[Vwoolf] the four great Victorians?

[Caroline Webb]

Orlando is a poet, and much of the talk about “great Victorian writers” in the ‘20s would have been about poetry.  Tennyson and Browning with Dickens and Trollope, perhaps?

The issue isn’t so much who Woolf herself would have thought was great—it’s who her contemporaries were lauding at the time, which may include people we don’t think about (as Orlando indicates).

I like the point about Eminent Victorians.

Caroline

From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces+caroline.webb=newcastle.edu.au at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Sarah M. Hall
Sent: Wednesday, 18 February 2015 5:52 AM
To: Anne Fernald; vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] the four great Victorians?

I'm not convinced she had four particular Victorian literary figures in mind; could it be an ironic reference to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, i.e. Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon? Although of course they're not writers. So readers can take their pick. Dickens would probably have to be one of the four; otherwise it's a free-for-all; probably no women though, not even George Eliot.

Sarah M. Hall
VWSGB


________________________________
From: Anne Fernald <fernald at fordham.edu<mailto:fernald at fordham.edu>>
To: "vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>" <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Sent: Tuesday, 17 February 2015, 3:15
Subject: [Vwoolf] the four great Victorians?

A facebook friend asks whom Orlando refers to when mentioning the four great writers of the Victorian age. I realize I don't know, nor do I really understand the paragraph. How do you read this?

As a reference to four novelists (she's just had volumes and volumes delivered) (e.g. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and....who? Hardy)? Or as a joke about the way we name an era's greats with certainty? Or....? It seems almost certainly NOT to be the four women of A Room of One's Own (Austen, Brontë, Brontë, Eliot)....

"Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons--all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion."

--
Anne E. Fernald<http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/faculty/english_faculty/anne_fernald_28537.asp>
Mrs. Dalloway, now available from Cambridge UP<http://www.cambridge.org/9781107028784>

Director of Writing/Composition at Lincoln Center,
Associate Professor of English<http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/index.asp> and Women's Studies<http://www.fordham.edu/womens_studies>
Fordham University
113 W 60th St.
New York NY 10023

212/636-7613
fernald at fordham.edu<mailto:fernald at fordham.edu>

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