Memoirs of a Novelist E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 145

Beschreibung

From Victorian England to fifteenth- century Norfolk, and pre-war London to Mount Pentelicus, Virginia Woolf offers a series of fictional impressions of women finding their place in the world around them. At once exquisitely drawn and brilliantly haunting, these snapshots of life are a remarkable testament to the narrative powers of one of Britain's best-loved novelists, and an insight into some of her perennial interests – namely her fascination with the role of the biographer, the literature of Greece and the loneliness of early twentieth-century London. This collection of five of Virginia Woolf's earliest stories explores the role of women in society, and hints at the stylistic form that would go on to define her later writing.

Leseprobe

Memoirs of a Novelist

Virginia Woolf

Modern Voices

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street

W1W 7RD London

www.hesperus.press

First published in Great Britain in 1985 by The Hogarth Press

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2006

Electronic edition published Hesperus Press Limited, 2024

Text by Virginia Woolf © Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett and Julian Bell 1917, 1919, 1921, 1923, 1942, 1944, 1973, 1977, 1985

The Estate of Virginia Woolf asserts the moral right of Virginia Woolf to be identified as the Author of the text of Memoirs of a Novelist.

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio Printed in Jordan by the Jordan National Press

ISBN: 1-84391-423-9

ISBN (13): 978-1-84391-423-5

e-book ISBN: 978-1-84391-628-4

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

1. Phyllis and Rosamond

2. The Mysterious Case of Miss V.

3. The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn

4. A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus

5. Memoirs of a Novelist

Biographical Note

Phyllis and Rosamond

In this very curious age, when we are beginning to require pictures of people, their minds and their coats, a faithful outline, drawn with no skill but veracity, may possibly have some value.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the door keeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

And as such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman’s hand in the dance of the marionettes; and the finger is laid upon the heart. It is true that our simple eyes believed for many ages that the figures danced of their own accord, and cut what steps they chose; and the partial light which novelists and historians have begun to cast upon that dark and crowded place behind the scenes has done little as yet but show us how many wires there are, held in obscure hands, upon whose jerk or twist the whole figure of the dance depends. This preface leads us then to the point at which we began; we intend to look as steadily as we can at a little group, which lives at this moment (the 20th June, 1906); and seems for some reasons which we will give, to epitomise the qualities of many. It is a common case, because after all there are many young women, born of well-to-do, respectable, official parents; and they must all meet much the same problems, and there can be, unfortunately, but little variety in the answers they make.

There are five of them, all daughters they will ruefully explain to you: regretting this initial mistake it seems all through their lives on their parents’ behalf. Further, they are divided into camps: two sisters oppose themselves to two sisters; the fifth vacillates equally between them. Nature has decreed that two shall inherit a stalwart pugnacious frame of mind, which applies itself to political economy and social problems successfully and not unhappily; while the other two she has made frivolous, domestic, of lighter and more sensitive temperaments. These two then are condemned to be what in the slang of the century is called ‘the daughters at home’. Their sisters deciding to cultivate their brains, go to College, do well there, and marry Professors. Their careers have so much likeness to those of men themselves that it is scarcely worth while to make them the subject of special enquiry. The fifth sister is less marked in character than any of the others; but she marries when she is twenty-two so that she scarcely has time to develop the individual features of young lady-dom which we set out to describe. In the two ‘daughters at home’ Phyllis and Rosamond, we will call them, we find excellent material for our enquiry.

A few facts will help us to set them in their places, before we begin to investigate. Phyllis is twenty-eight, Rosamond is twenty-four. In person they are pretty, pink cheeked, vivacious; a curious eye will not find any regular beauty of feature; but their dress and demeanour give them the effect of beauty without its substance. They seem indigenous to the drawing-room, as though, born in silk evening robes, they had never trod a rougher earth than the Turkey carpet, or reclined on harsher ground than the arm chair or the sofa. To see them in a drawing-room full of well dressed men and women, is to see the merchant in the Stock Exchange, or the barrister in the Temple. This, every motion and word proclaims, is their native air; their place of business, their professional arena. Here, clearly, they practise the arts in which they have been instructed since childhood. Here, perhaps, they win their victories and earn their bread. But it would be as unjust as it would be easy to press this metaphor till it suggested that the comparison was appropriate and complete in all its parts. It fails; but where it fails and why it fails it will take some time and attention to discover.

You must be in a position to follow these young ladies home, and to hear their comments over the bedroom candle. You must be by them when they wake next morning; and you must attend their progress throughout the day. When you have done this, not for one day but for many days then you will be able to calculate the values of those impressions which are to be received by night in the drawing-room.

This much may be retained of the metaphor already used; that the drawing-room scene represents work to them and not play. So much is made quite clear by the scene in the carriage going home. Lady Hibbert is a severe critic of such performances; she has noted whether her daughters looked well, spoke well, behaved well; whether they attracted the right people and repelled the wrong; whether on the whole the impression they left was favourable. From the multiplicity and minuteness of her comments it is easy to see that two hours’ entertainment is, for artists of this kind, a very delicate and complicated piece of work. Much it seems, depends upon the way they acquit themselves. The daughters answer submissively and then keep silence, whether their mother praises or blames: and her censure is severe. When they are alone at last, and they share a modest sized bedroom at the top of a great ugly house; they stretch their arms and begin to sigh with relief. Their talk is not very edifying; it is the ‘shop’ of business men; they calculate their profits and their losses and have clearly no interest at heart except their own. And yet you may have heard them chatter of books and plays and pictures as though these were the things they most cared about; to discuss them was the only motive of a ‘party’.

Yet you will observe also in this hour of unlovely candour something which is also very sincere, but by no means ugly. The sisters were frankly fond of each other. Their affection has taken the form for the most part of a free mason-ship which is anything but sentimental; all their hopes and fears are in common; but it is a genuine feeling, profound in spite of its prosaic exterior. They are strictly honourable in all their dealings together; and there is even something chivalrous in the attitude of the younger sister to the elder. She, as the weaker by reason of her greater age, must always have the best of things. There is some pathos also in the gratitude with which Phyllis accepts the advantage. But it grows late, and in respect for their complexions, these business-like young women remind each other that it is time to put out the light.

In spite of this forethought they are fain to sleep on after they are called in the morning. But Rosamond jumps up, and shakes Phyllis.

‘Phyllis we shall be late for breakfast.’

There must have been some force in this argument, for Phyllis got out of bed and began silently to dress. But their haste allowed them to put on their clothes with great care and dexterity, and the result was scrupulously surveyed by each sister in turn before they went down. The clock struck nine as they came into the breakfast room: their father was already there, kissed each daughter perfunctorily, passed his cup for coffee, read his paper and disappeared. It was a silent meal. Lady Hibbert breakfasted in her room; but after breakfast they had to visit her, to receive her orders for the day, and while one wrote notes for her the other went to arrange lunch and dinner with the cook. By eleven they were free, for the time, and met in the schoolroom where Doris the youngest sister, aged sixteen, was writing an essay upon the Magna Charter in French. Her complaints at the interruption – for she was dreaming of a first class already – met with no honour. ‘We must sit here, because there’s nowhere else to sit,’ remarked Rosamond. ‘You needn’t think we want your company,’ added Phyllis. But these remarks were spoken without bitterness, as the mere commonplaces of daily life.

In deference to their sister, however, Phyllis took up a volume of Anatole France, and Rosamond opened the ‘Greek Studies’ of Walter Pater.1 They read for some minutes in silence; then a maid knocked, breathless, with a message that ‘Her Ladyship wanted the young ladies in the drawing-room.’ They groaned; Rosamond offered to go alone; Phyllis said no, they were both victims; and wondering what the errand was they went sulkily downstairs. Lady Hibbert was impatiently waiting them.

‘O there you are at last,’ she exclaimed. ‘Your father has sent round to say he’s asked Mr Middleton and Sir Thomas Carew to lunch. Isn’t that troublesome of him! I can’t think what drove him to ask them, and there’s no lunch – and I see you haven’t arranged the flowers, Phyllis; and Rosamond I want you to put a clean tucker in my maroon gown. O dear, how thoughtless men are.’

The daughters were used to these insinuations against their father: on the whole they took his side, but they never said so.

They silently departed now on their separate errands: Phyllis had to go out and buy flowers and an extra dish for lunch; and Rosamond sat down to her sewing.

Their tasks were hardly done in time for them to change for lunch; but at 1.30 they came pink and smiling into the pompous great drawing-room. Mr Middleton was Sir William Hibbert’s secretary; a young man of some position and prospects, as Lady Hibbert defined him; who might be encouraged. Sir Thomas was an official in the same office, solid and gouty, a handsome piece on the board, but of no individual importance.

At lunch then there was some sprightly conversation between Mr Middleton and Phyllis, while their elders talked platitudes, in sonorous deep voices. Rosamond sat rather silent, as was her wont; speculating keenly upon the character of the secretary, who might be her brother-in-law; and checking certain theories she had made by every fresh word he spoke. By open consent, Mr Middleton was her sister’s game; she did not trespass. If one could have read her thoughts, while she listened to Sir Thomas’s stories of India in the Sixties, one would have found that she was busied in somewhat abstruse calculations; Little Middleton, as she called him, was not half a bad sort; he had brains; he was, she knew, a good son, and he would make a good husband. He was well to do also, and would make his way in the service. On the other hand her psychological acuteness told her that he was narrow minded, without a trace of imagination or intellect, in the sense she understood it; and she knew enough of her sister to know that she would never love this efficient active little man, although she would respect him. The question was should she marry him? This was the point she had reached when Lord Mayo was assassinated;2 and while her lips murmured ohs and ahs of horror, her eyes were telegraphing across the table, ‘I am doubtful.’ If she had nodded her sister would have begun to practise those arts by which many proposals had been secured already. Rosamond, however, did not yet know enough to make up her mind. She telegraphed merely ‘Keep him in play.’

The gentlemen left soon after lunch, and Lady Hibbert prepared to go and lie down. But before she went she called Phyllis to her.

‘Well my dear,’ she said, with more affection than she had shown yet, ‘did you have a pleasant lunch? Was Mr Middleton agreeable?’ She patted her daughter’s cheek, and looked keenly into her eyes.

Some petulancy came across Phyllis, and she answered listlessly. ‘O he’s not a bad little man; but he doesn’t excite me.’

Lady Hibbert’s face changed at once: if she had seemed a benevolent cat playing with a mouse from philanthropic motives before, she was the real animal now in sober earnest.

‘Remember,’ she snapped, ‘this can’t go on for ever. Try and be a little less selfish, my dear.’ If she had sworn openly, her words could not have been less pleasant to hear.

She swept off, and the two girls looked at each other, with expressive contortions of the lips.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ said Phyllis, laughing weakly. ‘Now let’s have a respite. Her Ladyship won’t want us till four.’

They mounted to the schoolroom, which was now empty; and threw themselves into deep arm chairs. Phyllis lit a cigarette, and Rosamond sucked peppermints, as though they induced to thought.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Phyllis at last, ‘what do we decide? It is June now; our parents give me till July: little Middleton is the only one.’

‘Except –’ began Rosamond.

‘Yes, but it is no good thinking of him.’

‘Poor old Phyllis! Well, he’s not a bad man.’

‘Clean sober, truthful industrious. O we should make a model

pair! You should stay with us in Derbyshire.’

‘You might do better,’ went on Rosamond; with the considering air of a judge. ‘On the other hand, they won’t stand much more.’ ‘They’ intimated Sir William and Lady Hibbert.

‘Father asked me yesterday what I could do if I didn’t marry. I had nothing to say.’

‘No, we were educated for marriage.’

‘You might have done something better. Of course I’m a fool so it doesn’t matter.’

‘And I think marriage the best thing there is – if one were allowed to marry the man one wants.’

‘O I know: it is beastly. Still there’s no escaping facts.’

‘Middleton,’ said Rosamond briefly. ‘He’s the fact at present. Do you care for him?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Could you marry him?’

‘If her Ladyship made me.’

‘It might be a way out, at any rate.’

‘What d’you make of him now?’ asked Phyllis, who would

have accepted or rejected any man on the strength of her sister’s advice. Rosamond, possessed of shrewd and capable brains, had been driven to feed them exclusively upon the human character and as her science was but little obscured by personal prejudice, her results were generally trustworthy.

‘He’s very good,’ she began; ‘moral qualities excellent: brains fair: he’ll do well of course: not a scrap of imagination or romance: he’d be very just to you.’

‘In short we would be a worthy pair: something like our parents!’

‘The question is,’ went on Rosamond; ‘is it worth while going through another year of slavery, till the next one comes along? And who is the next? Simpson, Rogers, Leiscetter.’

At each name her sister made a face.

‘The conclusion seems to be: mark time and keep up appearances.’

‘O let’s enjoy ourselves while we may! If it weren’t for you, Rosamond, I should have married a dozen times already.’

‘You’d have been in the divorce court my dear.’

‘I’m too respectable for that, really. I’m very weak without you. And now let’s talk of your affairs.’

‘My affairs can wait,’ said Rosamond resolutely. And the two young women discussed their friends’ characters, with some acuteness and not a little charity till it was time to change once more. But two features of their talk are worth remark. First, that they held intellect in great reverence and made that a cardinal point in their enquiry; secondly that whenever they suspected an unhappy home life, or a disappointed attachment, even in the case of the least attractive, their judgments were invariably gentle and sympathetic.