Back to Virginia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 26

Back to Virginia

OME 15 years ago, I greatly admired Virginia Woolf’s novels, I still respect her artistic integrity and the ‘sensitivity of her style. But on being reread, her books seem to reveal such, intellectual snobbery and emotional preciosity, so limited a view of human nature and so inadequate a vision of reality that they have lost most of their appeal. They proceed from a narrow little world, the end of which may be symbolised by Mrs Woolf’s suicide. I could endure only an hour of Louis MacNeice’s précis of The Waves (1YC); fatigue at trying to discern a pattern behind the thought-processes of her characters and at the monotony of outlook forced me elsewhere for a 4

mind-rinse. The following evening, introduced by George Rylands, nearly all the survivors of Bloomsbury paid tribute to her "beauty" (a description which always baffles me), her wit, integrity, genius and sensitivity, This Portrait was, I thought, more interesting than The Waves, for its concreteness and for three particular thingsMarjorie Fry’s admission that Virginia Woolf often did less than justice to human beings, a_ description of her snobbish deflation of earnest young men, and the reminiscences of the Woolfs’ cook, who, among all these high-brows, struck the most human and

spontaneous note.

J.C.

R.