[Vwoolf] Tallest Woman Writer Award

[mcuddy at chass.utoronto.ca]

A cousin, a retired college librarian, writes:

My bedtime reading this week is the Penguin Book of Modern Humorous
Quotations ("modern" = 1986) where I came across this pronouncement by
Alan Bennett:
"Of all the honours that fell upon Virginia’s head, none, I think, pleased
her more than the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of
1927, an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen."

The quote was immediately suspect because (1) Bennett is a former Beyond
the Fringe comedian, (2) he's a playwright and (3) the quote is from one
of his plays (Forty Years On).

Nevertheless I immediately thought, wouldn't it be nice if (a) the story
was true or, better, if (b) the story was false but swallowed whole by
unsuspecting transmitters.  At Red River College the walls are festooned
with huge colourful posters portraying various eminent people and
captioned with inspirational quotations of which about half turned out to
be spurious or at best doubtful.

I did a google search and was disappointed to see that all but two of the
results dutifully attributed the Virginia Woolf story to Alan Bennett. 
One of the two that didn't was an interview with Tom Stoppard who said:
"Well, in my opinion, Virginia Woolf was the tallest woman writer of the
twenties."
"Are you quite sure?"
"Yes, yes.  My information is that Katherine Mansfield was only four foot
eleven and Edith Sitwell was only five foot three.  But Virginia Woolf was
six foot eight, a fact not generally known." (Jon Bradshaw, "Tom Stoppard,
Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright," New York Magazine, January 10,
1977, p. 48).

A story told by one playwright may be dubious but when it's corroborated
by a second playwright you can be sure that it's complete hogwash. Anyway
I did another google search (Virginia Woolf how tall) and learned,
Stoppard notwithstanding, that she was 1.7 metres or 5 feet 6.929134
inches tall (rounded to the nearest millionth of an inch).

The second search result that did not cite Bennett was an article by Zaria
Glover entitled "Virginia Woolf Breaks the Mold for Women Writers." 
According to Glover: "Because Virginia Woolf died before she could see a
time when her works would be accepted, the only known award she received
was the Tallest Woman Writer Award in 1927 by the London Evening Standard
newspaper."

Of course, Zaria Glover was only 13 years old when she wrote this. Her
article was published in the Wright Free Press, a web site that helps
teachers help students write and publish their school essays as news
reports.

>From the evidence, Virginia Woolf's award-winning height is making rather
slow progress toward acceptance as indisputable historic fact.  But thanks
to budding journalists like Zaria Glover, there is hope.

(Melba adds: hope this offered some enjoyable holiday reading,  And hope
(again, and fervently) that we all have a Happ(ier) New Year!)