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IChard Shone
ments of Being: Unpublished Auto-graPhical Writings of Virginia Woolf !cl 'tett by Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex usiniVersity Press £4.80) 8:n8bury Heritage Elizabeth French 0;" (HaMish Hamilton £4.95) tnnline Sandra Jobson Darroch (Chatcincl VVindus £6.00) The industry—you know the one I meanaPace. Here are three more offerings blinPublished, autobiographical writings by Woolf of outstanding interest sZexPertly edited, a handsome piece of rer7„,reh from Elizabeth French Boyd and a i,7clahle life of Lady Ottoline Morrell, cag48 that splendid old bird in all her extravaeedrit Plumage. That the authors are women, trAithat two are Americans and one is AussLlan, may lead readers to any amount of Fcculatinn. glon Certainly imports are up, and roestm. sbury feminism has come home to gil,he sound of the waves breaking was, Vire:: Woolf tells us, her most important Y Memory, heard in the nursery at St Ives .11 ay Purest ecstasy I can conceive'. The sea its moods and manifestations occurs 1ii,,dsti,g1lout her novels and the fact that she ee'rtaniY drowning invests this imagery with a ChilnPoignancy. These memoirs of her jet °0d : and youth are full of scenes, obti,s' itnages which we recognise—somefr es straight, sometimes transformedth °I her fiction. They show how profoundly w:r entered her subconscious: her father gruce...ilik,inthgup and down, up and down the ter e , sour-sweet smell of sickness from here'ened rooms as one by one her mother, .th nstep-sister, her father and adored brother wailbY died; the fishing expeditions in Cornholm.; tile ascent to her study at the top of the with-d t° read history or Greek—'like a nun
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It is w. "g • of thi ith such events that the major part iag els pook is concerned—up to the liberat8100eath of Leslie Stephen in 1904, before se5. psbury, buggery and the Ballets Rushere r°M the first two memoirs, the longest self ' get a vivid picture of the author her1/4:i-intensely receptive and bewildered. the c there 0is also a greedy appreciation Of 4re 0is also a greedy appreciation Of 4re friends who gathered about her her finis' eanrinus nieo portraits similar to those in limn"trst novel The Voyage Out—Holman gou,n siPPing cocoa in a Jaeger dressing spert a brown, bearded Mr Wolstenholme the s,i,ng Plum. juice through his nostrils or (CLIJI girl whose virginity was seriously
with since a man had chalked her nose
ItiS cue. "tese two facets of her memory which ginia ,
woolf explores. Sometimes her hand fishes up from the water some luminous, half-explained moments of apprehension and at other times strange, often comic, creatures which she proceeds to place among her specimens. Trying to make connections, the theme of so much of her writing, accounts for her bewilderment—between night and day, masculine and feminine, past and present, the worlds of intellect, action and repose. Though much of the matter of this book is familiar from Virginia Woolf's biography, her manner of recall contains all those surprises and felicities of language we have come to expect when she writes, as it were, with her elbows on the table. The last piece, read to the Memoir Club of old friends, is a rigorous and often very funny justification for her unmitigated snobbery.
Talking of D. H. Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell once said that it had been a much harder task for her to break with her Portland background than it had been for him to break with his. Among the points of contact between these books, rebellion is perhaps the dominant one, as embodied in the change from the Victorian period to the twentieth century. It certainly produces some of the best passages of writing and most illuminating insights. Miss Boyd gives us the Victorian scene—from Holland House to India. It is a valuable sourcebook though much of what the author tells us has appeared elsewhere since she began her researches, commendably, many years ago. 'Why are you interested in our mother? Why are you interested in us?' she was once asked by Pippa Strachey. If the answer remains hazy, the book itself clearly sets out to unravel the tangled family connections of the Stephens and Stracheys, the Thackerays and Patties. She confines herself to the women of those tribes, which gives an unbalanced pictureand she does not always relate her findings to Bloomsbury itself, the raison d'être, after all, of her study. She ends, however, with an unusually interesting chapter on the writer Molly MacCarthy.
Ottoline Morrell has invariably been singled out as Bloomsbury's official hostess. Rightly, her biographer is at pains to contradict this and establish the variety of Ottoline's world and friends. It is a brave attempt to give us a truthful and dispassionate account of this amazing woman who could draw crowds in the street with her appearance. In.later years it must have taken some courage to go out at all. But Ottoline never lacked courage—in private or in public, and perhaps her most notable achievement is the pacifist stand she upheld in the First War. She took endless trouble to help conscientious objectors, attending tribunals, buttonholing Asquith and sitting on committees.
Polite Society could not forgive her for being interested in painting or poetry; to espouse the cause of pacifism was the final disgrace. It was this independence which early on attracted Bloomsbury as well as men like Russell and Lawrence.
Lady Ottoline's desire to bring people together, upon which her reputation rests, dealt her some terrible blows and the passages on life at Garsington Manor are sickening to read. The discovery of Lawrence's portrait of her as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love almost did for her. Clive Bell guessed that she dimly perceived the portrait to represent the general opinion of her. But her love of literature and painting, highly subjective always, ameliorated these setbacks (Huxley's Mrs Wimbush in Crome Yellow was another) and entertaining continued, between bouts of disfiguring illness, at Gower Street in the years before her death. By that time she had become the Brighton Pavilion of the fashionable and literary world, entrance fee, fires and all.
Mrs Darroch takes us cautiously through fact and legend—the latter of course more amusing, the former more interesting. She is rather poker-faced at times and there are some minor misinterpretations from an over-anxious desire to get Ottoline not only straight but in the most flattering profile. But with such a jaw and such a chin there seems ample room for shots from every angle.
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