Virginia Woolf mocking

people who object to (wild) experiments and who bemoan the deterioration of literature, nostalgic for a golden age in the past that contemporary literature, in their opinion, doesn't match.


"All he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne, all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe. Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson — Ben Jonson was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age, he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments — neither of which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him to say it — for he loved literature as he loved his life — he could see no good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself out another glass of wine."
(From "Orlando")

This can also apply well to other fields such as visual arts, cinema, music, linguistics, etc. 

As Orlando awoke 1 morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a woman.

For the time being, I don't know what to make of Orlando's sudden sex change (a satire or a more 'literal' version of Freud's idea about the development of a feminine identity? an absurd situation in which the character is trapped, as in existentialist works? a grotesque change of perspective, change of role which forces the protagonist to rethink his/her own former views? a depiction of Vita's different sexual roles, the inspiration for "Orlando"? an exploration of gender and the differences between the 2 sexes? pure comedy? etc.)
1 thing I find striking is that Orlando, after a 7-day sleep, wakes up to find himself transformed into a woman and yet shows no sign of perturbation or confusion. Orlando doesn't even pay it much thought, but gets dressed (unisex clothes) and goes on with his/her life, and albeit leaving his/her place, does it as if in a trance and lives as if no change occurred. Such reaction is remarkably similar to Gregor's reaction when he turns into an insect in "The metamorphosis". 
Any chance Virginia Woolf thought of Franz Kafka when writing this passage? 
Or is it random? 
Or were they inspired by the same source? 

Separating the art from the artist: A response

Before continuing, you'd better read or skim through this post: http://anotherbookblog.com/2013/10/03/separating-the-art-from-the-artist/
Rick, the author, asks in the end:

"Are you able to separate the art from the artist? Is there a particular writer or painter or actor that you admire, despite serious character flaws? What allows you (or someone you know, even) to make that distinction between art and life? Is that distinction important?"

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Let's assume there are 2 standpoints, put simply as:
1/ Unable to separate the art from the artist at all.
Look back at the quote above, one must ask what counts as "serious character flaws". Because of the sentence "Charles Dickens was absolutely terrible to his wife", I assume it extends further than political views. So the question is: what if you dig deeper and it turns out that every single acclaimed writer has some "flaws"? What if each writer is either sexist or racist or xenophobic or bigoted or homophobic or snobbish or extremely egocentric? Or communist or fascist or pro some totalitarian regime or in favour of things like slavery or segregation? What if many writers are assholes in real life: domineering, deceitful, pathologically dishonest, hypocritical, horrible to husband/ wife/ children, stingy, violent, etc.?
Look at my favourite writers.
Lev Tolstoy? Politically naive. Idealist. Horrible to his wife. Dominating.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite.
Virginia Woolf? A snob. And anti-Semite.
F. Scott Fitzgerald? Anti-Semite.
William Faulkner? Racist. Pro-slavery or something. Pathological liar.
Vladimir Nabokov? Homophobic. Extremely arrogant and narcissistic. Sexist.
Charlotte Bronte? Apparently xenophobic- "Jane Eyre" is full of ethnic slurs.
Milan Kundera? Communist, at least in the past.   
Gustave Flaubert? Had syphilis. 
etc.
(I'm not sure about Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Emily and Anne Bronte, Ivan Turgenev, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, etc. but I'll certainly find something. But then I myself also have some views others may object to). 
I can't help feeling that if you keep looking for ethics and morality and whatever in authors, then perhaps there aren't many books left to read.

2/ Always able to separate the art completely from the artist.
Nope, I don't believe those who claim that.
Writers can't separate their own political views from their writings. As long as they depict a society and present some groups of people in a certain way, explicitly or implicitly express approval or disapproval of some social issues, critique something in society- no, as long as they hold a pen and start writing, they can't leave their political views out of their fiction. How can one? It's one's worldview. Literature is always political.
(Think Jane Austen's works aren't political because she seems to deal with romance and marriage? They are political. That can be seen in, e.g, her critique of gender inequality and primogeniture. I also consider it political the way she satirises 'the sentimental novel' and some banal literary devices and tendencies in literature of her time, and the way she refuses to let 'masculine values' dominate her works). 
Similarly, readers read a book, with their own political views in the back of their mind. There may be times when you, whilst reading a novel, argue in your head- nope, nope, you're wrong; no, I disagree; what the fox are you thinking, etc. I read not only as a reader, not only as a human being, but also as a woman, as a feminist, as an East Asian or more specifically a Vietnamese or even more specifically a Southerner, as a person living in Norway, as an anti-communist, as a pro-democracy person, as an agnostic, and who knows what else. All these views make me who I am, and I can't leave them behind when approaching a work of art. And I believe it's the same for everybody- even professional critics have that personal factor.
The best thing one can do is to be able to recognise and acknowledge the aesthetic values of the book, one can't like it more personally if the views presented in book are too opposed to one's own. Even that can be difficult.


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Go back to Rick's questions, here are my thoughts:
1/ Some prejudices, stereotypes and views are less acceptable now than in the past.
I find it rather unfair (for lack of a better word) to dismiss a great writer of the beginning of the 20th century, or earlier, for some limited views, such as homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia... I may forgive a man in the 19th century for his misogyny, even if it's quite irritating. Society's progressing, the world's more connected, many countries are now multicultural, there have been movements and changes of law, people come to understand and accept many things that were once considered repulsive, sick or morally wrong, we're generally more tolerant, liberal, understanding... (or supposed to be, at least).
However, it's precisely because we're supposed to be more modern and open-minded that I might have problems with conservative, close-minded, intolerant, ignorant writers of today. Not only writers, but artists in general, especially those who create something, such as film directors, painters, screenwriters..., instead of, say, actors. Time matters. Distorted depiction of people of darker skin a few centuries ago, due to ignorance and lack of contact with other cultures, is forgivable, such as the emphasis on the Creole origin of Bertha Mason and other ethnic slurs in "Jane Eyre". But I cannot tolerate the depiction of Indians as savages, who eat beetles, eyeball soup, baby snakes and monkey brains, in the 1984 film "Indiana Jones and the temple of doom".
Similarly, I may understand that some people in mid-20th century were attracted to Marxism, but if someone today still swoons over Lenin and Stalin, or admires Mao and defends the CCP, that's another story.

2/ A writer's personal life is not my concern.
I don't really care how Charles Dickens treated his wife. It doesn't affect my perception of "Great expectations" or "A Christmas carol".
After all, I do make a distinction between the author and the person (which is why, when asked which writers I'd like to invite to dinner, I can't think of anybody). And I don't have the illusion that a writer who has an incredible ability to create vivid characters and slip into their minds and understand them, must be magnanimous, sensitive, kind, warm-hearted, moral, trustworthy... A writer's personal life, with all the foibles, pet peeves, odd habits, nuisances, eccentricities..., is outside his or her works.
(Should we stop reading Jane Austen because we think that a spinster couldn't understand relations between men and women? Should we stop reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath because we think that suicidal, mentally sick people had nothing to give us?...) 
Or maybe it's better to say: I make a distinction between the implied author and the real author. 
To me, a literary critic doesn't have to create great fiction to be a critic, and a novelist doesn't have to be a kind person to be a novelist. 
In extreme cases, I understand some people's decision to boycott artists who are, say, paedophiles or rapists, saying that buying their works is equivalent to supporting them, but I still watch Roman Polanski's films (or is it because his wrongdoings were committed some decades ago?).

3/ I care more about political views. But it also depends on whether they're obvious in the works, whether they affect my reading.
Marquez had some crazy views, but I don't see them in "100 years of solitude", "Chronicle of a death foretold" or "Memories of my melancholy whores".
Neither do I have problems with Albert Camus's crazy views when reading "The stranger" and "The misunderstanding", which I love.
Nabokov's sexism and homophobia are hardly seen in his novels, at least the ones I've read.
Zhang Yimou is 1 of those cases I feel sorry about, an enormous talent who sold his soul to the devil (by "the devil" I mean the CCP). Since "Hero", his films stink. But his early films are still great, some are masterpieces, especially "To live", "Raise the red lanterns" and "Red sorghum".
Politically, I can't stand Bernardo Bertolucci, but "Last tango in Paris" is very good; Oliver Stone, but "Wall Street" is well-done and tolerable; Jean-Luc Godard, but "Vivre sa vie" is thought-provoking and lovely, etc.
"The quiet American" I regard as rubbish, though Graham Greene's prose is likeable. "The book of Daniel" I may admire for E. L. Doctorow's artistry but can't like it any more than that. I don't regret reading them, but can't say whether I'll read their other books.

4/ Most important is obviously still the quality. Are the books worth reading? Are they great enough for readers to endure the authors' stupid, extreme opinions?
One cannot read all the books one wants to read in a lifetime- life is too short to spend time on bad books, let alone bad books by bigots.






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Go back to Rick's post. 
Would I read David Gilmore's books? Let's see. 
Generally, I don't pay much thought to the question about separating the art from the artist, because most of the writers I read were dead a while ago (or a long, long time ago), and their ways of thinking were rather shaped by the societies in which they lived. I may be more demanding when it comes to today's writers, but then I usually don't read them. Which is to say, now when I pick up a contemporary book, I'll be quite selective, and David Gilmore's probably not that interesting. How to put it, it's like, he's not praised that often (who knows whether he'll be read in another 50 years?). I would be more interested in Orhan Pamuk, Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Martin Amis, John Irving, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, etc. (yes, this is a confession- I haven't read their works). 
Considering his statement, I understand that he prefers to teach stuff he loves. To me, he's not exactly sexist- a feminist as I am, I don't use the word 'sexist' to label everyone and everything. But personally I find him rather limited. When a guy says that he only likes books by male authors, I don't think that women's books are not as well-written or fascinating as men's, I think that guy's limited.



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I may or may not read V. S. Naipaul's books. Can't say.
So far, my impression of him is quite negative: self-important, racist (with zero understanding of India, so I've heard), intolerant, and above all misogynistic (http://flavorwire.com/319649/a-collection-of-the-worst-things-v-s-naipaul-has-ever-said). If I read his books, I'll read with lots of preconceptions, constantly comparing him to female authors.
Last time I picked up a book of his, or 2, at the library, it seemed contrived and unnatural, therefore ridiculous.
But who knows. There's a possibility that I may read his books and gasp in awe and lower my voice, this man, despite his awful, intolerable personality, writes such magical prose.
Before that, there are still many novels to read.

Sleep (VW)

"But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures — trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life?"
(Chapter 2, "Orlando"- Virginia Woolf)

Virginia Woolf's poetic prose in "Orlando"

"Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the plain dances of his own country, which he danced as a child to these fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question.) . . . A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow — so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be — no woman could skate with such speed and vigour — swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm."


"He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand..."


"Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy — a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed — hence, they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him for love’s sake, one more embrace. And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s beard and that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing was too great.
Then suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.
‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged.)
[...]
She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded — like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman — here, however, remembering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain.
[...]
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him suddenly. Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her and she provoked them purposely — such is the curious obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament." 

"Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish in Orlando's soul, St Paul's struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there immovable till Paul's clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful irony, and all his teeth showing, 'Jour de ma vie!' he dashed the lantern to the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where."




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These passages are from "Orlando" (ebooks.adelaide.edu.au)
Beautiful writing styles I have seen many times, but Virginia Woolf's prose in "Orlando" is so poetic, so lyrical that I feel ecstatic as never felt since- when?- Nabokov's "Lolita". I even think many passages in the book, with the appropriate line breaks, may pass for pretty good poems. Jane Austen's prose is cool and crisp, but Virginia Woolf's is filled with music and overflows with images and sounds, impressions and emotions.
Who can write any more, having seen such writings?

Eurovision: "Rise like a phoenix" by Conchita Wurst

It is now about 3am on Saturday 10/5. The Eurovision final will be on Saturday evening.
After 3 years of forgetfulness, I watch Eurovision again this year and so far my favourite (a strong favourite) is "Rise like a phoenix", performed by Conchita Wurst, who represents Austria. Some other countries such as the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Norway*... have some pretty good songs, but Austria deserves to win more than any other country. I'm quite afraid that people may be too conservative to vote for her, even though I honestly think a gender-neutral singer has a greater chance in Europe than any other continent on the planet.
Good music, meaningful lyrics, performed beautifully, with emotions. What more does one need in a music performance?  

Lyrics: 

Waking in the rubble
Walking over glass
Neighbors say we’re trouble
Well that time has passed

Peering from the mirror
No, that isn’t me
Stranger getting nearer
Who can this person be

You wouldnt know me at all today
From the fading light I fly

Rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you're my flame

Go about your business
Act as if you’re free
Noone could have witnessed
What you did to me

Cause you wouldn’t know me today
And you have got to see
To believe
From the fading light I fly

Rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn

I rise up to the sky
You threw me down but
I'm gonna fly

And rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you’re my flame

  

The controversy I find predictable and understandable. I would be amazed if there were not such reactions. But on the brighter side, as far as I see, all or at least most of the negative comments point to the fact that Conchita Wurst dresses and wears makeups like a woman and at the same time keeps the beard, not the song, not the voice, not the performance.
I hope "Rise like a phoenix" will win. 
Wait for updates! 


*: Norway's represented by Carl Espen, with "Silent storm". The song improves when listened to the 3rd or 4th time, but I think it creates too weak an impression. A total opposite of Alexander Rybak's "Fairytale". 






Update after midnight: 
CONCHITA WON WITH 290 POINTS! WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!  AUSTRIA!

Virginia Woolf on Charlotte and Emily Bronte

From http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter14.html

"For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own. [...] It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel Villette. “The skies hang full and dark — a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation — they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book."

"The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather a mood than a particular observation. Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. [...] But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of comparing Wuthering Heights with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar."



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This is the umpteenth time I've read this essay.
Virginia Woolf sums up wonderfully the powers of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Like me, she has more admiration for Emily Bronte, who has a significant presence in "A room of one's own", together with Jane Austen (and even though Virginia Woolf praises Jane Austen more often, I can't help feeling that she keeps her in a respectful distance and recognises, with reason, her talent, but personally prefers Emily).
The passage on Charlotte is beautiful- one who finds one's own words inadequate must thank Virginia Woolf for articulating such thoughts as to why "Jane Eyre" matters and evokes strong emotions in readers, many of whom hold it dear to their hearts, in spite of all its shortcomings. 
Some novels rise above their flaws. 
(Which reminds me, I must read "Villette").





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I cannot find what Virginia Woolf might have written about Anne Bronte. As it seems, she never mentions the other sister.

Virginia Woolf's reading of Jane Austen

Here are 2 interesting articles:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number12/lee.htm (Judith Lee)

As Janet Todd has shown, Jane Austen was a continuing presence in Virginia Woolf’s letters, diaries, essays, and fiction.

I've seen her mentioned frequently in "A room of one's own", "The common reader" and some other essays, especially those on women and fiction. The name Wickham in "Mrs Dalloway" is an obvious allusion. "The voyage out", which I'm reading, has several allusions such as the name Willoughby, "Persuasion"... and some discussions on Jane Austen by the characters. Even though Virginia Woolf has an ambivalent view and doesn't want to consider Jane Austen a favourite, she admires her talent and sets her up as some kind of standard (one may even say she's obsessed with her).

She began by writing novels that were compared to Austen’s, and she ended by conceptualizing a figure of the artist (Anon) as a figure not unlike what Austen represented in her essays. [...] Woolf describes a woman who, if she had lived, would have written novels like those Woolf herself was writing.

This is not very far from the truth. One can read this essay: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter12.html I can see that in her 1st novel "The voyage out", Virginia Woolf, dealing with emotions and human interactions, tries to keep a cool, detached, controlled tone the way Jane Austen does, and at the same time, relies less on dialogues and focuses more on what people leave unsaid, as she thinks Jane Austen would have done if she had lived longer, "[s]he would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is."
Her beautiful prose also reminds me of Jane Austen, but of course later, she departs from this track and develops her own style. 
Judith Lee quotes Virginia Woolf:

Ever since Jane Austen became famous they [critics] have been hissing inanities in chorus ….  [D]ebating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.

A while ago I watched "Becoming Jane" (having a vague feeling that I'd done so, many years before, but at the time didn't care very much about the author depicted), and didn't finish. Anne Hathaway's bad accent isn't as irritating as the fact that the film associates the author of "Pride and prejudice" with her heroine Elizabeth Bennet and implies that she incorporates her own experience with a vain man into her novel. The idea is distasteful not because I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Bennet, I simply think such a depiction is rather limited, and somehow discredits her abilities as a writer.
Judith Lee quotes Virginia Woolf again:

I have often thought of writing an article on the coarseness of Jane Austen. The people who talk of her as if she were a niminy piminy spinster always annoy me.

I'd have loved to read that. I myself think "rears and vices" in "Mansfield park", albeit denied by many people, is very likely to imply sodomy. Jane Austen's not that 'nice', priggish, prim as a person.
Judith Lee comments at length on this line by Virginia Woolf:

Here is Jane Austen, a great writer as we all agree, but for my own part, I would rather not find myself alone in a room with her. A sense of meaning withheld, a smile at something unseen, an atmosphere of perfect control and courtesy mixed with something finely satirical, which, were it not directed against things in general, rather than against individuals would be almost malicious, would, so I feel, make it alarming to find her at home.

Both John Fowles and I have expressed the same idea. But, putting me aside, it's more understandable that John Fowles feels this way, considering that he's a man and a man may sometimes be quite intimidated by a sharp, witty woman. But another woman!

If we reflect upon Woolf’s readings of Jane Austen, especially in A Room of One’s Own, we shall find that she consistently characterizes Austen in much the same way that critics have characterized Elinor.  For much of her life, Woolf in a sense positioned herself as “Marianne” to Austen’s “Elinor”: We find in the character a “sense” she admired and the attempt to imagine a “sensibility” in which her writing originated. At times, Woolf expresses an admiration and irritation much like Marianne’s, on some occasions defending and on others dismissing her “sister” in a continual dialogue as necessary and as frustrating as the conversations of so many of Austen’s sisters.

For the time being, I'm not sure, having read only "Mrs Dalloway" and some chapters of "The voyage out". But the idea is interesting.



http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol29no1/auerbach.html (Emily Auerbach)

Edward Albee entitled his famous play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I would ask instead, “Who’s Afraid of, Annoyed with, Intimidated by, in Awe of, and in Dialogue with Jane Austen?” and answer, “Virginia Woolf.” I insist that without Jane Austen there would be no Virginia Woolf. Perhaps more of interest to Austen aficionados, I also argue that because Woolf knew firsthand the difficulty and exhilaration of perfecting one’s craft as a revolutionary woman writer, she produced some of the most perceptive and illuminating critical comments about Jane Austen ever made.

Virginia Woolf the essayist is very different from Virginia Woolf the novelist. Whereas F. Scott Fitzgerald maintains a clear, concise style in both fiction and nonfiction (only becomes more poetic in novels) and Gertrude Stein's always a mess, Virginia Woolf's prose can be loose, disordered, tiresome in her novels, especially in her stream-of-consciousness ones, but in essays she writes in a clear, concise, straightforward style with such authority that one must nod with her. And whilst I cannot say, with the same conviction, that without Jane Austen there would be no Virginia Woolf, I agree with the next sentence above.

Although Woolf praised Austen for three decades, her own complicated relationship to Austen seems to have evolved over time. In early essays and references in novels, Woolf writes about Austen from a respectful distance and with considerable ambivalence. Later in her life, particularly after reading Austen’s juvenilia, Woolf appears to have identified more closely with Austen and to have become more intent on defending her from critics viewing her as a decorous maiden aunt writing “little” novels because of her “little” life. [...] “Jane Austen and the Geese” shows Woolf defending Austen as if to defend herself and all women writers.

Her ambivalence is understandable. Jane Austen has limitations and creates her own restrictions, she's too little of a rebel. One doesn't have to defend, say, Nabokov for his sophisticated style, even if it poses a problem for many readers, because it's an asset, but one that likes Jane Austen always feels the need to defend her, as others may criticise her for triviality, for her small canvas, limited world, for her narrow concerns (obvious in letters), for her determination to leave out poverty and suffering, for ending all novels with marriages, for sticking strictly to familiar things, for being dull, for conventions, etc. and they do have a point, at least to some extent. Her admirers, if they're serious readers, are aware of such issues. Jane Austen's such a problematic figure, as I've written before, on the 1 hand she has such genius, on the other hand one feels quite uneasy because she focuses on such tiny things. Above all, the things for which she's criticised are the very things that (misogynistic) men accuse female writers of. Virginia Woolf therefore has to defend her, to defend herself, who also focuses on emotions, longings, relationships, human interactions, and to attack the view that male things like war and politics are more important and interesting.

As a fellow writer, Woolf felt she could appreciate Austen’s intricate craft—and the labor it took to produce it—in a way that non-writers never could:  “Only those who have realized for themselves the ridiculous inadequacy of a straight stick dipped in ink when brought in contact with the rich and tumultuous glow of life can appreciate to the full the wonder of her achievement, the imagination, the penetration, the insight, the courage, the sincerity which are required to bring before us one of those perfectly normal and simple incidents of average human life”.

This is probably why I enjoy reading writers' writings on other writers than critics', not because of the childish view that you must do something well before critiquing someone else, but simply because a writer may have from experience some insight and understanding an outsider can never have. But then, obviously not every great novelist can be a great critic- I'm thinking of 2 persons specifically, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov.

Patronizing critics sniping about Austen’s tiny life enraged Virginia Woolf. She refused to accept the idea that Austen must have been broken-hearted because she never married or led a “normal” life. Writing about herself, Woolf observed, “Happiness—what, I wonder, constitutes happiness?  I daresay the most important element is work” (Diary 7 May 1919). Woolf knew Austen worked hard to hone her skills and found joy in her profession—yes, profession—as a writer. “She was happy in her life,” Woolf notes of Austen. “Life itself—that was the object of her love, of her absorbed study; that was the pursuit which filled those unrecorded years and drew out the ‘quiet intensity of her nature’”

I do understand the view some people hold, the irony of an unmarried woman writing about love and ending all novels with marriages, but that means nothing, for Jane Austen has greater understanding of love and relations between men and women than many writers with more experience. In fact, I think marriage might have done her harm.

Woolf did not ever, however, become an uncritical Janeite.  She finds Fanny Price boring and confesses to reading Mansfield Park “two words at a time” (Letters 2 February 1925).  She seems to find Austen’s perfection, artistic control, aloofness, and inscrutability maddening at times, and she objects when readers link her own work or personality to Austen’s.  She complains in her diary of Katherine Mansfield, “A decorous elderly dullard she describes me; Jane Austen up to date” (28 November 1919), insisting in letters that she does not want to be “Jane Austen over again,” particularly if it means that she has to suppress half her sexuality (Letters 5 December 1919, 20 November 1932).  In the same letter censuring critics for treating Austen like a “niminy piminy spinster,” Woolf herself calls Austen “a limited, tart, rather conventional woman for all her genius” (20 November 1936).

I don't think anybody likes to be compared to a predecessor, even if it's a compliment. The good thing is that, I don't know for how long Virginia Woolf was compared to Jane Austen, but today she stands alone, as Virginia Woolf, with her own style, with her "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the lighthouse" and "The waves", etc., her association with modernism and stream of consciousness (together with James Joyce), Bloomsbury and her own place in literature. I haven't seen many people now compare her to Jane Austen.

Austen seems to confound any attempt Woolf makes to give her just one label. Woolf’s extensive comments on Austen leave us with a sense of implied oxymorons—Austen as a limited genius, an alarming domestic, a conventional rebel, an old-fashioned modern.

But ain't it true?

Unlike other women writers, Austen did not allow anger to distort her prose. Elizabeth Bennet does not suddenly in the middle of Pride and Prejudice stop to launch into a feminist diatribe against inadequate opportunities for women, the way Jane Eyre does. Woolf tells us that Jane Austen doesn’t preach or rant; she simply refuses to allow “masculine values” to prevail in her fiction, despite their dominance in society. Biased critics inevitably judged men’s novels about the battles of men in war more important than women’s novels about “the feelings of women in a drawing-room,” but Austen knew better than that. As she put it in Northanger Abbey, her novels displayed “the greatest powers of the mind” and “most thorough knowledge of human nature” in “the best chosen language”.

This is related to the point about defending Jane Austen, some paragraphs ago. Virginia Woolf, I believe, also learns not to preach or rant in her novels. That would be unpleasant.

As Woolf grew older and read more of Austen’s juvenilia, she seems to have acquired a greater appreciation of her unconventional depths and a greater disdain for those critics and readers who never got past the “quiet maiden lady” Woolf herself had once labeled Austen (Southam 244).

I have no intention of reading her juvenilia now, but over the past few months I have seen Jane Austen more clearly and found many of my previous conceptions entirely wrong.

Woolf, too, is an elusive, slippery, enigmatic figure, so writing about Woolf and Austen takes not just temerity but audacity.  My search has not concluded but has led me far enough to gain a greater appreciation of both feisty, non-niminy piminy women who ignored the honking critical geese, kept to their own style, went on in their own way, and found the courage to write fiction that changed the world.

What a conclusion. So far, more drawn to her nonfiction, now I have to read more of Virginia Woolf's novels. 

Thoughts after reading "Lady Susan"

I've been reading a Penguin book comprising 3 Jane Austen stories: the novella "Lady Susan" and 2 unfinished novels "The Watsons" and "Sanditon". They are said in the introduction to cover 3 periods in Jane Austen's writing life: "Lady Susan" belongs to the 1st, a bridge between her juvenilia and her 3 1st novels "Sense and sensibility", "Pride and prejudice" and "Northanger abbey"; "The Watsons" belongs to the unhappy, quiet middle period; and "Sanditon" is her last work, interrupted by her death, concluding the period that produced "Mansfield park", "Emma" and "Persuasion".
As expected, "Lady Susan" is thin literally as well as figuratively. A few details seem contrived, and the ending is quite hasty and unconvincing, which I also feel about the endings of "Sense and sensibility" and "Northanger abbey".
However, it's interesting, and unlike any of her works. 1st, the book's written in the epistolary form (so was "Elinor and Marianne", but it was rewritten and changed into 3rd-person narration and became "Sense and sensibility"). A mingling of voices, "Lady Susan" shows Jane Austen's brilliant gift for employing different language for her characters. One can see that this form is limited and not the best choice for Jane Austen (especially when I don't even like her real letters, which I consider tedious, full of gossip and triviality, and which are probably read more for the woman behind them than for literary value), but it's nice to see her do something different. 2nd, Lady Susan is a deceitful, hypocritical, mercenary, scheming, shamelessly selfish and ruthless woman. Although such a figure appears several times, with variation, in later works, as Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Caroline Bingley and Mary Crawford, Lady Susan, unlike them, is a widow, and a mother (a future version of the 4 characters I've just mentioned?), and more importantly, she's the central, eponymous character and the driving force in the story. In the later works, immorality is rather concealed- such acts, happening offstage, are mentioned or retold briefly and the villains tend not to be seen in close-ups. Here, it is direct, the readers have Lady Susan's perspective and hear of her plans and have insight into a person who has neither conscience nor shame. 
Compared to Jane Austen's later 6 novels, "Lady Susan" is less polished, but for various reasons I think it should be seen in relation to them, for the reader's understanding and appreciation of "Lady Susan" itself and Jane Austen's works as a whole. The only regret is that she didn't come back to the novella and revise, it could have become another masterpiece, and a very unusual one.

Lupita Nyong'o 's style