because of their class or (like her) sex.

There were her proto-feminist essays too, such as A Room of One's Own; and her diaries, in which she found a new language to talk about mental health and the battles she bravely fought (probably what we now call bipolar) that culminated in her drowning herself in the Ouse in 1941. Of course her style and her politics are not to everybody's taste. But as she wrote in A Room of One's Own, "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters. To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some headmaster or professor is the most abject treachery."

She might have added the council official with his list of transgressions; but we have all benefitted from Woolf's courage in exposing herself to censure by being true to her own visions.





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