While Tolstoy and William Morris both came to doubt art’s power to change society—and if it failed in that it failed for them in everything—James Joyce and Virginia Woolf entrusted themselves to it, for its own sake, entirely. ‘Now they’re bombing Spain,’ said Joyce in 1936. ‘Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done?’ Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe, in Between the Acts, is her last version, perhaps consciously her last, of the artist in relation to society. Finishing the book, as always, was a strain on her perilous mental balance. It was written, but not revised for the press, when she walked out of her garden gate and down to the river to drown herself.
From 1938 onwards Leonard and Virginia Woolf were living for longer and longer periods in the country, at Rodmell in Sussex. Between the Acts is contained in a day and a night, and in one country house with its barn, pastures, and gardens. Poyntz Hall is old but middle-sized and ordinary—as far as anything described by Virginia Woolf is ordinary. There is no mention of it in the guidebooks, but ‘driving past, people said to each other, “I wonder if that’ll ever come into the market?”’ But although its beauty is real, its suggestion of a settled contentment is not. A closer look shows ‘vast vacancies’ of body and spirit. Children are divided from adults, husband from wife, servants from employers, and Poyntz Hall itself seems cut off from the war and almost unconcerned, although at any moment ‘guns might rake the ancient land into furrows.’ Miss La Trobe is the unlikely force that will make for wholeness. She is a bizarre, disconsolate figure, a lesbian deserted by her lover, fond of drink and known to the villagers as Bossy. Her art is as a presenter of pageants. She ‘gets them up,’ composing everything herself, words, music, and passing shows. A setting is required—Poyntz Hall itself—and an acceptable cause, in this case a collection for the repair of the parish church, but these are not the things that matter to Miss La Trobe. A heap of old clothes and a cast of amateur actors who don’t always know their parts are all that she has to work with, and she despairs, or almost despairs, of making her audience ‘see.’ What she had had in mind to show them had been the whole history of their island, back to the ‘night before roads were made, or houses,’ through to the present moment when they would be asked to see their own reflections in great mirrors and looking glasses, borrowed from the Hall and held up to their view. All this had been her intention, but in her own judgement she has failed. She needs company, she needs a drink, but in the village she is an outcast and she knows that when she goes into the public bar, the customers will fall silent. This, however, is not important to her (just as Virginia Woolf tried to persuade herself, time after time, that what her critics said was unimportant). For her the failure—worse than death—is failure as an artist. But when the pageant is over and the audience has drifted away, leaving the park to the cows and the roosting swallows, Miss La Trobe is already possessed by a new idea. She has ‘heard the first words.’ These are words that other characters in the book will speak, but have not yet spoken. In fact, we never know what they are. But Miss La Trobe does know.
She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant: one thread of smoke thickened against the trees…From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.
from End Games, edited by Maura Dooley,
South Bank, 1988
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Ackland, Valentine, 247—8, 250, 252; Whether a Dove or a Seagull (with Sylvia Townsend Warner), 250
Ackroyd, Peter: Blake, 12, 14—15; Dickens, 14
Acworth, Dr James, 93
Aiken, Conrad, 189
Alain-Fournier (Henri Alain Fournier), 305—10, 354; Colombes Blanchet, 306; Le Grand Meaulnes, 305, 306—7; translated as The Lost Domain by Frank Davison, 305, 309—10
Albert, Stephen, 529
Aldington, Richard: enlists, 161; Images, 165
Allen, Walter, 52
Allston, Washington, 19
Amis, Sir Kingsley: correspondence with Larkin, 375, 377
Amory, Mark, 331
Andrews, Henry Maxwell, 315—17
Angier, Carole: Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 318—19
Annan, Noël, Baron, 277
Anscombe, Elizabeth, 356
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 167
Arbuckle, Roscoe (‘Fatty’), 467
Arkell, David: Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life, 1886—1914, 305, 308
Arnim, Elizabeth von, 149
Arts and Crafts movement, 129—33
Ashbee, Charles Robert: biography by Fiona MacCarthy, 129—33; From Whitechapel to Camelot, 129
Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 130
Ashbee, Janet (née Forbes), 131
Askwith, Betty: Two Victorian Families, 76
Asquith, Anthony, 327
Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 188
Atherton, Gertrude, 229
Athill, Diana, 318
Atlantic Monthly, The, 24
Auden, Wystan Hugh: influence on MacNeice, 347, 352; John Lehmann publishes, 341; MacNeice travels with, 348
Augustine, St, 313
Austen, Jane: final illness, 5; on romantic imagination, 395; Emma, 5—11; Northanger Abbey, 10; Persuasion, 506—7
Austen-Leigh, James E. (Jane Austen’s nephew): memoir of Jane, 10
Austin, Alfred, 104
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 44n
Bacon, Leonard, 169
Baker, Michael: Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall, 253—8
Balcombe, Sussex, 468, 486—90
Baldwin, Louisa (née Macdonald), 105, 115, 137
Balfour, Arthur James (later 1st Earl), 145
Banks, Leslie, 483
Barbera, Jack and William McBrien (eds): Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smih, 358—63
Barrie, Sir James Matthew: on attempting to grow up, 306; on Mrs Oliphant, 511; and Peter Pan statue, 189; visits dying Mrs Oliphant, 72; Peter Pan, 213
Basire, James, 13
Batemans (house), Sussex, 142
Batey, Mavis, 84
Batten, Mabel (‘Ladye’), 255—8
Battiscombe, Georgina: Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, 97—100
Bawden, Edward, 168
Bayley, John, 502
Beach, Sylvia, 168
Beardsley, Aubrey, 139, 177
Beardsley, Mabel, 140
Beauman, Sally, introduction to Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys, 233—5
Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron, 315
Beck, Ian, 310
Beckett, Samuel, 414, 505, 525
Bedford College, London, 173—4
Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of, 453
Beerbohm, (Sir) Max, 233
Bell, Clive, 281, 283
Bell, Julian, 283, 338
Bell, Quentin, 275, 277, 289
Bell, Vanessa, 280—4, 289, 291
Bellow, Saul: Henderson the Rain King, 424; Ravelstein, 424—6
Benda, Simone, 306, 308; Sous les nouveaux soleils, 307
Bennett, Alan, 215
Benson family, 280
Benson, Arthur, 73, 75, 196
Benson, Edward White, Archbishop of Canterbury: biography by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, 73—8; and loss of eldest son, 281
Benson, Frederick, 73, 75, 280
Benson, Hugh, 73, 75—6, 280
Benson, Maggie, 73, 75
Benson, Martin, 75
Benson, Minnie (née Sidgwick), 73—5
Benson, Nellie, 73
Benson, W.A.S., 138
Bernhardt, Sarah, 139
Besant, Annie, 118
Bethlehem, 459
Betjeman, Sir John, 346, 445
Biala, Janice, 295
Blackwood, John (publisher), 32, 38, 40, 58,
67
Blackwood, Major (publisher), 40
Blackwood, Miss (John’s sister), 52
Blackwood, William, 61
Blackwood’s Magazine: Mrs Oliphant writes for, 40, 43, 57, 67, 70
Blake, Catherine (née Boucher; William’s wife), 13—14, 16
Blake, James and Catherine (William’s parents), 12—13
Blake, William, 12—16, 313, 358; ‘Schoolboy’, 168
Bloomsbury group, 277, 289
Blunden, Edmund, 354
Blunt, Anthony, 346, 348
Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen: on Charlotte Mew, 178; on William Morris, 107; Love-Lyrics & Songs of Praise, 124
Boer War (1899—1902), 245
Boll, Theophilus, 179
Booker Prize, 477—9
Boos, Florence, 104
Bottomley, Gordon, 150
Bourget, Paul, 235
Bowen, Stella, 295
Bowra, Sir Maurice, 99
Boylan, Clare (ed.): The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored, 507
Brenan, Gerald, 289
Bridges, Robert, 166
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): John Lehmann at, 342; MacNeice works for, 349, 351; Penelope Fitzgerald works for, 472—5
Brittain, Vera, 253
Brontë, Charlotte: Villette, 66
Brontë, Emily, 98
Brooke, Rupert, 157
Brooke-Rose, Christine: Amalgamemnon, 506—7
Brown, Ford Madox, 294
Brown, Frederick, 289
Burnand, Francis, 208
Burne-Jones family: at The Grange, 133—4
Burne-Jones, Christopher, 134
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward: death, 142; decline in popularity, 141; exhibits, 137—8; fears de Morgan’s wife, 126—7; at The Grange, 136—40; illustrates Kelmscott Chaucer, 124, 141; indulges granddaughters, 141; infatuation with Helen Gaskell, 141—2; Kipling visits, 101; liaison with Mary Zambaco, 108—9, 135, 145; marriage, 108—9; Mary Nicholson keeps house for, 117; meets George Eliot, 36; resigns from Academy, 139; stained glass, 137, 146; supports William Morris, 124; tours Italy, 137; watercolours reviewed (1993), 143—7; Golden Stairs, 138; ‘The Merciful Knight’, 144—5; Phyllis and Demophoön, 136, 145
Burne-Jones, Georgiana, Lady (née Macdonald): on Edward’s ‘The Merciful Knight’, 144; at The Grange, 135, 140—1; in local politics, 118; marriage, 108—9; on Morrises’ marriage, 117; on servant problems, 92, 139; settles in Rottingdean, 142; William Morris’s dependence on, 119
Burne-Jones, Margaret see Mackail, Margaret
Butler, John, 529
Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, 115
Butts, Thomas, 14
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 19—20
Cage, John, 529
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal): exhibition (New York 1990), 450—6
Cannan, Gilbert, 166
Carlyle, Thomas, 21
Carpenter, Edward, 130—1, 242—3
Carr, James Lloyd: The Harpole Report, 380, 386; A Month in the Country: Introduction to, 380—7
Carrington, Dora, 288—91
Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson): biographies of, 80—6; deaconate, 193; Alice in Wonderland, 83; Sylvie and Bruno, 85; Through the Looking Glass, 83
Cartwright, Julia, 140, 142
Cather, Willa, 25
Cecil, Lord David, 327
Chalmers, Martin, 432—3, 436
Chang, Jung see Jung Chang
Chapbook (Harold Monro’s periodical), 160, 166—8, 170
Chapman, John (publisher), 37—8
Charles I, King, 446
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Kelmscott Press edition, 123, 141
Chelsea Bookshop, 162
Chelsea Broadsides, 162
Chipping Campden, 129, 131—2
Christ Church, Oxford: Lewis Carroll at, 81
Christian, John, 146
Christ’s Hospital (school), 19
Clarke, Revd James Stanier, 6
Cobden-Sanderson, Annie, 118
Cockerell, Kate, Lady, 182
Cockerell, Sir Sydney, 124, 171, 181—2, 188
Cohen, Morton N.: Lewis Carroll: A Biography, 80—5
Coldstream, Nancy, 348
Coleridge, Mary, 188
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17—21; Biographia Literaria, 20; Notebooks, 20; Remorse (play), 19
Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White, 57, 134
Coltman, Ella, 187—8
Compton-Burnett, Dame Ivy, 505
Connolly, Cyril: edits Horizon, 341 Conrad, Joseph: friendship with F.M. Ford, 295—6
Constable, John, 482
Conti, Italia see Italia Conti
Cooper, Barbara, 343
Cooper, James Fenimore, 21
Cornford, Frances: Monro publishes, 165; ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’, 170
Corvo, Baron see Rolfe, Frederick
Cottle, Joseph, 19
Coulton, Barbara: Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 349
Cournos, John, 272
Cox, Michael, 192
Craig, Edward Gordon, 167
Crane, Walter, 146
Crawford, Alan, 129
Cronwright-Schreiner, Cron, 241, 244—5
Cross, John, 37, 39
Cuala Press, 227
Dahl, Roald: biography by Jeremy Treglown, 371—3; Boy, 371
D’Arcy, Ella, 177
Dartmoor, 446—9
David, Elizabeth: A Book of Mediterranean Food, 342
Davies, W.H., 149—50, 161, 277
Davin, Dan, 344
Dawes, ‘Toddy’, 380—1
Delafield, E.M.: Consequences, 268; Late and Soon, 260; Thank Heaven Fasting: afterword, 259—70
de la Mare, Elfrida (née Ingpen; Walter’s wife), 187—9
de la Mare, Florence (Walter’s daughter), 189
de la Mare, Jinnie (Walter’s daughter), 189
de la Mare, Walter: appearance, 184; and Edward Thomas, 148, 150; and Naomi Royde Smith, 189; poetic qualities, 251; readings at Poetry Bookshop, 184, 277; reputation, 277; supports Charlotte Mew, 182; Theresa Whistler’s biography of, 184—90; ‘Arabia’, 169; ‘The Huntsmen’, 170; The Listeners and Other Poems, 188; Memoirs of a Midget, 189; ‘The Old Man’, 189; Peacock Pie, 184, 188—9, 488; A Portrait, 189
de la Pasture, Mrs Henry, 260
Democratic Federation, 139
de Morgan, Mary Evelyn (née Pickering), 126—8
de Morgan, William: biography by Mark Hamilton, 125—8; Alice-for-Short, 128; Joseph Vance, 128
Denman, Gertrude Mary, Lady (née Pearson), 489
De Quincey, Thomas, 19
Derby, Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of, 87
Dick, Kay, 360
Dickens, Charles: Angus Wilson and, 371; death, 36; dialogue in, 505—7; fictional plots, 497; on lesbianism, 253; not admired by Mrs Oliphant, 57, 64; sets final novel in cathedral city, 45; William Morris cites, 106; A Christmas Carol, 46
Dickinson, Emily, 358
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 130
Dickinson, Patric, 359
Digby, Kenelm: Broadstone of Honour, 112
Disraeli, Benjamin, 85, 205
Dodds, E.R., 344, 348
Dooley, Maura (ed.): Novelists at Work, 517
Douglas, James, 253
Doyle, Roddy: The Commitments, 406; The Snapper, 406; The Van, 406—10
Drabble, Margaret: Angus Wilson: A Biography, 367—71
Drinkwater, John, 157
Duffy, Maureen, 99
du Maurier, George, 206—8
Dun Emer Press, 168
Dunn, Douglas, 379
Dunn, Jane: A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, 280—4
Dürer, Albrecht: The Knight, Death, and the Devil, 112
Eastbourne, 491—2
Egoist, The (magazine), 179
Eliot, George: Georgiana Burne-Jones seeks advice from, 136; Karl’s biography of, 36—9; on M
ethodism, 54; Mrs Oliphant on life of, 70; Mrs Oliphant’s Salem Chapel attributed to, 58; on position of women, 31; on working in remote past, 525; Adam Bede, 38, 54; Autobiography, 70; Middlemarch, 28—35, 38, 115, 525; The Mill on the Floss, 31—3; Romola, 39; Scenes of Clerical Life, 44; Silas Marner, 38—9, 46, 511
Eliot, T.S.: edits Criterion, 167; on learning to care, 98; Monro rejects, 165—6; Pound promotes, 166; proposes toast to John Lehmann, 343; publishes MacNeice’s poetry, 348; reads to Oxford University Poetry Society, 354; takes French lessons from Alain-Fournier, 308; ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 401; The Rock, 285; The Waste Land, 166, 304, 354
Ellerbeck, George: Literary Award, 380
Ellis, Henry Havelock, 242—3, 257
Ellman, Richard: James Joyce, 529
Elton, Oliver, 217
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21, 239
Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Islands, 93
English Review, 295
Enright, D.J., 376
Epstein, (Sir) Jacob, 160 ‘Etherton, George’, 177
Eton Rambler (magazine), 194
Evans, Isaac (George Eliot’s brother), 37