Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life - against tyranny, against law, against convention. The reformer’s love of humanity, which has so much of hatred in it as well as love, fermented within her. The outbreak of revolution in France expressed some of her deepest theories and convictions, and she dashed off in the heat of that extraordinary moment those two eloquent and daring books - the Reply to Burke and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which are so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them - their originality has become our commonplace. But when she was in Paris lodging by herself in a great house, and saw with her own eyes the King whom she despised driving past surrounded by National Guards and holding himself with greater dignity than she expected, then, ‘I can scarcely tell you why’, the tears came to her eyes. ‘I am going to bed,’ the letter ended, ‘and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.’ Things were not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own feelings.

  She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice - and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and independence and the right to live her own life - and she wanted something different. ‘I do not want to be loved like a goddess,’ she wrote, ‘but I wish to be necessary to you.’ For Imlay, the fascinating American to whom her letter was addressed, had been very good to her. Indeed, she had fallen passionately in love with him. But it was one of her theories that love should be free - ‘that mutual affection was marriage and that the marriage tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die’. And yet at the same time that she wanted freedom she wanted certainty. ‘I like the word affection,’ she wrote, ‘because it signifies something habitual.’

  The conflict of all these contradictions shows itself in her face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent, and beautiful into the bargain with its great coils of hair and the large bright eyes that Southey thought the most expressive he had ever seen. The life of such a woman was bound to be tempestuous. Every day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people’s prejudices. Every day too - for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist - something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh. She acted upon her theory that she had no legal claim upon Imlay; she refused to marry him; but when he left her alone week after week with the child she had borne him her agony was unendurable.

  Thus distracted, thus puzzling even to herself, the plausible and treacherous Imlay cannot be altogether blamed for failing to follow the rapidity of her changes and the alternate reason and unreason of her moods. Even friends whose liking was impartial were disturbed by her discrepancies. Mary had a passionate, an exuberant, love of Nature, and yet one night when the colours in the sky were so exquisite that Madeleine Schweizer could not help saying to her, ‘Come Mary - come, nature-lover - and enjoy this wonderful spectacle - this constant transition from colour to colour’, Mary never took her eyes off the Baron de Wolzogen. ‘I must confess,’ wrote Madame Schweizer, ‘that this erotic absorption made such a disagreeable impression on me, that all my pleasure vanished.’ But if the sentimental Swiss was disconcerted by Mary’s sensuality, Imlay, the shrewd man of business, was exasperated by her intelligence. Whenever he saw her he yielded to her charm, but then her quickness, her penetration, her uncompromising idealism harassed him. She saw through his excuses; she met all his reasons; she was even capable of managing his business. There was no peace with her - he must be off again. And then her letters followed him, torturing him with their sincerity and their insight. They were so outspoken; they pleaded so passionately to be told the truth; they showed such a contempt for soap and alum and wealth and comfort; they repeated, as he suspected, so truthfully that he had only to say the word, ‘and you shall never hear of me more’, that he could not endure it. Tickling minnows he had hooked a dolphin, and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy and only wanted to escape. After all, though he had played at theory-making too, he was a business man, he depended upon soap and alum; ‘the secondary pleasures of life’, he had to admit, ‘are very necessary to my comfort’. And among them was one that for ever evaded Mary’s jealous scrutiny. Was it business, was it politics, was it a woman, that perpetually took him away from her? He shillied and shallied; he was very charming when they met; then he disappeared again. Exasperated at last, and half insane with suspicion, she forced the truth from the cook. A little actress in a strolling company was his mistress, she learnt. True to her own creed of decisive action, Mary at once soaked her skirts so that she might sink unfailingly, and threw herself from Putney Bridge. But she was rescued; after unspeakable agony she recovered, and then her ‘unconquerable greatness of mind’, her girlish creed of independence, asserted itself again, and she determined to make another bid for happiness and to earn her living without taking a penny from Imlay for herself or their child.

  It was in this crisis that she again saw Godwin, the little man with the big head, whom she had met when the French Revolution was making the young men in Somers Town think that a new world was being born. She met him - but that is a euphemism, for in fact Mary Wollstonecraft actually visited him in his own house. Was it the effect of the French Revolution? Was it the blood she had seen spilt on the pavement and the cries of the furious crowd that had rung in her ears that made it seem a matter of no importance whether she put on her cloak and went to visit Godwin in Somers Town, or waited in Judd Street West for Godwin to come to her? And what strange upheaval of human life was it that inspired that curious man, who was so queer a mixture of meanness and magnanimity, of coldness and deep feeling - for the memoir of his wife could not have been written without unusual depth of heart - to hold the view that she did right - that he respected Mary for trampling upon the idiotic convention by which women’s lives were tied down? He held the most extraordinary views on many subjects, and upon the relations of the sexes in particular. He thought that reason should influence even the love between men and women. He thought that there was something spiritual in their relationship. He had written that ‘marriage is a law, and the worst of all laws... marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties’. He held the belief that if two people of the opposite sex like each other, they should live together without any ceremony, or, for living together is apt to blunt love, twenty doors off, say, in the same street. And he went further; he said that if another man liked your wife ‘this will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation, and we shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse a very trivial object.’ True, when he wrote those words he had never been in love; now for the first time he was to experience that sensation. It came very quietly and naturally, growing ‘with equal advances in the mind of each’ from those talks in Somers Town, from those discussions upon everything under the sun which they held so improperly alone in his rooms. ‘It was friendship melting into love...’, he wrote. ‘When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other. ‘ Certainly they were in agreement upon the most essential points; they were both of opinion, for instance, that marriage was unnecessary. They would continue to live apart. Only when Nature again intervened, and Mary found herself with child, was it worth while to lose valued friends, she asked, for the sake of a theory? She thought not, and they were married. And then that other theory - that it is best for husband and wife to live apart - was not that also incompatible with other feelings that were coming to birth in her? ‘A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of the house’, she wrote. Indeed, she discovered that she was passionately domestic. Why not, then, revise that theory too, and share the same roof. Godwin should have a room some doors off to work in; and they should dine out separately if they liked - their work, their friends, should be separate. Thus the
y settled it, and the plan worked admirably. The arrangement combined ‘the novelty and lively sensation of a visit with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life’. Mary admitted that she was happy; Godwin confessed that, after all one’s philosophy, it was ‘extremely gratifying’ to find that ‘there is someone who takes an interest in one’s happiness’. All sorts of powers and emotions were liberated in Mary by her new satisfaction. Trifles gave her an exquisite pleasure - the sight of Godwin and Imlay’s child playing together; the thought of their own child who was to be born; a day’s jaunt into the country. One day, meeting Imlay in the New Road, she greeted him without bitterness. But, as Godwin wrote, ‘Ours is not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory pleasures.’ No, it too was an experiment, as Mary’s life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs. And their marriage was only a beginning; all sorts of things were to follow after. Mary was going to have a child. She was going to write a book to be called The Wrongs of Women. She was going to reform education. She was going to come down to dinner the day after her child was born. She was going to employ a midwife and not a doctor at her confinement - but that experiment was her last. She died in child-birth. She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, ‘I cannot bear to think of being no more - of losing myself-nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist’, died at the age of thirty-six. But she has her revenge. Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realize the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.

  Jane Austen Practising

  The summer of 1922, remarkable for public reasons in many ways, was privately remarkable for the extreme coldness of its nights. Six blankets and a quilt? A rug and a hot water bottle? All over England men and women went to bed with such words upon their lips. And then, between two and three in the morning, they woke with a start. Something serious had happened. It was stifling. It was portentous. Steps must be taken immediately. But what a frightful effort it needs in the early hours of the morning to throw off all one’s clothes!

  All over England for the past ten or twenty years the reputation of Jane Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and blankets. The voices of the elderly and distinguished, of the clergy and the squirearchy, have droned in unison praising and petting, capping quotations, telling little anecdotes, raking up little facts. She is the most perfect artist in English literature. And one of her cousins had his head cut off in the French Revolution.

  Did she ever go fox hunting? No, but she nursed Miss Gibson through the measles. Her knowledge of the upper middle classes was unrivalled. One of her ancestors entertained King Charles. Macaulay, of course, compared her with Shakespeare. And where is Mansfield Park? So they pile up the quilts and counterpanes until the comfort becomes oppressive. Something must be done about it. But what a frightful effort it needs at this time of day to shake off all these clothes!

  Now opportunely, in the nick of time, comes Love and Friendship to give us the very chance we want. Here is a little book written by Jane Austen long before she was the great Jane Austen of mythology. The Jane Austen of Love and Friendship was a girl of seventeen scribbling stories to amuse the schoolroom. One is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother. Another is nearly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. Nobody (for we may leave Mr Chesterton to the end) has been here before us, and so we may really read Jane Austen by ourselves for the first time.

  She is a girl of seventeen writing in a country parsonage. And on page two, without turning a hair, out she raps ‘natural daughter’. Yet her mother might have come in at that very moment. The eighteenth century, of course, still persisted. The little Austens had the freedom of the house as no other children were to have it for a century at least. Money and marriage would no doubt be jokes in the nursery as they were, much more coarsely, jokes upon the stage. And clever children, beginning to laugh at their elders, would in the year 1790 pick up the last new novel and make fun of its heroine. ‘Ah! what could we do but what we did? We sighed and fainted on the sofa.’ When Jane Austen read that aloud, no doubt her brothers and sisters took the reference to Adeline Barrett, or whoever was the fashionable heroine of the moment. And as the Austens were a large family, and Mrs Austen stitched and darned and lay an invalid on the sofa, her daughters, while still very young, were well aware that life in a country parsonage has little in common with life in Mrs Radcliffe’s novels. This is all plausible enough, and much more might be written in the same strain. But it has nothing whatever to do with Love and Friendship. For this girl of seventeen is not writing to amuse the schoolroom. She is not writing to draw a laugh from sister and brothers. She is writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; she, in short, is writing. ‘A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends, my Acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called. Alas! how altered now! Tho’ indeed my own Misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other.’ The authoress of those lines had, if not a whole sitting room to herself, some private corner of the common parlour where she was allowed to write without interruption. But now and then, as the writing of Love and Friendship proceeded, a brother or a sister must have asked her what she was laughing at. And then Jane Austen read aloud, ‘I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura.... Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint....’And taking up her pen again she wrote, it is clear, as fast as she could write, and faster than she could spell, for the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia popped into her head as quick as lightning. She was in the enviable position of having one page to fill and a bubbling fancy capable of filling half a dozen. So if she wants to dispose of the husband of Phillipa she decrees that he shall have one talent, driving, and one possession, a coach, and he shall drive for ever between Edinburgh and Stirling, or, for Jane Austen does not exaggerate, shall drive to Stirling every other day. And Philander and Gustavus - what shall we do with them? Oh, their mothers (and, by the way, no one knew who their fathers were - perhaps Philip Jones the bricklayer, and Gregory Staves the staymaker) - their mothers kept their fortune of nine hundred pounds in the table drawer. So they stole it, and wrapped it in nine parcels, and spent it in seven weeks and a day, and came home and found their mothers starved, and went upon the stage and acted Macbeth. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense, there can be no doubt that Love and Friendship makes excellent reading. But what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of seventeen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

  Girls of seventeen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed point from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature. They do not know that wherever they go and however long they live they will always find Lady Grevilles snubbing poor Marias at a dance. But Jane Austen knew it. That is one reason why she is so impersonal and remains for ever so inscrutable. One of those fairies who are said to attend with their gifts upon cradles must have taken her on a flight through the air directly she was born. And when she was laid in her cradle again she knew what the world looked like. She had chosen her kingdom. She had a
greed that if she might rule over that territory she would covet no other. Thus at seventeen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation to the universe like a work of art. When Jane Austen, the writer, wrote down, in the most remarkable sketch in the book, a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which Jane Austen, the clergyman’s daughter, no doubt once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and somehow we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of seventeen, did she round upon herself in shame, and obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, end here. And the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist - on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. ‘One of the first characters in the World,’ she called her, ‘a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight and myself.’ With these words the passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember how the young Brontës wrote, not so very much later, about the Duke of Wellington.