Essayists From England

"Surtout point de zèle. ["Above all, no zeal" —Talleyrand] Butler's favourite maxim is not perhaps the last word in human wisdom and human virtue; the last word insists on the imperative duty of zeal in certain circumstances. But, if not the last, it is unquestionably the last word but one. A world which consistently lived up to this motto would certainly be without some of the finest and most extraordinary flowers of human endeavour; but it would also be relieved of innumerable miseries and wickednesses. Men show at least as much zeal in mischief as in well doing, in folly as in wisdom. The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. In any cause, the best or the most atrocious, zeal is always intoxicating. A world without zeal would be a world deprived of many simple but savage pleasures: but at least half its present excuses for interfering and bullying would have been taken away from it."

"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful."

"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death."

"I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it."

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

"'There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. ... All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head — round and round, continually What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night — not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep — the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits ... we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying ... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on ... There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die ... one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."

"Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time."

"I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. [...] I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? [...] I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape."

"What is extraordinary is that the hostility the [Bloomsbury] group originally provoked is still with us and is often expressed with the violence of first discovery. In a recent New Statesman review, for example, the English critic John Carey quotes one of Virginia Woolf's snobbish remarks about the lower classes and concludes: "Maybe she was right to make away with herself and leave the landscape clean.""

"The novel, of course, was never to be the same after the day she started work on it. As novel succeeded novel she proceeded to break, in turn, each mold of her own."

"I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'."

"Virginia Woolf is referenced in this book again and again, both for her work and for her tragic life, which, I suppose, are one and the same...None of my books could have been written without these extraordinary authors."

"Comparing Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, as people tend to do, Virginia Woolf had this to say: "The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.... [Charlotte Brontë] does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, which is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I love," "I hate," "I suffer"...She goes on to state that Emily Brontë is a greater poet than Charlotte because "there is no 'I' in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but not the love of men and women." In short, and here I would agree with her, Wuthering Heights is mythic."

"In rereading Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" (1929) for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious-as she always was-of being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences. Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writer should sound."

"Woolf meant something to me. Mrs. Dalloway, I remember, was the first thing I read. I loved the style; I was very interested in the style"

"In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance."

"Our thinking does tend to be dominated—colonized, you might say—by the history of patriarchal thought and language, but it is still possible to think independently if you make up your mind to do it and be vigilant. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own promises that “if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think,” we might change the world."

"(What women writers, contemporary or historical, well-known or obscure, do you count among your most important literary influences? And is anxiety of influence a notion that applies equally to women writers?) AO: I could name dozens, but here are a few:...Among prose writers, Virginia Woolf above all."

"There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Bront‘s, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before."

"It is also possible to use fictitious characters to highlight an absence, as Virginia Woolf does in A Room of One's Own when she speaks of Shakespeare's talented and fictitious sister, for whom no opportunities were open. I wrote a similar piece about the invented sister of a Spanish chronicler who visited Puerto Rico in the 18th century to make visible the absence of women chroniclers."

"I don't like Virginia Woolf that much...I'm interested in Virginia Woolf, the critic. All the texts in The Common Reader are wonders of precision, of humor, of intelligence, but I'm a little afraid at times of certain lyrical aspects of her fiction. It seems as if she gets a little carried away. I wish there were a little more of Jane Austen in Virginia Woolf. But the essays, all of them, interest me."

"Virginia Woolf... it's taken us fifty or sixty years to figure out what she was doing in her novels. We are just beginning to get some good Virginia Woolf criticism, because she was way ahead of her time. Everyone said James Joyce is it. OK, he was it for then, but to me Virginia Woolf is still it, while Joyce is an interesting phenomenon historically. Woolf is still a writer who took risks that we don't even know how to explain. It's a matter of rereading, learning to read, and seeing what is there, instead of what "ought to be there.""

"I think Virginia Woolf is probably the person whose technical daring and her skill at doing that kind of thing and moving from one head to another head, from one point of view to another, in the years and in the ways, is the most admirable. Nobody has written anything like that that I know. I was fascinated by what she did. She was doing something new in story telling, something new in the novel, by that moving point of view. The nineteenth-century novel does it too, of course, in a very different way."

"as feminist theory began to finally get into my head, and as I began to read what the feminists told me to read, which was my female ancestors in writing-I had always read George Eliot, Willa Cather, and so on, certain writers, and of course Virginia Woolf. I had read Virginia Woolf for years, but as I began to understand what she was trying to say, I was reeducated, it really was true. And I think, I'm so grateful to Woolf and all the rest of them because I think I would not have been able to go on writing, that this pretending to be a man all the time, it was beginning not to work. I'm not a man, but I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what this sort of discomfort and feeling of frustration was, and I had to learn how to write as a woman, and there's no doubt about that, and I had to fight a lot of my own training and prejudices."

"if your storyteller's Virginia Woolf, you've hit a pretty high-level society."

"The incredible upsurge of woman writers and poets in the 1980s is a sign that women are finding their voices. They're beginning to talk about their experiences without using a male vocabulary or meeting male expectations. It's sticky, because the language is so male-centered that it excludes much of the feminine experience. Sex, for instance, is always described from a male point of view, as penetration, insemination, and so on. A lot of women still deny that their experience is different than a man's. They do this because it's scary to realize you don't have the words to describe your own experience. The few words we do have we get from our mothers and the women who taught us when we were young. Virginia Woolf says, "We think back through our mothers.""

"("Has feminism affected your self-concept?") Yes, it's given me more confidence to be a woman. It has helped women be women and not just reflections of men, particularly, as Virginia Woolf said, "magnifying reflections" of men."

"("you wouldn't agree with Virginia Woolf that there is such a thing as a woman's prose style?") I don't know. I am not going to disagree with Virginia Woolf about anything. I see her style, which is wonderful. Now there's the kind of complexity that I envy with my whole heart, that kind of weaving. But is there anybody besides Virginia Woolf who can do that particular sort of thing? You see, that way of thinking slides so easily into a sort of sexism that it worries me a little bit."

"There's a life force that's in Orlando. There's a light shining from that book. When I feel discouraged, I can pick it up and read a paragraph and feel up again. Woolf covers four hundred years of history, and one person lives for four hundred years. And I thought, "Yeah, I can treat time like that." The way Virginia Woolf uses time makes sense to me. And frees me, too. If I want a character to live to a hundred and twenty so that he can live many connecting experiences, so that he can go from one part of history to another, then I just go ahead and do it. We don't know exactly how old my grandmother is, my mother and my father are, because they have all these fake papers and stories, and so I just went ahead and gave them long lives and didn't worry about their ages. Orlando gave me permission to make them as old as they needed to be."

"When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people."

"Reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando was an event... it's all right to make your man turn into a woman, it's all right to have a century of time flow by here and a moment of time flow by there. She showed me various freedoms I could take in writing."

"Rita Giacoman is the first hardcore Palestinian feminist we meet. She cites Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, speaks of the deep need to degender education for the young. She's in contact with Israeli feminists, and she comments-quite Woolflike-"Feminists-both Israeli and Palestinian-interpret movement not in nationalist terms, but in terms of cooperation.""

"I know that Virginia Woolf's entire literary project was to find the space, the frozen moment in time, where the individual might matter, because whenever time, that is to say, history intervened, the individual was lost....And Virginia Woolf went mad the last time and killed herself at least partly because it was another war, and who could bear such a thing?"

"As women readers have articulated not just separate taste, a separate list of best-sellers, favorites, but also a developing network we can call culture, Woolf's role in this culture has become clearer, more obviously key. She wrote about textured lives, the secret currents between women, towards each other, against men, even against each other, but always with a piercing consciousness of sexual conflict. Many of us have imitated/will imitate Woolf to discover what she has to offer in the way of style and vision. And since so many women read and use Woolf, her work becomes familiar, "easier.""

"How begin to describe the permission Woolf’s feminism and artistry bestowed on the hopeful beginner? For me, her work, which never panders, was a reliable antidote to literary men’s scorn or disregard. Her novels demonstrated that despised domesticity, including dinner parties and shopping, could be transformed into unrivaled art."

"Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed."

"...on race, as on so much else, Virginia was not a typical white European feminist, but stood against much of what that sector of women has come to stand for. Virginia Woolf wanted the military budget for women. She made the case for middle-class women. She said it should come to women as wages for the housework we did; that that was a better way to spend the money. I can't see an argument against it. In Three Guineas, the only extensive nonfiction book she ever wrote, she made this central. But the case she makes for wages for housework, spelled out most brilliantly in this extraordinary book, seems not to interest - may even be censored out by - her admirers...I think Virginia can be tremendously useful to us, to all of us, women of color, Third World women, white women, and men on our side, because she gives us the strength to demand more of what we're entitled to. And the strength also to refuse to replicate or allow other women to replicate what we have been attacking men for doing and being."

"Her genius was intensely feminine and personal—private almost. To read one of her books was (if you liked it) to receive a letter from her, addressed specially to you."

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. Virginia Woolf did this incomparably. And the complexity of her human relationships, the economy with which she managed to portray them... staggering…(Was Woolf a big influence when you began writing?) NG: Midway, I think-after I'd been writing for about five years. She can be a very dangerous influence on a young writer. It's easy to fall into the cadence. But the content isn't there..."

"[S]ome economic awareness may even be a prerequisite to the full appreciation of [some] books, plays, and operas. Virginia Woolf's Orlando must be quite bewildering to the economically ignorant."

"I would like to have written Orlando (laughs). But I'm very far from that!"

"Not surprisingly, a valorization of the body has been present in nearly all the literature of "second wave" 20th-century feminism, as it has characterized the literature produced by the anti-colonial revolt and by the descendants of the enslaved Africans. On this ground, across great geographic and cultural boundaries, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) anticipates Aimé Cesaire's Return to the Native Land (1938), when she mockingly scolds her female audience and, behind it, a broader female world, for not having managed to produce anything but children."

"I don't think we read George Eliot, [Jane Austen]], Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O'Connor as "women writers" anymore, but as vital voices of their time. I know that, for instance, Toni Morrison will be read in this fashion. She is already. The point we're striving for is one at which the criteria for the work is its worth to readers, its excellence, the qualities that shine out and endure."

"I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for "white"; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for "black." And by U.S..standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to being india."

"I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right. Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"Of the modern writers, Virginia Woolf is one who consistently attempted to place women at the center of her thinking. But she did not do it with the bold and inclusive sweep of Sappho. She did it awkwardly and with apology, with a tone of self-deprecation. This is apparent, for example, in A Room of One's Own, in its style and tone and in its apparent random "female" ambience of thought hither and yon, an innovation to mask the real power of her intellect."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."