• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Notes NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION I. These are Renate Poggioli's terms in TJu Theory ofthe Avant-Garde. ch.2. Poggioli's entire account illuminates how Bloomsbury was and was not avant-garde, 2. Bloomsbury writers were closely associated at times with the Nation and the NewStatesman , but the political and even parts of the literary halves of these periodicals were edited and written by journalists largely unassociated with the Group. Desmond MacCarthy edited two periodicals that might be considered small magazines, and, though both had Bloomsbury con­ tributors, neither the Neu. QuarterlY nor lift and Letters could be called a Bloomsbury magazine. 3. Desmond MacCarthy can serve as an illustration of what is involved in determining the membership of Bloomsbury. Recently MacCarthy's son­ in-law David Cecil has denied his connection with Bloomsbury: 'As he himself said, "Bloomsbury has never been a spiritual home to me" (Cecil, 'Introduction', p. 15). Cecil omits the other half of the sentence from MacCarthy's Bloomsbury memoir, which is 'but let me add that I have not got one, although at Cambridge for a few years I fancied that I had'. MacCarthy goes on to call Bloomsbury a home away from home and note how he converged on the Group through the Apostles, Clive Bell and the Stephen sisters (SPR/BG, p. 28). To these connections could be added his association with Roger Fry, which led to his writing the introduction for the catalogue of the first post-impressionist exhibition. Like Strachey, MacCarthy was more closely involved in Old than New Bloomsbury, but in both he edited periodicals that depended on his Bloomsbury friends for contributions. One of Mary MacCarthy's purposes in founding the Memoir Club was, as with its precursor the Novel Club, to encourage her husband to write. That MacCarthy moved in other circles as well as Bloomsbury is not, of course, a sufficient reason for excluding him from the Group, because all the members had friends outside Bloomsbury. In his associations, his values and , most importantly, his writings, Desmond MacCarthy displays as many affinities with Bloomsbury as anyone in the Group, which is why Leonard Woolf, Raymond Mortimer and Quentin Bell, among others, include him in Bloomsbury. NOTES TO CHAPTER I: INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUNDS I. The connection between Virginia Woolfand Caroline Emelia Stephen has been overdeveloped by Jane Marcus, who thinks that 'we need search no 279 280 Notes further for the origins of Virginia Woolf's pacifism and mysticism' than her aunt's books (p. 27). The evidence is mostly indirect (though there are unmistakable indications of a dislike of her aunt's personality and writings in Virginia Woolf's early letters), and there are other, more obvious sources in Virginia Woolf's quite different mystical experiences, in her study of Plato, in the pacifism of the women's movement, in the anti-militarism of her father and in the Quaker heritage of Roger Fry, who influenced her so profoundly. 2. The interesting connections between Moore, Russell and phenomenolog­ ists, especially Franz Brentano with his influential concept of intentional­ ity, have been set forth in Roderick Chisholm's Realism andtlu Background of Plunomenology . 3. Raymond Williams has described Bloomsbury's liberalism as a bourgeois ideology of pluralistic civilised individualism and noted some of the ironies of its current influence: Indeed the paradox of many retrospective judgements ofBloomsbury is that the group lived and worked this position with a now embarrassing whole-heartedness: embarrassing, that is to say, to those many for whom 'civilised individualism' is a mere flag to fly over a capitalist, imperialist and militarist social order; embarrassing, also, to those many others for whom 'civilised individualism' is a summary phrase for a process of privileged consumption. (p.63) 4. The essay, reprinted in The Captain's Death Bed and Collected Essays, reads 'in or about December, 1910', but the original Hogarth Essay text says 'on or about December, 1910'. 5. Pater was one of the few influential Victorian prose authors about whom Virginia Woolfdid not write. In TheAbsent FatlJer: Virginia Woolfand Walter Pater, Perry Meisel finds her silence an indication ofPater's importance for her. Some ofthe connections Meisel finds significant can also be located in the work of Virginia Woolf's present father, which Meisel does not examine; other similarities are to be found in the influence of such writers as HenryJames and G. E. Moore, which Meisel also ignores while finding additional evidence for Pater's influence in the deep differences between his work and Virginia Woolf's. NOTES TO CHAPTER 2: LESLIE STEPHEN I. See Lowell's 'Verses Intended to Go with a Posset Dish to My Dear Little God-Daughter, 1882', as printed in Maitland (pp. 318-19), with its description ofthe gifts he wishes her - her father's wit, her mother's beauty - and the faintly ominous prophetic warning, I simply wish the child to be A sample of Heredity Enjoying to the full extent Life's best, the Unearned Increment, ... Notes 281 Thus, then, the cup is duly filled; Walk steady, dear, lest all be spilled. 2. The typescript (Add . MS 61973 in the British Library) is a revised version ofpp. 107-37 of 'A Sketch of the Past' in the first edition of Moments ofBeing (1976) and includes an additional twenty-seven-page section on Leslie Stephen and Hyde Park Gate. The typescript has been incorporated into the second edition of MomtTIts ofBeing (1985), which is the text cited here. 3. Hardy thought Stephen's philosophy influenced him more than that of any other contemporary (F. Hardy, p. 1(0) . 4. In The English Utilitarians Stephen wrote of Mill's The Su.hjectitm ofWomen, None of his writing is more emphatically marked by generosity and love of justice. A certain shrillness of tone marks the recluse too little able to appreciate the animal nature of mankind. Yet in any case, he made a most effective protest against the prejudices which stunted the develop­ ment and limited careers of women. (111281) 5. See Noel Annan's The CU.riOIlS StrtTIgth ofPositivism in English Political Thought and his Introduction to Stephen's Selected Writings in British Intellectual History; Leonard Woolf is not discussed specifically in these , but Annan's criticisms clearly apply to his work. 6. Two unreprinted essays in the Cornhill give Stephen's views on literature and morality quite clearly: 'Art and Morality' was written shortly after the publication of Pater's Ttu Renaissance ; 'T he Moral Element in Literature' is a defence of the ideas in 'Wordsworth's Ethics' that Arnold had criticised. 7. Stephen's letters to his wife, now in the Berg Collection, reveal him to be unhappy with omissions he felt forced to make, and, in his DNB account of his grandfather James Stephen, he concealed the parentage of an illegiti­ mate son. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3: SOME VICTORIAN VISIONS I. One reason why Forster seems not to have forgotten the details of Rooks­ nest is that he kept an account of it written when he was fifteen, just after leaving the house, and then continued more than a half century later. See the Appendix to Howards End. 2. When A NinetttTIth-CtTltury Childhood was reissued in 1948 (with an intro­ duction by John Betjeman describing it as 'a work of genius'), Mary MacCarthy changed some of the fictitious titles and place names to their originals but kept the family name of Kestrell. 3. According to Keynes's mother, Florence Ada Keynes. Mark Rutherford portrayed John Brown in TheRevolutitm in Tanner's Lane (F. A. Keynes, pp. 21-2). 4. In 1899 Virginia Woolftumed a copy ofIsaac Watts's famous Logick into a palimpsest by pasting the pages of a fragmentary holiday diary into it, anticipating in a symbolic manner, perhaps, the way in which G. E. Moore's epistemology would underlie her later fiction. This Warboys diary 282 Notes contains various kinds of writing, such as Ruskinian nature sketches (QB/VW, I 65-6) and another early satire, 'A Terrible Tragedy in a Duck Pond', which makes fun of the Duckworths' name by imagining its origin in the saving ofa duck for a king (pNY). 5. Virginia Woolf's obituary is reprinted in Winifred Gerin's Anne Thackeray Ritcmt, a good biography for the Victorian backgrounds of Virginia Woolf. 6. Spilka notes the connection between this passage and Virginia Woolf's suicide (p. 124). 7. Leslie Stephen's side of the correspondence is now in the Berg, and Julia Stephen's manuscripts are in the library of Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. 8. See Virginia Woolf's 'Nurse Lugton's Curtain' and 'The Widow and the Parrot' (CSF). One of Julia Stephen's stories has some faint connections with To th« lighthouse. In 'Emlycaunt', the name of a fairyland haven for animals imagined by Vanessa and Thoby when they were very young (according to a note on the manuscript), the boy who visits this land on a rocking horse has a sister named Lily; just before the visit he receives a toy sailing boat for his birthday, but is told that because of the fog it cannot be sailed on the Round Pond that day. An example of the pervasive social milieu of these stories, together with what must have been an allusion to Virginia, occurs in the beginning of a story about a monkey on a moor. A young child named 'Ginia' buries her shoes and stockings in the sand, and is likened to a bare-legged little beggar girl when she has to be carried home. 9. In 'A Sketch of the Past' Virginia Woolfalso says he never went to Italy or stayed in Paris (MB, p.

Load more

  38

Copy Link