The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist

By James Hafley

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520351905

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THE GLASS ROOF

THE

GLASS ROOF

Virginia Woolf as Novelist

By James Hafley

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

1954

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS

ENGLISH STUDIES: 9

EDITORS (BERKELEY): W. H. DURHAM, J. M. CLINE, J. J. LYNCH

Submitted by editors November 25, 1953

Issued July 30, 1954

Price, Cloth $2.50, Paper $1.75

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND Los ANGELES

CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOR MY MOTHER

MAE NEWBERRY HAFLEY

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To each of the many persons who assisted me with this study, I am sincerely grateful. It is a special privilege for me to than\ Myron F. Brightfield, Mark Schorer, and James R. Caldwell, of the University of California, whose help was particularly abundant and indispensable.

J.H.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II THE EARLY NOVELS

CHAPTER III THE REGULATION OF A PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER IV THE CREATIVE MODULATION OF PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER V THE LAST NOVELS

CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION

APPENDIX NOTE ON THE NAMES OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S CHARACTERS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A s THE NUMBER of books and essays concerning the novels of L% Virginia Woolf increases, so also does the number of L. conflicting opinions concerning those novels. But perhaps at the basis of—and more important than—the critics’ other disagreements is their lack of agreement simply as to what Virginia Woolf’s novels are about. Thus, for example, Joan Bennett finds no metaphysical system in the novels, but only Virginia Woolf’s own sense of values;¹ Bernard Blackstone speaks of Chinese quietism, mysticism, romanticism, and an enquiry which is strictly metaphysical;² David Daiches notices the influence of Bergson, Proust, Joyce, and Freud;² Floris Delattre too sees the influence of Bergson and Proust, but no important influence of Joyce or Freud;* F. C. Frierson recognizes impressionism, but no real thought at all;’ Winifred Holtby says that Virginia Woolf was not significantly influenced by Bergson, Joyce, and Proust, but that she was a good Platonist; Maxime Chas- taing discovers traditional British empiricism;⁷ Deborah Newton can find no consistently reasoned philosophy;⁸ Joseph Warren Beach and Rebecca West agree that Virginia Woolf is a philosopher writing fiction. … In short, she is a poet;’ J. Isaacs finds a very profound effect of Pater, and William James’ influence;¹⁰ Ruth Gruber, a typical melancholy English philosophy.¹¹ These distinguished critics—and many others—have written about Virginia Woolf with real insight and valuable discernment; yet it is only natural that their divergent findings should result in equally divergent interpretations and assessments of her novels.

This study, then, is an attempt to explicate Virginia Woolf’s novels, through a general, factual examination of the development of her ideas as they are given definition by her technique.

The pattern of this development will be set forth in the light of Virginia Woolf’s intellectual surroundings and influences, in order that her work may be placed in the historical frame to which it belongs. It is my contention that the novels, taken in their chronological order, reveal a constant and organic development of thought, and consequently of form; that the technical development from the second novel, Night and Day, to the third, Jacob’s Room, though more immediately obvious, is actually far less important and marked than later developments, despite the fact that most previous critics tend to regard it as the main artistic crisis in the novels. Therefore the nine novels will be examined in the order of their composition. Finally there will be a summary of the configuration of meaning traced in its development in the main body of this study. The result will be a detailed analysis of just what the novels try to do and how they try to do it—in short, a description based upon an examination of meaning.

With D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf repudiated the positivistic realism that she felt to have characterized certain members of the preceding generation of English novelists. Like her contemporaries, she sought and found a new way of looking at life—an original perspective, a vision of experience. Expression of this philosophical perspective in art required a new formal perspective as well, but it was at first the thought that necessitated the form, and not so much the form that determined the thought. Although much attention has been given to the thought of Lawrence, of Joyce, of Huxley, Virginia Woolf has been noticed and valued mainly as a superb stylist and writer of English prose. Yet she, profoundly as any of her contemporaries, was concerned with the philosophical as well as the purely formal problems of her art. That art—although this is arguable—may be not so great as Lawrence’s or Joyce’s or even Huxley’s: it may be that Virginia Woolf succeeded so well because the goal she set herself was easier to reach.

What is important is that she was not simply an impressionist, a person with nothing to say who said it beautifully, but a serious artist whose main purpose in her novels was to convey a unified vision of life and experience. It seems to have been her misfortune, however, as perhaps it was Sterne’s, to express herself so well—to convey this vision in so interesting a way—that many of her readers have often paid too much attention to how she writes, and too little to what she means. Again like Sterne, it was her misfortune to command a philosophical perspective that the novel proper is perhaps not suited to formalize; therefore, rather than sacrifice vision to alien form, she managed to achieve a formal perspective that could, and in her best work did, express that vision perfectly. The content—and that alone—can be used to justify its form; but the content must first be understood through an examination of its form.

To such an understanding of her thought and art, the external facts of Virginia Woolf’s life—and they alone, unfortunately, are available at the present time—are not particularly important. If and when her diaries are published in their entirety and her definitive biography is written, the student of her novels will have a great deal more with which to work; at present he can only gather together some of the relatively few known facts and speculate about their relationship to her work.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the third child of Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth.¹² She was educated at home: choosing as she pleased from among the books in her father’s large library; meeting such famous friends of his as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henry James; learning the Greek alphabet from Walter Pater’s sister. Her mother died in 1895, her father in 1904; both of them, but especially her father, influenced her work as well as her character in no small degree."

After Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia moved with her sister Vanessa (a painter and, in her drawings for Virginia Woolf’s books, her sister’s best commentator) from Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury. In 1912 she married the journalist and political figure Leonard Woolf; they lived in Richmond until shortly after World War I, and then returned to Bloomsbury, having begun the Hogarth Press in 1917 with Leonard Woolf’s winnings in the Calcutta Sweepstakes. (This press rose from an amateurish hobbyhorse for the young couple to become one of the significant English publishing houses.)

Although she had lived elsewhere, and had indeed traveled throughout Europe, Bloomsbury became Virginia Woolf’s real home. She herself became, most strangely, the center of the famous, perhaps the notorious, Bloomsbury Group. Strangely, because—although this has not been realized—she had intellectually very little of real importance in common with most of the other members, who included Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Raymond Mortimer, and possibly David Garnett. Stephen Spender, having named these persons as the core of the group, calls it the most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars.¹⁴ Virginia Woolf was, it would seem, simply a gracious hostess to this interesting and variegated group of persons. In 1907, as a matter of fact, she was not even that: the group met on Thursday evenings in her large workroom, but she herself was usually very silent, torn between extreme shyness and silence and sudden outbursts of scathing criticism. This, then, is one version of the Bloomsbury Group."

On the other hand, the Lord Keynes Bloomsbury Group, as it is revealed in his T wo Memoirs J* was a Cantabrigian circle passionately interested in metaphysical speculation and with Moore’s Principia Ethica as its bible; the conversations seem to have been much like the one that opens Forster’s The Longest Journey. Although a superficial consideration of Moore’s doctrine—emphasizing what Lord Keynes refers to as timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after’ —does suggest Virginia Woolfs moments of being, the smallest amount of reflection makes evident a complete lack of correspondence between the two. In this group Virginia Woolf was a silent partner and, again, a hostess.

It will become more evident in the course of this study that Virginia Woolf was not intellectually in accord with Bloomsbury; it will also become apparent that her own dealings with and solutions to the problems discussed there were precisely her own, and not dependent upon this group of which she was socially at the center.

The Keynes Bloomsbury Group is the one that so provoked F. R. Leavis, who deplored its treatment of D. H. Lawrence, referred to it as inimical to the development of any real seriousness, and asked, Can one imagine… Leslie Stephen… being influenced by, or interested in, the equivalent of Lytton Strachey?¹⁷ And Leavis is not alone in his antipathy. What must be explained, however, is that Virginia Woolfs work is not Bloomsbury in any distasteful connotation of the word; that although she called herself a highbrow and a snob, it was in her own sense of these terms and not in the sense in which they are applied to Bloomsbury by its detractors; that, above all, her thought—her philosophical perspective—can be neither defined nor detected as Bloomsbury. T. S. Eliot has said that Virginia Woolf was the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but of the literary life of London. … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken: she may be, from one point of view, only the symbol of it; but she would not be the symbol if she had not been, more than anyone in her time, the maintainer of it. Although Eliot does not deign to use the word Bloomsbury, he mentions that the sufficient answer to that society’s detractors would probably be that it was the only one there was. … Any group will appear more uniform, and probably more intolerant and exclusive from the outside than it really is; and here, certainly, no subscription of orthodoxy was imposed. Had it, indeed, been a matter of limited membership and exclusive doctrine, it would not have attracted the exasperated attention of those who objected to it on these supposed grounds."

In 1904, the same year in which she moved to Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf began contributing critical reviews to the Times Literary Supplement; and about 1906 she wrote her first novel, The Voyage Out, although it was not published until 1915. Besides nine novels, she wrote short stories, sketches, essays, lectures, biographies, feminist literature (of a special kind), and, with S. S. Koteliansky, translations from the Russian.

On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse on Sussex Downs, near which she had lived during the early part of World War II. She committed suicide neither because of depression over her last novel nor because she could not stand the thought of going on through another war, although both of these have been given as reasons for her death.²⁰ In fact, it is said that during the German blitz she helped give first aid, and that she continued (like Drake as the Armada approached) to play bowls at Rodmell during the Battle of Britain, with Spitfires and Messerschmitts fighting, swooping and crashing round her. Again, not only her last novel, but several of her novels, caused her nervous collapses because of her extremely self-critical nature. She did, indeed, dislike the ending of Between the Acts, her last novel, and she felt that the novel as a whole was below her standard; she also profoundly regretted that there should be another war, murmuring after a bomb had seriously damaged her London house that every beautiful thing will soon be destroyed. But the reason for her suicide was the return of a mental condition from which she had suffered during part of the period at Richmond and from which she feared that she would not again recover. To Leonard Woolf she wrote: I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those horrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness in life to you. You have been perfectly good. I cannot go on and spoil your life.²² A coroner’s inquest pronounced her death suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Since her death her husband has published Between the Acts, several volumes of her essays and sketches, one slim volume of her short stories, and a book of extracts from her diaries; there remain unpublished by far the greater part of the diaries and whatever letters and rejected fragments may exist.

The year 1915, in which Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published, is not a particularly useful date for the critic of her work, since this novel was evidently first written when she was twenty-four years old, some nine years before the time of its publication. It will perhaps be profitable, however, to begin by examining very briefly the state of the English novel from about 1905 to 1915, while keeping in mind Virginia Woolf’s famous and remarkable assertion, which she admitted to be possibly disputable, that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.²*

CHAPTER II

THE EARLY NOVELS

IF HUMAN CHARACTER changed in 1910, the English novel did not. Because King George V succeeded King Edward VII on the throne in that year, it soon became convenient to distinguish the Georgian from the Edwardian novel; but it is unlikely that by 1924, when Virginia Woolf made her statement about human character, she would have forgot that George became king in May, 1910, and not in December. The significance of December, 1910, has nothing to do with the novels then being published; nevertheless there are important differences between the Edwardian and the Georgian novel.

By 1905 all but two of the major Victorian novelists were dead, and those two—George Meredith and Thomas Hardy—were writing not novels but poetry. Mrs. Humphry Ward was writing mostly feministic novels between 1905 and 1915; and a more important novelist, George Moore, published The Lake in 1905 and only two novels—The Broo\ Kerith and Héloïse and Abélard—after that. Moore’s main contribution during this period, and perhaps the most important of his works, was Hail and Farewell.

The novelists in full swing during the Edwardian period, and those who had a good start at that time, included Conrad, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Forster, May Sinclair, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Maurice Hewlett, William Wymark Jacobs, Arthur Machen, Eden Phillpotts, Henry Handel Richardson, Algernon Blackwood, Sir Philip Gibbs, Hugh Walpole, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, William De Morgan, Robert Hichens, Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford, W. B. Maxwell, W. J. Locke, Somerset Maugham, and Ford Madox Ford.

Obviously, Edwardian loses even its chronological meaning if it is applied to all these writers; Ford Madox Ford, for ex ample, did his best work well after 1910, and has nothing in common with, say, Wells. When Virginia Woolf spoke of the Edwardian novelists as materialists in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, she had in mind the very popular but lesser novelists Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, and not at all Conrad and Forster.

Georgian is equally valueless as a descriptive term for the novelists of 1910-1936. The first of these decades saw the early work of such novelists as Lawrence, Joyce, Dorothy M. Richardson, Frank Swinnerton, Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Victoria Sackville-West, C. E. Montague, Norman Douglas, E. M. Tomlinson, Compton Mackenzie, Wyndham Lewis, Ronald Firbank, E. M. Delafield, St. John G. Ervine, Gilbert Cannan, W. L. George, James Stephens, and Henry Green, many of whom are, of course, still writing. In the 1920’s some of the more important beginning novelists were Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Maurice Baring, T. F. Powys, Sarah Millin, Gladys Stern, Margaret Kennedy, Louis Golding, Liam O’Flaherty, and David Garnett; in the 1930’s, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, J. B. Priestley, and—of some historical importance— A. J. Cronin, whose Hatter’s Castle in 1931 is said by devotees of naturalism to have helped restore the English novel to sanity¹—the sanity, that is to say, of the Edwardians.

And whatever else Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett may have been, they were most certainly sane.

Most people in this world seem to live in character; they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than character actors.²

That is an Edwardian sentiment, and this is the corresponding Georgian sentiment:

Who in the world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case—and until one can do that a character is of no use to anyone.’

These passages, especially the second, are distorted by having been removed from their contexts; nevertheless they serve to exemplify Edwardian and Georgian points of view, and to justify, with countless other examples, Virginia Woolf’s assertion that human character changed in 1910. Irene, in Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, is a mystery to many of the other people in that book, but never to the author or the reader; Jacob, in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, is a mystery to his friends, the author, the reader, and himself.

The Edwardians saw people as simple, whole, definable; the Georgians saw them as complex, diverse, ineffable. But not until about 1915 did Georgian novels—in this sense—begin to appear; and even after 1925 Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells continued to write Edwardian novels, although Galsworthy began to reflect certain Georgian tendencies.

Several different nonliterary events were responsible for this change in perspective. Since human character had changed, the Edwardian novels were no longer satisfactory to young writers. The novels of Henry James began to be appreciated; Freud’s writings began to appear in English translation very shortly after 1910; in December, 1910/ the Post-Impressionist Exhibition had opened at the Grafton Galleries and had shown, in another art, a whole new way of looking at people and life; the ideas of Henri Bergson and of William James started to gain attention in England shortly after 1907'—for all these reasons some people began to question the validity and the reality of life as the Edwardians depicted it and Herbert Spencer glossed it.

Added to these influences was a literary event of which the importance cannot be exaggerated—the impact of Dostoevski.

It is not quite correct to speak of the Russian novel as having influenced the Georgians, because the Russian novel influenced the Edwardians