[Vwoolf] Another book to cross off your list

[Stuart N. Clarke]

George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge at the University Press, 1941), p. 975: ‘Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), daughter of Leslie Stephen, is another [like Rose Macaulay in the previous paragraph] of “books in the blood”.  Such novels of limited renown as Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931) have been greeted as original experiments in a new technique of fiction—the exploration of consciousness replacing the exploitation of event.  Actually they are the attempts of an essayist not instinctively a novelist to use fiction as a means of expression.  Virginia Woolf has small invention and her characters are the transient and embarrassed phantoms of her ideas.  A better measure of her quality can be gained from her critical studies, The Common Reader, first series (1925), second series (1932) and A Room of One’s Own (1929).  Three Guineas (1938) proved disappointingly unconstructive.  Her essays in criticism, traditional in form and theme, have far more genuine impulse than her novels, which carry little conviction as vital creations.

Mrs Woolf rises from her grave to comment: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.”

George Sampson (1873-1950) was the “fourth and youngest child of Thomas Sampson, mariner ... Poor health prevented him from going to school until nearly eleven and circumstances compelled him to leave before he was sixteen. He was then set to work for London matriculation and was trained as an elementary schoolteacher at Southwark Pupil Teacher School and Winchester Training College. ... the Cambridge History of English Literature. Its completion was delayed by ill health, but when it was published it was rightly hailed as a tour de force” (ODNB).

Stuart
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