A piece by Library Assistant, Sally Oxland.
A few years ago, I’d been reading a number of books written by women between 1900 and 1980, most of which were published by Virago or Persephone. Always on the lookout for someone I’d never read before, I picked up a 2009 edition of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Pastors and Masters, in Hesperus’s Modern Voice series. This had a foreword written by Sue Townsend, which included the comment:
“I knew nothing about her [Ivy] at the time, apart from the fact that she was a high priestess of English literature, and that Virginia Woolf lost sleep at night worrying about their rivalry”
This intrigued me. I’d never studied either writer at school, but had read Mrs Dalloway at uni, without enjoying it. I’ve never grown to love her fiction, but I find her non-fiction enthralling and often very funny. ‘A Room of one’s Own’ is a work of genius, and I find the following passage from one of her essays both funny and poignant (poignant, because it was written two weeks before her suicide, at a time of fragile mental health, when her doctor had ordered her to concentrate on ordinary domestic housework and cooking):
“And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner, Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down”
I had to find out why Ivy Compton-Burnett had caused her sleepless nights, and this led me to investigate the dramatic changes which took place in their respective reputations over the course of the best part of a century. So, here is the result of my search.
Edward Albee’s play Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first performed in 1962, was hugely successful, winning many awards. In 1966, the film version won Oscars for best leading actress, Elizabeth Taylor, and best supporting actress, Sandy Dennis.
The source of the title, according to Albee, was a slogan scrawled in soap on a mirror in a New York saloon, but his memory of where he actually saw it may have been slightly hazy, because five years earlier, in a 1957 issue of the New Yorker magazine, a writer described how a friend had spotted that phrase while reading graffiti on the wall of an espresso café in Greenwich Village. Maybe Albee had coffee in the same place, or maybe he was a regular reader of the New Yorker…
Whatever the origin of the title may have been, Albee was struck by the phrase. It seemed to him a “rather typical, university intellectual joke”, well suited to his play set in a world of tormented university academics.
The joke was apparently lost on the wider public. Who was Virginia Woolf? She was not one of the characters in the play, and her day as the leading icon of women’s modernist writing was yet to dawn. In the 1960s her name was unfamiliar to many, and early reviews of the play and film invariably felt the need to explain just who she was.
During her lifetime, Virginia Woolf herself was by no means confident of her reputation. In 1937, the final book to be published before her suicide in 1941 was poorly received by critics, and she was tortured by sleepless nights as she brooded on the work of a rival woman writer. She noted in her diary on March 31st:
“I was so damnably depressed and smacked on the cheek by Edwin Muir in The Listener and by Scott James in The Life. They both gave me a smart snubbing : E M says The Years is dead and disappointing, so in effect did S James. All the lights sank, my reed bent to the ground. Dead and disappointing – so I’ found out, and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it – a dank failure. My writing is much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton Burnett. Now this pain woke me at 4 a.m. and I suffered acutely.”
Ivy Compton-Burnett was the writer whose reputation was so feared by Virginia Woolf. She was two years younger than Woolf, and said of her own work “my books are hard not to put down”, a description whose direct, comic bluntness gives a glimpse of the “bitter truth and intense originality” admired by Virginia.
Contemporary critics were equally impressed. The New Statesman described Compton-Burnett as “… one of the very really original novelists alive… Her strange books have about them the golden touch of perfection: in their own sphere they are flawless works of art, and no-one else could conceivably have written a page of them,” while the TLS wrote of her “…brilliant wit”, and her “ …formal and sophisticated elegance of conversational idiom, and gift for quiet, bland and sinister melodrama”, describing her as “a remarkable and unusual novelist, who has in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel.”
Reviews of Virginia Woolf’s books, whilst praising the beauty of her writing, often found an absence of humanity there. This is notable in contemporary criticism of The Waves, in 1931.
Frank Swinnerton, reviewing the book in the Evening News wrote:
I am not a great admirer of Mrs Woolf’s work, and I find the present book as bloodless as its predecessors; but it would be idle to deny great distinction to the style, great beauty to many of the similes, and much subtlety and penetration to the author’s intuitions. If to these qualities life had been added, I should have been lost in admiration of Mrs Woolf’s gifts.
L. P. Hartley, in the Week-end Review found a sombre side behind the dazzling prose in Woolf’s characters, with their spiritual rather than corporeal presence:
[The characters] do not speak what is in their minds, they speak what is at the back of them, they proceed from association to association, from speculation to speculation borne up on bubbles of pure aesthetic emotion. . . .; phrases and sentences of perfect beauty, strain seraphically free from taint of personality. . . . Her genius is like a shaft of sunlight breaking into a room — a golden medium in which float a million fiery particles but beyond that enchanted area the darkness is darker than it was.
Storm Jameson, writing for the Fortnightly Review, also remarked on the distance between the bright, physical reality of life and its shadowy image seen in Virginia Woolf’s prose.
Mrs Woolf has made enormous sacrifices. She is like a woman who has turned her back on life and watches it passing in a mirror, so that nothing shall shake the steadiness of her glance, none of those distractions, those sudden blindings that come from touching what one sees.
Metaphor, interior monologues and streams of consciousness create the shimmering, shifting, ambiguous universe of Virginia Woolf’s books, while forceful dialogue relentlessly drives Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters and plots to their inevitable fate – the “bitter truth” which Virginia saw at the heart of Ivy’s work, in comparison to her own “dank failure”.
In Dodie Smith’s book ‘It Ends in Revelations’, published in 1967, a teenage character, Kit, describes Ivy Compton-Burnett as her favourite modern novelist, because: “the dialogue’s so marvellous, somehow it’s what the characters are thinking as well as what they are saying, so it ends by being what they are.” Kit goes on to list the plots of Ivy’s books as dealing with adultery, bigamy, murder and incest.
Ivy Compton-Burnett’s faultless skill in dealing with such highly-charged, lurid subjects, through the everyday medium of conversational speech, clearly captured a hugely admiring audience from the late 1920s, but her popularity languished in the late 1960s, when her tales of Edwardian families in crisis no longer seemed to strike a chord in the rapidly changing cultural climate.
By contrast, appreciation of Virginia Woolf’s elliptical prose flourished, and the nuances and ambiguities of her lifestyle fitted well with the spirit of the age, alongside the rise of second-wave feminism, and the explosion of feminist literary criticism of the 1970s.
Since then, there would seem to be little doubt over which of the two enjoys the greater reputation, both as a key writer in the literary canon, and as an iconic figure in public recognition and in popular culture.
Virginia Woolf’s work is studied in schools and universities throughout the world, and countless academic books and articles are written about her.
She appears as a character in popular fiction, in Maggie Gee’s ‘Virginia Woolf in Manhattan’, and in 1988, singer Siobahn Fahey left chirpy 1980s girl band Bananarama, to form the gothy Shakespears Sister, seizing on a reflection from Virginia’s 1929 feminist essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ to name her new venture. In 2002, when Nicole Kidman won the Oscar for best actress for her role as Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours, no explanation of her character was seen as necessary.
Today, almost sixty years since that first performance of Albee’s play, Virginia Woolf’s reputation is assured.
Here in Bromley House, we have six of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, and one biography of her life. Thirteen of Virginia’s novels are on the shelves, and 25 books about her life, her writing, her travels, and her friends, 21 one of which were published after 1972, coinciding with upsurge of interest in her work and fascination with her life.
In these days of the Lockdown Library, many, many books were issued to you all in those few days of pandemic-borrowing that emptied our shelves. When the books are all returned, and we re-shelve them, it will be revealing to see whether any of you chose either Virginia or Ivy to keep you company in the Time of Corona. But that’s a job for another day…