Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics)

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Bibliographical Preface © Frank Kermode 1992

Editorial material © David Bradshaw 2008

Text © the Trustees of the Virginia Woolf Estate

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Selected Essays

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID BRADSHAW

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

SELECTED ESSAYS

DAVID BRADSHAW is Reader in English Literature at Oxford University and Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. Among other volumes, he has edited The Hidden Huxley, Waugh’s Decline and Fall, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Huxley’s Brave New World, and the Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, as well as Oxford World’s Classics editions of Lawrence’s The White Peacock and Women in Love, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction. In addition, he has edited A Concise Companion to Modernism (Blackwell, 2003) and, with Kevin J. H. Dettmar, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Blackwell, 2006). He is a Fellow of the English Association and Victorian and Modern Literature Editor of the Review of English Studies.

CONTENTS

Biographical Preface

Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Virginia Woolf

SELECTED ESSAYS

READING AND WRITING

The Decay of Essay-Writing

Modern Fiction

The Modern Essay

How it Strikes a Contemporary

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown

Character in Fiction

‘Impassioned Prose’

How Should One Read a Book?

Poetry, Fiction and the Future

Craftsmanship

LIFE-WRITING

The New Biography

On Being Ill

Leslie Stephen

The Art of Biography

WOMEN AND FICTION

The Feminine Note in Fiction

Women Novelists

Women and Fiction

Professions for Women

Memories of a Working Women’s Guild

Why?

LOOKING ON

Thunder at Wembley

The Cinema

Street Haunting: A London Adventure

The Sun and the Fish

The Docks of London

Oxford Street Tide

Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car

Flying over London

Why Art Today Follows Politics

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Explanatory Notes

BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her father, Leslie Stephen, himself a widower, had married in 1878 Julia Jackson, widow of Herbert Duckworth. Between them they already had four children; a fifth, Vanessa, was born in 1879, a sixth, Thoby, in 1880. There followed Virginia and, in 1883, Adrian.

Both of the parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyer and writer on law. His first wife was a daughter of Thackeray, his second had been an admired associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, and also, like her first husband, had aristocratic connections. Stephen himself is best remembered as the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and as an alpinist, but he was also a remarkable journalist, biographer, and historian of ideas; his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) is still of great value. No doubt our strongest idea of him derives from the character of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse; for a less impressionistic portrait, which conveys a strong sense of his centrality in the intellectual life of the time, one can consult Noël Annan’s Leslie Stephen (revised edition, 1984).

Virginia had the free run of her father’s library, a better substitute for the public school and university education she was denied than most women of the time could aspire to; her brothers, of course, were sent to Clifton and Westminster. Her mother died in 1895, and in that year she had her first breakdown, possibly related in some way to the sexual molestation of which her half-brother George Duckworth is accused. By 1897 she was able to read again, and did so voraciously: ‘Gracious, child, how you gobble’, remarked her father, who, with a liberality and good sense at odds with the age in which they lived, allowed her to choose her reading freely. In other respects her relationship with her father was difficult; his deafness and melancholy, his excessive emotionalism, not helped by successive bereavements, all increased her nervousness.

Stephen fell ill in 1902 and died in 1904. Virginia suffered another breakdown, during which she heard the birds singing in Greek, a language in which she had acquired some competence. On her recovery she moved, with her brothers and sister, to a house in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; there, and subsequently at several other nearby addresses, what eventually became famous as the Bloomsbury Group took shape.

Virginia had long considered herself a writer. It was in 1905 that she began to write for publication in the Times Literary Supplement. In her circle (more loosely drawn than is sometimes supposed) were many whose names are now half-forgotten, but some were or became famous: J. M. Keynes and E.