Simon is writing persuasively (when does he do otherwise?) about Virginia Woolf today and specifically A Room of One's Own,
and as it happens that just last night I read a passage referring to her I thought I'd post it.
But before we get to that, what do you think of the picture? It is of the two-year-old Virginia with her mother Julia Stephen and I found it on Read, Seen, Heard where Kihm, who describes himself beautifully as an unfocused generalist (join the club!), comments on what that small girl had ahead of her ...
To the quotation then, and this appears in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings
. It is the academic Hugo Dyson* recalling his visits to Garsington Manor when he was an undergraduate and his hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell filled her house with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other writers and artists of the day. At Garsington he had encountered "all the people whom secretly one would have most desired to meet - and, as so often happened to a shy, insignificant person, when one did meet them one was filled with a kind of terror. They were kindly enough, but I found them alarming. They weren't, most of them, my weight. I do remember finding Virginia Woolf immensely beautiful and immensely frightening; and one of my fears - I don't think I was quite alone in this - was that she would speak to me one day (but she never did)".
*I'll digress a moment to the meetings of The Inklings, the Oxford discussion group at which the likes of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met to talk and read their work aloud, and to report Dyson's reaction to Tolkien's reading another instalment of The Lord of the Rings: "Oh god, not another elf".
Did you ever read A Boy at the Hogarth Press (Richard Kennedy)? Very funny fly-on-the-wall memoir by an office boy who was too young to be impressed by the Woolfs.
Posted by: m | 12 July 2012 at 12:24 PM
Didn't she grow to look very much like her mother. As, indeed, a lot of us do!
Posted by: Claire | 12 July 2012 at 01:06 PM
No, I haven't read that. Off to add it to my list ...
Posted by: Cornflower | 12 July 2012 at 07:27 PM
She did, and yes, a lot of us do!
Posted by: Cornflower | 12 July 2012 at 07:29 PM
Oh I'm sure I could have lent it to you all those years ago when I ran a press myself. You'll not be surprised to hear my father gave this printer's devil a copy!
Posted by: Dark Puss | 12 July 2012 at 09:46 PM
You do still have your press, don't you? If so, I hope you'll have occasion to run it again before long.
Posted by: Cornflower | 12 July 2012 at 09:50 PM
Yes it's at the cottage, needs new rollers (need to find a place to refurbish them) and ink etc.; probably Jayne can help me there. I haven't printed anything since 1977. Want to lend a hand?
Posted by: Dark Puss | 12 July 2012 at 09:58 PM
I'd love to see how it's done, and it would be great to have it in use again, I'm sure. Make that your 'summer project'!
Posted by: Cornflower | 12 July 2012 at 10:00 PM
Deal!
Posted by: Dark Puss | 12 July 2012 at 10:09 PM
It's a great book, I read it as a teenager when I ran a private press (on a much, much smaller scale) in Scotland.
Posted by: Dark Puss | 12 July 2012 at 10:10 PM
I must dig it out and re-read it. It was so funny, he was so unimpressed by them and I loved the way he didn't think much of VW's books. (I've just finished Night and Day, am torn between wanting to throttle the characters ... and then she wins me over with some wonderful description of London.)
Posted by: m | 13 July 2012 at 12:41 AM
What ever does he mean "They weren't, most of them, my weight." ?
Posted by: Rhys | 13 July 2012 at 08:06 AM
I suppose he means their relative intellectual level - the heavyweights in contrast to the 'lowly' undergraduate - though he was almost certainly of their level or above, he hadn't grown into his ability at that stage.
Posted by: Cornflower | 13 July 2012 at 08:27 AM
Monty Python could have done a great sketch of that: "Trouble at t' Press". Michael Palin as the boy and Terry Jones as Virginia ...
Posted by: Cornflower | 13 July 2012 at 11:02 AM
A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a great little book! Probably not very reliable, but definitely an entertaining perspective on Woolf - not least because it reveals that Leonard Woolf was not impressed by Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing. An interesting tidbit!
And thank you for my lovely mention at the beginning of the post - and for posting a photo I had never seen before. She had that striking gaze even then!
Posted by: Simon T | 17 July 2012 at 03:05 PM
I'd never seen the picture before, either, but it is very much 'her', isn't it?
Posted by: Cornflower | 17 July 2012 at 03:31 PM