Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  It was thus that we tried in the Guild office that afternoon to explain the nature of fictitious sympathy and how it differs from real sympathy and how defective it is because it is not based upon sharing the same important emotions unconsciously. It was thus that we tried to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence.

  Perhaps it was at this point that you unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of papers. You did not at once untie the string that fastened them. Sometimes, you said, you got a letter which you could not bring yourself to burn; once or twice a Guildswoman at your suggestion had written a few pages about her life. It might be that we should find these papers interesting; it might be that if we read them the women would cease to be symbols and become instead individuals. But they were very fragmentary and ungrammatical; they had been jotted down in the intervals of housework. Indeed, you could not at once bring yourself to give them up, as if to expose their simplicity were a breach of confidence. It might be that their illiteracy would only perplex, you said; that the writing of people who do not know how to write — but at this point we burst in. In the first place, every English woman knows how to write, in the second, even if she does not she has only to take her own life for subject and write the truth and not fiction or poetry for our interest to be so keenly roused that — in short, we cannot wait but must read the packet at once.

  Thus pressed you did by degrees and with many delays — there was the war for example, and Miss Wick died, and you and Janet Erskine retired from the Guild, and a testimonial was given you in a casket, and many thousand working women tried to say how you had changed their lives — tried to say what they will feel for you to their dying day — after all these interruptions, you did at last gather the papers together and finally put them in my hands. There they were, typed and docketed with a few snapshots and rather faded photographs stuck between the pages. And when, at last, I began to read, there started up in my mind’s eye the figures that I had seen all those years ago at Manchester with such bewilderment and curiosity. But they were no longer addressing a large meeting in Manchester from a platform, dressed in their best clothes. The hot June day with its banners had vanished, and instead one looked back into the past of the women who had stood there; into the four-roomed houses of miners, into the homes of small shopkeepers and agricultural labourers, into the fields and factories of fifty or sixty years ago. Mrs. Burrows for example had worked in the Lincolnshire fens when she was eight with forty or fifty other children, and an old man had followed the gang with a long whip in his hand “which he did not forget to use”. That was a strange reflection. Most of the women had started work at seven or eight, earning a penny on Saturday for washing a doorstep, or two pence a week for carrying suppers to the men at the iron foundry. They had gone into factories when they were fourteen.

  They had worked from seven in the morning till eight or nine at night and had made thirteen or fifteen shillings a week. Out of this money they had saved some pence with which to buy their mother gin — she was often very tired in the evening and had borne perhaps thirteen children in as many youthful years; or they fetched opium to assuage some miserable old woman’s ague in the fens. Betty Potter killed herself when she could get no more. They had seen half-starved women standing in rows to be paid for their match boxes while they snuffed the roast meat of their employers’ dinner cooking within. The smallpox had raged in Bethnal Green, and they had known that the boxes went on being made in the sick room and sold to the public with the infection thick on them. They had been so cold working in the wintry fields that they could not run when the ganger gave them leave. They had waded through floods when the Wash overflowed its banks. Kind old ladies had given them parcels of food which turned out to contain only crusts and rancid bacon rind.

  All this they had done and seen and known when other children were still dabbling in seaside pools and spelling out fairy tales by the nursery fire. Naturally their faces had a different look on them. But they were also, one remembered, firm faces, faces with something indomitable in their expression. And the reason can only be that human nature is so tough that it will take such wounds, even at the tenderest age, and survive them. Keep a child mewed up in Bethnal Green and she will somehow snuff the country air from seeing the yellow dust on her brother’s boots, and nothing will serve her but she must go there, and see the “clean ground” as she calls it for herself. It was true that at first the “bees were very frightening”, but all the same she got to the country and the blue smoke and the cows came up to her expectations. Put girls after a childhood of minding smaller brothers and sisters and washing doorsteps into a factory when they are fourteen and their eyes will turn to the window and they will be happy because, as the work room is six stories up, the sun can be seen breaking over the hills “and that was always such a comfort and a help”.

  Still stranger, if one needs additional proof of the strength of the human instinct to escape from bondage and attach itself to a country road or a sun rising over distant hills, is the fact that the highest ideals of duty flourish in an obscure hat factory as surely as on a battlefield. There were women in Christie’s hat factory, for example, who worked for “honour”. They gave their lives to the cause of putting straight stitches into the bindings of men’s hat brims. Felt is hard and thick; it is difficult to push the needle through; there are no rewards or glory to be won; but such is the incorrigible idealism of the human mind that there were “trimmers” in those obscure places who would never put a crooked stitch in their work and ruthlessly tore out the crooked stitches of others. And as they drove in their straight stitches they reverenced Queen Victoria and thanked God, drawing up to the fire, that they were all married to good Conservative working men.

  Certainly that story explained something of the force, of the obstinacy which one had seen in the faces of the speakers at the Congress in Manchester. And then if one went on reading these papers, one came upon other signs of the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench entirely had reached out, it seemed and seized upon, old copies of magazines; had attached itself to Dickens; had propped the poems of Burns against a dish-cover to read while cooking. They read at meals; they read before going to the mill. They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please”, and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books — they read with the indiscriminate greed of a hungry appetite that crams itself with toffee and beef and tarts and vinegar and champagne all in one gulp.

  Naturally, such reading led to argument. The younger generation had the audacity to say that Queen Victoria was no better than an honest charwoman who had brought up her children respectably. They had the temerity to doubt whether to sew straight stitches into men’s hat brims should be the sole aim and end of a woman’s life. They started arguments and even held rudimentary debating societies on the floor of the factory. In time the old trimmers even were shaken in their beliefs and came to think that there might be other ideals in the world besides straight stitches and Queen Victoria. Ideas, indeed, were seething in their brains. A girl, for instance, would reason, as she walked along the streets of a factory town, that she had no right to bring a child into the world if that child must earn its living in a mill. A chance saying in a book would fire her imagination and make her dream of future cities where there were to be baths and kitchens and wash houses and art galleries and museums and parks.

  The minds of working women were humming and their imaginations were awake. But how were they to realize their ideals? How were they to express their needs? Of middle-class organizations there were many. Women were beginning to found colleges, and even here and there to enter the professions. But these were middle-clas
s women with some amount of money and some degree of education behind them. How could women whose hands were full of work, whose kitchens were thick with steam, who had neither education nor encouragement nor leisure, remodel the world according to the ideas of working women? It was then, I suppose, some time early in the Eighties, that the Women’s Guild crept modestly and tentatively into existence, occupying for a time a certain space in the “Co-operative News” which was called the “Woman’s Corner”. It was there that Mrs. Acland asked, “Why should we not hold our Co-operative Mothers’ Meetings, when we may bring our work and sit together, one of us reading some co-operative work aloud, which may afterwards be discussed?” And on April 18th, 1883, she announced that there were seven members who had achieved this object.

  This was the tiny magnet that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. This was the central meeting place where was formed and solidified what was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what “clean ground” had given the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had given to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place a room where they could sit down and think remote from boiling saucepans and crying children; and then that room became a place where one could make, and share with others in making, the model of what a working woman’s house should be. Then as the membership grew and twenty or thirty women made a practice of meeting weekly, that one house became a street of houses; and if you have a street of houses you must have stores and drains and post boxes; and at last the street becomes a town, and a town brings in questions of education and finance and the relation of one town to another town. And then the town becomes a country; it becomes England; it becomes Germany and America; and so from debating questions of butter and bacon, working women at their weekly meetings have to consider the relations of one great nation to another.

  So it was that in the year 1913 Mrs. Robson and Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Wright were getting up and asking not only for baths and wages and electric light, but also for cooperative industry and adult suffrage and the taxation of land values and divorce law reform. It was thus that they were to ask, as the years went by, for peace and disarmament and the sisterhood of nations. And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things — of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult child-births, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere. All this lay behind the speeches of Mrs. Robson and Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Wright. The papers which you sent me certainly threw some light upon those old curiosities and bewilderments.

  But it cannot be denied that, as I began by saying, they do not make a book, as literature they have many limitations. The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. Indeed, we are reminded of those obscure writers before Shakespeare who had never been beyond the borders of their own parishes and found expression difficult and words few and awkward to fit together.

  And yet since writing is an impure art much infected by life, the letters you gave me seem to possess some qualities even as literature that the literate and instructed might envy. Listen, for instance, to Mrs. Scott the midwife, “I have been over the hilltops when the snowdrifts were over three feet high, and six feet in some places. I was in a blizzard in Hayfield and thought I should never get round the corners. But it was life on the moors; I seemed to know every blade of grass and where the flowers grew and all the little streams were my companions.” Could she have said that better if Oxford had made her a doctor of letters? Or take Mrs. Layton’s description of a match box factory in Bethnal Green, and how she “looked through the fence and saw three ladies sitting in the shade doing some kind of fancy work”. It has something of the accuracy and clarity of a description by Defoe. And when Mrs. Burrows brings to mind that very bitter day when the children were about to eat their cold dinner and drink their cold tea under the hedge and the ugly woman asked them into her parlour saying, “Bring these children into my house and let them eat their dinner there,” one must admit that she gets her effect, and brings the scene before us — the frozen children eating hot boiled potatoes in a ring on the floor — by whatever means she manages it. And then there is a fragment of a letter from Miss Wick, the sombre purple figure who typed as if the weight of the world rested on her shoulders. “When I was a girl of seventeen,” she writes, “my then employer, a gentleman of good position and high standing in the town, sent me to his home one night ostensibly to take a parcel of books, but really with a very different object. When I arrived at the house all the family were away, and before he would allow me to leave he forced me to yield to him. At eighteen I was a mother.” The stiff words, which conceal all emotion conventionally enough, are yet illuminating. Such then was the burden that rested upon that squat and sombre figure — such were the memories that she stored as she sat typing your letters, guarding your door with such tremendous fidelity in her purple dress.

  But I will quote no more. These letters are only fragments. These voices are beginning only now to emerge from silence into half articulate speech. These lives are still half-hidden in profound obscurity. To write even what is written has been a task of labour and difficulty. The writing has been done in kitchens, at odds and ends of time, in the midst of distractions and obstacles — but really there is no need for me, in a letter addressed to you, to lay stress upon the hardships of working women’s lives. Have not you and Janet Erskine given your best years — but hush! you will not let me finish that sentence and therefore, with the old messages of friendship and admiration, I will make an end.

  GRANITE AND RAINBOW

  This collection of essays was first released in 1953, featuring 27 pieces that were published anonymously in British and American journals, several of which were only rediscovered close to the time of publication. The subjects of the essays are categorised as falling within the art of fiction and the art of biography, focusing on writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry James and Horace Walpole.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE ART OF FICTION

  The Narrow Bridge of Art

  Hours in a Library

  Impassioned Prose

  Life and the Novelist

  On Rereading Meredith

  The Anatomy of Fiction

  Gothic Romance

  The Supernatural in Fiction

  Henry James’s Ghost Stories

  A Terribly Sensitive Mind

  Women and Fiction

  An Essay in Criticism

  Phases of Fiction

  PART II: THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

  The New Biography

  A Talk about Memoirs

  Sir Walter Raleigh

  Sterne

  Eliza and Sterne

  Horace Walpole

  A Friend of Johnson

  Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister

  Money and Love

  The Dream

  The Fleeting Portrait

  Poe’s Helen

  Visits to Walt Whitman

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  PART I: THE ART OF FICTION

  The Narrow Bridge of Art

  FAR the greater number of critics turn their backs upon the present and gaze steadily into the past. Wisely, no doubt, they make no comment upon what is being actually written at the moment; they leave that duty to the race of reviewers whose very title seems to imply transiency in themselves and in the objects they survey. But one has sometimes asked oneself, must the duty of the critic always be to the past, must his gaze always be fixed backward? Could he not s
ometimes turn round and, shading his eyes in the manner of Robinson Crusoe on the desert island, look into the future and trace on its mist the faint lines of the land which some day perhaps we may reach? The truth of such speculations can never be proved, of course, but in an age like ours there is a great temptation to indulge in them. For it is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves. Is it not the critic’s duty to tell us, or to guess at least, where we are going?

  Obviously the inquiry must narrow itself very strictly, but it might perhaps be possible in a short space to take one instance of dissatisfaction and difficulty, and, having examined into that, we might be the better able to guess the direction in which, when we have surmounted it, we shall go.

  Nobody indeed can read much modern literature without being aware that some dissatisfaction, some difficulty, is lying in our way. On all sides writers are attempting what they cannot achieve, are forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it. Many reasons might be given, but here let us select only one, and that is the failure of poetry to serve us as it has served so many generations of our fathers. Poetry is not lending her services to us nearly as freely as she did to them. The great channel of expression which has carried away so much energy, so much genius, seems to have narrowed itself or to have turned aside.

  That is true only within certain limits of course; our age is rich in lyric poetry; no age perhaps has been richer. But for our generation and the generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair, which is so intense, so personal, and so limited, is not enough. The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist — it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock.