Virginia Woolf: Carlyle's House and Other Sketches

Reviewed by STEPHANIE JOHNSON

In 1923, after Katherine Mansfield's death, Virginia Woolf wrote of her, "Do people always get what they deserve, and did Katherine Mansfield do something to deserve this cheap posthumous life?"

Woolf made this remark after a supposed sighting of Mansfield's ghost, but she could equally have made it as John Middleton Murry continued to publish all of his late wife's journals, letters, jottings, doodles and scraps of paper she had inadvertently marked.

Admirers of Woolf may recall her comments as this slim volume, Carlyle's House, is published. It's a collection of seven short sketches written by the then 27-year-old novice writer in 1909, and published for the first time this year. A great deal has been made of the discovery, which is a romantic tale in itself.

Theresa Davies, a family friend of Leonard Woolf's companion Trekkie Parsons, would now and again take on typing jobs. In 1968, Leonard gave her a notebook with a brown cover, dated 1909 and with most of the pages blank. Folded into the back of the notebook was a letter from Dame Ethel Smyth, the composer, feminist and suffragette, with whom Virginia had a long and passionate correspondence.

The letter is dated December, 1939, which gives us an indication of when the notebook was last handled by Virginia. Soon after he handed the notebook over, Leonard died and Theresa put it away in a bottom drawer. Then, during a recent house move, the notebook was rediscovered and given to David Bradshaw of Worcester College, Oxford.

Bradshaw's introduction to Carlyle's House is breathless and excited. This rather meagre collection of late juvenilia is, in his opinion, "a substantial addition to the Woolf canon" and contains "new angles on such prime Woolfian concerns as patriarchy, feminism and marriage".

These grand statements contrast resoundingly with the more realistic observations of Doris Lessing's down-to-earth foreword. In her opening sentence she describes the pieces as "five-finger exercises for future excellence" and, further on: "With Woolf we are up against a knot, a tangle, of unlikeable prejudices, some of her time, some personal."

This refers to the sketch that is likely to be received most negatively: Jews, an intensely unpleasant depiction of Mrs Loeb, a Jewish hostess at a dinner party Woolf attends. As antidote, Lessing reminds us of the Jewess in Between the Acts, the novel Woolf had almost finished at the time of her suicide in 1941, a character Virginia describes with affection and respect. Bradshaw writes that this sketch will "bear the doubtful distinction of being Woolf's first significant anti-Semitic smear".

It's a smear that will join the famously offensive caricature in her 1937 novel The Years and the lesser-known short story of the same year, The Duchess and the Jeweller.

In an effort to downplay this aspect of Virginia's work, Bradshaw says The Years "argues against the anti-Semitism of English fascists and emphasises the embeddedness of Jews in England". I think it is more that we forgive Virginia because of her marriage to the long-suffering and devoted Leonard, who was an assimilated Jew, which does much in the mind of the reader to obscure her lifelong anti-Semitism.

It is interesting to revisit 1909, the year of the notebook, and look at Virginia's life. She was living unhappily with the brother she had little in common with, Adrian, and had just accepted and rejected a proposal of marriage from Lytton Strachey. She was still grieving for her much-loved brother Thoby, who had died three years before from typhoid, and was about a year into an intense flirtation with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa's husband, who titillated himself and her by telling her he wanted to kiss her. In her diary, she describes 1909 as being "not a vintage year for diarising" and also a time of "vexations and frustrations".

In his short-lived diary of the same year, Adrian gives quite a different picture of Woolf's life, at least superficially. Together they attended plays, operas, concerts, soirees, dinners, parties, the zoo, Speakers' Corner. They went away for weekends in the country, and at the end of that year Woolf went to Europe with Vanessa and Clive Bell. Adrian records his sister going to her German lessons, sitting for her portrait and instigating her own Thursday evening meetings.

At this time she would also have been working on an early draft of her first novel, The Voyage Out. In 1909, she was leading a life full of stimulation and holidays, not at all unusual for a young woman of her class - not that it made Woolf happy. In August of that year, Strachey described her in a letter to Leonard Woolf as "young, wild, inquisitive, discontented and longing to be in love".

So it is through the eyes of this mostly unhappy young woman that we visit first Carlyle's house and meet in less than a page Amber Reeves, a young New Zealander who scandalised with her affair and consequent love-child to H.G. Wells. We go to Cambridge where George Darwin is described as a "solid object", which became common in her later work, used to describe anything Victorian and therefore passe. There's an account of visiting her tutor Miss Case at Hampstead, the nasty Jews and the final piece, the peculiar Divorce Courts.

This writing details a visit the author made to the courts to hear the famous case of Rev Fearnley-Whittingstall, who had repeatedly, over a number of years, raped and assaulted his wife. She had taken refuge with the lesbian Miss Lewis, who had opened her home to women in the same situation before. Oddly, given Virginia's feminism and bisexuality, she sympathises more with the deserted husband.

In her 1996 eponymous biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee writes "her remains are fearsome", and later that it is "a peculiarity of her posthumous reputation that the full, immense extent of her life's work has only revealed itself gradually". This new volume, then, is very much in keeping with the way that Virginia's body of work has stayed with us.

In the title sketch, Virginia remarks that Carlyle's house "has the look of something forcibly preserved". Perhaps the same could be said of this collection, too - it is a little museum piece, a little curiosity, and once the initial flurry is over, likely to be ignored by all but Woolfian scholars.

Foreword by Doris Lessing

Hesperus, $19.95