From Bloomsbury . . .

I sometimes think that the books that have stayed longest in my mind are those that I haven’t read. As I scan my shelves, many of the titles my eyes pass over are books I read about while still at school or heard about at university; books bought in a rush of enthusiasm which faded as something new grabbed my attention.

In my salad days the two volumes of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader were among the most influential. Volume 1 was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1932. They are collections of reviews and journalism, written while she was also creating some of her best-known novels. They cover literary criticism, character sketches and the byways of reading. I have never forgotten how enticing she made Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia sound:

We are drawn on down winding paths of this impossible landscape because Sidney leads us without any end in view but sheer delight in wandering. The syllabling of the words even causes him the liveliest delight. Mere rhythm we feel as we sweep over the smooth backs of the undulating sentences intoxicates him. Words in themselves delight him. Look, he seems to cry, as he picks up the glittering handfuls, can it be true that there are such numbers of beautiful words lying around for the asking? Why not use them, lavishly and abundantly? And so he luxuriates. Lambs do not suck – ‘with bleating oratory they craved the dam’s comfort’; girls do not undress – they ‘take away the eclipsing of their apparel’; a tree is not reflected in a river – ‘it seemed she looked into it and dressed her green locks by that running water’.

Who could resist? Well, my college tutor could: ‘Too many purple passages!’ he said severely. My innocently cheeky reply at the time was that I didn’t think so, but that was why I wanted to study English with people who knew better. After three years of being taught better, I was haunted by his austerity for a long time. But the rebellious voice inside me that loved the smooth backs of undulating sentences has never entirely evaporated and came bubbling up again when I recently reopened The Common Reader. The delight of Woolf’s essays is at least in part thanks to her own readiness to rush forward on the waves of language. It is her enthusiasm that grabs attention and leads us along the shelves, begging us to pause and open what has so long been neglected. She has an eye for female writers, even those whom fashion and time have pushed into the shadows. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh had run to thirteen editions by 1873. But by the time Virginia Woolf was reading it forty or fifty years later, the received opinion she quotes from a contemporary academic held that: ‘Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.’ How much more entertainingly Virginia Woolf says the same thing:

In short the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned to her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Montgomery, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.

But she still reads the novel-poem and shines a light into the servants’ quarters to whet our appetite:

We cannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh without becoming aware that the Ancient Mariner who lingers, for unknown reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another has us by the hand, and makes us listen like a three years’ child while Mrs Browning pours out in nine volumes of blank verse the story of Aurora Leigh.

Her curiosity and empathy for a fellow writer make her sympathetic to Browning’s desire to create poetry out of everyday life. But she is well aware that self-parody and bathos lurk in potholes along the way. However – and this is the hook that reels us into the bookshop to buy a copy – she emphasizes that

if she meant rather to give us a sense of life in general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened and compacted by the fire of poetry, she succeeded. Aurora Leigh with her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age.

Others, whose reputations are beyond recovery, can still be a source of pleasure and delight. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is one:

Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted about her. Her simplicity is so open: her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender.

Or Laetitia Pilkington, who was a mere three feet two in height.

Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement? Laetitia Pilkington (1712–1759) was something of the sort – shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet, like Thackeray’s daughter, like Miss Mitford, like Madame de Sévigné and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate to sob . . . Still, though her room near the Royal Exchange is threadbare, and the table is spread with old playbills instead of a cloth, and the butter is served in a shoe, and Mr Worsdale has used the teapot to fetch small beer that very morning, still she presides, still she entertains. Her language is a trifle coarse, perhaps. But who taught her English? The great Doctor Swift.

And then a little gossip is tipped in and we get an endearing glimpse of Dean Swift himself.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘I have brought you here to show you all the Money I got when I was in the Ministry, but don’t steal any of it.’ ‘I won’t, indeed, Sir,’ said I; so he opened a Cabinet and showed me a whole parcel of empty drawers. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘the Money is flown.’

So she goes backwards and forwards in time, from Chaucer and the Pastons to Meredith and Hardy. Little snippets of gossip flash by, new vistas open and one is reminded of the sheer pleasure of wandering, drifting to stop at a flower here and a weed there, across the centuries of English literature. Notoriously, Woolf doesn’t write about the women on whom she herself depended for home comforts but, mostly, about those who were educated and wealthy enough to write diaries or letters. But she was very aware of the limitations society forced upon all women, both socially and physically. And how much can be gleaned from letters that will never be written, let alone preserved, in our modern, high-speed age. She was writing at a time when letters were still the main method of communication. Telephones, it is true, were around, but only for those who could afford them; they were not the ubiquitous appendages they are today. No mobiles, no texting, no Internet. Communication was measured in hours and days rather than seconds. It took time and correspondence to develop a new friendship, as is shown by her account of the friendship between Geraldine Jewsbury in Manchester and Jane Carlyle in Cheyne Walk in London. They met quite briefly at a party when Geraldine visited London, but Geraldine’s determination to develop a friendship led to a steady correspondence which finally, in 1843, led to Carlyle himself suggesting that they invite her to stay.

Jane reflected that a little of Geraldine would be ‘very enlivening’, but, on the other hand, much of Geraldine would be very exhausting . . . She came on the 1st or 2nd of February, and she stayed till Saturday, the 11th of March. Such were visits in the year 1843. And the house was very small, and the servant was inefficient. Geraldine was always there. All the morning she scribbled letters. All the afternoon she lay fast asleep on the sofa in the drawing room. She dressed herself in a low-neck dress to receive visitors on Sunday. She talked too much. As for her reputed intellect, ‘she is as sharp as a meat axe, but as narrow’.

Mrs Carlyle almost had to turn her out of the house, and while Geraldine got into the cab, her eyes full of tears at parting, Jane’s were decidedly dry. Indeed she was immensely relieved to see the last of her visitor. But Geraldine continued to correspond and so the friendship recovered and deepened. You’ll have to look at Volume 2 of The Common Reader to follow it to its sad end. Mrs Woolf’s views may not always please the reader, but they are always thoughtful and stimulating. ‘How should one read a book?’ is the title of one essay. Another, ‘The Russian point of view’, attempts to characterize the differences between Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and why they each appeal so much, and in such different ways, to British readers. ‘On not knowing Greek’ also explores what we take from our world into reading the literature of another. If I can see that some passages are purple, that as with Sidney, language runs away, carrying her on its back, jolting this way and that, sometimes even threatening to throw the rider, The Common Reader still remains an exhilarating and stimulating experience. And as she herself says:

After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The Battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than King Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 60 © Alan Bradley 2018