Marcel Proust. Her Mrs Ramsay, like Forster’s Mrs Wilcox and Mrs Moore, is a new
kind of character – maternal, wise, detached from, superior to, protective of the
childish men around her. They are tributes to the authors’ mothers – a class rather
taken for granted in English literature. Woolf ’s literary criticism, too, in The
Common Reader and other essays, is quick, informal, sensitive in rendering impres-
sions, always personal and in her own voice, and often as revealing of herself as of
the work. Her polemic,A Room of One’s Own (1928), traces the history of women’s
contributions to English literature with fine judgement. It set a course for academic
literary feminism, and can be recommended to all students of English for its
sustained irony.
A Room of One’s Ownshows how rarely in the history of English literature a
woman writer has had room to write. Woolf also argues that girls should be allowed
into universities on the same terms as their brothers, as had not happened to her. In
a late lecture, ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), Woolf maintains that ‘all writers since
Chaucer have come from the middle class ... have had good, at least expensive,
educations .... That was true of all the 19th-century writers, save D. H. Lawrence.’
The first generalization is fair enough, but the others may have surprised her audi-
ence, the Workers’ Educational Association. The lecturer, born in 1882, calls D. H.
Lawrence, born in 1885, a 19th-century writer; but he had then been dead ten years
and perhaps his early novels seemed old-fashioned. But as Virginia Stephen seems to
have read the lives of every writer in her father’s Dictionary of National Biography,
what she next says is strange: ‘all the nineteenth-century writers’ had a ‘good, at least
expensive education ... .’ True of some poets, this is untrue of novelists. Thackeray
and Trollope were sent to expensive schools and hated them. Less well educated
novelists include Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Mrs Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli,
Charles Dicke ns,George Eliot, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf
herself.There are now as many women as men in British universities, and far more
women than men studying English literature. Creative writing courses have been
taken by some successful novelists. But in the 19th century a ‘good, at least expen-
sive ’ education seems to have been less helpful to a novelist than a sense of depriva-
tion in early life. A need to write trumps the need for a room in which to write.
A more ambiguous,less polemical feminism fuels Orlando: A Biography (1928).
As its hero changes sex and lives for nearly four hundred years, the subtitle is a spoof.
It also parodies the obituaristic, external style of the Dictionary of National
Biography. Yet the key to Orlando is its dedication to Vita Sackville-West, with whom
Woolf was infatuated (see Portrait of a Marriage (1973) by Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s
son).Orlando is a fantasy love-letter to its aristocratic dedicatee, and to her ancient
house. It put a new ‘bi-’ into biography.
Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys
The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, founded 1917, also published Katherine Mansfield
(1888–1923) and other new writers, often in translation, especially Russians and
eastern Europeans. Mansfield’s notable short stories, many set in her native New
Zealand, are firmer than those of Woolf, who thought Mansfield’s ‘hard’ and ‘shal-
low’. The work of Lawrence, Woolf and Mansfield should be compared with that of
the master of the short story, the humane Anton Chekhov.
A writer of short fiction which should last is Jean Rhys(?1890–1979), daughter
to a Welsh doctor, born in Dominica but educated in England. A chorus girl, she left
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 361