Tea or Books? #129: Authors Who Wrote Too Much vs Not Enough and A Room of One’s Own vs A Bookshop of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf, Jane Cholmeley, and authors who wrote too much or not enough – welcome to episode 129!

In the first half, we use a great topic suggestion by David – do we prefer authors who wrote too many books or those who didn’t write enough? And what do we mean by that? It was really fun trying to decide which authors fell into which category.

In the second half, two quite different works of non-fiction: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley.

If you’d like to find out more about our appearance at Marlborough Literary Festival – here’s their events info.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
The Visitors by Mary McMinnies
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
P.G. Wodehouse
The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
The Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Dorothy L. Sayers
Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Barbara Pym
Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes
Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Sanditon by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Dorothy Whipple
Virginia Woolf
Barbara Comyns
Muriel Spark
Mary Essex/Ursula Bloom
Paul Gallico
Ian McEwan
Michael Cunningham
Mary Lawson
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Sarah Waters
Adele and Co by Dornford Yates
Tove Jansson
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
To The North by Elizabeth Bowen
Babbacombe’s by Susan Scarlett (Noel Stratfeild)
High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

Tea or Books? #95: Woolf vs Austen and The Foolish Gentlewoman vs The Half-Crown House

Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Margery Sharp, Helen Ashton – welcome to episode 95.

In the first half, we take a detour from our usual practice and pit two authors against each other. And it’s two very big hitters – Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, suggested by my friend Paul.

In the second half, we look at two post-war novels about houses – The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp and The Half-Crown House by Helen Ashton.

Do get in touch with us if you have any suggestions or questions – teaorbooks[at]gmail.com. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcast app of choice etc. You can also support the podcast at Patreon, from as little as a dollar a month.

 

The books and authors we mention in this episode are everything by Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf [!] and:

There is a Fortress by Winifred Peck
House-Bound by Winifred Peck
Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck
Arrest the Bishop by Winifred Peck
Summer by Ali Smith
Winter by Ali Smith
The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald
Charlotte Mew by Penelope Fitzgerald
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Mapp and Lucia by E.F. Benson
Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton
The Village by Marghanita Laski
Tadpole Hall by Helen Ashton
Joanna at Littlefold 
by Helen Ashton
Yeoman’s Hospital by Helen Ashton
The Captain Comes Home by Helen Ashton
Angela Thirkell
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym
A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym
The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne

25 Books in 25 Days: #23 Virginia Woolf

I’ve read a fair few biographies of (and books about) Virginia Woolf, but somehow I always keep going back for more. I’ve also met Alexandra Harris once or twice over the years, so it was sort of inevitable that one day I’d read Virginia Woolf (2011) by Alexandra Harris, published in a rather lovely hardback, and which I found in Brighton a year or two ago.

Considering how many long books have been written about Woolf, I wasn’t sure how Harris would get her complex and significant life into 170 pages. But what a staggering achievement Virginia Woolf is – this isn’t just the essentials (though it includes that); somehow, miraculously, Harris has still accompanied those with insights into the literature and a wonderful freshness to the whole thing. It steers between the Hermione Lee school of biography (every footstep requires three footnotes) and the ‘She must have felt…’ school of biography – into something approachable, concise, and extremely thoughtful.

Having read it today, I’m still not sure how Harris managed to get so much into so few pages. There are certainly books that get more treatment than others – Orlando gets a lot; A Room of One’s Own is rushed past – but nothing felt completely overlooked. There’s even a chapter on the afterlifes of Woolf, and how the publishing of her letters and diaries, and various biographies about her, have helped shape her reputation. Virginia Woolf is a brilliant starting point for anybody interested in her life and work – but, what is more, it’s also a vital and beautiful book for even the dyed-in-the-Woolf reader, however much they’ve already read about her.

To The River by Olivia Laing

to-the-riverSomehow it took me months and months to read To The River (2011) by Olivia Laing, having it on the go alongside lots of other books I was reading – and yet it is likely to be on my best books of the year. I think I was enjoying it so much, and realising what an unusually perfect book for me it was, that I didn’t want to read any of it unless I was in exactly the right mood.

I discovered that To The River existed when reading reviews of The Shelf, I think (just in case you’ve missed how much I loved Phyllis Rose’s book, have yourself a merry little read of this) – I quickly ordered a copy, but waited until it felt like the right time to read it. Why was I so excited about it? Well, I have two words: Virginia. Woolf.

To The River plays on the title To The Lighthouse, and it’s inspired by Virginia Woolf – at least partly. The loose structure of the memoir (for such I suppose it is) is that Laing is walking the length of the Ouse – the river in which Woolf drowned herself in 1941, but also (unsurprisingly) one which has a long and varied history before that. Laing mixes the personal and the investigative as she walks along this route – an area she knows fairly well already, but with plenty left to explore and unearth… and all while Woolf comes in and out of the narrative, always a reference point, if not quite the subject of the book.

I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. “When it hurts,” wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, “we return to the banks of certain rivers,” and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy.

I’ve kinda already spoiled which river that is (mea culpa) – and it was a form of grief that took Laing there this time: the break-up of a relationship, which she mentions throughout the book (though not in an Eat, Pray, Love sort of way – more as a series of memories threaded throughout). (FYI, I haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love and have no idea what it’s really like.)

Like Laing, I am very fond of rivers. I grew up in a village called Eckington, in Worcestershire, which is in a bend of the River Avon. That meant that it flooded every year, and two of the three roads that led out of the village would generally be impassable, but it also gave me a lifelong love of rivers – you could walk all the way around the village by river, or you could stroll down to one of the two locks. You could even follow the river for miles in either direction, if you so chose. And in Oxford I have usually lived relatively close to a river – it’s five minutes’ walk from my house now – and it’s where I instinctively go when I’m sad. This week, in fact, I was pretty miserable for a couple of days – and, in the first burst of it, I went and stood by the river, staring into it. Not in a Virginia-Woolf-throw-myself-in, I should add, but because I find rivers calming and beautiful, and somehow reassuringly constant.

Anyway, Laing walks along the river – or as near as she can get to it; a lot of the riverbank is privately owned – and it’s greatly enjoyable just to read about the places she stays, the people she bumps into, and her reflections on her surroundings. I love reading all this sort of thing:

I walked back through fields of sleeping cows as the dusk fell down about me. I was staying that night in an old farmhouse near Isfield church, in a room at the end of a long corridor separated from the rest of the house by a velvet curtain. It smelled smoky and sweet, as if apple wood or cherry had been burning for generations. I’d been lent a torch when I went out, and now, tiptoeing back in, I was given a flask of hot milk and a homemade truffle to take up to bed. It was nice to be coddled. I wrapped the duvet round me and ate my feast while flicking through a book I’d found hidden beneath a stack of Country Life.

But To The River is much more than a travel diary: along the way, Laing discusses all manner of things that happened near her route, or which she is reminded of. And I mean ‘all manner of things’. There is a brief history of the discovery of dinosaurs and the rivalries it entailed; the life of Simon de Montfort; Piltdown man; folklore about dancing nymphs – it’s really all there. And, weaving in and out of all of them: Virginia Woolf. The places she visited, the inspiration she gathered for her novels, and the way she would have experienced the area. To be truthful, I would have loved a bit more about Woolf and about Laing’s history of reading her books – but I can’t fault the exemplary way that Laing brings together all the disparate histories she discusses with the trip she is taking. It’s quite extraordinary. It somehow doesn’t feel disjointed at all – as each thought comes to the surface, naturally, she gives a brief and engaging summary of the topic. It’s conversational and (here comes the river metaphor) flowing.

It was a pleasure to spend time in To The River. Such an unusual premise for a book makes me applaud the good people of Canongate for being willing to publish it – and wonder what other books of this ilk might be out there. Thank you, Olivia Laing, for taking this trip – for being both a brilliant researcher and a vulnerable self-analyser, and for bringing the two elements together so beautifully.

Roger Fry: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

I’m a bit behind with reviewing, to put it mildly, but I did read Roger Fry (1940) for the biography phase of Heavenali’s Woolfalong. She suggested a biography of Woolf, or Orlando or Flush, but I piped up with this one – the only actual biography that Woolf wrote, as opposed to those novels she tagged ‘a biography’ onto the end of. Sorry that it’s come so long after the months in question, but I promise I read it during the relevant period!

roger-fryIt feels quite odd, to read a biography by a woman who has been so very biographied – particularly one that was published only a year before she died. How would she write about someone? What precedent would she leave for those who would write about her? Well, it wasn’t quite what I expected. And I’m not quite sure how to write about it.

Firstly – who was Roger Fry? In some ways, he would have made an excellent character in a Woolf novel. He was a painter whose paintings never quite lived up to his hopes – and certainly never got the acclaim he sought. On the other hand, he was an art critic of great repute, whose writings of criticism were popular and respected by many – while also being castigated with horror by the old guard. Indeed, Kenneth Clark said that Fry was ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin … In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry’. Alongside this, his personal life was fraught. His wife Helen became mentally ill not long into their marriage, and moved to an asylum for the rest of her life. Fry had affairs with several women, including Virginia Woolf’s sister, but Woolf does not spend much time on these – perhaps unsurprisingly. He was a kind, damaged man, not content with his lot or his achievements – but seems to have been warmer, less difficult to love, than some of the Bloomsbury Group.

My favourite section, I think, was the chapter on the Post-Impressionists. This was mostly fun in the oh-so-subtle pleasure Woolf takes in showing the people who railed against the ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition that Fry organised in 1910 (it is argued that Woolf’s famous words ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ refers, at least in part, to this exhibition). Fry apparently coined the term post-impressionist, and he was the first to introduce Manet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and more to the British public – and most of them did not take well to it. It is astonishing, reading this chapter, to see how much vitriol there was in the press, in essays, even in letters to Fry; it damaged his standing in academic circles. It is difficult to imagine anybody caring that much about art today. But even by the time Woolf was writing, in 1940, these artists had become accepted parts of the European artistic landscape.

I went into the book expecting him to appear as something like a character in a Woolf novel, built up piece by piece, description by description, until the complex composite appeared. It wasn’t quite like that. She is fairly linear in her depiction of Fry, concentrating chiefly (in his later life) on his professional successes and failures, but Woolf does describe some of the less concrete elements of Fry’s life. I think what surprised me was her style in doing so. Here, for example, she is writing about Helen’s illness:

The end of his work in America coincided with a far more terrible conclusion. When, three years before, Sir George Savage had told him that in his opinion Helen Fry’s illness was hopeless, he had refused to believe him. He had gone from doctor to doctor; he had tried every method that held out the least chance of success. It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion. In the hope that his wife could still live with him he had built a house from his own design near Guildford. In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there. But the illness increased, and in that year he was forced, for the children’s sake, to give up the battle. It had lasted, with intervals of rare happiness, since 1898. “You have certainly fought hard to help your wife, and shown a devotion I have never seen equalled”, Dr Head wrote to him in November 1910. “Unfortunately the disease has beaten us.”

She is not quite the impersonal biographer, but she is very far from the novelist here. You can’t imagine a sentence as prosaic as ‘In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there’ appearing in her fiction. Yet you can’t imagine ‘It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion’ being found in the work of a modern day biographer. Throughout Roger Fry, Woolf’s writing falls a little between two stools. It is never bad writing, of course – she would be incapable of that – but it feels rather held back. Woolf wears the hat of the biographer a little uneasily, if she is not aping or exaggerating it in her fiction.

Woolf also makes no mention of her personal relationship with Fry. Stranger still, she refers to Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell throughout without acknowledging her connection with them – and at one point even refers to ‘Virginia Woolf’ as though it were a different person. She is trying on a persona which cannot find its reflection in the cast of characters she is depicting – awkwardly, when those characters are real and include herself.

So, is this a good biography? Yes – rich and informative and sensitive. And normally I don’t much care about the style of the biographer – indeed, I don’t want it to intrude on the reading experience, or get in the way of the subject. But any reader of Roger Fry today is likely to be more interested in Woolf than Fry, and this is a strange piece of that jigsaw puzzle. Yes, a good biography – but not quite what one expects from Woolf, and disconcerting to see her talent hide in the shadows of her own book. A fascinating read, and a curious footnote to my understanding of Woolf’s life and style.

#1938Club: Virginia Woolf and Stanley Spencer

Magnolias

As with the 1924 Club, I thought I’d see how Virginia Woolf started the year in 1938 – and, unrelated, found this beautiful 1938 painting by one of my absolute favourite artists: ‘Magnolias’ by Stanley Spencer. 1924 started well for Woolf; 1938 is a rather different matter. This is the first entry she wrote that year.

Sunday 9 January Yes, I will force myself to begin the cursed year. For one thing I have ‘finished’ the last chapter of Three Guineas, & for the first time since I don’t know when have stopped writing in the middle of the morning.

How am I to describe ‘anxiety’? I’ve battened it down under this incessant writing, thinking, about 3 Gs – as I did in the summer after Julian’s death. Rau has just been, & says there is still a trace of blood: if this continues, L. will have to go next week to a nursing home & be examined. Probably it is the prostate. This may mean an operation. We shall know nothing till Tuesday. What use is there in analysing the feelings of the past 3 weeks? He was suddenly worse at Rodmell; we came up on Wednesday: – the 28th or thereabouts; since when its been a perpetual strain of waiting for the telephone to ring. What does the analysis show &c? He went to the hospital to be X rayed; habitual, dulled; but only laid under a very thin cover. I walk; work, & so on. Nessa & Angelica & Duncan all at Cassis, which shuts off that relief, but why should she have this forced on her? Anyhow, they come back in a fortnight I suppose.

Harry Stephen, Judith, I think our only visitors. A dead season. No one rings up. Fine today. And the result of writing this page is to make me see how essential it is to steep myself in work; so back to 3 Guineas again. The the time passes. Writing this it flags.

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (#Woolfalong)

Thank goodness it’s a leap year, as this helpful 29 February means I’ve just snuck into the January/February bracket for posting my first contribution to Ali’s Woolfalong – more on that here. Basically, in these first two months, the aim was to read (or reread) either Mrs Dalloway or To The Lighthouse – the two most famous Woolf novels. Being a massive Woolf fan, I was delighted with the opportunity to reread.

To The Lighthouse

This is, I think, the fourth time I’ve read To The Lighthouse (1927), but the first time I’ve done so since about 2009. Would I still love it as much? Short answer: yes. Slightly longer answer: I seem to need more of a focused opportunity to read Woolf than I used to. Perhaps my brain has become more scrambled, but I found I needed a bit more concentration than usual to properly appreciate her prose – but it more than pays off.

It is often said that Woolf novels have little plot. Certainly, despite multiple reads, I couldn’t remember a great deal about what happened in To The Lighthouse. (And yet, in a moment I won’t spoil in this review, it is the only novel at which I have ever gasped aloud in shock at something that happens, and the ingenious way that it is told.) Essentially, the Ramsay family and some hangers-on are staying by the coast, waiting to see whether or not they can travel to the lighthouse the next day – and that is the starting point for conversations, musings, changes, hatreds, heartaches, observations. And what a starting point:

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.

I only meant to quote up to ‘…within touch’, but I couldn’t stop. It’s such beautiful, such rich writing. Woolf uses words and sentences with an extraordinary sense of their patterns and waves, forming sentences that flow in and out – darting here and there; observing and reflecting – until the simplest moments become daring composite images of the person concerned. The worst writers are those that imitate Woolf and get it wrong; the best writer of the 20th century (to my mind) is Woolf. Her strength is seeing past the surface of a simple word or action, and delving into every nuance.

This is also why readers will tend to love or loathe Woolf. If you read for plot, there is little for you. If you like prose always to be sparse and effective (a style I also love), then Woolf will probably rankle. If you like to read quickly, then you’ll have to learn to slow yourself down to appreciate Woolf – I certainly had to this time around (perhaps I read faster than I used to?) – but I was encouraged by this passage about reading towards the end of To The Lighthouse:

But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the bramble, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page after page.

Isn’t that glorious? Time and again, for almost any experience she documents, Woolf is able to explore and unravel more than the moment suggests. Her descriptions aren’t always intuitive, but they reveal more than any other author I’ve read; there is infinite richness here.

Of particular note are the ways Woolf documents the evolving relationships between Mr Ramsay and his son James, the latter of whom harbours passionate but silent hatred. (‘Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he teased his youngest son’s bare leg.’) Equally wonderful are the scenes of Lily the artist, looking at her canvas and battling against feelings of failure and creative obstacles.

The edition I read was the Oxford World’s Classics pictured above, which is lovely to look at and to read, but David Bradshaw’s notes are eccentric to say the least. I can write now (since my DPhil is over) that he took my first year viva, and was so aggressive and discouraging – not to mention unscholarly, in a rude criticism based on his confusing of two different books – that I almost quit my research afterwards. I  was not predisposed to enjoy his editing, therefore, but I hope this isn’t colouring my view of his footnotes, which feel rather phoned in and are often facile (who needs to know, for instance, Bradshaw’s hypothetical musings on why the rent is to low?), though there are some useful points among them. But there are so many editions of To The Lighthouse out there that you can more or less have your choice of them.

The important thing is, I think, that you try her. Try her fiction, and try her non-fiction (which we’ll get to later in the Woolfalong). Perhaps you’ll love her, perhaps you’ll hate her, but if you’re in the former camp, it will change your reading life forever and add a depth and dimension to your experience of fiction that no other author I’ve read has been able to match.

Virginia Woolf in 1924

VW diary vol 2I’ve been struck down with a little bit of Reader’s Block it seems – not sure how pervasive yet – so I’ve not finished any more 1924 books yet. What terrible timing! I’m hoping to finish off one more before the week is out, but for today, let’s take a look at how Virginia Woolf greeted the year in her diary. Spoilers: it’s not with an egalitarian worldview. Or short paragraphs.

2 January 1924: The year is almost certainly bound to be the most eventful in the whole of our (recorded) career. Tomorrow I go up to London to look for houses; on Saturday I deliver sentence of death upon Nellie & Lottie; at Easter we leave Hogarth; in June Dadie comes to live with us; & our domestic establishments is entirely controlled by one woman, a vacuum cleaner, & electric stoves. Now how much of this is dream, & how much reality? I should like, very much, to turn to the last page of this virgin volume & there find my dreams true. It rests with me to substantiate them between now & then. I need not burden my entirely frivolous page with whys & wherefores, how we reached these decisions, so quick. It was partly a question of coal at Rodmell. Then Nelly presented her ultimatum – poor creature, she’ll withdraw it, I know, – about the kitchen. “And I must have a new stove, & it must be on the floor so that we can warm our feet; & I must have a window in that wall…” Must? Is must a word to be used to Princes? Such was our silent reflection as we received these commands, with Lottie skirmishing around with her own very unwise provisoes & excursions. “You won’t get two girls to sleep in one room as we do” &c. “Mrs Bell says you can’t get  drop of hot water in this house…” “So you won’t come here again, Nelly?” I asked. “No, ma’am, I won’t come here again” in saying which she spoke, I think, the truth. Meanwhile, they are happy as turtles, in front of a roaring fire in their own clean kitchen, having attended the sales, & enjoyed all the cheap diversions of Richmond, which begin to pall on me. Already I feel ten years younger. Life settles round one, living here for 9 years as we’ve done, merely to think of a change lets in the air. Youth is a matter of forging ahead. I see my contemporaries satisfied, outwardly; inwardly conscious of emptiness. What’s it for? they ask themselves now & then, when the new year comes, & can’t possibly upset their comfort for a moment. I think of the innumerable tribe of Booth, for example; all lodged, nested, querulous, & believing firmly that they’ve been enjoined so to live by our father which is in heaven. Now my state is infinitely better. Here am I launching forth into vacancy. We’ve two young people depending on us. We’ve no house in prospect. All is possibility & doubt. How far can we make publishing pay? And can we give up the Nation? & could we find a house better than Monks House? Yes, that’s cropped up, partly owing to the heaven sent address of Nelly. I turned into Thornton’s waiting for my train, & was told of an old house at Wilmington – I’m pleased to find [how] volatile our temperaments still are – & L[eonard] is steady as well, a triumph I can’t say I achieve – at the ages of 42 & 43 – for 42 comes tripping towards me, the momentous year.

Now it is six, my boundary, & I must read Montaigne, & cut short those other reflections about, I think, reading & writing which were to fill up the page. I ought to describe the walk from Charleston too, but can’t defraud Montaigne any longer. He gets better & better, & so I can’t scamp him, & rush into writing, & earn my 20 guineas as I hope. Did I record a tribute from Gosse: that I’m a nonentity, a scratch from Hudson, that the V.O. is rotten; & a compliment all the way from American from Rebecca West? Oh dear, oh dear, no boasting, aloud, in 1924. I didn’t boast at Charleston.

 

Virginia Woolf’s Garden

For one of my Christmas presents, my brother made a very impressive sacrifice – by buying me a book about an author he is, ahem, not fond of. Sadly, he does not love our Virginia, but that is not a unique perspective. (More on Colin’s reading, or lack thereof, another time perhaps… if I can bring myself to admit that my twin brother hasn’t finished reading a book in over six months…) (Sorry Colin!)
Anyway, this was one of my favourite Christmas presents, and will probably appear on my end of year favourite books – mostly because of how sumptuous it was to read. And by ‘read’, I mean ‘look at photos’.

 

Which isn’t to say that there is no writing – not by a long chalk. Caroline Zoob, who was tenant of Monk’s House for quite a few years and whose efforts largely helped restore the garden, writes winningly of the process and the Woolfs’ lives. But the beautiful photography by Caroline Arber was certainly my favourite thing about the book. It really is beautiful, and made me (with my complete ignorance of all things gardening) want to take up horticulture. I pretty swiftly shifted to wanting to take up visiting more gardens that other people have put effort into, but never mind.
Using Virginia and Leonard’s diaries and letters, alongside other resources, Caroline recreates what the experience of creating this garden was like for both of them, and traces its development alongside their lives – past Virginia’s death in 1941 and all the way to Leonard’s in 1969. There aren’t all that many contemporary photographs of V and L in the garden,but what resources there are have been wonderfully mined. And it becomes very clear that the garden was Leonard’s passion particularly – with his experimentation with rare bulbs, unusual arrangements, and complex garden design. Virginia’s primary delight was her writing shed, and she jokes about envying the garden for the attention it receives from Leonard.
If one knew nothing about the pair, there is enough biographical detail in Zoob’s writing to make the book completely accessible, but without overdoing it for those of us already very familiar with the Woolfs’ lives (which, after all, is probably a high percentage of those who would want to read a book called Virginia Woolf’s Garden). The area I would have loved more detail is what happened to the house after Leonard died; how it came to the National Trust, and how various residents experienced living there. There are only two or three pages which discuss Zoob’s life there – and, considering this is an almost unique perspective, I would have loved more…

When we arrived at Monk’s House we knew very little about Virginia. To begin with, I found the intensity of some of the visitors disconcerting. On a day when the house was closed, I came home to find a woman weeping at the gate, overcome by the thought that Virginia’s hand had touched that very gate as she left the house on her way to the river. I did not have the heart to tell her that Virginia had left the garden through a different gate at the top of the garden, long since disused. Instead I made soothing noises and offered to make her a cup of tea.

Perhaps Zoob modestly thought people wouldn’t be interested – but, oh, I would certainly have been!
Something I wasn’t quite so interested in was the element of garden design in the book. I certainly recognise that many people would love these sections, but it was like double Dutch to me – or, indeed, like Latin. At least they came with pretty pictures. And I was very impressed by the tapestry garden design, also (I think) by the photographer Caroline Arber, that appeared throughout – for example:

 

Of the making of books about Virginia Woolf there is no end – and I, for one, am delighted about it. This one has to go near the top of Woolfenilia, and I heartily recommend it as a coffee table book (if such things still exist) and as a fascinating, detailed account to read thoroughly too.

Shiny New Virginia Woolf

I think there are a whole bunch of things from Shiny New Books Issue 4 that I haven’t mentioned yet – and Issue 5 is less than a month away!  So, for Virginia Woolf fans, here are some links to explore (since I wrote THREE posts about Woolf for that issue, folks):

1.) Essays on the Self
A lovely edition, from Notting Hill Editions, with a selection of some of Woolf’s best essays (and… some others too.)

2.) A Room of One’s Own
You probably don’t need me to tell you what a ground-breaking, phenomenal, and brilliant book this is – but, in case you do, click through.

3.) Five Fascinating Facts about Virginia Woolf
I love a Five Fascinating Facts post, and had fun putting this one together about Ginny.