[Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"

[Harish Trivedi]

Yes, Boris Ford was a Leavisite, and there were further connections too.

Frank W Bradbrook was at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was a student
of Leavis. After Cambridge, he taught all his life at what was then the
University College of North Wales at Bangor (and is now the University of
Wales, Bangor). He had a Ph D from Cambridge which he published as *Jane
Austen and her Predecessors*, and besides the one on VW, he contributed (as
I recall) a couple of other essays too to the various volumes of the *Pelican
Guide*. Though Leavis seldom travelled out of Cambridge in his later years,
Bradbrook was able to bring him to Bangor to speak there and spend a few
days in his hill-top house on Bangor Mountain which overlooked Penrhyn
Castle on one side and the Menai Straits on the other.

Another significant connection here perhaps is that Frank W B was the
brother of M. C. Bradbrook (Muriel Clara), who went on to become a
professor at Cambridge and Mistress of Girton.  She is mentioned in VW's
diaries c. 1933, for an essay she had published on VW in Leavis's highly
influential journal *Scrutiny. *As I recall, VW wrote of M C Bradbrook*: *She
is young, ardent and Cambridge. VW saw this attack as a sign that her
reputation would now decline.  (Sorry I can't check  and quote accurately
as I am away from home, so this is from fading memory.)

As for the revival of VW beginning in the 1970s, it was really a rebirth
due to her being discovered and hailed as a founding figure of literary
feminism, and it marked almost a new start in VW Studies. Few scholars
working now may have any idea of how she was mocked and dismissed until
(and into) the 1970s, as being "The Invalide Lady of Bloomsbury", to invoke
the title of a book-review on her by I think Cyril Connolly in *The Sunday
Times*. She was seen as an effete High Modernist, a decadent Bloomsbury
aesthete, and as a woman writer with frail nerves who had gone mad several
times and eventually committed suicide. It wasn't only Frank Bardbrook;
this was the general view of her that prevailed, with some devoted admirers
scattered thin on the ground.

And it is not only the mighty academic engine of American feminism that has
now refashioned VW but also the meticulous publication of her vast archive
gifted by Quentin Bell to the U of Sussex. Without the many volumes of
her *Letters
*and *Diaries*, we might not have had much important source materials to go
on.  In current scholarship, VW is first and last a feminist, and as would
often happen with massive swings of the pendulum, this has in turn eclipsed
some other valuable aspects of her work which are perhaps not in consonance
with feminism, such as the lyrical-mystic-intuitive strain that surfaces in
her work from time to time, the short shrift that she often gave to
materialistic "reality," and her valorization of literary androgyny.

I may add that Frank W Bradbrook supervised my Ph D dissertation which was
titled "VW and the Tradition of the English Novel" (1975). I found him to
be an exceptionally erudite and broad-minded scholar, a kind, caring and
humorous man, and the kind of punctilious and enabling supervisor and
mentor that many Ph D students in these more crowded times may only dream
of. I was his first Ph D student (he was in his mid-fifties then) and only
the fourth in English in the then 90-year history of that institution. In
Britain in those days, doing a Ph D was thought to be bad form and a
somewhat vulgar show-off act in a rather American way. More than half of
the staff (now "faculty") in that English Department did not have a Ph D,
including our permanent Head. In many books, the Bibliography at the end
began by stating: "The place of publication is London, unless otherwise
stated."

Not only has the image, and academic substance, of VW changed hugely in the
last 50 years but also of course the world around us.

Thanks, everyone.

Harish Trivedi




On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 22:31, Regina Marler via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
wrote:

> Boris Ford edited that early version. A Leavisite. Another example of the
> long arm of the Leavises reaching through the decades to stamp out VW and
> Bloomsbury. Good luck!
>
> (I covered this in Bloomsbury Pie, of course.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Regina
>
>
>
> Sent from a small, hand-held device. Please excuse typos.
>
> On Jun 16, 2021, at 12:49 AM, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf <
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>
> 
> This first appeared in 7 vols in 1961 and was frequently reprinted.  It
> was revised as "The New Pelican Guide to English Literature" in 1983.  My
> copy is the 1990 reprint.  In vol. 7 is the late (d. 1983) Frank W.
> Bradbrook’s "Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction".  In “To
> the Lighthouse”:
>
>
> The world of prose has been united with those of poetry and of art.  ‘Orlando’
> (1928), though it has brilliant passages, has not the unity of ‘To the
> Lighthouse’ and the indulgence of fantasy is inclined to pall. ... There
> are beautiful passages [in ‘The Waves’], but there is not ‘an intimate
> autobiographical sense of life'. ‘The Years’ (1937) contains, near the
> beginning, a flash of the old satiri­cal wit in the description of the
> hypocrisy of Colonel Pargiter and the death, after a painful, protracted
> illness, of his wife. The novel, as a whole, shows signs of tiredness, and
> is dull and monotonous. ... [In] ‘Between the Acts’ (1941) [the] heart has
> gone out of Virginia Woolf's work.
>
>     That her genius had burned itself out is confirmed by the six
> pre­viously unpublished short stories at the end of ‘A Haunted House’
> (1944).  Her short stories, despite some brilliancies, tend to confirm
> the sense of a minor talent.
>
> “A Haunted House” (1944) Contents:
>
> 6 from “Monday or Tuesday” (1921) :
> A Haunted House
> Monday or Tuesday
> An Unwritten Novel
> The String Quartet
> Kew Gardens
> The Mark on the Wall
>
> 6 published separately:
> The New Dress - 1927
> The Shooting Party - 1938
> Lappin and Lapinova - 1939
> Solid Objects - 1920
> The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection - 1929
> The Duchess and the Jeweller - 1938
>
> 6 unpublished (per Leonard Woolf, but he said “Moments of Being” may have
> been published; only that story and “The Searchlight” are finally revised):
> Moments of Being: "Slater's Pins Have No Points" – published 1928
> The Man Who Loved his Kind – [1925]
> The Searchlight – [1939]
> The Legacy – [1940]
> Together and Apart – [1925]
> A Summing Up – [1925]
>
>
> Stuart
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