[Vwoolf] Portrait of a Londoner

Fri Jul 15 09:59:05 EDT 2022

Vara is asking: conspiracy or cock-up?  Jeanette McVicker believed/believes the former.

(1) Hallman (1975) could not have known of the 6th essay, as that discovery was the result of BJK’s efforts for her 1980 edn.  The 1982 reprints were REPRINTS of Hallman, not a resetting.  Why should the publishers be hunting around for another essay?

(2) McVicker says that she can only presume that Quentin and Angelica were aware of the 6th essay.  This seems odd to me.  She is portraying them as like me!  How excited I was when the 1980 edn came out, how relieved that “Portrait of a Londoner” was included (for I felt guilty at not having written to BJK about it), how thrilled to find my name in the acknowledgements, and how I pored over it, looking for the additions to the 1967 edn that had made it into the 1980!  I don’t suppose Angelica even had a copy of the Bibliography.  Would Quentin have been leafing through, looking for additional essays in Section C?  BJK was a modest person: she found very many unidentified Woolf essays for inclusion in the four editions of her Bibliography, but she didn’t trumpet her findings – as we do now, because finding something new is so rare.

Stuart

From: Neverow, Vara S. 
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2022 2:02 PM
To: mhussey at verizon.net ; 'Stuart N. Clarke' ; vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Portrait of a Londoner

[snip] 

Is it possible that the "lost" London Scene essay was omitted intentionally in the 1975 version because it was somewhat different in style from the others? Was it just sloppy--a failure to include the last essay because it was overlooked? 

Vara

Vara Neverow
(she/her/hers)
Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program
Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 
Southern Connecticut State University 
New Haven, CT 06515

203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu

I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the Paugusett and Quinnepiac peoples.

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From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2022 8:30:32 AM
To: 'Stuart N. Clarke' <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>; vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Portrait of a Londoner 

I wasn’t aware that ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ had ever been considered “lost”—perhaps that was just an assumption made because it wasn’t included when Frank Hallman (or ‘Hallam’ as the notes to the Snowbooks edition incorrectly has it) made 
I wasn’t aware that ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ had ever been considered “lost”—perhaps that was just an assumption made because it wasn’t included when Frank Hallman (or ‘Hallam’ as the notes to the Snowbooks edition incorrectly has it) made his edition of The London Scene, the one that was later reprinted by Hogarth. That Francine Prose is the source of the canard isn’t surprising, given what a hash she made of her account of the genesis of Mrs. Dalloway when she introduced the Mrs Dalloway Reader (a volume published to cash in on the success of The Hours). With Beth Daugherty’s prompting, I tidied up and corrected Prose’s prose for the paperback edition. Sigh. Celebrity authors are probably good for publishers but not so much for scholarship.

From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> On Behalf Of Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2022 4:56 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Portrait of a Londoner

I am not aware of how “persistently” this canard has been repeated, but it seems to originate in Francine Prose’s intro. to the NY: Ecco (HarperCollins) edition (& see the dust-jacket) of n.d. (2006): “her lost ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ 

I am not aware of how “persistently” this canard has been repeated, but it seems to originate in Francine Prose’s intro. to the NY: Ecco (HarperCollins) edition (& see the dust-jacket) of n.d. (2006): “her lost ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ essay, rediscovered in 2004 by British publisher Emma Cahill in the University of Sussex archive” (p. xiii).  See also notes 1 to each of the essays in “Essays” vol. 5 for the location of the proofs etc that are extant.

See also the correspondence below from Woolf_Studies_Annual, 11 (2006): 1-2.

Stuart

From: Stella Deen via Vwoolf 

Sent: Friday, July 15, 2022 1:13 AM

To: VWOOLF 

Subject: [Vwoolf] Portrait of a Londoner

Dear All: I wonder why the sixth of Woolf's London Scene Essays, "Portrait of a Londoner" is persistently said to have been lost until re-discovered in 2004 at the University of Sussex? I have not done any research in the archive, 

Dear All:

I wonder why the sixth of Woolf's London Scene Essays, "Portrait of a Londoner" is persistently said to have been lost until re-discovered in 2004 at the University of Sussex?  I have not done any research in the archive, sadly, and perhaps the answer is that "Portrait of a Londoner" was not filed with the other manuscripts in the series.  But since the essay was duly published in Good Housekeeping (in December 1932), preceded by the other London Scene essays, was it really "lost"?

Stella Deen (she/her)

Interim Chair, Communication Studies

Associate Professor of English

CSB 50

State University of New York at New Paltz

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