Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Mr Whicher accordingly has supplied not merely an article, or a few lines in a history of literature, but a careful, studious, detailed account of all her works regarded from every possible point of view, together with a bibliography which occupies 204 pages of print. It is but fair to him to add that he has few illusions as to the merits of his authoress, and only claims for her that her ‘domestic novels’ foreshadowed the work of Miss Burney and Miss Austen, and that she helped to open a new profession for her sex. Whatever help he can afford us by calling Pope ‘Mr’ Pope or Pope Alexander, and alluding to Mrs Haywood as ‘the scribbling dame’, he proffers generously enough. But it is scarcely sufficient. If he had been able to throw any light upon the circumstances of her life we should make no complaint. A woman who married a clergyman and ran away from him, who supported herself and possibly two children, it is thought without gallantry, entirely by her pen in the early years of the eighteenth century, was striking out a new line of life and must have been a person of character. But nobody knows anything about her, save that she was born in 1693 and died in 1756; it is not known where she lived or how she got her work; what friends she had, or even, which is strange in the case of a woman, whether she was plain or handsome. ‘The apprehensive dame,’ as Mr Whicher calls her, warned, we can imagine, by the disgusting stanzas in the ‘Dunciad’, took care that the facts of her life should be concealed, and, withdrawing silently, left behind her a mass of unreadable journalism which both by its form and by the inferiority of the writer’s talent throws no light upon her age or upon herself. Anyone who has looked into the works of the Duchess of Newcastle and Mrs Behn knows how easily the rich prose style of the Restoration tends to fall languid and suffocate even writers of considerable force and originality. The names alone of Mrs Haywood’s romances make us droop, and in the mazes of her plots we swoon away. We have to imagine how Emilia wandering in Andalusia meets Berinthus in a masquerade. Now Berinthus was really Henriquez her brother... Don jaque di Morella determines to marry his daughter Gementine to a certain cardinal... In Montelupe Clementina meets the funeral of a young woman who has been torn to pieces by wolves... The young and gay Dorante is tempted to expose himself to the charms of the beautiful Kesiah... The doting Baron de Tortillés marries the extravagant and lascivious Mademoiselle la Motte... Melliora, Placentia, Montrano, Miramillia, and a thousand more swarm over all the countries of the South and of the East, climbing ropes, dropping letters, overhearing secrets, plunging daggers, languishing and dying, fighting and conquering, but loving, always loving, for, as Mr Whicher puts it, to Mrs Haywood ‘love was the force that motivated all the world’.

  These stories found certain idle people very ready to read them, and were generally successful. Mrs Haywood was evidently a born journalist. As long as romances of the heart were in fashion she turned out romance after romance; when Richardson and Fielding brought the novel into closer touch with life she followed suit with her ‘Miss Betsy Thoughtless’ and her ‘Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy’. In the interval she turned publisher, edited a newspaper called The “Parrot, and produced secret histories and scandal novels rather in the style of our gossip in the illustrated papers about the aristocracy. In none of these departments was she a pioneer, or even a very distinguished disciple; and it is more for her steady industry with the pen than for the product of it that she is remarkable. Reading when Mrs Haywood wrote was beginning to come into fashion, and readers demanded books which they could read ‘with a teacup in one hand without danger of spilling the tea’. But that class, as Mr Gosse indicates when he compares Mrs Haywood to Ouida, has not been improved away nor lessened in numbers. There is the same desire to escape from the familiar look of life by the easiest way, and the difference is really that we find our romance in accumulated motor-cars and marquises rather than in foreign parts and strange-sounding names. But the heart which suffered in the pages of the early romancers beats today upon the railway bookstall beneath the shiny coloured cover which depicts Lord Belcour parting from the Lady Belinda Fitzurse, or the Duchess of Ormonde clasping the family diamonds and bathed in her own blood at the bottom of the marble staircase.

  In what sense Mr Whicher can claim that Mrs Haywood ‘prepared the way for... quiet Jane Austen’ it is difficult to see, save that one lady was undeniably born some eighty years in advance of the other. For it would be hard to imagine a less professional woman of letters than the lady who wrote on little slips of paper, hid them when anyone was near, and kept her novels shut up in her desk, and refused to write a romance about the august House of Coburg at the suggestion of Prince Leopold’s librarian - behaviour that must have made Mrs Haywood lift her hands in amazement in the grave. And in that long and very intricate process of living and reading and writing which so mysteriously alters the form of literature, so that Jane Austen, born in 1775, wrote novels, while Jane Austen born a hundred years earlier would probably have written not novels but a few exquisite lost letters, Mrs Haywood plays no perceptible part, save that of swelling the chorus of sound. For people who write books do not necessarily add anything to the history of literature, even when those books are little old volumes, stained with age, that have crossed the Atlantic; nor can we see that the students of Columbia University will love English literature the better for knowing how very dull it can be, although the University may claim that this is a ‘contribution to knowledge’.

  Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

  So far as we can remember, Miss Hill does not ask herself once in the volume before us whether people now read Miss Edgeworth’s novels. Perhaps she takes it for granted that they do, or perhaps she thinks that it does not matter. The past has an immense charm of its own; and if one can show how people lived a hundred years ago - one means by that, how they powdered their hair, and drove in yellow chariots, and passed Lord Byron in the street - one need not trouble oneself with minds and emotions. Indeed, we can know very little of the dead; when we talk of the different ages of the past we are really thinking of different fashions of dress and different styles of architecture. We have an enormous supply of such properties in our minds, deposited there by a library of books like this book of Miss Hill’s. She stamps the figure of a chariot in gold upon her boards, as though it helped us to understand Miss Edgeworth. We persuade ourselves that it does, and yet we should think it strange if the future biographer of ‘Mrs Humphry Ward and her Circle’ illustrated his meaning by a hansom cab. To Miss Edgeworth herself, we may be sure, Miss Hill’s account of her would seem a little irrelevant and perhaps not very amusing; nevertheless, we are under the illusion that this enumeration of trifles and names helps us somehow to see her more clearly than before, as certainly it produces in us a mild feeling of benevolence and pleasure. To Miss Hill undoubtedly belongs the credit of choosing her illustrations happily, so that they excite in us the curious illusion that we are peopling the past. For the moment it seems very much alive, and yet it is nothing like the life we know. The chief difference is that it makes us laugh much more consistently than the present does, and that it is composed to a much greater extent of visual impressions - of turbans and chariots with nothing inside them.

  Miss Edgeworth, although she lived in Ireland, sometimes visited London and Paris. She crossed the Channel for the first time in 1802, the voyage taking three hours and a half, ‘a comparatively quick passage for those days of sailing packets’, Miss Hill points out, invoking the spell of the past. Something, after all, must be invoked when one has a heroine who, brought face to face with Mme Récamier, merely remarks, ‘Mme Récamier is of quite an opposite sort, though in the first fashion a graceful and decent beauty of excellent character.’ To solidify the chapter one can also quote at length what the poet Rogers said about the famous bath and how Miss Berry admired the famous bed. At the same time, we cannot believe that Maria would have included Mme Récamier among her circle. In common with all the women writers of the eighteenth century, Miss Edgeworth was strikingly modest. Her habits were such that no one
would have taken her for a remarkable person, but it is scarcely necessary to be at such pains to prove it. She was diminutive in figure, plain in feature, and wrote demurely at her desk in the family living-room. Nevertheless, she observed everything, and in congenial company talked well upon ‘old French classic literature’ and listened sympathetically to stories of the Revolution. Moreover, she was so sprightly and sensible that young men of fashion both of ‘the light, easy, enjoying-the-world style’ and of the ‘melancholy and Byronic’ were fascinated and let her twit them with impunity. She turned the conversation adroitly from politics to wit, and ridiculed the fashion for the ‘triste’ in manner and ‘le vague’ in poetry. One love affair she had with a Swedish gentleman called Edelcrantz, whose understanding was superior and whose manners were mild. But, on ascertaining that she would have to leave her family and live in Sweden if she married him, she refused, although, “being exceedingly in love with him’, she suffered much at the time and long afterwards. In May 1813, Maria Edgeworth, with her father and stepmother, spent some weeks in London. The town ran mad to see her; at parties the crowd turned and twisted to discover her, and as she was very small, almost closed above her head. She bore it with composure and amusement; the general verdict seems to have been Lord Byron’s: ‘One would never have guessed that she could write her name; whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if nothing else was worth writing.’ On the other hand, we have Miss Edgeworth: ‘Of Lord Byron I can tell you only that his appearance is nothing that you would remark.’

  The obvious thing happened; people stared, were disappointed, laughed good-humouredly, and began to talk of other things. Her biographer is in the same predicament. She has recourse, with the rest of the world, to Mme de Staël. That lady was lavishing her eloquence upon London; report said that when she was silent - that is while her hair was dressed and while she breakfasted - she continued to scribble. She extorted four words from that Duke of Marlborough, who was scarcely known to speak. ‘Let me go away,’ he cried, on hearing her announced. Unfortunately, Napoleon escaped from Elba and Miss Edgeworth withdrew to Ireland, and for some reason we hear much more of Mme d’Arblay’s impressions of the battle of Waterloo than of a much more interesting subject - Miss Edgeworth herself. Maria took no part in the campaign, save that she describes (from hearsay) a banquet given at Drogheda by the Lord Mayor, at which the victorious generals were represented in sugared paste. Perverse although it may seem, Drogheda and the opinion of Drogheda upon the victory interests us far more than the account of Wellington’s reception in Paris; I possibly if we were told what Miss Edgeworth saw among the peasants on her estate we should realize far better what Waterloo meant than by reading the faded exclamations of Mme d’Arblay upon the spot.

  Europe settled down again, however, and Maria was able to visit Hampstead in 1818, and to stay with Miss Joanna Baillie, the author of ‘Plays on the Passions’, and the lyric.

  The chough and crow to roost are gone,

  admired by Scott. In spite of her fame she, too, was modest:

  ‘No one could have taken her for a married woman. An innocent maiden grace hovered over her to the end of old age.’ She walked discreetly behind her elder sister when the two old ladies, dressed in grey silk and lace caps alike, were present at the reading of one of Joanna’s ‘Plays on the Passions’ in the assembly rooms. On hearing of it some of her friends were shocked and wrote, ‘Have ye heard that Jocky Baillie has taken to the public line?’ There was Mrs Barbauld also, who sometimes stayed at Hampstead, and was severely reproved by the Quarterly Review for her Ode, ‘1811’, by which she depressed the spirits of the nation. There was Lady Breadalbane, who fell asleep in her carriage and was locked up in the coachhouse; nobody missing her for a considerable time, several carriages were rolled in after hers, and then, ‘she wakened’ - but what she said Maria has no time to report. There was Mr Standish, ‘the tip-top dandy’, who stayed at Trentham and displayed such a toilet-table that all the ladies’ maids were invited to a private view of his dressing-case, ‘which, I assure you, my lady, is the thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing-box’. How charming our ancestors were! - so simple in their manners, so humorous in their behaviour, so strange in their expressions! Thus, as we run through Miss Hill’s book, we pick up straws everywhere, and dull must be our fancy if we fail in the end to furnish all the Georgian houses in existence with tables and chairs and ladies and gentlemen. There is no need to tease ourselves with the suspicion that they were quite different in the flesh, and as ugly, as complex, and as emotional as we are, for their simplicity is more amusing to believe in and much easier to write about. Nevertheless, there are moments when we bewail the opportunity that Miss Hill seems to have missed - the opportunity of getting at the truth at the risk of being dull.

  Jane Austen and the Geese.

  Of all writers Jane Austen is the one, so we should have thought, who has had the least cause to complain of her critics. Her chief admirers have always been those who write novels themselves, and from the time of Sir Walter Scott to the time of George Moore she has been praised with unusual discrimination.

  So we should have thought. But Miss Austen-Leigh’s book shows that we were far too sanguine. Never have we had before us such certain proof of the incorrigible stupidity of reviewers. Ever since Jane Austen became famous they have been hissing inanities in chorus. She did not like dogs; she was not fond of children; she did not care for England; she was indifferent to public affairs; she had no book learning; she was irreligious; she was alternately cold and coarse; she knew no one outside her family circle; she derived her pessimistic view of family life from observing the differences between her father and mother. Miss Austen-Leigh, whose piety is natural but whose concern we cannot help thinking excessive, is persuaded that there is some ‘misapprehension’ about Jane Austen, and is determined to right it by taking each of the geese separately and wringing his neck. Someone, properly anonymous and we can scarcely help thinking fabulous, has expressed his opinion that Jane Austen was not qualified to write about the English gentry. The fact is, says Miss Austen-Leigh, that she was descended on her father’s side from the Austens, who sprang, ‘like other county families, from the powerful Clan of the Clothiers’; on her mother’s from the Leighs of Addlestrop, who entertained King Charles. Moreover, she went to dances. She moved in good society. ‘Jane Austen was in every way well fitted to write of the lives and feelings of English gentle people.’ In that conclusion we entirely concur. Still the fact that you are well fitted to write about one set of people may be taken to prove that you are not well fitted to write about another. That profound observation is to the credit of a second anonymous fowl. Nor, to be candid, does Miss Austen-Leigh altogether succeed in silencing him. Jane Austen had, she assures us, opportunities for a wider knowledge of life than falls to the lot of most clergymen’s daughters. An uncle by marriage lived in India and was a friend of Warren Hastings. He must have written home about the trial and the climate. A cousin married a French nobleman whose head was cut off in the Revolution. She must have had something to say about Paris and the guillotine. One of her brothers made the grand tour, and two were in the Navy. It is, therefore, undeniable that Jane Austen might have ‘indulged in romantic flights of fancy with India or France for a background’, but it is equally undeniable that Jane Austen never did. Yet it is difficult to deny that had she been not only Jane Austen but Lord Byron and Captain Marryat into the bargain her works might have possessed merits which, as it is, we cannot truthfully say that we find in them.

  Leaving these exalted regions of literary criticism the reviewers now attack her character. She was cold, they say, and ‘turned away from whatever was sad, unpleasant, or painful’. That is easily disposed of. The family archives contain proof that she nursed a cousin through the measles, and ‘attended her brother Henry, in London, in an illness of which he nearly died’. It is as eas
y from the same source to dispose of the malevolent assertion that she was the illiterate daughter of an illiterate father. When the Rev. George Austen left Steventon he sold five hundred books. The number that he must have kept is quite enough to prove that Jane Austen was a well read woman. As for the slander that her family life was unhappy, it is sufficient to quote the words of a cousin who was in the habit of staying with the Austens. ‘When among this Liberal Society, the simplicity, hospitality, and taste which commonly prevail in different families among the delightful vallies of Switzerland ever occurs to my memory.’ The malignant and persistent critic still remains who says that Jane Austen was without morality. Indeed, it is a difficult charge to meet. It is not enough to quote her own statement, ‘I am very fond of Sherlock’s sermons.’ The testimony of Archbishop Whately does not convince us. Nor can we personally subscribe to Miss Austen-Leigh’s opinion that in all her works ‘one line of thought, one grace, or quality, or necessity... is apparent. Its name is Repentance.’ The truth appears to us to be much more complicated than that.