[Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"

[Pat Laurence]

Re: the reception of Bloomsbury and Woolf in England and America
Any study of the reception of Woolf would need to trace not only the social
history, as Mark Hussey suggests, but also the economic and political
philosophy and stances of the group of critics under observation. I
attended a conference on Bloomsbury at Birkbeck College, London, late 90s,
I think, where Robert Skidelsky (who had just published the second volume
of his biography of Keynes) was featured. He emphasized not only Keynes'
"ambivalence" toward aspects of Bloomsbury, particularly during and after
World War I, no longer taking certain aspects seriously (see "My Early
Beliefs"), but there was considerable Bloomsbury-bashing besides. This was
a different climate than what I was experiencing as a Woolf critic in
America. I would add economics and politics to the "values" criticism of
Leavis.
Pat Laurence

On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 3:00 PM Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> I think 🤔 Moody himself was innocent and that it was the editor/publisher
> who chose to trash Woolf.
>
> Vara Neverow
> Department of English
> Southern Connecticut State University
> New Haven, CT 06515
> 203-392-6717
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Stuart N.
> Clarke via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 17, 2021 2:57:49 PM
> *To:* VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu <VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> *Subject:* Re: [Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"
>
> I think Moody is more appreciative of Woolf in the body of his book.  He
> seems to be struggling in a Sargasso Sea of adverse opinions – and there
> were many – and he can’t stop quoting them.  At least, he faces down the
> Leavisites head on; his comment on Frank Bradbrook’s essay is that it, “in
> its sedulous derivativeness, might be offered as a classic instance of the
> arid influence which the ‘Scrutiny’ milieu can have on its uncritical
> followers” (p. 103).
>
> Stuart
>
> *From:* Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 17, 2021 6:13 PM
> *To:* VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu ; mhussey at verizon.net
> *Subject:* Re: [Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"
>
> Many thanks to Harish and Mark and Regina and Stuart!
>
> I've recently written two pieces on Woolf's evolving status and addressed
> her (hostile) reception (the Introduction to the first volume of the
> Bloomsbury *Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources *and a chapter
> for Anne Fernald's forthcoming *Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf--*note:
> this is not a promotion!). I cited key passages from Mark's "Virginia
> Woolf in America" in both instances. The research on Woolf-hating was
> unpleasant to say the least.
>
> Harish's wonderful email fully validates and affirms what I found as I
> examined the attitudes in the UK and US and elsewhere. And Harish's
> first-person recollections and observations are invaluable. I loved reading
> that email.
>
> Also of relevance (always) is J. J. Wilson's "From Solitude to Society in
> Reading Virginia Woolf" (in Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow, eds, *Virginia
> Woolf: Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual
> Conference on Virginia Woolf*, New York: Pace University Press, 1994),
> 13– 18).
>
> One of my favorite examples of shrugging Woolf off as exceptionally
> inferior appears in the front matter for A. D. Moody's slim 1963 volume *Virginia
> Woolf*: "genius places her with the minor rather than the major modern
> novelists." Indeed?
>
> Then there's the obnoxious 1991 UK television program *J'Accuse Virginia
> Woolf *with Tom Paulin.
>
> And memorably, Anna Snaith calls attention to the revolting contribution
> by Philip Hensher who wrote ‘Virginia Woolf Makes Me Want to Vomit’,
> Telegraph, 24 January2003, telegraph.co.uk/ comment/ personal- view/
> 3586663/Virginia- Woolf- makes- me- want- to- vomit.html (see the second
> page of Snaith's Introduction to her edited collection *Palgrave Advances
> in Virginia Woolf Studies*).
>
> Vara
>
> Vara Neverow
> Department of English
> Southern Connecticut State University
> New Haven, CT 06515
> 203-392-6717
> neverowv1 at southernct.edu
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Mark Hussey
> via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 17, 2021 11:10 AM
> *To:* VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu <VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> *Subject:* Re: [Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"
>
>
> I too am grateful to Harish for his very interesting post. At some point
> during the VW conference last week I mentioned that in the Penguin *Room
> of One’s Own* I bought in 1973 Woolf is identified in the front matter as
> ‘the daughter of Leslie Stephen and the wife of Leonard Woolf’, as of
> course she was, but by 1994 when I bought another Penguin edition of it,
> that note begins, VW ‘is now recognized as a major twentieth-century
> author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary
> history’.  And that change is due, as several here have pointed out, to
> the work of many scholars as well as to the amazing access provided by her
> Estate.
>
> I see in my copy of Walter Allen’s *Tradition & Dream* that I bought in
> 1974 and took off to university with me, Woolf’s ‘moments of revelation and
> illumination’ are not ‘always illuminative in any real sense. Sometimes
> they don’t amount to much more than a series of short, sharp feminine gasps
> of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Virginia Woolf’s use of the
> semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily used’. That was the dominant
> (Leavisite, as Regina Marler noted) view in the mid-1970s in England at any
> rate. I’ve written a bit about the difference between English and American
> reception in ‘Virginia Woolf in America’ (for Christopher Reed’s volume *Rooms
> of Their Own*), but a social history (or phenomenology!!)  of the
> reception of Woolf and Bloomsbury from about the 1930s to now would
> probably tell us a lot about British and American ‘intellectual’ culture!
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+mhussey=verizon.net at lists.osu.edu> *On
> Behalf Of *Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 17, 2021 4:31 AM
> *To:* vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
> *Subject:* [Vwoolf] "The Pelican Guide to English Literature"
>
>
>
> 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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