Woolf thinks that despite Montaigne, the English may be said to own the essay because of its peculiar popularity among them. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other” about “the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder” (“The Decay of Essay-writing.”)
Early in her writing career, when she was reviewing books for the Times Literary Supplement, Cornhill Magazine, and the Anglo-Catholic newspaper the Guardian, Woolf chose to review books about strong and smart women, and perhaps especially if they are somewhat obscured by their positions—she has a long piece on “The Sister of Frederic the Great,” and “The American Woman” is another example. Charlotte Bury, lady-in-waiting to George IV’s Queen Caroline, interests her as a woman of taste and brains who is forced to make a living by serving a woman who, at her worst, made Bury feel she was humoring a madwoman.
Sometimes the woman may not be especially smart or resourceful, but merely boxed in by circumstance: Woolf chose to review a book about Louise de La Vallière, for example, at some length. “The Journal of Lady Elizabeth Holland” is another subject of interest—Lady Holland divorced or was divorced by Sir Godfrey Webster and married Lord Holland. Lady Holland, able and broad-minded” had “the attitude of a shrewd man of business who is well used to the world and well content with it;” she was “a hard woman, perhaps, but undoubtedly a strong and courageous one.” The memorable moment here is Lady Holland at one of her evening gatherings rapping her fan and telling Macaulay “we’ve had enough of this; move on to something else.”
She reviews the love letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh and a biography of Elizabeth Carter, one of the “Bas Bleu” society, a prodigy of learning who loved to “sleep soundly and loved exercise.” Carter published a translation of Epictetus in 1758, which made her money and introduced her to the Blues. Woolf clearly is impressed with Carter’s command of Greek and thinks it’s a determining feature in being taken seriously as an intellectual. In her “Impressions” of her father she says she read some Greek with him, and she comes back to this topic later in her essay on not knowing Greek. But she did know Greek.
Most notably, Woolf reviewed the letters of Queen Elizabeth written before her accession to the throne. Elizabeth was a scholar of languages, with great native intelligence but also someone who trained herself, during times of imprisonment and great personal danger, to exercise the strictest of self-control and to say exactly what she meant, even when that was not always the whole truth or perhaps even near it.
At this time Woolf was working on her first novel, with the working title Melymbrosia; it was eventually published as The Voyage Out in 1915.
She is not at her best when writing in the abstract, as in “The Value of Laughter.” I think “A Walk by Night” fails, too, though McNeillie thinks it anticipates To the Lighthouse. She writes reviews of several of W. E. Norris’s novels, popular at the time. In her review of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth she isolates in Wharton’s own words the qualities she is examining in New York society; is members have an “affinity” for each other—that is, they have “the same prejudices and ideals,” and “they had a force of negation which eliminated anything beyond their own range of perception.” Many of the authors she reviews seem to be friends of the family or relations. She reviews a lot of bad books and sometimes she makes clear they are bad, but usually she damns them with faint praise. She reviews seven volumes of verse plays with admirable persistence.
Some poor clergyman’s book about the Lakes gets compared with Wordsworth’s 1810 Guide to the Lakes. Wordsworth writes with the calm authority” of one who had lived there most of his life. His admiration cannot be driven to “hasty exaggeration.” He thinks “mountains, trees, and lakes” as well as “the most minute changes of leaf and herb, are the seriously important things” in life, and “persuades us in the end that it is, or should be, really so.”
She reviews The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century, which was originally published as an introduction to the last volume by Hakluyt.
In a late entry in her diary Woolf says Bruce Richmond, who’d just retired as editor of TLS, taught her “ a lot of [her] craft” including “how to compress; how to enliven; & also…to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.”
In addition to The Golden Bowl, Woolf reviewed Henry James’s “Portraits of Places” (1883), whose essays about England were reprinted as English Hours (1905). Both James and Woolf have fun with an overheard conversation between a tall, sun-burned young man with “stupid blue eyes” and a beautiful young girl. “I suppose it’s pretty big,” she says, and he answers, “Yes, it’s pretty big.” “It’s nicer when they are big,” says she, and James notes that “for some time no further remark was made.” Woolf transcribes the conversation without adding James’s additional remark that they were talking of a boat. “I had had an idea they were flirting,” says James, disingenuously.
For F. W. Maitland’s biography and letters of her father (1906), Woolf contributed a few pages, “Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen,” about her sense as a child that “my father was not very much older than we were” because of the way he engaged in play with them. She recounts his reading to the children, his reading tastes, his reciting and declaiming poetry (like Ridley Ambrose in The Voyage Out or Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. He disliked reading poetry from a book but enjoyed speaking it from his prodigious memory. “Later on I read with him some Greek and some German.”
She reviews Gissing’s Private Papers, an edition of Fulke Greville’s Life of Philip Sidney, a life of Thomas Hood. She writes a long review of Sarah Bernhardt’s Memoirs. She finds a hard practicality in Bernhardt—“One figures her…a cheapener of fowls with the best of them,” somewhat literal-minded, skeptical. She notes the difficulties Fielding Hall has in trying to explain his conversion to Eastern mysticism, is interested in the correspondence of Shelley with Elizabeth Hitchener, a schoolmistress whom he met when he was 19, recognized as someone of understanding, and tried to turn into the atheist revolutionary he saw in himself. Hitchener was later part of the Shelley ménage before that became too awkward.
She reviews letters of Wordsworth, who, though a reluctant correspondent whose letters showed “his life…to be made of common stuff,” nevertheless reveals in them something pointing “to the most exalted end.”
Woolf reviews the impressions of two foreign travelers in London, one book in German and the other in French. In “A Week in the White House,” she reviews the book of a man who spent that time closely observing Theodore Roosevelt. With delicacy and subtlety she suggests that Roosevelt substitutes energy and sociability for discernment and judgment.
She likes A Room with a View but thinks Forster had already done this. She reviews the letters of Christina Rossetti, who defended her life as a poet but knew she was not a great one. She reviews a book on Venice’s Golden Age. Like so many people, she shows that Boswell is a touchstone: appreciating him reflects well on the writer. She publishes an obituary of her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen in the Guardian. She reviews a life of Johnson’s friend Baretti.
“Impressions at Bayreuth” continues what “The Opera” (a piece in The Times opening the 1909 season) started in theorizing about music or perhaps more accurately exploring the difficulties of such theorizing. “Before we have made up our minds as to the nature of the operatic form” she writes here, “we have to value very different and very emphatic examples of it.” She settles for the “impressions” of an “amateur.” But they are not impressionistic in the way—my example—E. M. Forster describes Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Howard’s End. After a performance of Parsifal, she notes the crisis that never comes in this opera, the lack of a “spring” for the drama in either love or war, and the desire of the Knights for the Grail, combining intense human emotion “with the unearthly nature of the things they seek.” She saves her most poetic touches to describe the intervals, when the audience left the opera house to enter a rural summer evening.
She has an odd lack of sympathy and understanding of Elizabeth Gaskell’s books, while she is sympathetic to those of George Gissing.
These essays are introduced and copiously annotated by McNeillie, and it is a shame they are not as carefully proofread. ( )