[Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"

Thu Jun 17 04:30:49 EDT 2021

Harish’s reminiscences are fascinating, and I’m so glad he thought fit to respond.

Cyril Connolly’s article in the “Sunday Times” was called "Our Lady of Bloomsbury" (16 Apr 1972), which is an excellent review of Noble’s “Recollections of Virginia Woolf”, concluding:

“To read this book is to get to know a wonderful human being who was also a most gifted writer.”

Almost equally fascinating is its opening:

“In May 1941 ... Horizon produced a special memorial number to her, commissioning articles from T. S. Eliot, Rose Macaulay, V. Sackville-West, Duncan Grant and William Plomer.  All these have been reprinted intact ... no acknowledgement has been made to the provider of this useful brainchild ...”

There *was* an article called "The Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury" by David Burnham in “Commonweal” (2 Oct 1942), but I haven’t seen it.  I believe it reviewed “The Death of the Moth”, Daiches’ book, EMF’s Rede lecture, and was also a kind of obituary on Woolf.

Stuart

From: Harish Trivedi 
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2021 6:07 AM
To: Regina Marler 
Cc: Stuart N. Clarke ; vwoolf listserve 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"

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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