Re: Notes from the river bottom

--- James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> Cecilia --
>
> Here's the table of contents for the page you gave me:
>
> I don't see "Modern Fiction" on there, but do see "Modern Essays." Is
> that the one you're talking about?

Sorry, Jim. I pasted the wrong URL, because I'd been reading the "Letters
to a Young Poet" essay that began this whole thread. The correct URL is:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031.txt

> What's the difference between an intellectual and a social snob? I
> wasn't really accusing her of any particular type of snobbery, just
> saying she was a snob. From what I've read of her bios she does seem to
> have moved in fairly exclusive circles, had problems with the help
> occasionally, but don't know that she was particularly rude to the lower
> class to their faces.

She was actually quite poor for much of her life, but she had a
distinguished literary heritage, so she considered herself one of the
intellectual elite. Her father was a well-known writer whose first wife
was Thackeray's daughter.

> That Guardian article looks good. This line:
>
> >The idea that one may like Bennett and Woolf, Woolf and James Joyce was
> not possible for her.
> >
> I don't think is completely accurate. She had her criticisms of Joyce,
> but places herserlf in the same class of writer as Joyce in her "Modern
> Fiction" essay, in oppositon to Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, and I think
> Bennett too.

She does say very nice things about Joyce in that particular essay,
insofar as she'd read the serializations of ULYSSES. However, I seem to
recall that, in A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, she very clearly separates women
writers from male writers simply by virtue of difficulty and sensibility.
She found far more similarities between herself and George Eliot or Jane
Austen than James Joyce, even though modern scholars would disagree.

> I like the criticism of the film "The Hours" to the extent it's deserved
> (I don't know, I haven't seen the film). Woolf did indeed like having a
> good time. Her nephew records a party in which her and her sister (the
> biographer's mother :) ) ran around topless for awhile.

There's a number of stories like that about her. Didn't the Bloomsbury
crowd at one point pretend to be a foreign delegation and fool some Very
Important People? Something about a boat.

> >
> "ability to look at the situation of women without bitterness"? Has she
> not read "A Room of One's Own" or "Three Guineas." They're both
> brilliant essays, but I wouldn't say they're free of bitterness.

Agreed. Actually, I'd say that without the bitterness, they'd lose much
of their flavor.

Best,
Cecilia.

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Received on Tue Jul 8 14:52:30 2003