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Introduction: Viriginia Woolf, European Essayist Notes Introduction: Viriginia Woolf, European Essayist 1 Arnold Bennett,' Is the Novel Decaying?' (1923), p. 47. 2 Maria DiBattista has provided a similar interpretation of this diary entry which she claims indicates `not so much that Woolf's center will not hold' but rather that it `eludes . the spirit's grasp' (The Fables of Anon (1980), p. 24). As DiBattista concentrates exclusively on the novels, her reading of this entry does not examine the link between this sense of reaching out without being able to grasp the true `reality' and the question of the essay, which I argue is essential to Woolf's own understanding of her artistic project. 3 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), p. 28. 4 For examples of this conceptions of the essay see Orlo Williams, The Essay (n.d.) and Bonamy DobreÂe, English Essayists (1946). In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), John Gross has offered a modified definition of this conjunction between the essay and the idea of the gentleman by identifying the belletrist with the unattached, freelance commentator on literary matters whose emergence and disappearance he traces from the early nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth. In Gross's terms, the man of letter is defined by its opposition to the professional academic, much in the same way as the common reader stands in contrast to `the critic and the scholar' for Woolf (see especially Gross's 1991 Afterword). For a discussion of the idea of the common reader in relation to Woolf's essayistic practice see below, Chapter 2. 5 For examples of these postwar readings see David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (1942); Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (1962). 6 Georg LukaÂcs, `On the Nature and Form of the Essay', p. 7. 7 Graham Good, The Observing Self,p.8. 8 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 11±26. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, `The Essay as Form' (1958), p. 5. 10 John Snyder, Prospects of Power, p. 159. 11 This focus on the possibility of fashioning and refashioning the self char- acterises, according to Stephen Greenblatt, also the theatre of the Renais- sance; see his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). 12 Snyder, Prospects, p. 174. 13 Ibid., p. 178. 14 Ibid., p. 172. 15 Snyder's choice of Woolf and Rich as representative feminist essayists leaves out some crucial interventions made by feminists writing in the 1970s and 1980s, whose work might be seen to resemble more closely Montaigne's approach to subjectivity. See especially HeÂleÁne Cixous's `The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's `For the Etruscans' (1985). Snyder's arguments about the Baconian inheritance in feminist essayists are perhaps better reflected in more recent attempts to reclaim the essay as 151 152 Virginia Woolf 's Essays an essentially feminine genre either on the basis of historical questions, such as the composition of the readership of essays in the eighteenth century, and of politico-ideological ones. For an example of the former see Beth Carole Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson (1995) and Michael Kaufmann, `A Modernism of One's Own' (1997); for the latter see the articles collected in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (eds), The Politics of the Essay (1993). 16 The reference to `feminist pamphlets' is taken from Jean Guiguet's Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1965), where A Room and Three Guineas are listed under the heading `Feminism and Pamphlets'. For Guiguet Woolf's feminist essays express that part of her character and personality that had been repressed in the novels in the pursuit of artistic purity. Woolf's constant interest in the feminist cause does not therefore reveal for Guiguet just `a considerable degree of social consciousness' but also demands a revision of the interpreta- tion of her work that would read into what has been seen as a self-centred concern with individual consciousness a way of breaking out of the strictures of neo-classicist aesthetics (p. 192). Guiguet's view of the repression of fem- inist concerns in Woolf's novels will be echoed over ten years later by MicheÁle Barrett in Women and Writing, but also in her more recent introduc- tion to the Penguin edition of A Room and Three Guineas (1993). 17 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 18 MicheÁle Barrett, Introduction, in Women and Writing,p.1. 19 Among the suggestions for further reading listed by Barrett are Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art (1968); Nancy Topping Bazin, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (1973); Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny, 2nd edn (1973). 20 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, pp. 263±97. 21 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 16. 22 For some of the stages of the debates initiated by Moi, see Janet Todd's Feminist Literary History (1988), which was explicitly conceived as a rebuttal of Moi's arguments; Naomi Schor, `Introducing Feminism' (1986), and Diana Fuss, `Getting Into History' (1989) both discuss the issues raised by Moi's version of the history of feminist criticism. 23 This increased popularisation of Woolf's essays is reflected by the fact that her work was represented within the Penguin 60s series not by her fiction but by a selection of essays, Killing the Angel in the House (1995), which included `Professions for Women', `The Feminine Note in Fiction', `Women Novelists', `The Intellectual Status of Women', `Two Women', `Memories of a Working Women's Guild', and `Ellen Terry'. 24 See especially Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays, pp. 10±12, and Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson, pp. xvi-xviii. The stress on the dialogic character of Woolf's relation to past authors had already been under- lined by Gillian Beer, who set out to trace the lines of exchange between Woolf and literary history in Arguing with the Past (1989). As the title of her collection of essays indicates, though, Beer's notion of dialogue was more antagonistic than the one proposed by Brosnan or Rosenberg and was modelled on the parent/child relationship rather than on Bakhtin's theories. Notes 153 25 For examples of comparative readings of Woolf's and Montaigne's essayistic practice see Juliette Dusinberre's Virginia Woolf's Renaissance, pp. 40±64; Catherine Sandbach-DahlstroÈm, ` ``Que scais-je?'': Virginia Woolf and the Essay as Feminist Critique' (1997). See also the discussion of Woolf's reading of the Essais in Chapter 2 below. 26 Musil, The Man Without Qualities, book ii, chapter 62 (pp. 267±77). Musil's `novel' appeared in German between 1930 and 1942, overlapping in some ways with Woolf's own work on The Pargiters, the project for writing a `novel- essay' which she started in 1932 and then split off into The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). 27 Claire de Obaldia's The Essayistic Spirit (1995) offers one of the clearest and most illuminating analyses of Continental Essayism, stressing the lines of continuity that link its earlier, modernist examples to its later revival in the works of prominent postmodernist and poststructuralist critics, from Barthes to Derrida. But because her interest lies in tracing those lines, de Obaldia is forced to effect a too clear-cut separation between `Essayism' and the essay proper which closes off any possible exploration of the interaction between the issue of genre and that of gender. 28 Jane Marcus, `Thinking Back Through Our Mothers' (1981), p. 7. 29 For one of the very few contemporary analyses of the issue of class in Woolf from a feminist perspective see Mary Childers, `Virginia Woolf on the Out- side Looking Down' (1992). Woolf's alleged blindness to class determinations was also at the centre of Q. D. Leavis's attack on Three Guineas in `Caterpillars of the World Unite!', (1938). As I discuss in Chapter 3, though, the restriction of Woolf's audience to a certain class segment in Three Guineas is a direct consequence not so much of her own class position as of some of the rhetorical strategies of argumentation she chose for the essay. 1. Eccentric Histories 1 As most of Woolf's early articles were published anonymously, the begin- nings of her career are surrounded by a high degree of uncertainty, and different editors have identified different essays as her first published piece of writing. In 1986 Andrew McNeillie opened the first volume of his edition of the essays with Woolf's review of William Dean Howells's The Son of Royal Langbirth, which appeared in the Guardian on 14 December 1904. Six years later Mitchell A. Leaska's notes to the early journals identified another arti- cle, `Social England' (Guardian, 7 December 1904) as her first piece of pub- lished work (PA, n. 16, p. 219). This confirms the nebulous character of this period of Woolf's career, which offers the possibility of questioning the integrity of her oeuvre and thus destabilise her twin identity of modernist writer and feminist critic. As Michel Foucault argued in `What is an Author' (1969), `the word work and the unity it designates' (p. 104) are an integral part of the ideological function performed by the notion of authorship. 2 Throughout this section I will be using Woolf's maiden name whenever the reference is specifically to her early writings; in all other cases, she will be designated by her married name, as by convention. This alternation between maiden and married name is meant to underline the `strangeness' or, as we 154 Virginia Woolf 's Essays shall see, the `eccentricity' of this period of her career to the identity of the established figure we have come to recognise as `Woolf'.
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