If writing meant that, it was not worth doing - The Tunnel, fourth book of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

The Tunnel (1919) by Dorothy Richardson, the fourth book in the Pilgrimage series, is what I will write about here.  There are always interesting things in these books.

1. Our autobiographical heroine is now in London, working in a dentist office and living in a little room in St. Pancras.  The genre of the novel is “young woman in the city.”  The previous novels, where Miriam was a teacher in Germany, a teacher in North London, and a governess, were all false starts, but Richardson, and thus presumably Miriam, will work as a secretary – office manager, maybe – for the dentists for ten years, so maybe this roman is finally going to start fleuving.

Three false starts in the first three novels is just one more reason why Richardson is neglected.  Patience testing.

2.  Richardson’s method continues to be relentlessly interiorized, inside Miriam’s head all the time, and fragmented, with lots of the usual writing that connects scene to scene missing.  The reader is tossed into the pool headfirst, over and over again.  A mass of material results – lots of extraordinary social detail, like all of the stuff where Miriam learns to ride a bicycle, and lots of questionable but at least provocative thinking from young Miriam.  I have been wondering, though, how it is all being shaped by Richardson.  Really, if it is shaped.  My prejudice is that all else equal, shaped is more artful than unshaped.

Both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf reviewed The Tunnel in 1919.  Both were, at that point, the authors of one book each, so this is early, before their major works.  But I assume they were both better readers than I am, and both vote that Richardson’s novels are unshaped.

Mansfield: “Only we feel that until these things are judged and given each its appointed place in the whole scheme, they have no meaning in the world of art.”

Woolf: “We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms.”

These are both positive, if skeptical, reviews.  Many thanks to Neglected Books for collecting these reviews among so much other useful material.

3.  In real life, Richardson reconnected with a high school friend around this time (1894 if I am dating the time of the novel correctly).  The friend was recently married to a young writer who turned out to be H. G. Wells.  I mean, he always was, but in 1894 he had not yet published a novel, just a mass of short stories and newspaper writing, so he was not yet, you know, H. G. Wells.  Anyway, this sounds so unlikely to me, but it happened, and if it happened it went into Pilgrimage, so there is some fascinating stuff about Miriam hanging around with the Wells circle.

One way Pilgrimage is perhaps shaped is as a portrait of the artist as a young woman, and much of that theme is developed in the “Wells” chapter.  For example:

[T]he business of the writer was imagination, not romantic imagination, but realism, fine realism, the truth about ‘the savage,’ about all the past and present, the avoidance of cliché . . . what was cliché? . . . (Ch. 6, 122 ellipses in original)

Rows and rows of ‘fine’ books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, ‘men of letters’; and looking out for approbation.  If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. (Ch. 6, 130)

To write books, knowing all about style, would be to become like a man.  Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd.  (Ch. 6, 131)

Many great lines in Chapter 6.

I’ll save #4 for tomorrow.  Zola and Gissing tomorrow.

Woolf's Waves and Faulkner's stories - more books I read in May - I love tremendous and sonorous words

More books I read in May.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).  A difficult book.  It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of consciousness to a new, extreme position.  I wonder if it is a dead end.  It is a live novel.

Six friends describe or think about or experience their lives.  Childhood, school, and so on at roughly decade intervals, interspersed with a prose poem about light effects on the ocean.  The text, aside from the prose poem, is all in quotation marks, as if it is speech, except for “said Neville,” “said Rhoda,” like that, which I have to put in quotation marks here, which is confusing.  But the text is obviously not speech, but thought, and not direct thought, as in Mrs Dalloway (1925), definitely not stream-of-consciousness, but more like a summary of thought, or a retrospective description of thought.  All of it somehow “said.”

The first section, the childhood piece, is the most confusing, because I have no information besides names and gender (three boys, three girls), and, realistically, it is not clear how the childhood personality transfers to the teenager or adult.  Characters sometimes seem to blur into each other, too.  Later, I could tag Louis as the poetic sensibility, Susan as the motherly one, Bernard as the novelistic sensibility, and so on.  The six characters take turns for a while, which is a little mechanical (I think, okay, who is left, who has not “spoken” yet?), until the last section, which is a fifth of the book:

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard.  “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life…  This, for the moment, seems to be my life.  If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire.  I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes.  I would say, ‘Take it.  This is my life.’  (238)

Bernard the “novelist,” has taken over.  He has never written a novel (has he?), but it is possible that this text, or some refraction of this text, is his novel, the story of this group of friends.  Perhaps the whole thing is meant to be his.  “’I love tremendous and sonorous words’” he says, or thinks, or writes, much earlier in the book (32).  He sure does.

I assume, when I re-read The Waves someday, I will abandon everything I just wrote.

***

William Faulkner, These 13 (1931).  His first book of short stories; his worst title?  Faulkner occasionally rearranged his work, so this book has vanished, dissolved into Collected Stories (1951), but I wanted to think about the stories in their earlier context.

Four stories are about World War I, mostly pilots.  They are now  housed in “The Wasteland” in Collected Stories, almost by themselves.  Three stories are about Americans in Europe after the war, and are in “Beyond.”  The Italian stories in particular sounded more like Hemingway than I would have guessed possible for Faulkner, but perhaps I am being addled by the shared subject matter.

None of these are Faulkner at his best, but he did keep them.  They are not essential Faulkner, unless the question if “how did Faulkner become Faulkner”.

The other six are essential, good or bad.  They express the essence of Faulkner’s art circa 1930.  “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner’s first published story (!), the perfect distillation of “Southern Gothic”; “Dry September,” a clear-eyed lynching story; “Hair,” Southern Goofic, but the shared protagonist with “Dry September” shows how Faulkner’s Balzac-in-Mississippi concept works; and “That Evening Sun,” about racial incomprehension, and ditto on the Balzac thing except the characters are from The Sound and the Fury.

That’s only four.  “Red Leaves” and “A Justice” are about Chickasaw slave-owners and the history of Yoknapatawpha County before it was Yoknapatawpha.  Faulkner is mythologizing.  I only have a vague sense of what he is doing in these two stories.  A problem for later.

Mrs. Ramsay and the bay leaf - peering into the dish in To the Lighthouse

This is a piece about how readers change.  And about food.

The long dinner chapter of To the Lighthouse (1928), Chapter XVII of “The Window,” what a masterpiece.  It does so much.  Here is a taste.

… and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off.  The cook had spent three days over that dish.  And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes.  And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought. (100)

Mrs. Ramsay thinks of celebration but also death, that love “bear[s] in its bosom the seeds of death.”  Then the outside intrudes on her and the dinner guests praise the dish, a boeuf en daube, and mock English cooking as “an abomination (they agreed).”  I have to say, I ate so well in London, the English food included.  No doubt circa 1910, the time of the novel, things were not so good.

The stew is first mentioned about twenty pages earlier, in Ch. XVI.  Mrs. Ramsay is nervous about her big dinner:

… and they were having Mildred’s masterpiece – Boeuf en Daube.  Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready.  The beef, the bay leaf, and the wine – all must be done to a turn.  To keep it waiting was out of the question… things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt.  (80)

When I last read To the Lighthouse, maybe twenty-five years ago, I suppose I nodded along, sympathizing with Mrs. Ramsay’s anxiety.  This time, though – do you cook? – you saw it, right?  “The bay leaf must be done to a turn”?  The bay leaf!

Boeuf en daube is beef stewed in wine, and is not a difficult dish.  It is classic Provence country cooking, not imperial cuisine.  I can make a daube – come over some time.  One good way to agitate bookish Twitter is to say a book is or is not “difficult,” because the word can mean different things.  In fact, daube is difficult in three ways – let’s use a recipe attributed to Julia Child:

1. The list of ingredients is long.  Nothing exotic, but many pieces.

2.  The preparation ideally takes, as the cook has told Mrs. Ramsay, three days, which requires planning.  One day of marinating, one day of checking the stewpot, one day of just sitting there until reheated.  The amount of work by the cook is, mostly, minimal, although see below.  I am assuming the Ramsay vacation house has a stove.

3.  At one point, you have to make a basic roux, and you could burn that.  I mean, I could.  Pay attention!

Otherwise, this is a forgiving and flexible dish.  It will not be “entirely spoilt,” nor spoilt at all, if reheated.  The meat was actually “done to a turn” the day before the dinner.

As for the bay leaf, and for that matter the wine and many other ingredients, you just toss them in your Dutch oven, or your daubière if you have one, and put it in the oven.

Mrs. Ramsay does not understand what her cook has told her.  Apparently, at some point in the past, there was some fuss over bay leaves.  Perhaps the cook insisted that she could not make a certain dish because there were no bay leaves, and now Mrs. Ramsay fixates on them.  “Done to a turn” may be the cook’s phrase, too.

Now, having said this, the logistics of getting the food to the table at the right temperature for a dinner of twelve or more is a challenge.  Then there is the question of the stove.  A cook at the time often functioned more like a naval engineer, keeping a complex and temperamental machine operating at a consistent temperature.  Too bad Kipling never wrote a story about this, a great cook and the things she can make her Victorian stove do.  Keeping dishes hot required real skill.  We have it easy, now.

I wonder if I had any idea what boeuf en daube was when I first read this novel.  Now that I know, and even know how to make it myself, an entire extra little dimension of the story unfolds.

So this is one way we change as readers.  We learn things.

texts chosen at random - Fench novels, Virginia Woolf, and a lot more - Auerbach says "write your own book!"

Wrapping up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.  He ends with three chapters on the modern novel, mostly French, but covering a lot of territory.

19. “Germinie Lacerteux,” Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Zola.

This chapter is by itself a history of the 19th century French novel, repeating some of the ideas of the previous Stendhal / Balzac / Flaubert chapter.   It is too bad that Auerbach begins with the novel that is not read much, but it is too useful for his purposes, since it is about a servant, a maid, which links back to the passage from the Odyssey in Chapter 1.  And the background of Germinie Lacerteux (1865) is useful, hilarious – the longtime servant of the brothers dies and they discover that she had her own life, that she was human, thus inspiring the novel.  How do you represent such a person?  Can a novel be built from “the sensory fascination of the ugly, the repulsive, and the morbid” (499)?  I know, now this sounds ridiculous.  It might have sounded slightly ridiculous at the time to a reader who – but now I am repeating my doubts about Zola’s “ideas.”

Auerbach has great fun with Zola.  “Even today, after half a century the last decades of which have brought us experiences such as Zola never dreamed of, Germinal is still a terrifying book” (512).  So-called Naturalism died off because “there was no one left to vie with him in working capacity, in mastery of the life of the time, in determination and courage” (515).

This chapter is so expansive that it includes significant sections on 19th century German and Russian literature, plus Ibsen.

20. “The Brown Stocking,” Woolf and Proust.

The passage with which Auerbach begins is the longest in Mimesis, three and a half pages of To the Lighthouse (1927) in which Mrs. Ramsay knits a sock and thinks, or maybe just exists.  Auerbach then summarizes the passage, which takes him six pages, or perhaps eight.  Woolf’s text is so compressed that merely describing it expands it.

That is pretty much all Auerbach does with Woolf’s text.  He just looks at it.  Looking at it carefully is a lot of work and source of insight.

When I noted a few posts ago that Mimesis was half French, I was understating, since I was counting this chapter as English, when it is actually half French.  Auerbach moves to Woolf to some passages from Proust, and then wanders freely – Joyce, Hamsun, Mann, Gide.  He writes that he “could never have written anything in the nature of a history of European realism; the material would have swamped me” (548).  Well, the book he did write is quite the substitute.

Epilogue

Auerbach describes his method.  Take some texts – passage, really – from each period and use them as “test cases for my ideas.”  Which texts?  “[T]he great majority of the texts were chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose” (556), which is random in a sense but maybe not in some other senses.  He wishes he had been able to cover more “English, Spanish, and German texts” (557).  He wrote Mimesis in Istanbul, in exile, away from a research library.

As useful as always, the commenters at Languagehat pointed me to Edward Said’s introduction to the 2014 edition of Mimesis.  Said argues that some features of the book are personal responses to the war.  France is a conquered country; Germany is the conqueror.  Auerbach is righting the balance.  Maybe so.

In the end, the reader is left to fill in the gaps, pick his own passages from various languages, and write his own book, possibly in some other form.

Which book should we all read together next?  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages or what?  What will possibly be as good as Mimesis?

sundry gnomic texts and phrases - the botched and bungled Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Everybody has to establish how badly Thomas Hardy writes.  “The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are lumpish and dull and inexpressive…  It is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did…” (400-1) writes Virginia Woolf.  “The book [Tess of the d’Urbervilles] is handled with very uncertain skill, botched and bungled” moans D. H. Lawrence, who loves Hardy (410).  “I will say that Tess is one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu [forced] books I have yet read” howls Robert Louis Stevenson.  Hoots Henry James, in reply:

But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile.  The pretence of “sexuality” is only equaled by the absence of it, and the abomination of language by the author’s reputation for style.  There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds.  But you have better ones in Polynesia.  (388, the James and Stevenson from letters, not reviews)

The page numbers refer to the “Criticism” section of the 1979 Norton Critical Edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the 1891 novel in which Hardy leads, cajoles, and forcefully shoves poor Tess, the unluckiest heroine in English literature, to her Doom.  The incessance of the Hardy-bashing amidst – as part of – the serious attempts to understand Hardy are clearly an editorial decision.  Perhaps the editor is letting undergraduates know that it is okay to loathe Hardy’s writing.  Now, get that out of your system and, like Lawrence and Woolf and many others, move forward.

I have come across Hardy fans who deny that the bad Hardy sentence exists.  I wonder what they see when they come across something like this, which starts poor and crashes:

The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.  (Ch. 30)

Here’s one that starts pretty well:

His thought had been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating flexuous domesticity.  (Ch. 36)

The Latinate weirdisms like “vague lucubrations over the social rubric” are one side of Hardy’s bad writing.  They always belong to the narrator.  The other side is also always the narrator’s fault.

Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, ‘You shall be born,’ particularly is addressed to potential issue of hers.  (Ch. 36)

Her future children, that last phrase means, although that’s nothing compared to the four sentences of indirection in Chapter 5 in which the narrator tries to say but not say that Tess has a big chest.  But I am here more interested in the strange intrusion of the irrelevant, alien reference, so odd in a novel about a milkmaid.

If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she [Tess] had vigorously moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.  But it had not been in Tess’s power – nor is it in anybody’s power – to feel the whole truth if golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.  She – and how many more – might have ironically said to God with Saint Augustine: ‘Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast permitted.’  (Ch. 15)

Within a page there are quotations from Roger Ascham and Jeremy Taylor.  If only Tess had spent more time with their gnomic texts!  The way to save the narrator, both his vile style and private references, is to break him off from Hardy a bit, to make the narrator part of the argument of the novel.  Make him a little nuts. I can kind of see how to do it.

The other way to go is to ignore him, I guess, to just focus on big, vital Tess, who overshadows the narrator, the other characters, and even the landscape.  The people who love the novel love Tess.

All right, that’s out of my system. Forward.

One of Meredith’s more baffling sentences - perhaps more than one

Meine Frau has described Thomas Bernhard as the anchovy of German literature, meaning that although many people savor him, for others even the smallest taste of his style ruins the dish.  George Meredith is, let’s say, the Brussels sprout of the Victorian novel.  His style is very much his own.

I switched to a vegetable in deference to the veganism of Colleen of Jam & Idleness, who wrote this encomium to an obscure 1864 Meredith novel.  She is responding with enthusiasm to the powerful flavor of Meredith.  Look at how long her excerpts are (I understand the problem).  Look at this fragment:  “then, like the wise ancients, we should be able to tell to a nicety how far we had advanced in our dithyramb to the theme of fuddle and muddle,” from the middle of a long paragraph about hats.

This is the beginning of Chapter II, when we have been introduced to the hero’s father and little else:

Fame, the chief retainer of distinguished families, has first sounded the origin of the Feverels where their line of Ancestry blossoms with a Baronet; and Rumour, the profane vagabond, who will not take service in any respectable household, whispers that he was a Villain.  At all events, for this proud race, behind his dazzling appearance sits Darkness and democratic Adam, and they cling to him as an ark of pure aristocracy.

The editor of the Penguin Classics editions adds a footnote: “One of Meredith’s more baffling sentences.”  The next page or so of the paragraph makes clearer that Meredith is describing the antique origins of the family.  Although some were hearty enough to fight on “Marston Moor, that great field of phlebotomy,” the family has just barely kept enough sons alive to perpetuate the line, perhaps because of “the Apple-Disease.”  That mysterious concept will not be explained, or mentioned again, for another twenty-five chapters, although the earlier mention of Adam should suggest that Meredith is referring to some aspect of original sin (sexual knowledge, specifically).

Here we see one of the distinctive tics of Richard Feverel, the continuous use of shorthand and nicknames.  The tutor becomes the Wise Youth, the Baronet’s pedagogical method is the System, the hypochondriac uncle is the Dyspepsia, the struggle between right and wrong is the Magian Conflict, and an elderly relative is the Eighteenth Century (“Adrian had to sit alone with Hippias and the Eighteenth Century”).

Those of us who are devoted fans of Thomas Carlyle’s prose will recognize the technique, as in The French Revolution where everything ends up with two names, the invented driving out the actual.  I was amazed to see someone bring this into a novel.

Virginia Woolf, in “The Novels of George Meredith” (1928, in The Second Common Reader), describes Richard Feverel this way:

The style is extremely uneven.  Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies as flat as a pancake.  He seems to be of two minds about his intention.  Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative.

But:

He has been, it is plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel.  He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb.

I would not want to advise a reader who hates Brussels sprouts to put them on his anchovy pizza.  I enjoy it all well enough myself, but once I realized how deliberately artificial the entire novel was, in style, story and structure, it began to be pretty interesting.  So for tomorrow, the artificial Meredith.

Woolf on Rossetti - "I Am Christina Rossetti"

One-ninth of the way through Algernon Swinburne’s six-volumes of collected letters, in 1866, he has not even mentioned Christina Rossetti.  She had published two outstanding books at this point, and Swinburne was an obsessive reader of poetry as well as close friends with her brothers.

In Swinburne’s defense, 1) many letters are lost, 2) at the point I have reached he is amply occupied with the horrified critical reaction to his own blasphemous and obscene book, and also his prodigious alcoholism, and 3), later, although I do not know when, he wrote about Rossetti that “I have always thought that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written” and that a particular poem, one I have not read, “was touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.”

Swinburne is as bad as the folks who write blurbs for novels today.  I found this bee-yoo-tee in Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay “’I Am Christina Rossetti.’”  Woolf singles out that quote, I am afraid, to mock Swinburne, along with two lesser critics.  “Very little of value has been said about poetry since the world began,” writes Woolf, as if she were familiar with Wuthering Expectations.

Woolf proceeds to follow her own advice and say little, devoting four of her seven pages to a fragmented biography of Rossetti.  At what is this novelist better than fragmented biography?

… in reality she dwelt in some curious region where the spirit strives towards an unseen God – in her case, a dark God, a harsh God – a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the world were hateful to Him.  The theatre was hateful, the opera was hateful, nakedness was hateful – when her friend Miss Thompson painted naked figures in her pictures she had to tell Christina they were fairies, but Christina saw through the imposture…  [Her belief] taught her that chess was wrong, but that whist and cribbage did not matter.

A novel about Christina Rossetti would do well to be careful about making her too sympathetic.  By “do well” I of course mean “do badly”; such a novel would likely do badly and be remaindered quickly.

Woolf also says a bit of value about Rossetti’s poetry, just a little, emphasizing her musicality and sharp eye, as when she points out these marvelous lizards:

My heath lay farther off, where lizards lived
    In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone;
Like darted lightnings here and there perceived
        But no where dwelt upon.  (“From House to Home”)

I have now quoted almost as many lines of Rossetti as Woolf did.  Her criticism method is metaphor.  “Death, oblivion, and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave,” for example.  The piece ends with an apocalyptic fantasy of an underwater London – now that was a surprise.  Rossetti will still be read, even then, that is Woolf’s point.

“’I Am Christina Rossetti’” was published a year after A Room of One’s Own.  It would make a pleasing and useful appendix to that book.

James tells, James shows - some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively

Should I write about what Henry James does especially well rather than what is missing from The Spoils of Poynton?  Ignore the missing furniture and instead trace the twisting of Fleda Vetch’s conscience while under emotional stress?  The latter is the purpose of the novel, not the crafting of original metaphors or the polishing of mellifluous phrases.

Well, it is all a work in progress, so I am going to continue to complain.  Complaining is a way to learn, yes?  No?  Today’s complaint is contradictory:  James does not have enough scenes in The Spoils of Poynton, and James should have fewer scenes in the novel.

I am just inverting the old “show, don’t tell” advice, following a recent post by Rohan Maitzen.  Henry James seems to be at his best when he tells, when he frees himself from the constraints of scene.  Sometimes he is telling background, summarizing a character’s past or something like that, but often he is following the thoughts of a character – in Spoils, the thoughts of young Fleda as she thinks through her romantic and ethical problems.  James abandons anything but the vaguest sense of location or action or detail, nor does he pretend to give us much in the way of Fleda’s exact thoughts.

He is not writing a Virginia Woolf novel.  Think of the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, when we go shopping with Clarissa.  We are always in her head but at the same time are constantly reminded of her surroundings, of her physical location – she has just gone down her front steps, she is looking in a particular shop window, she has stepped off the curb, but is all the while thinking of her past and the people she used to know.  The technique makes it difficult to tell a story where any amount of time passes.  Readers of To the Lighthouse know how Woolf handles that problem.

James can instead use a few pages to cover days or even weeks of mental progression.  In Chapter XIII, for example, Fleda has moved in with her father in London.  A passage covers her activity (summary: none, “[h]er only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse”) and another passage describes her father and his activities, including his “objects, shabby and battered…  old brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books” – it turns out he is a collector, too, but a collector of junk.  And then two solid pages of Fleda’s thinking about her relations with the other characters in the novel. 

“This continued a fortnight, at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated” by a visitor, which moves us to Chapter XIV, a single scene, which in James seems to mean a minimal amount of establishing detail – “She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit” – and then talk talk talk filled out with “Owen looked conscious,” “Fleda cried out with a long wail,” “Owen honestly exclaimed,” and more semi-elegant variation.  Competent enough, but James’s showing is rarely up to his telling.

That biscuit is the only concrete object in the chapter, and it returns at the beginning of the next.  Fleda and Owen are interrupted; the biscuit falls on the floor because of “some precipitate movement” by Fleda.

For Mrs. Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively.  (Ch. XV)

In a novel that is really about exceedingly, excruciatingly small matters of decorum and conscience, a nibbled biscuit making a scene “lively” is perfect.  I wish James had summarized more of the chatter, but not at the expense of the biscuit.

ink – ink – ink pots, yes, yes, yes - Henry James is everywhere.

If I have felt little urgency to read James, I blame his continual presence in my reading.  He rivals anyone but  Samuel Johnson as a subject of anecdotes, quips, and opinions.  He supplies examples of whatever literary subject is at hand somewhere in his fiction or criticism.  Henry James is everywhere.

No, but I do feel that I know a lot about him, given how little of him I have read.  I know about the first time he met Virginia Woolf:

Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye – it is like a childs marble – and said “My dear Virginia, they tell me – they tell me – they tell me – that you – as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild – the descendant I may say of a century – of a century – of quill pens and ink – ink – ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me – ahm m m – that you, that you, that you write in short.”  This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg – do they? – nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that.*

I will credit Woolf with some poetic license here, but not much.  “In short” is a bit too much like a punchline.

Levi Stahl describes, in a guest-star packed post (Wharton, Spender, Sei Shonagon), a 1948 book of nothing but James anecdotes.  “I – I have trifled with the exordia.”  It is worth knowing the context of that real-life Jamesian sentence, as good as it is by itself.**

When did I read about Henry James and his odd entanglement with Constance Fenimore Woolson?  I have no idea, but I was prepared when, while reading X. J. Kennedy’s The Lords of Misrule: Poems, 1992-2001, I came across “The Ballad of Fenimore Woolson and Henry James.”***  Fenimore may have fallen in love with James:

Now a diffident hat-tilt from Henry
Might fend off her loneliness,
But Henry was wedded already, it seemed,
To his ethical consciousness.

Poor Fenimore perishes by her own hand, but the story has a happy ending:

Henry went back to his writing desk,
Spread paper like an open chart
And he drew dear Fenimore into his arms
And transformed her to a work of art
Sill living,
Transformed her to a work of art.

In a note Kennedy admits that “a subtle history has been crudely simplified,” which is likely also a fine description of my own pieced together scraps of second- and third-hand knowledge of Henry James.

*  The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888-1912, August 25, 1907.  The misuse of apostrophes is Woolf’s.  Other errors quite likely mine.

**  In the comments of Stahl’s post, I am accused of contributing to the decline of civilization, a rare pleasure.

***  The ballad is also included in In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007.

Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson - to summarize, or not?

Although I doubt it is visible, I write with models in mind, critics who read well, think well, and, most importantly, write well.  All errors in fact, style, opinion, and grammar are, unfortunately, mine, but I try.  Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport, Virginia Woolf, William Pritchard, Ruth Franklin, Edmund Wilson, Christopher Benfey, Ingrid Rowland, James Wood (your list is presumably different - please, share).  I’m thinking about their work as magazine writers, although most of them have done other kinds of writing, too.  Reviews of novels or biographies, career surveys, topics of interest to readers.  “How Should One Read a Book?”  “The Pleasures of Reading.”

Virginia Woolf, in “The Novels of George Meredith” (1928) – I’m looking at The Second Common Reader (1932) – surveys, in a fundamentally Appreciationist style, the decaying reputation of the once-eminent novelist.  “This brilliant and uneasy figure has his place with the great eccentrics rather than the great masters,” but should you, common reader, read him?  Of course, of course.

The piece begins with a bit of life-and-fame, ends with a summary judgment, and in between visits three of Meredith’s many novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Henry Richmond, and The Egoist.  I have read the last one, hope to read the first, and have doubts about that middle one.  The entire essay is about 3,500 words, or close to what I would write if I did a weeklong, five-part survey of Meredith that covered three novels, life-and-fame, etc., etc., although I would not dare employ Woolf’s enormously long paragraphs.

What does Woolf think is in Meredith's novels?  Here’s how the description of Feverel begins:

The style is extremely uneven.  Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies flat as a pancake.  He seems to be of two minds as to his intention.  Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative.  He vacillates from one attitude to another.  Indeed, the whole fabric seems to rock a little insecurely.

The reader wondering what Meredith’s novel might be about is still wondering.  In the next lines Woolf mentions a baronet, an ancestral home, “great ladies flaunting and swimming; the jolly farmers slapping their thighs,” “whiskers and bonnets.”  Honestly, I have no idea what the novel is about.  Why should I read it? “[T]he vigour of its intellectual power and its lyrical intensity” – that’s it.  The other novels are treated similarly.  Meredith is discussed entirely in terms of 1) style (“flamboyancy”) and 2) purpose.

Edmund Wilson was the finest writer of plot summaries I have ever encountered.  His pioneering essay on Marcel Proust (in Axel’s Castle, 1931) includes a long summary of the entirety of In Search of Lost Time, ingeniously woven into the fabric of the essay along with interpretation and biography.  Wilson is not assuming that his readers know the plot, quite the opposite.  The essay is a work of advocacy – read Proust!  Read all of it!  The meaning of the novel is inseparable from what happens.

He does the same thing with a more straightforward review of a brand new novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in The Shores of Light, 1952, pp. 403-407), although the summation only takes two paragraphs.  "We are left with the prospect of the lady and her lover [doing what they do at the conclusion of the book]" – Wilson takes us right though the end of the novel.  His purpose, again, is serious.  He has to convince readers that Lawrence’s novel, already infamous as a dirty book, is artistically and ethically serious.  The “about” of the novel is indispensable.

By contrast, in a pair of short reviews of Willa Cather novels, One of Ours and The Lost Lady (pp. 39-43), Wilson efficiently crams all of the plot he wants into one longish sentence per novel, all the support he needs for his brief discussion of the quality of Cather’s prose and her methods of characterization.

I worry, sometimes, that I am too neglectful of the onerous but necessary duty of summary, that my dutiful readers skim through four days of Salammbô or Barchester Towers with increasing bafflement.  Look, one is about a bunch of barbarians besieging an ancient city, and the other is about a turf battle among pampered clergymen – I don’t quite remember which is which, but that’s not my point.  The stories in both novels are pleasurable to read, but I’m not convinced that they are terribly interesting to read about, even draped with Wilson’s expert prose, while Trollope’s asides and Flaubert’s earrings give me something to chew on.  Every novel has a story.  Many novels have excellent stories.  Very few have Mrs. Proudie or crucified lions.

How should there be wine in my son's house? - Walter Scott, antiquary

Walter Scott was, early on, a relentlessly experimental novelist.  He had discovered a new kind of novel with new, unknown rules.  Many of the flaws in Scott’s novels are the result of his experimentation.  Scott’s response to serious weaknesses in characterization or storytelling was not so much to tinker with the novel at hand, but to write another novel.

The Antiquary (1816) was Scott’s third novel.  Set in 1794, it is, unlike the first two books, not exactly a historical novel (Scott was 23 years old in 1794).  It is, instead, about history, about Scottish history.  It is a self-critique, sometimes even a self-parody.  The Antiquary of the title is obsessed with every detail of Scottish history.  His obsession turns him into a fool.  How is Walter Scott any different?

The best scene in the novel, the funeral of the young fisherman Steenie Meiklebackit, suggests an answer.  We are at the beginning of Volume III, two-thirds through the novel.  Chapter One begins with Oldbuck, the Antiquary, asking his valet if “it is expected I should attend the funeral?”  It is, within some narrow prescriptions:

Ye ken in this country ilka gentleman is wussed to be sae civil as to see the corpse aff his grounds – Ye needna gang higher than the loan-head – it’s no expected your honour suld leave the land – it’s just a Kelso convoy, a step and a half ower the door-stane. (III.1.237-8)

That “Kelso convoy” gets Oldbuck’s attention, something new for him to research.  The rest of this chapter is deliberately packed with antiquarian nonsense.  An old vase is broken by a dog, an Egyptian cameo is described in detail, and, most importantly, Oldbuck argues with his nephew, at length, about the authenticity of the poems of Ossian.  The last paragraph sneaks in a reference to the 17th century poet William Drummond.  Now, some of the Ossian stuff is quite funny, and, for Scott, even a bit smutty, but the reader wanting Scott to just get on with it may be pulling hair out by the fistful.

This chapter of trivialities is purposeful, though.  It highlights the moral seriousness of the fisherman’s wake, and it works.  Scott emphasizes the various traditional mourning customs, but in a way that makes them deeply meaningful.  This might be my favorite part of the novel – long, but that’s Scott (Elspeth is the dead man’s ancient grandmother):

When Oldbuck entered this house of mourning, he was received by a general and silent inclination of the head, and, according to the fashion of Scotland on such occasions, wine and spirits and bread were offered round to the guests. Elspeth, as these refreshments were presented, surprised and startled the whole company by motioning to the person who bore them to stop; then, taking a glass in her hand, she rose up, and, as the smile of dotage played upon her shrivelled features, she pronounced, with a hollow and tremulous voice, "Wishing a' your healths, sirs, and often may we hae such merry meetings!"

All shrunk from the ominous pledge, and set down the untasted liquor with a degree of shuddering horror, which will not surprise those who know how many superstitions are still common on such occasions among the Scottish vulgar. But as the old woman tasted the liquor, she suddenly exclaimed with a sort of shriek, "What's this?—this is wine—how should there be wine in my son's house?—Ay," she continued with a suppressed groan, "I mind the sorrowful cause now," and, dropping the glass from her hand, she stood a moment gazing fixedly on the bed in which the coffin of her grandson was deposited, and then sinking gradually into her seat, she covered her eyes and forehead with her withered and pallid hand. (III.2.249)

Although the grandmother’s grief is especially dramatic, the mother and father are given their own, personal, responses to the death of their son.  At the end of the chapter, the father is incapable of carrying the head of the coffin.  Oldbuck, “landlord and master to the deceased,” takes his place - as I mentioned yesterday, he is not a fool about truly important matters.  The old ways, in this scene, have real meaning.  Most of Oldbuck’s antiquarianism is nonsense, but in the fisherman’s cottage, we find something worth preserving.  What is Scott doing, if not preserving it?

I was happy to see Virginia Woolf – I’m back to her essay on The Antiquary – single out the same scene as especially fine.  But she also uses it to club Scott about the shoulders, too, because “it is true that his scene breaks into ruin without his caring.”  Another character arrives at the fisherman’s’ hut, “[f]alsity breaks in,” and the plot, long in abeyance, creaks forward again.  We’re told of a secret marriage, an infant smuggled away, a sinister French nursemaid, that sort of thing.  I didn’t care much before Steenie’s funeral; after, it’s hopeless.

Something for Scott to work on in the next novel.

Page numbers from the Edinburgh Edition of The Antiquary, 1995.

His literary merits are almost undiscoverable - the highly recommended The Antiquary

Two views of Walter Scott, of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816). Virginia Woolf, first, picking out her favorite Scott:

I can’t read the Bride [of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the Antiquary (I think those two, as a whole, are my favorites). (Sep. 12, 1932, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, p. 104)

By heart!  Her favorites!  A strong recommendation.  Woolf, throughout decades of letters, is effusive about Scott, sometimes casting herself as his only remaining reader (see Aug. 12, 1928).

Now, Ford Madox Ford, from his eccentric literary history, The March of Literature (1938):

The Antiquary is a more serious attempt at novel writing [than Ivanhoe or Rob Roy], but its longwindedness is unbelievable and its insistence on assuring the reader that Scotland is a historically important and gentlemanly kingdom, not to be born...

His literary merits are almost undiscoverable… [The Antiquary] takes exactly forty pages of the closely printed pages of the 1837 edition of the “Waverley Novels” before anything like an adventure is so much as adumbrated.  This is a damning defect.* (711)

But when Ford includes only two Scott novels in his “essential reading” list at the end of his history, they are Ivanhoe and The Antiquary!

Someone, here, is wrong (preview: both are wrong).  Since I have been paying attention, I have noticed as many references to The Antiquary by Victorian writers as to any Walter Scott novel.  For readers who took Scott as the center of great literature – George Eliot, for example, or Robert Louis Stevenson, The Antiquary was at the center of the center.  They can make off-handed references to The Antiquary because of course everyone has read it.

Now I’ve read it, too, as has Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings.  I’ll just speak for myself in saying that Ford’s description of the novel is accurate, but if I replace “adventure” (a rescue from a fast-rising tide) with “story,” I then have to replace “forty pages” with “a third of the book.”  And even then, I wish Scott had taken more time to get to the plot as such, since it is terrible – “a fearsomely predictable long-lost-heir plot,” Rohan calls it.

No one seems to like the plot.  When Virginia Woolf wrote about the novel at length, in “The Antiquary” (1924, collected in The Moment and Other Essays, 1948), she was interested in characters and episodes only.  The Antiquary has one great character who elevates every scene he’s in, and it has one great scene that justifies the concept of the novel.  The character is Edie Ochiltree, the wise beggar.  Please read Rohan on him.  She gets right at the power of a character who could easily have been an unbearable stereotype (and in the process demolishes Ford’s criticism of The Antiquary’s gentlemanly Scottishness).  The fine scene I’ll save until tomorrow, when I’ll return to Woolf as well – she liked it, too.

I haven’t said anything about what happens in the novel, because it doesn’t matter, or give an idea of what the writing is like, because it’s like Walter Scott.  The story barely makes sense, the romantic couple are cardboard of the usual grade, and the scenes are held together by nothing stronger than clothespins.  Ford is utterly wrong - Scott's merits are, with a bit of effort, discoverable.  The enthusiastic Woolf is wrong, too.  I would have trouble recommending the novel to any ordinary reader, anyone who is not a student of 19th century English literature, which is, of course, a nice thing to be.

* Readers of Parade’s End may discover some amusing hypocrisy here.

What I would be doing if I were not doing what I'm doing

No, not extending my research to mummified baboons, or bog cats.  I'm all done with that.

Skeptical readers of Wuthering Expectations may have noticed that despite my current specialization, I am not quite exactly really entirely committed to the 19th century.  Some might have discerned deviationist Modernist tendencies. 

If I were not reading what I am reading, that's what I would be reading.  Robert Musil and Robert Walser, Pound and Cavafy and Montale, various scruffy Surrealists and Dadaists and Symbolists and Vorticists and Lunatists and other Istists.  Virginia Woolf, definitely Virginia Woolf. 

See Nonsuch Books, which is hosting a group reading of four Woolf novels this winter.  Mmm, how tempting.  Mrs. Dalloway is one of my touchstone books, one that I've studied a bit and really wrestled with.  I say wrestled because I find some of its ideas very challenging.  I don't even like it that much.  Woolf, in her novels, is sometimes more of an enemy than a friend.  But fighting with her is enormously valuable.  She always wins, and improves my game, so to speak.  If I keep practising, maybe I will win a round someday.

But I don't think I'll read along.  I'm doing what I'm doing.  Scottish literature, and Native American history, and when will I get back to Hawthorne and Melville and Dickens and Eliot (G., not T.S.)? 

The other thing I would be doing if I weren't etc. is turning back to early modern literature, particularly the period from about 1580 to 1640, the Age of Shakespeare and the Spanish Golden Age (plus Montaigne).  It's the single greatest temporal congregation of literary genius I know, just unbelievably rich.

A little over a week ago, Jennifer at Early Modern Underground announced a discussion of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1630 or so), a bizarre and insane minor masterpiece.  That was another thing I was not going to do, but Michael5000's response to the play pulled me in, so I re-read it one evening last week and had a great time.  The discussion has been productive, too.  And this play is only the, I don't know, 19th best Elizabethan or Jacobean play not by You Know Who.

Really, what a time.  Donne, Spenser, and Jonson.  Marlowe, Webster, and more Jonson.  Calderon de la Barca, Luis de Góngora, Don Quixote, Francisco de Quevedo.  The Anatomy of Melancholy.  Most amazing, in a way, is how good the best poems of the minor poets are:  Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton and the Psalms of Mary Sidney and so on.  Not to mention Ol' What's His Name.  That's what I'm trying to say: it's a treasure trove even ignoring Shakespeare.

Maybe Early Modern Underground will host another one of these?  But for now, I doubt they'll mind if anyone wants to join in on John Ford.

And if you don't like any of those, how about The Lord of the Rings, hosted by Shelf Love and others. That one is definitely not for me, not anymore.

No, now, I'm reading what I'm reading.  But I wanted to plug these worthy read-alongs.

A lot of great books do not have sympathetic characters - plus, my bibliography

I tried to do some genuine research for Sympathetic Character Week, to try to shape my rhetoric, if nothing else.  Besides Wayne Booth's book, enormously helpful, and to which I'll return later in the week, I did not have much luck.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose; How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland;  How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster: these all seemed like good candidates.  None mentioned the issue at all, and the reason was clear enough.  None of them took the question seriously.  Of course you don't dismiss a book because you don't like the characters.  Now get back to work!

The same person who suggested the spot-on yet off-point Freud essay led me to Samuel Johnson's Rambler #4, (1750), on the "new realistic novel."  Anybody want to defend this position:

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable, because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corrupters  of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved than the art of murdering without pain.

Or more concisely: "It is therefore not a sufficient vindication of a character that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn" (emphasis mine). I think that cat is pretty much out of the bag by now.

Virginia Woolf always comes through for me.  From "How Should One Read a Book" (1926):

Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticising and judging.

Sympathizing with whom, one should ask?  Woolf is clear enough, but we'll return to that on Friday.*

So (again excepting Booth) none of these books were that helpful.  One argument, my strongest, is perhaps so obvious that no one bothers to make it: a lot of great novels (stories, poems) have characters with whom no sane, mature person should sympathize.  And another swath of books is constructed independently of our concept of sympathy.  You shouldn't like them, you shouldn't want to be their friend, you shouldn't wish them well.  You should wish some of them ill, frankly. 

One group of books is more or less Modernist; the other is more or less pre-modern.  Pre-modern first. One reason we call Don Quixote the first novel is that we've hijacked it, turning it into a novel, and one way we did that was by learning to sympathize with the travails of Our Lord Don Quixote.  My understanding is that at the time it was generally read as a collection of side-splitting cruelty, an early Three Stooges. Ha ha - poke him in the eye again!  We aren't capable of reading it that way any more; sympathy is a powerful thing.

But what to do, then, with Egil's Saga, about a sociopathic Icelandic poet, or Grettir's Saga, about the last of the monster-killers, who is something of a monster himself?  So much pre-modern and early modern literature was created under entirely different assumptions of the reader's response.  Sometimes, a sympathetic response works; sometimes we have to find another way in to In Praise of Folly or The Lusiads or Orlando Furioso.

Now, the Modernists, deliberately working against sympathy: Charles Baudelaire titles one of the Paris Spleen prose poems "Let's Beat Up the Poor."  Or how about the poem "Against Her Levity," one of the six banned poems from The Flowers of Evil, in which the speaker expresses his desire to copulate with a wound he has made in his lover.  Yuck! Baudelaire's art presents a challenge to the notion of sympathy.

Every third French writer seems to ends up following in his path: Rimbaud, Ubu Roi, the Dadaists and Surrealists.  Icy Gustave Flaubert, contemptuous of his own characters -- not that you have any obligation to read Madame Bovary like he wanted you to (and let's revisit Flaubert in a couple of days).  And it's not just France:  As I Lay Dying.  The Castle (he's never going to get in).  The Voyeur.  Beckett, or Bernhard, or Borges ("I sure hope that nice Pierre Menard finishes his Don Quixote book.")  There are exceptions on this list - see Beckett's heartbreaking Krapp's Last Tape.  Surrealists aside, I haven't even mentioned the genuinely avant garde stuff, mostly because I'm not sure I want to call any of it "great."  Additions to this list, or the one above, most welcome.

One could make a much longer list of wonderful Modernist books that do depend on some type of sympathetic relationship between the reader and the characters.   That is, and should be, the norm.  But there's this other world, too.  What should one tell the reader who refuses to look into Wuthering Heights because the characters are unpleasant?  Stay away from all those other books?  Or, try another approach - it's a lot more pleasant than it looks.

* In fairness, I should mention that Woolf called this essay "a lecture, for schoolgirls," which suggests a certain amount of contempt.  In more fairness, those schoolgirls were undergraduates at Yale.

Poe on Barnaby Rudge, proto-murder mystery

Edgar Allan Poe wrote two reviews of Barnaby Rudge in 1841. The first review was of the first few chapters, serialized, the final review of the whole book.

The initial review is a curious thing. Poe is excited to find that Dickens has written a murder mystery. Earlier that year, Poe had published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," often considered, correctly or otherwise, to be the first detective story. So one can understand Poe's interest.

Poe uses his review to use the clues at hand to solve the mystery. Today, his magazine would receive a swarm of angry "Spoiler!" emails. I don't know if Poe's readers thought this was fair game or not. Anyway, Poe correctly identifies the murderer. He proceeds to explain exactly how the story will unfold and how the murderer will be revealed.

Here, Poe is wrong in every detail, sometimes hilariously wrong (the hilarious part is that his predictions are so confident). But he's correct in one sense - the story he describes would be a much better murder mystery. One thing Poe does in his second review, of the complete novel, is to discuss, in detail, and correctly, how the murder plot is botched. The drama of the solution of a 25 year-old murder loses a lot of its impact when inserted into the middle of the Gordon Riots, which engulfed London in flames for a week, and resulted in the deaths of at least 800 people, many by hanging. One more execution in all that bloodshed - well, it's not nothing, but it does not exactly stand out.

In fairness, although Poe regrets the loss of the murder mystery amidst the rioting, he does say that "The riots form a vivid series of pictures never surpassed." He means not just unsurpassed by Dickens, but by anyone.

Poe was a pioneering book reviewer, but I'm not convinced that he is a first-rank critic. Much of the interest in reading Poe, as is the case with the Barnaby Rudge reviews, is to learn about Poe. He reminds me of Virginia Woolf in this way. Her Common Reader essays often reveal as much or more about her ideas about the novel than about the book she is reviewing. I hope this doesn't seem negative - the ideas about ficiton of Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe are worth reading for their own sake.

Poe's reviews are both in the Library of America Essays and Reviews.

Jane Austen, Great Man of History

Thomas Carlyle, at the beginning of the lectures titled On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841):

“For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” (p. 239, Everyman’s Library edition)

This is a strong statement. One odd thing about it is that I swear Carlyle says the exact opposite in his 1830 essay “On History”, arguing that what is really needed is a bottom-up history of ordinary people.*

I’m more sympathetic with the older Carlyle, the prophet of what we now call social history. But I’m no dogmatist. “Social forces” of all sorts are, intellectual, political, and economic, to me, sufficient causes of, for example, the Reformation or the French Revolution. But within those limits, the specific actions of Martin Luther and Napoleon were consequential. They explain why things happened when they did, instead of fifty years sooner or later, and they direct the “social forces” in specific directions. I sound like a Marxist. Superstructure, vanguard, etc.

Lovers of literature, readers of old books, at least, must all have at least some belief in the Great Man theory. For the reader, the specific work, the exact combination of words, is important. If Jane Austen had died a year earlier, Persuasion would be gone; if a little before that, Emma and Mansfield Park would never have existed. No combination of social forces, no changes in political or economic conditions, would have brought them into existence without her.

It’s easy, in fact, to imagine the social conditions that preclude any Jane Austen novels at all – social breakdown in England (just look at the sad state of literature in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France), or a society so rigidly patriarchal that Austen never received an education. This is the power, at least to me, of Woolf’s invocation of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister in A Room of One’s Own. I imagine all of the wonderful books that could have been.

* For example: "Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies." ("On History", 5th paragraph). Although I remember a stronger statement somewhere else.