I checked out “Emily Dickinson’s Reading” from library the other day trying to learn what books she had read. I did the same thing on Virginia Woolf and wrote this a few years ago.
Like Lincoln, who was very much a man of letters, Virginia Woolf never had any formal education. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters and British ‘intellectual aristocracy.’ When her father died in 1904 Virginia had her second breakdown and tried to commit suicide.
In her letter to Vita Sackville-West (2/19/29), with whom Virginia had a brief ‘passionate affair’ in 1925, she described her first-rate education:
“I read English literature when I was young; I like to think of myself tapping at my father’s study door, saying very loud and clear “Can I have another volume father? I’ve finished this one”. Then he would be very pleased and say “Gracious child, how you gobble!” and get up and take down, it may have been the 6th or 7th volume of Gibbons complete works, or Speddings Bacon [The Life and Letters of Francis Bacon in seven volumes by James Spedding], or Cowper’s Letters.” “But my dear, if it’s worth reading, it’s worth reading twice” he would say. I have a great devotion for him—what a disinterested man, how high minded, how tender to me, and fierce and intolerable—But I am maundering.”
I do not know at this moment when Lytton Strachey and Virginia first met, but I know he proposed to Virginia for marriage in 1909, Virginia considered it for one evening. (Virginia and Leonard married in 1912) In her letters to Lytton Strachey, Virginia often talked about readings and literature. She was an avid reader no doubt; in her letter to Lytton Strachey (10/22/15), she wrote,
“I think it is time we took up correspondence again, . . . I should think I had read 600 books, since we met. Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, . . . I am beginning the Insulted and Injured [Dostoevsky, 1862] which sweeps me away. Have you read it?”
Virginia was taken aback by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in 1912 and she read his Insulted and Injured in 1915. On her letter to Lytton Strachey on 9/1/12, she wrote,
" . . . I have now run full tilt into Crime et Chatiment [I think it is French Crime and Punishment], fifty pages before tea, and I see there are only 800; so I shall be through in no time. It is directly obvious that he [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born: . . Have you been writing about him?"
On her letter to Katherine Cox (9/4/12), she wrote, " . . .I have thrown aside Crime and Punishment to write to you, . . Leonard here looks up from his composition and sends his love."
Janice was also taken aback by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in her high school days and has been trying to sell him to me over the years; pretty soon I may fall and declare “I am sold!” Janice said “ Dostoyevsky is one of my favorite authors ever. (but the idea of flying through 800 pages seems crazy to me)”
In her letter to Vita Sackville-West (1/8/29), she talked about Anna Karenina, which mom [my blog began with “Letters to my daughters” which is the subtitle of this blog] wanted me to read (who shouldn’t read it?) and I never did. Joy spent a summer cramming it in her undergraduate days, so she may be able to help me figure out what Virginia meant. War and Peace and Anna Karenina were touted as the realist fictions, and did Virginia think H.G. Wells and Galsworthy (who went on to get the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932) were ‘mediocre wishy washy’ realist novelists?
“I have written myself out of breath—30,000 words in 8 weeks [Phases of Fiction] and now want to dive and steep myself in other people books. I want to wash off all my own ideas, so I have been ready and reading . . . I’ve been reading Balzac, and Tolstoy. Practically every scene in Anna Karenina is branded on me, though I’ve not read it for 15 years. That is the origin of all our discontent. It wasn’t Wells [I supposed H.G. Wells], or Galsworthy or any of our mediocre wishy washy realists: it was Tolstoy. How could we go on with sex and realism after that? How could they go on with poetic plays after Shakespeare? . . . Orlando [Virginia’s biography novel] has now sold 13,000 copies in America: that’s the last time I mention him.”
Upon reading Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky declared it “flawless as a work of art.” and upon reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot thought “this is on a par with War and Peace!”
Virginia read lots of Thomas Hardy. In her letter to Janet Chase (12/10/14), she wrote,
“Have you read Thomas Hardy’s new poems [Satires of Circumstance 1914] They’re quite the most beautiful things I’ve read since—certainly since [George] Meredith, . . Also Arnold Bennett’s Price of Love [1914] is good.”
“Leonard is reading the poems of John Donne: I’m half way through the Return of the Native, a novel by Thomas Hardy.” (letter to Lytton Strachey on [Boxing Day of 1912])
“Just got this letter from Thomas Hardy, I wrote to thank him for his poem about father—will you keep it for me.” (letter to Janet Chase on 1/26/15)
Virginia read in Latin, Greek, French and Italian and may be more. In her letter to Vanessa Bell (2/23/18), she wrote,
“You must teach Julian [Vanessa’s young son] Greek. I find my chief consolation now in making out Greek plays, and even with what I know its quite worth while. Besides, it would be something to break his teeth against. He [Julian] wrote me a very charming letter. I think he has the Stephen gift of language (not that its much to boast of—) . . . “
Julian Bell [Vanessa’s son, Virginia’s nephew, a poet] taught in Wuhan University [a relatively famous University] in China in 1935 and participated in the Spanish Civil War; like Hemingway in WWI, Julian was an ambulance driver and was killed in a battle in 1937. Hemingway’s ambulance driver experience gave us A Farewell to Arms—the only novel I read twice. He was also in Spanish Civil War and that's why we have For Whom the Bell Tolls. If you haven't seen Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman's movie, you have no idea what you've missed!
In her letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies (9/30/15), she wrote, “I am reading Latin, and French."
In her letter to Saxon Sydney-Turner (12/31/16), she wrote,
“Now I am going to read the Greek Anthology (in a copy you gave me once) which I find very hard and absorbing.”
In her letter to Saxon Sydney-Turner (2/3/17), she wrote,
“As to William Watson [knighted in 1917 for his patriotic poems], I prefer his pomp to his wit. . . . as to Aeschylus [an ancient Greek playwrite, touted as the father of the tragedy] on the other hand, I’ve been reading him in French which is better than English; Aeschylus however excited my spirits to such an extent that, hearing my husband snore in the night, I woke him to light his torch and look for zeppelins {German bomber during WWI, this letter was written in 1917 during WWI} He then applied the Freud system to my mind, and analysed it down to Clytemnestra [a female character in Aeschylus’s play, and became the prototype of femme fatale—using beauty, charm, or sexual allure—leading to ‘fatal attraction’] and the watch fire, which so pleased him that he forgave me. All the morning I have been reviewing with great labour an American essayist.”
In her letter to Saxon Sydney-Turner (8/10/16), she wrote,
“I am reading Count Carlo Gozzi’s [Italian dramatist] in his own tongue, and don’t find it very difficult, but then they only use about 16 words.”
In VW's diary of 8/20/30, she wrote,
"I am writing while my potatoes boil. . . . I am reading Dante; I say, yes, this makes all writing unnecessary. This surpasses 'writing' as I say about Shre. [Shakespeare] I read the Inferno for half an hour at the end of my own page: [ Waves]; that is the place of honour; that is to put the page into the furnace--if I have a furnace. Now to mash the potatoes. L [Leonard] has laid my carpet."
(In the diary above she was writing that she was revising her novel,
Waves, and upon reading Dante's, she felt she can burn the pages of
Waves, which was thought to be one of her best, if not the best, novels.)
During her last bout of depression and breakdown, she went mad, “hearing inside her head a chorus of birds singing in Greek, before she walked into river Ouse with stone in her pockets in 1941.
“Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding O Death! The waves broke on the shore.” is the last line of her The Waves and is also her epitaph. One can imagine how heroically she fought the death; she flung herself to the fight with all her being. Nobody succeeds fighting death, but she failed tragically.
