[Vwoolf] Le Guin and Woolf

[Matthew Cheney]

Hello Woolfians,

Here’s some more Le Guin on Woolf—

Le Guin was one of the science fiction writers asked by *The Guardian* to
choose “their favourite author or novel in the genre” and Le Guin chose
Woolf, saying:

You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all
who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't
read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain
things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with
the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an
ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a
lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf.

I was 17 when I read *Orlando*. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to
me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly
different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive.
I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze
over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the
marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill
of being taken *absolutely elsewhere*.

How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up
and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging
the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous,
complete.

In *Flush*, Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an
alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again
what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I
imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she
wrote in and thinking *what are your dreams?* and listening . . . sniffing
the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless
world.

Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own.

source:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice

(This was reprinted in her book *Words Are My Matter* as “Learning to Write
Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf”)

Woolf was always central to Le Guin, back to the day when she was about 14
and her mother gave her a copies of *A Room of One’s Own* and *Three
Guineas*. (She discusses this briefly in this interview:
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2013-growing/song-herself)
References to Woolf’s work pop up throughout her nonfiction especially, but
I see traces in her fiction, too.

This topic is close to my heart, as it was probably via Le Guin that I
discovered Woolf myself when I first read, at a
much-too-young-to-understand-it age Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and
Mrs. Brown”, and then, to try to understand it better, sought out “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. (For the curious, I’ve written about that a bit at
my blog
<https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2018/01/ursula-le-guin-in-your-dreams-in-your.html>.)
I sent a completed first draft of a dissertation to my committee on Woolf’s
birthday, a dissertation that is 1/3 about Woolf, and which would not have
been possible, in so many ways, without Le Guin. Foremothers, grandmothers,
greats.

Matthew Cheney
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