Lively Details in Virginia Woolf's Literary Criticism

HAUPTSEMINARARBEIT “LIVELY DETAILS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LITERARY CRITICISM” Selin Beyhan Lively Details in Virginia Woolf’s Literary Criticism: Where Life and Art Fuse Together “Virginia Woolf’s importance as a novelist has to a large extent eclipsed her significance as a literary critic and reviewer,” says Mary Lyon in her preface to Books and Portraits. This remark would hardly cause objections inasmuch as when the name “Virginia Woolf” reaches one’s ears, more or less the same image will start floating in the minds of many: a leading figure of modernism in literature, a vigorous defender of feminism, the master of the stream of consciousness technique, a renowned novelist... However, in addition to having all these titles, Woolf was an essayist, a critic, and despite not having formal education in today’s context, she was a literary scholar. Writing reviews for the prominent literary magazines was the major resource of her living, and it constituted the major part of her writing career. Many of Woolf’s literary essays were compiled in The Common Reader, the series, which, with its title, “indicates that as a critic she regarded herself as something of an amateur” (Daiches 131). Despite her incredibly rich background after all the decades she spent in libraries, diving into the inner depths of oceans of literature, she disguises herself as a ‘Common Reader’, who “is worse educated, and has not been gifted by nature so generously,” but whom Dr Johnson “rejoices to concur with; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty [sic] and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”1 She is sceptical on unchallengeable conclusions, sharp deductions, judgments and frowns, when it comes to literary criticism; therefore, she, disguising as a common reader, takes fancy and high-sounding shoes of literary scholars off, and walks softly in our drawing rooms 1 “The Common Reader” The Common Reader I 1 with bare feet. In this sense, it would be prudent to state that there is a common ground on which many literary scholars meet about Woolf’s essays: Like her novels, her essays also reveal her freewriting style that goes hand in hand with her well-known ‘stream of consciousness’ technique; hence, it is called unsystematic by some, and “has not the consistency or richness of a systematic critic” (Daiches 134), which, I think, is open to discussion, depending on what we understand from ‘system’. During the translation process of The Common Reader Series into Turkish, I was very lucky to the get the opportunity of having a closer look at Woolf’s literary criticism, which I had never come across before. I was fascinated, and overwhelmed as well, by this peculiar style of writing, which I did not take long to realize that is not ‘criticizing’, ‘reviewing’ or ‘making some authoritative comments about the works of some authors’, but a set of successful attempts to activate readers’ minds, to lead them to involve actively in an intellectual conversation. Among all the other aspects that bring Woolf’s literary essays under long discussions and analysis, one of them displays itself more apparently: her keenness in life stories. This aspect brings naturally one question along: In what ways and for what purposes does Woolf include biographical details in her literary essays? Hence, in order to provide solid answers to this question, I will analyse three essays by Woolf, “I am Christina Rossetti”, “The Pastons and Chaucer”, and “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters” respectively, the common ground of all of which is to focus on people besides their works; however, each of these essays has different features at the same time. In her approach to literary works, Woolf always uses “we”, not “I”, because she pretends to be a common reader and “it is her “we” who think in this way, not “I” who imposes this knowledge on others” (Koutsantoni 80). On the other hand, I, as the writer of this undemanding paper, do not pretend to be a ‘common reader’; I am a 2 common reader as I would count myself blessed if I could have only a grain of Woolf’s literary knowledge. By beginning “with the biography—for what could be amusing? As everybody knows, the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible,” Woolf takes us to a journey in Christina Rossetti’s life in a ‘sealed magic tank’. The magic tank metaphor is the core of this ‘criticism’, which again I doubt to label as ‘criticism’, as it sounds like diminishing this fascinating life journey, this stimulating group talk between Woolf, Rossetti and the readers to such a cold and didacticsounding one word as ‘criticism’. It is Virginia Woolf herself, who tells us that “to admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom […]”2 hence, it would be pointless to expect from her to simply declare rules and draw certain lines between “good literature” and “bad literature”, even without giving no attention to what lies behind of the literary material in question. Now, with the guidance of Woolf, we gather around this tank, where “all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures--for they are rather under life size.” With this ‘sealed magic tank’ metaphor, which leads the flow of the whole essay, we are not simple, mere audience anymore who read a criticism essay to grasp Woolf’s ideas about Christina Rossetti but discoverers who set out an excursion to the virgin territories of the author’s life. In the beginning of the essay, what we first read about Christina Rossetti is not a word about her style, or the literary trend that she follows, or what she mentions in her poems, but the fact that we are going to celebrate her centenary. Immediately then, we are informed about one of her most apparent traits, her shyness. Before we are introduced to her works, her literary identity, to namely 2 “How One Should Read a Book?” The Common Reader II 3 Christina Rossetti the poet, we are introduced to her family, her lifestyle, where she comes from, her love affair, her relationship to God, what kind of a God she has, overall, to Christina Rossetti the human-being. Layer by layer, Woolf peels the crust off and goes down to the core of the substance which gives its essence to Rossetti’s works. Just as we are wondering when she will begin discussing Rossetti’s works, at which point this enchanting life-story will turn to some authoritative degrading or praising bulk of comments (mainly because, I think I could take the liberty of claiming this here, this is what is generally expected from criticism), “[…] a fish […] suddenly dashes at the glass and breaks it,” and the fact turns into fiction and Rossetti’s imaginary voice that reveals some comments probably made her time about her poems rises along with the crash of the broken glass: “Yes [she seems to say], I am a poet. You who pretend to honour my centenary are no better than the idle people at Mrs. Tebb's tea-party. Here you are rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling my writingtable drawers, making fun of the Mummies and Maria and my love affairs when all I care for you to know is here. Behold this green volume. It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and sixpence. Read that.” “This is the climax of the essay and now Virginia Woolf can come to the point to which she has all the while been leading: ‘It is the poetry that matters’” (Bennett 159) If what matters is the poetry only, why does Woolf choose to spend three pages on Rossetti’s life? No, Woolf apparently disagrees with this ‘focus on the work only’ approach. If we are ignorant of the milestones in poet’s life path, how are we supposed to read her poems intelligibly? Here comes the crucial point of the essay: “The difficulty of judging a poem.” While it is so obvious that “critics at the same table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book” and 4 one critic argues that a prose “should be thrown upon the flames,” while the other one “declares it a masterpiece,”3 how could it be different for poetry? Let us leave alone the poet’s life; Woolf seems to discuss, however, “very little of value has been said about poetry since the world began. The judgment of contemporaries is almost always wrong.” She simply puts forwards the three different schools of criticism and argues that trying to follow all of these will take us nowhere. Then, what are we supposed to do other than build our own judgments? Woolf concludes with her own judgment, plainspoken and which seems to be built on the poet only, but which takes the lid off her poems at the same time: “O Christina Rossetti, I have humbly to confess that though I know many of your poems by heart, I have not read your works from cover to cover. […] You were an instinctive poet. You saw the world from the same angle always. […] You were wise perhaps. Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one's ears--like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck. Yet for all its symmetry, yours was a complex song. […] Certainly they owe to it their sadness--your God was a harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns. […] Modest as you were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your vision. […] In a word, you were an artist […]” It becomes crystal clear that in order to come to a judgment independent from inconsistent comments of different critics, we are supposed to glance at Rossetti’s life through a “magic tank”, get to know her as well as her works. This is what Woolf thinks about Rossetti and her poems, her own conclusion, her own words completely free from highly academic phrases and clichés. For the otherwise would include Woolf among the “furry and gowned” authoritarians. Furthermore, rather than stating barely “Overall, I admire her works as a poet”, Woolf takes us back to the tea party 3 “How It Strikes to a Contemporary” The Common Reader I 5 and says “I would certainly have committed some indiscretion in the awkward ardour of her admiration,” at the exclamation of “I am Christina Rossetti.” For there is a story to be ended; an essay through which we become companion of the poet, “akin to her” could not be ended with a bare statement of admiration. When we finish reading this essay, we know who Christina Rossetti was. For both it deals with not only one but two literary works and it is one of the most obvious and purest sample of Woolf’s fusing fact and fiction, in her own terms, in a “life-telling” pot, “The Pastons and Chaucer”, which appears in the first volume of The Common Reader series, requires a substantial amount of effort and time to analyse. This essay emerges as a preeminent illustration of “her passion for entering into domestic detail and for recovering hidden histories” (Lee 93) and how she “has herself considered the biographical and historical forces behind the writer and his work” (Goldman 113). What differs here from “I am Christina Rossetti” is that Woolf does not primarily focus on Chaucer’s inner-self or his life story, but on what he saw when he wrote his famous Canterbury Tales. For drawing a sketch of the past, imagining and making us imagine the Middle Era, she takes another literary work as basis, “The Paston Letters”, as letters probably serve better than any other genre in terms of bringing the obscurest lives to light and “prove a medium through which to enter into conversation with the addressee by exchanging views freely” (Koutsantoni 130). The question regarding what Woolf might have aimed by presenting the past as plain as it was, with all the dullness and daily choirs in it, brings the answer with itself: Again, to lead us, the common reader, to read more intelligibly, to build our own judgment. “The Pastons and Chaucer” can be likened to a few-layered structure, through which we, step by step, come to the conclusion on how the medieval times influenced the development of literary taste of people in twentieth century. Woolf aims to draw a realistic picture 6 of the time before modernisation without romanticising or overlooking at how past differs from today, “creating some past perfect world that is only nostalgic, and inherently dead and gone ” (Mitchell 2015) Woolf firstly introduces us to a well-known aristocrat family, the Pastons, who are also known with their collection of letters, but cannot be thoroughly counted as literary persons such as authors or poets. Woolf stimulates the curiosity, which we naturally have or should have as readers, by opening the essay with the depiction of Caister Castle, in a way which reminds of the beginning of a historical novel. With such an introduction, we prepare ourselves for a life story, which may be full with mystery and quaintness, and winks temptingly from the past to pull us into its misty veils. Before long, we are informed about “seven religious men” and “seven poor folk”, which refer to the priests and scholars respectively, who, under Sir John Fastolf’s will, were educated in this huge castle made built by himself in Norfolk; furthermore, we learn that these “seven religious men and seven poor folk […] should be praying for the souls of Sir John and his parents, but there is no sign of them or no sound of their prayers, and the place is ruin.” Now again, in this very first paragraph, we have found ourselves in the deepness of the past. Where are we exactly? As Woolf mentions Sir John Fastolf, the well-known knight of the fourteenth century, and the Castle, the symbolic structure of that era, she must have aimed to bring us directly back to the medieval era. “Not so very far off lie more ruins—the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where John Paston was buried […]” Soon enough, we begin to establish the connection we have been expecting since we first saw the title of the essay. Is Woolf going to deal with the Paston Letters in this essay? What does Chaucer have to do with them, then? Actually, for those who are familiar with the theme of The Canterbury Tales, there is a hint embedded in the story: Pilgrims. “Nevertheless, 7 the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory, and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened […]” Woolf leaves that hint there for us to bear in mind and goes on with her journey in the medieval era. Through the following pages, we get closer to the Pastons’ family affairs mainly based on their letters. Woolf reveals some facts about the Pastons such that they made their fortune on the earth, that John Paston does not even have a tombstone due to the neglect of his eldest son Sir John and so on so forth, but not in a strict factual and documentary way but narrating, even maybe in a “gossiping” manner as if she was telling the stories of some obscure persons living far away to a group of people having gathered in front of the fire who are curious to learn about some eccentric lives buried in the mysterious past, when “in the most desolate part of England […], in a raw new-built house, without telephone, bathroom or drains, armchairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by.” What is Woolf’s aim here by bringing us back to these eras and letting us imagine it up to the smallest details? Making us Chaucer’s contemporaries? For “the reader understandably feels most comfortable and at ease reading his contemporaries. John Paston can read Chaucer as twentieth-and twenty-first-century readers cannot” (Saloman 66). In this sense, time barrier is also added to the series of obstacles that we inevitably confront and sometimes consciously sometimes unconsciously deal with during the understanding and internalisation process while reading a literary text. We, leaded by Woolf, keep getting closer to the Pastons through the letters, and Woolf sets the son Sir John Paston as the prominent 8 figure of our journey. Here is how Woolf introduces a figure from the medieval era, Sir John and some facts about his character to us. “He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. […] Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed something of his father’s ambition.” Then Woolf keeps drawing the picture of the life in that era: “The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and Lancaster alternately faded and flourished.” The unfinished tombstone of the father John Paston remains as the key image of the story, which Woolf employs like a torch to illuminate the dark corners of the son Sir John Paston’s daily life and traits. To what purpose does illuminating Sir John Paston serve in the essay? Through the pages of Margaret’s letters in which we learn about Sir John’s extravagance, how he spent money on “clocks and trinkets, and upon paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such stuff.” Among this “other such stuff” “there are eleven volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.” With these comments Woolf makes, fiction is mingled into fact where imaginatively Chaucer is added as another factor that prevents Sir John Paston from fulfilling his duties. 9 As far as we know Woolf, or to put it more correctly, claim to know her, she would find it more fascinating it and it would show parallelism with her ‘impressionist’ views, to look at Chaucer through the eyes of a figure from medieval era rather than to simply ‘explain’ how people would live in desolation, how they spent their times with praying or which economic conditions they had to struggle with in order to illuminate how Chaucer might have been regarded in his time, which facts and conditions we, as the readers of modern era, should take into consideration while reading his works, what he might have seen or thought while he was producing his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. So Woolf reveals plainly how Sir John Paston reads Chaucer as an evasion from the dullness of the daily works he is supposed to deal with, how Chaucer makes him feel, why Chaucer appeals to him in a few sentences: “Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane. […] But Lydgate’s poems or Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete.” Woolf establishes the connection between the readers of the medieval era and of the modern times with the mutual concern and curiosity that Chaucer awakens in us. Chaucer makes us to with to learn the end of the story, just as Sir John Paston did by sitting in his chair for hours and hours centuries ago. Centuries have passed; our world is not exciting as our ancestors’ now; however, what has remained unaltered, Woolf argues, is what Chaucer arouses in us, his “preeminent story-teller’s gift”. Woolf, presenting the life in those times from the first person through letters, comes to the conclusion step by step that the era in which Chaucer was born significantly 10 contributed to what makes him Chaucer. “England was an unspoilt country.” Life was way more different then, Woolf seems to say, as you may have already noticed from the life of the Pastons. Chaucer’s era was different from Shakespeare’s; besides its “picturesque and gay appearance”, there are two other traits that dominated medieval era, which are “solidity”, the reason why Margaret is inundated with agony only for John Paston’s remaining without a tombstone, and “conviction”, the reason why Margaret prays for days and night, and rushes to priests to get help. Woolf concludes that this spirit of the era is the answer to how Chaucer is differentiated from Shakespeare. In the course of the essay, this conclusion emerges naturally; this is what Woolf aims here, she is not dictating or explaining her conclusion in a highly-cultured, knowledgeable authoritative manner; she presents a life story from that period and waits for us to see her point. Even though the story has already arrived where it has been meant to do, and the connection to Chaucer has already been established, the story has not yet finished. So she goes back to story of Sir John Paston because there is another literary work apart from Chaucer’s that has been the subject of this essay. Sir John’s story is complete now: “[…] Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb was still unmade.” Even though story of Sir John is “swallowed up as a raindrop absorbed in the sea” in these letters, as these letters “like all collections of letters” do not focus on an individual but on the whole family, Woolf puts the story of an individual on the focus, in her half fiction-half fact journey that starts with the inner depths of Sir John’s character, develops into his connection with Chaucer. “In the same way that Sir John’s reading of Chaucer illuminates his world by 11 allowing him to see the events of his daily life through Chaucer’s accounts, Woolf’s reading of the Paston Letters illuminates her own workd, while providing glimpses into the lives of the Pastons. And reading Woolf’s essay allows her readers to experience their own worlds, the world of Woolf reading the Pastons, and the world of Sir John reading Chaucer “ (Saloman 68). There is a bare season in English Literature,” starts Woolf her essay, Dorothy Osborne’s Letters”, a season where we do not hear whispering, screaming or simply talking of humans through their diaries or letters. Sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century were buried in sharp silence. Writing in any form is tightly bound to life conditions; hence, “great changes in psychology were needed and great changes in material comfort-arm-chairs and carpets and good roads--before it was possible for human beings to watch each other curiously or to communicate their thoughts easily.” People need comfort, both materially and mentally, to contemplate about their inner-selves, to observe other people and in turn to produce literature. This need for comfort is much heavier for the women, on the other hand. “Writing was an uncommon art, practiced, rather for fame than for money […]” and according to Woolf, this is one of the reasons to which English literature owes some part of its magnificence. However, in such a period as the Elizabethan period when scarcity of material comfort is apparent and people strive hard to make a living, at least to keep up with standards, it would not be surprising to see that sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are “bare seasons” in English literature, when “lives and characters appear in stark outline.” Thus, when we think of the literary conditions of the period that made possible and impossible for some genres to be produced, and Woolf’s “absorption in women’s lives and details” and “her quest for female forebears” (Lee 93), Woolf’s reason for choosing Dorothy Osborne as the primary figure for her review becomes apparent. 12 Osborne was famous for her letters to her husband Sir Temple because the date she was born (1627) allowed her to pour her mind onto papers. For “it was people, not theories and generalizations, that fascinated her” (Brewster 67), Woolf, not surprisingly, must have found it worthy to take a look at those letters, which were the only way of that time to settle down in people’s minds and attend as observer to their lives for “at that date though writing books was ridiculous for a woman there was nothing unseemly in writing a letter.” As may be expected from Woolf, in the course of the essay, we are blessed with some successive impressions from Dorothy Osborne’s life. We could not be expecting from Woolf to strip the letters from the life details of their writer and approach them as a mere literary product, which carries nothing more than some grammatical structures, some puns, maybe some eloquence, putting the life embedded in those lines aside completely or mentioning the author briefly only in a two or three sentences for the sake of informing the reader. No, it would not be Woolf’s way of dealing with a literary text. Hence, like most of the essays in the Common Reader series, this essay is also “full of shrewdness, warmth, knowledge of the world and of human nature, serving as an instrument in order to reflect and explain the vibrations of the external world” (Plomer 142). Even if we do not know Dorothy or we have not read her letters, in the course of the essay, we become quite acquainted with Dorothy, we know a lot about her character, the “melancholy and gravity in her blood”, her mother, her sisters, her royal family and how this royalty shapes and most of the time puts a burden on her life, about gentlemen who wished to marry her and what she thought of these gentlemen, how she fell in love with Temple and was determined to marry him despite the socio-economic obstacles between them and that she finally succeeded it, how the fierce of her letters soothed after her marriage and her transformation from a vicarious woman of letters to a steady, 13 calm and noble wife of a bureaucrat, to “mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise and great.” Get to know the author first, Woolf seems to say again. However, she gets never lost in the life of the author and loses the track of the work, the letters. When reading her essay, we still know that it is a review, not the love story of Dorothy Osborne’s despite the fact that we have learnt a lot about her. Free indirect speeches, abruptly intervening quotations from Dorothy Osborne’s letters in the grammar of seventeenth century let us know that we are still on the track of the letters. Woolf introduces us to the life of the author, but constantly reminds that we are not gossiping but discovering the forces behind that brings the work into this or that shape. While reviewing a literary work or an author, a critic would simply state that the author in question lost her or his creativity or productivity for this or that reason, or even without giving a reason; and it would be rather acceptable. However, here we know quite well why Dorothy Osborne stopped writing letters; Woolf does not criticise her here, she does not frown on or interrogate her either. She simply puts forwards the reason but she does fail, or intends so, to repress her anger and sorrow for a woman who stopped producing and stepped behind her husband by this sharp end: “[…] Much though we honour the admirable ambassadress who made her husband's career her own, there are moments when we would exchange all the benefits of the Triple Alliance and all the glories of the Treaty of Nimuegen for the letters that Dorothy did not write.” Why, she seems to say, while we need so desperately for woman fellows in literature and you have such a gift for pouring your mind onto paper so beautifully, why did you choose to become an ambassador’s wife and not an eminent author of your generation? Surely, there are many more precious essays of Virginia Woolf’s, which are worth to be subject as well to pages of analysis in terms of 14 representing clear and solid examples of how she thrusts people to the forefront not as mere historical figures but as heroes and heroines of the stories that are made of a set of impressions in her own mind. Referring back to the claim of some scholars mentioned in the beginning of this paper, about Woolf’s critical essays being “unsystematic”, if what we understand from being systematic is developing the essay in a strict standard “introduction-development and conclusion” structure mentioning briefly the author, raising his or her work to the heaven or burying it into ground and then dictating what the author should or should not have done, what we, as readers, should take into consideration while reading a literary work, then Woolf’s criticism is not systematic. However, if the word “unsystematic” brings along the notion of being “messy, disorganised, scattered”, this word cannot be used for Woolf’s criticism. For even after such a short and undemanding analysis of these three essays, it becomes quite clear that with each lively detail that she includes in her essays and each aspect of the author or the period she focuses, Woolf has an aim. Even though she seems to write freely and she gives the impression that she is about to get lost in her thoughts, her impressions and in the fascinating lives and living conditions of the authors any time, she never does that. “The essay must be pure-pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter,” said she once.4 This constant shift between ‘life’ and ‘art’ is what keeps her non-fiction always fresh, always alive. Each of her essays is like a journey. She knows well where to start, when to leave off, which route to take, which vehicles to use, in order to arrive her final destination, which she has already set on her mind before starting the journey. 4 “The Modern Essay” The Common Reader I 15 Works Cited Primary Sources: Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader First Series.11th Ed. London: The Hogarth Press, 1968. Print. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader Second Series. 8th Ed. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965. Print. Secondary Sources: Bennett, Joan. Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. 159. Print. Brewster, Dorothy. Virginia Woolf. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1963. 67. Print. Daiches, David. “The Uncommon Reader.” Virginia Woolf: The Makers of Modern Literature. Norfolk Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1942. 131134. Print. Goldman, Mark. The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic. The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1976. 113. Print. Koutsantoni, Katerina. Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. 80-130. Print. Lee, Hermione. “Virginia Woolf’s Essays.” A Cambridge Companion to Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe, Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 91-108. Print. Lyon, Mary. “Biographical Writings of Virginia Woolf.” Books and Portraits. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977. vii. Print. Mitchell, Marea. “Reading the Past: Virginia Woolf, Chaucer and the Pastons.” University of Survey. Web: 02 July 2015. <https://blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwomen/2015/07/02/reading-the-pastvirginia-woolf-chaucer-and-the-pastons/ > Plomer, William. “A Life “Rich on Experience.” Virginia Woolf Interviews and Recollections. Ed. J.H. Stape. London: Macmillan, 1995. 142. Print. Saloman, Randi. Virginia Woolf’s Essayism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 66-68. Print. 16