Edition: Penguin, 1942
Review number: 1110
Orlando is famous as the novel into which Woolf poured her passion for Vita Sackville-West; the character of Orlando is meant to represent both her and her aristocratic family background (her rootedness in English history was one of the things which fascinated Woolf). And yet, even though she is a vitally important part of the novel, it would be quite possible to read it and admire it without being aware of this fact. Orlando is not the only character in the novel inspired by a real person; his early lover Sasha is a portrait of Vita's own Violet Trefusis.
Orlando seems at first to be a (rather whimsical) historical novel about a poetically minded Elizabethan nobleman. However, Orlando remains a young man through the early Stuarts, before he becomes Charles II's ambassador to the Turkish court in Constantinople. This is when things become really strange, when Orlando escapes a massacre in a revolt because he is in a deep sleep and is thought to be dead, and wakes up a woman. She lives through the next two and a half centuries (up until the day in 1928 when Woolf says she is writing) and only in this form is able to find love, with the similarly sexually ambiguous Shelmerdine.
The intimations of homosexuality are actually quite discreet, particularly by modern standards. They have been rather seized upon, making Woolf something of an icon for lesbian pride, and yet they remain unusual for their tenderness.
At least as important to Woolf is the issue of feminism. When Orlando becomes a woman, court cases are brought against her to deprive her of her property on two grounds: she is dead, so that she cannot own property; and she is a woman, which Woolf says "amounts to much the same thing". (This mirrors events in Vita's life, for as a woman she could not inherit her ancestral home when her father died.) Even by writing a novel purporting to be in part a biography of a woman, Woolf was making a point: the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by her own father, was overwhelmingly masculine. Then there is the poetry; in an indirect reference to Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own (published a year later), Orlando writes bad poems as a man (to the derision of Ned Greene, who also appears in the essay). With less opportunity to write after the change of sex, most of the early work is abandoned and destroyed, but what Orlando then writes is of far higher quality.
In Orlando, the reader is constantly aware of a the poetic quality in the language Woolf uses, something she uses to express the slow flow of time in the life of one who seems to be immortal. Its tone is also partly due to the novel being a pioneering example of what is now called magic realism, a method of writing far more familiar than it could have been to the original readers. Among the diverse later writers that the novel brings to my mind are Peake, Rushdie, Jill Paton Walsh and the Moorcock of Mother London. Orlando is the most obviously non-realist Woolf novel of those I have read, and yet it is also the one which is likely to be most accessible to the modern reader, largely because its influence has trickled into much of modern mainstream literature and also into the fantasy genre.
Showing posts with label Virginia Woolf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virginia Woolf. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 July 2002
Wednesday, 13 September 2000
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)
Edition: Granada, 1977
Review number: 614
Woolf's extended essay on women and literature (based on talks given at Cambridge University women's colleges) is one of her best pieces of writing. Her basic argument is simple. The reason that there were so few top rank female authors before the twentieth century is because women have in general had hard lives. They have mostly been the ones principally responsible for bringing up children (not to mention bearing them in the first place), and they have been subject to male domination which has denied them such useful attributes for a writer as education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. (This is the point of the title, as Woolf expresses her thesis succinctly by saying that what a woman needs to write is a room of her own and a guaranteed private income.)
The argument could be applied equally well in just about every field of human culture: philosophy, science, fine art, music are obvious examples. In most of these areas, the pattern is similar, with a massive improvement in the representation of women at the highest level as the twentieth century has progressed. In fact, I think that in English literature, the most prolific and most reprinted authors are both women, though I would not give either many points for quality (I'm talking about Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton).
The thesis doesn't necessarily hold literally in individual cases. One of the most successful authors currently writing is Joanna Rowling, and she wrote a large part of her first novel in cafes in Edinburgh because it was cheaper than heating her home - neither a room of her own nor a guaranteed income.
While there are certainly more top quality women writers today, the position they hold is still not as secure as that of male authors - one of the most prestigious league tables of twentieth century literature produced to mark the year 2000 was strongly criticised because it contained so few women (of 100 novels listed, there were only eight by female authors). This has led some feminists to try to exaggerate the importance and ability of writers simply because they were women (and similar moves have been made to champion the achievements of other groups which have not made a huge impact for the same reasons, such as writers from developing countries). Unfortunately, this does not have the desired effect and tends to bring ridicule to those involved. It is not a trap into which Woolf falls; she dismisses some of the earliest female poets who were basically gifted by amateur and untutored noblewomen with plenty of leisure. (A poor education is a serious handicap for a writer.)
Once women began to write (Woolf citing Aphra Behn as the first true female author in English), they changed literature. Men, Woolf says, had tended to write about women as sexual and romantic objects; even Shakespeare heroines are generally important as characters through relationships with men. Woolf suggests that women characters with interests other than marriage and family are a late nineteenth century phenomenon, but that is partly because she dismisses George Eliot for a different reason (effectively, because she stooped to using a man's name for the purposes of publication), and it seems to me that Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch is an obvious earlier example.
While not always persuading me to accept the details of it, Woolf presents her general argument very well. It is perhaps most strikingly expressed in the famous example she gives of a fictitious equally gifted sister of Shakespeare who remains uneducated, runs away from home to escape a distasteful marriage, is laughed at when she tries to get work as an actor, and ends up killing herself after being seduced by actor-manager Ned Greene.
Review number: 614
Woolf's extended essay on women and literature (based on talks given at Cambridge University women's colleges) is one of her best pieces of writing. Her basic argument is simple. The reason that there were so few top rank female authors before the twentieth century is because women have in general had hard lives. They have mostly been the ones principally responsible for bringing up children (not to mention bearing them in the first place), and they have been subject to male domination which has denied them such useful attributes for a writer as education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. (This is the point of the title, as Woolf expresses her thesis succinctly by saying that what a woman needs to write is a room of her own and a guaranteed private income.)
The argument could be applied equally well in just about every field of human culture: philosophy, science, fine art, music are obvious examples. In most of these areas, the pattern is similar, with a massive improvement in the representation of women at the highest level as the twentieth century has progressed. In fact, I think that in English literature, the most prolific and most reprinted authors are both women, though I would not give either many points for quality (I'm talking about Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton).
The thesis doesn't necessarily hold literally in individual cases. One of the most successful authors currently writing is Joanna Rowling, and she wrote a large part of her first novel in cafes in Edinburgh because it was cheaper than heating her home - neither a room of her own nor a guaranteed income.
While there are certainly more top quality women writers today, the position they hold is still not as secure as that of male authors - one of the most prestigious league tables of twentieth century literature produced to mark the year 2000 was strongly criticised because it contained so few women (of 100 novels listed, there were only eight by female authors). This has led some feminists to try to exaggerate the importance and ability of writers simply because they were women (and similar moves have been made to champion the achievements of other groups which have not made a huge impact for the same reasons, such as writers from developing countries). Unfortunately, this does not have the desired effect and tends to bring ridicule to those involved. It is not a trap into which Woolf falls; she dismisses some of the earliest female poets who were basically gifted by amateur and untutored noblewomen with plenty of leisure. (A poor education is a serious handicap for a writer.)
Once women began to write (Woolf citing Aphra Behn as the first true female author in English), they changed literature. Men, Woolf says, had tended to write about women as sexual and romantic objects; even Shakespeare heroines are generally important as characters through relationships with men. Woolf suggests that women characters with interests other than marriage and family are a late nineteenth century phenomenon, but that is partly because she dismisses George Eliot for a different reason (effectively, because she stooped to using a man's name for the purposes of publication), and it seems to me that Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch is an obvious earlier example.
While not always persuading me to accept the details of it, Woolf presents her general argument very well. It is perhaps most strikingly expressed in the famous example she gives of a fictitious equally gifted sister of Shakespeare who remains uneducated, runs away from home to escape a distasteful marriage, is laughed at when she tries to get work as an actor, and ends up killing herself after being seduced by actor-manager Ned Greene.
Monday, 21 August 2000
Virginia Woolf: Jacob's Room (1922)
Edition: Grafton, 1976
Review number: 581
Most of Woolf's novels that I have read seem to be trying something new, and are not quite successful. To the Lighthouse is an exception, though I am not sure that I understood it. Jacob's Room is more a character study than a novel, the new thing that is attempted being to reveal the personality of Jacob Flanders throught the impressions he has of others and those they have of him rather than through his thoughts and actions as in a conventional narrative.
This idea is inherently limited in scope, reducing the components of a traditional novel to just one: character. (This is in itself no reason for lack of success, because reductions to other components have been notably successful in this century: there are crime novels which consist almost entirely of plot, and science fiction novels which consist almost entirely of background.) Other plotless novels had been written in the past, such as that forerunner to so much modern literature, Tristram Shandy, though satire plays an important part in the success of that novel and is really absent from Jacob's Room.
I don't feel (as you may have gathered) that Jacob's Room really works. Jacob Flanders is not a particularly interesting character; he is a Bloomsbury intellectual, yet is too young to have made his mark or even to have formed interesting ideas of his own. Woolf's choice of him as the central character shows a slightly surprising lack of imagination in the author of Orlando.
The idea of using both Jacob's impressions of others and their impressions of him to illuminate his character also does not quite come off. This is partly because Woolf makes a stylistic choice that everything should be in the third person. The forms which would be particularly suited to the aims of the novel would be ones which really do give the impression of multiple points of view, such as diaries, epistolary or stream of consciousness narratives. These would all also require a greater variety of style than Woolf gives the impression that she is capable of acheiving.
Woolf's later novel, Orlando seems to be a more successful character study, enlivened by elements of fantasy (longevity and sexual ambiguity) missing from Jacob's Room.
Review number: 581
Most of Woolf's novels that I have read seem to be trying something new, and are not quite successful. To the Lighthouse is an exception, though I am not sure that I understood it. Jacob's Room is more a character study than a novel, the new thing that is attempted being to reveal the personality of Jacob Flanders throught the impressions he has of others and those they have of him rather than through his thoughts and actions as in a conventional narrative.
This idea is inherently limited in scope, reducing the components of a traditional novel to just one: character. (This is in itself no reason for lack of success, because reductions to other components have been notably successful in this century: there are crime novels which consist almost entirely of plot, and science fiction novels which consist almost entirely of background.) Other plotless novels had been written in the past, such as that forerunner to so much modern literature, Tristram Shandy, though satire plays an important part in the success of that novel and is really absent from Jacob's Room.
I don't feel (as you may have gathered) that Jacob's Room really works. Jacob Flanders is not a particularly interesting character; he is a Bloomsbury intellectual, yet is too young to have made his mark or even to have formed interesting ideas of his own. Woolf's choice of him as the central character shows a slightly surprising lack of imagination in the author of Orlando.
The idea of using both Jacob's impressions of others and their impressions of him to illuminate his character also does not quite come off. This is partly because Woolf makes a stylistic choice that everything should be in the third person. The forms which would be particularly suited to the aims of the novel would be ones which really do give the impression of multiple points of view, such as diaries, epistolary or stream of consciousness narratives. These would all also require a greater variety of style than Woolf gives the impression that she is capable of acheiving.
Woolf's later novel, Orlando seems to be a more successful character study, enlivened by elements of fantasy (longevity and sexual ambiguity) missing from Jacob's Room.
Tuesday, 25 July 2000
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Review number: 549
Virginia Woolf made her name with her fourth novel. While not a stream of consciousness narrative, it has aspects of that style, and might be regarded as a precursor. Mrs Dalloway describes a day in the life of a society hostess as she prepares for a party. This particular day stands out because of the unexpected return of a former lover from India after twenty years, prompting a series of memories.
Mrs Dalloway is very static, free of plot or drama; it is a novel about character. Though Clarissa Dalloway is not a particularly interesting person - deliberately, I presume - the reader gets to know her quite well. It reads a bit like the introductory volume of a Victorian novel, as the return of an ex-lover certainly provides the potential for an interesting plot to follow on from what Woolf has written.
Thursday, 3 December 1998
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)
Edition: Panther
Review number: 175
To The Lighthouse is the story of one woman, Mrs Ramsay, and the influence she has over her family, a large one with eight children, and her house guests. The Ramsay family live on a Hebridean island during the summer, where all three parts of the novel are set. In the first part, set before a war, she is carefully organising the lives of her children, her house guests and her neighbours. (She is an inveterate matchmaker.) Her husband is more interested in his work (something left undefined of an intellectual nature) than in his family, and often undoes much that she has been working towards by a casual remark. We see this in the proposed trip to the lighthouse on a small island off the coast, a treat for the Ramsay's son James and an opportunity for Mrs Ramsay to send her charitable aid to the lighthouse keeper. James has set his heart on going, encouraged by his mother, and then Mr Ramsay points out that given the time of year and the falling barometer there is no way the trip can be made safely. His remark is the occasion for much resentment, to which he is completely oblivious.
The second part chronicles the war through the decay of the now abandoned house; in the third part, the family return, depleted by the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and three of her children. In this part, it is the elderly Mr Ramsay who wants to go to the lighthouse, reluctantly accompanied by James and his sister Cam, now teenagers. The book ends with two significant events: they finally reach the lighthouse, and James' rowing is praised by his father, the first word of praise he has ever received from him.
The most obvious question about the book is "What is signified by a trip to the lighthouse?" Why is it that different characters at different times want to go there? The way that the eventually arrival at the lighthouse occurs at the moment when James receives the word of praise from his father is not a coincidence, nor is the way that the arrival brings the end of the book, no description of the actual visit being written by Woolf. The purpose of a lighthouse is to warn ships away from the rocks around it, effectively to point the way that travellers should go. That aspect of a lighthouse is not really mentioned in the book; the characters are more concerned by the difficulty of getting there and the isolation of those who live there. However, is this is the significance then the only way I can think of to relate this to the plot of the novel is to suggest it shows the way to a better relationship between James and his father, which can only be attained when the influence of Mrs Ramsay is overcome. That fits in with the way that James wants to go in the first part, encouraged by his mother but prevented by circumstances, and with his father wishing to go in the third part while James and Cam no longer want to.
One of the great strengths of this novel is the way the Woolf suggests a symbolic meaning while writing a novel which is rigorously naturalistic. In that sense, it is the opposite of Orlando, the only other Virginia Woolf novel I have read; there, the novel appears full of symbols, but few of them mean anything outside of themselves or only hark back to the main themes, longevity and sexual development.
Review number: 175
To The Lighthouse is the story of one woman, Mrs Ramsay, and the influence she has over her family, a large one with eight children, and her house guests. The Ramsay family live on a Hebridean island during the summer, where all three parts of the novel are set. In the first part, set before a war, she is carefully organising the lives of her children, her house guests and her neighbours. (She is an inveterate matchmaker.) Her husband is more interested in his work (something left undefined of an intellectual nature) than in his family, and often undoes much that she has been working towards by a casual remark. We see this in the proposed trip to the lighthouse on a small island off the coast, a treat for the Ramsay's son James and an opportunity for Mrs Ramsay to send her charitable aid to the lighthouse keeper. James has set his heart on going, encouraged by his mother, and then Mr Ramsay points out that given the time of year and the falling barometer there is no way the trip can be made safely. His remark is the occasion for much resentment, to which he is completely oblivious.
The second part chronicles the war through the decay of the now abandoned house; in the third part, the family return, depleted by the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and three of her children. In this part, it is the elderly Mr Ramsay who wants to go to the lighthouse, reluctantly accompanied by James and his sister Cam, now teenagers. The book ends with two significant events: they finally reach the lighthouse, and James' rowing is praised by his father, the first word of praise he has ever received from him.
The most obvious question about the book is "What is signified by a trip to the lighthouse?" Why is it that different characters at different times want to go there? The way that the eventually arrival at the lighthouse occurs at the moment when James receives the word of praise from his father is not a coincidence, nor is the way that the arrival brings the end of the book, no description of the actual visit being written by Woolf. The purpose of a lighthouse is to warn ships away from the rocks around it, effectively to point the way that travellers should go. That aspect of a lighthouse is not really mentioned in the book; the characters are more concerned by the difficulty of getting there and the isolation of those who live there. However, is this is the significance then the only way I can think of to relate this to the plot of the novel is to suggest it shows the way to a better relationship between James and his father, which can only be attained when the influence of Mrs Ramsay is overcome. That fits in with the way that James wants to go in the first part, encouraged by his mother but prevented by circumstances, and with his father wishing to go in the third part while James and Cam no longer want to.
One of the great strengths of this novel is the way the Woolf suggests a symbolic meaning while writing a novel which is rigorously naturalistic. In that sense, it is the opposite of Orlando, the only other Virginia Woolf novel I have read; there, the novel appears full of symbols, but few of them mean anything outside of themselves or only hark back to the main themes, longevity and sexual development.
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