Some of us keep up an air of stoic indifference to reviews, some avoid distress by refusing to read them, but we all care, and for good reasons. His life would have entirely ended mine.” and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. When Desmond praises ‘East Coker,’ and I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I,” and even in her reflection on her father’s death: “Father . . . The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself. . . . ![]() Some readers, apparently, have been shocked to find how anxious and sensitive Virginia Woolf was about reviews, and how easily commendation of others could make her envious, but most writers, if they are honest, will recognize themselves in such remarks as “No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. Henry James in his notebooks, letters, and prefaces may have said more interesting things about literary technique, but I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like, what are its worries, its rewards, its day-by-day routine. It was, I feel, a very happy idea to confine the selections from her diary to her reflections on her own career as a writer. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?” No, I can’t get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely and at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. So intense are my feelings (about Roger) yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. Forster, and during the spring of 1940, when invasion seemed imminent, Virginia Woolf refused to be distracted from writing her life of Roger Fry: “It’s the vastness, and the smallness, that makes this possible. It dictates ‘This half hour must be spent on Russian,’ ‘This must be given to Wordsworth.’ Or ‘Now I’d better darn my brown stockings,’ ” and it is characteristic that the word she should find to express her critical reservations about “Ulysses” is “underbred.” Politically a little to the left of center, they all shared a deep distrust of Parties and the State, believing passionately in the supreme importance of personal relations: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” wrote E. M. “I have,” writes Virginia Woolf-and most of them could have written the same-“an internal, automatic scale of values which decides what I had better do with my time. In rebellion against the rhetoric and conventional responses of their Victorian parents, hating dogma, ritual, and hypocritical expressions of unreal feelings, they, nevertheless, inherited from the Victorians a self-discipline and fastidiousness that made bohemian disorder impossible. Nearly all its members had been to Cambridge and came from distinguished upper-middle-class families i.e., without being aristocrats or large landowners, they were accustomed to efficient servants, first-rate meals, good silver and linen, and weekends in country houses. It included novelists, critics, painters, college dons but, curiously, no important poet (if one counts Virginia Woolf as a novelist) or composer. There is an excellent account of the intellectual influences from which it was born in a posthumous essay by Maynard Keynes for its later history we shall have to rely upon the memoirs of David Garnett, which are now appearing in England, and the journals of Virginia Woolf, of which “A Writer’s Diary” (Harcourt, Brace) is, we hope, only the first installment.īloomsbury was not a “school” in any literary sense-there is no common Bloomsbury style or subject-nor was it centered on any one salon, like the Holland House set of the nineteenth century, or the Garsington set, to which many of its members also belonged. ![]() It is, probably, already too late to hope that someone will write a definitive history of Bloomsbury, that fascinating cultural milieu which formed itself around 1910, exercised its greatest influence during the twenties, and came to an end with the death of Virginia Woolf. Photograph from Mondadori Portfolio / Getty
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