[Vwoolf] Frank Swinnerton on The Waves

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

You remember right.  I tracked down the comment.

"She claimed to be presenting not Mrs Brown, but Mrs Brownness. That 
sounds splendid. But in order to discover the Mrs Brownness Virginia 
Woolf was forced to write solely of ruminative or introspective persons, 
and when she had carried her exploration to the four minds in /The 
Waves/ she had reached as far as that particular method would take her. 
There were four poetic somethings; but they all thought alike." (Frank 
Swinnerton, /The Georgian Literary Scene/, Everyman edition, revised 
1951, p. 281)

This reminds me of the old humorous seaside postcard that has a picture 
of a rather formidable wife looking at the card a weighing machine has 
given to her very meek looking husband. "It says you are handsome, 
muscular and decisive. It's got your weight wrong too." Had he even read 
the novel?

Jeremy H


On 05.10.2020 17:03, Harish Trivedi wrote:
> Did not Frank Swinnerton in /The Georgian Literary Scene/ count the 
> total number of characters in the novel as four -- if I remember 
> right.  They were all too /vague /for him, obviously, and tended to 
> merge into each other.
> Harish Trivedi

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