VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: OR RATHER, A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN.
52 Tavistock Square, London, WC1, a plaque now remembers Virginia Woolf (*1882- †1941), the basement from where she ran, as from 1924, together with her husband, the Hogarth Press, and whether she also had her “writing-room”. We presume that this is where she fine-tuned the final written version of the lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1928, “On Women and Fiction”, to appear in 1929 as “A room of one’s own”, subsequent to be rescued as one of the pillars of modern “feminism”, at least in the realm of literature. Much later, in the year 2004, a bust of Woolf was added to the garden of the square.
“… a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”1
Let us underline that charming homage to the British Library (then hosted by the British Museum, nowadays in Euston Road, near St-Pancras), and reiterate our thanks to the personnel of that honourable institution, perhaps the most enlightening and productive “office” the author of these lines has ever had, from 1981 onward, and which has helped writers, artists, scholars and politicians from all over the world since its first opened.
Years ago, while scribbling away on a notebook the next authors who were to appear in the blog, I did engrave the name of Virginia Woolf, even taking into account that my familiarity with her literary opus should be described as rather tentative and incomplete. The fact that she appears now, much earlier than planned, is all the fault of the Greeks, as always. In 2023 I received an email, which always begins with a vibrant χαῖρε!, from Antigone. An open forum for classics2, a wonderful website dedicated to the celebration (and re-interpretation) of the Greek-Roman backbone of our so-called Western world, which keeps being eroded from the inside. It was an invitation to read an essay of Virginia Wolf On Not Knowing Greek3, published first in 1923.
I was all astonishment, as I began to be assaulted by the beauty and the rhythm of such love-declaration to Classical Greek, a text whose flow does indeed reverberate the “stream of consciousness”, a narrative device which she, together with Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and James Joyce (1882-1941), was to pioneer, helping her to be considered, at least by some, as one of the most innovative novelists of the 20th century. Above all, Classical Greek continues to constitute a refuge, for everyone wanting to be exorcised of the malheur and the aimless forwardness of the epoch, be either that of Woolf, or ours. What the Germans at the most appropriate call “Weltschmerz” (badly translated as “the pain of being in the world”), was for the Ancient Greeks a normal, inescapable, unlamented “natural state of the world”:
“There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”4
But it is the language in itself that perseveres, at one level the rhythm, at other the “compactness”:
“Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole ting of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley (Percy Bysshe Shelley, *1792-†1822) takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek.
πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἔρως ἅψηται. 5 (13 words)
…For everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love. (21 words)
Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled.”
The key problem in Shelley’s translation is the word ἄμουσος, which he adroitly transforms into “undisciplined”, μουσος being related to the “Muses” (Μοῦσαι, the nine inspirational goddesses of the arts and science), ἄ acting as an “inverting” prefix, “those not inhaling the spirit of the “Muses”. In German we have the adjective “musisch”, derived straight from Greek, hence “unmusisch” would be a person who, alas, has not been permeated by the “Muses”. Thus, a German version, aspiring at the same “compactness” would be:
“Alle werden Dichter, selbst die früher Unmusischen, alsbald denen Liebe anfällt.“(11 words)
An even shorter version, replacing “Unmusischen” for “Unfähigkeit', and getting rid of one article and one personal pronoun, would be:
„Alle werden Dichter, alsbald Liebe anfällt, trotz früher Unfähigkeit'' (9 words)
A possible English version:
“Everyone, self those earlier unenlightened, becomes a poet, as soon Eros imperates…” (12 words)
In Spanish:
“Todos devienen poetas, incluso aquellos que eran incapaces, apenas Eros impere...” (11 words).
Yet the version which upholds the compactness of the Greek original and does not alter the substance is in Latin, provided by a Latinist, an acquaintance of the writer of these lines:
AMŌRE QVICVMQVE RAPIĀTVR, QVAMQVAM LONGISSIME A MVSIS AFVERIT, ARTIFEX FIT. (10 words)
But was Shelley perhaps, by enlarging the number of words, just trying to extend the fragrance, to enhance the enjoyment of the “concentrated substance” contained in the Greek original? Or, as he might have been “paid” by the number of words contained in his opus, did he simply stretch the phrase as far as possible, in order to get more money? Let us be magnanimous.
So it is indeed possible to force other languages to abandon a little bit of their carcass (perhaps superfluous), but we are pushed towards such an attempt by the Greek language. It is she who is illuminating the path to be entered to obtain “semantic concentration” …
Hence Woolf’s insistence on going to the original:
“It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations.“6
“And, although it seems ungracious to add this when we have owned so much indebtedness to translators, some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without. With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as “aweary” will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. And such is the power of the Greek language that to know even a little of it is to know that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.“7
The last phrase “… nothing more beautiful in the world…” could sound nowadays as an excessive romantic over-appraisal. Yet that eulogy, formulated in the 1920s, has not lost its pertinence. Even more, it has been retaken and popularised, hence reaching larger audiences, over the last years. One example is the considerable success (more so taking into account the subject) of a delightful book (more than 300.000 copies sold) written by the Italian hellenist and essayist, Andrea Marcolongo, “La Lingua Geniale. 9 ragioni per amare il greco” (2016), The ingenious language. Nine epic reasons to love Greek” “ , translated into many languages, and well-received everywhere in spite of some shortcomings and errors.
A very much recommendable Italian television programme, Otto e Mezzo, la 7, broadcasted on the 3rd of January of 2017 the refreshing encounter, LUNGA VITA ALLE LINGUE MORTE, under the supervision of Lilli Gruber, between Marcolongo, the Latinist and professor at Oxford, Nicola Gardini, author of a book also successful, “Viva il latino, Storia et Belleza di una lingua inutile” (2016), and the art historian Vittorio Sgarbi. (…) Gardini will publish in 2021 “Viva il Greco. Alla scoperta della lingua madre”, to underline, once more, what he said in that television programme, “… il lavoro sul il latino y il greco è davvero un addestramento a la densità del significato…”, motivated by “un desiderio de parola ultima…”
I cannot but insist upon every reader of this blog to watch that programme (available in Internet), even if their Italian was too basic, and listen to that joyous, enlightening exchange between connoisseurs and amateurs of the classical languages, and how the supposedly “dead languages” help to understand the whirlwinds of our epoch, the fate of Italy and Europe, and even that of the Catholic Church.
Yet this Classical Greek tsunami keeps expanding its waves. Less than two months ago, Le Figaro, one of the major French newspapers, carry a long article, entitled “Why Ancient Greek is essential to enjoy happiness” (free translation), in which Laure de Chantal, “écrivaine et agrégée de lettres classiques”, “Si vous faites du grec, vous serez toujours heureux!”, “If you do Ancient Greek, you will always be happy!”.
Whether this propaganda for Ancient Greek as the ultimate panacea for the malheurs of our epoch reflects to a large extent the current French crisis and national disorientation, which looms becoming one of the most earthshaking of the “5th Republic”, remains a valid question mark. Whatever the answer, the embrace of Ancient Greek, either seeking refuge or seeking wisdom, emerges more and more as the last anchor in a so-called Western World which has lost its compass.
DO MATERIAL CONDITIONS NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE POSSIBILITY AND THE QUALITY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION?
A first impression, after reading Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, is that the English writer was adamant that only “economic independence” would guarantee that a woman could express herself, and be herself, in the unpredictable industry of “writing fiction”.
“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a
conclusion upon these two questions – women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. 8
Yet there is more than the postulate of a mechanic synergy between material conditions and literary creation. It is also a somewhat whimsical yet relevant and humour-blessed panorama of the absurdities uttered on women and their supposed inabilities over the last centuries, including Napoleon and Benito Mussolini, the latter finding women incapable, the former despising them. No wonder that these two “war lords” ended their career under lugubrious circumstances. On the “other side” were both Dr. Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, admiring women and seeking their companionship, recognising their cogitations as no way underneath the level of men.
Woolf goes further, that of the two news which landed more or less at the same time, “votes for women”, and a “legacy of an aunt”, it was the legacy that counted the most. A lesser dependency on men implied also a reappraisal of their role in the world:
“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened I found that she had left me five hundreds pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. (…) So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. (…) I need not flatter any man; ...”9
Mrs. Woolf takes a particular interest in the Elizabethan Era, the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), considered by many as the “golden age” in English history, a sort of “English Renaissance”, with considerable achievements at all levels, in literature above all the name William Shakespeare will be engraved in gold.
“...ask the historian (,,,) to describe under what conditions women lived (…) in the time of Elizabeth. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. 10
(…) One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones will all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms; to realize that no women could have written poetry then.” 11
“Judith Shakespeare” appears, a fictional character created by Virginia Wool, “the sister of William”, to demonstrate that a woman with all the capabilities of the great English writer, could not have been allowed to implement all her talent, she would not be sent to school, that she would, at the end, simply die, forgotten, leaving no written traces of her artistic ambitions.
Albeit material conditions do impact upon artistic creation, it is risky at the utmost to reject the possibility of literary creation emerging even under the direst conditions, be either man or woman. As has been said, even slaves may be touched by the “Muses”, and respond by composing a song or a sonnet, precisely in order to elevate themselves above the misery and the exploitation.. A recent book by the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff, appropriately titled “Shakespeare's Sisters” disagree at strength with Woolf’s assessment of the Elizabethan epoch, proving that that era did indeed produce its share of great women writers.
Let us now jump into the nineteenth century, where we will see the emergence of the British “middle class”.
“… which Miss Emily Davies a litter later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them. If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, ‘women never have an half four … that they can call their own’ – she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have in the general sitting-room, subject to all kind of interruptions. “12
So, notwithstanding the lack of “a room of one’s own”, Jane Austen was capable of writing great novel. Was she perhaps just an exception?
It is in the comparison between Jane Austen (*1775- †1817 ), whom Mrs Woolf admires all heartedness, to the point of comparing her to the great Ancient Greeks, and Charlotte Brontë (*1816- †1855), where we could pinpoint the seeds of Woolf’s final formulation of his theory about women’s writing, but also her contradictions:
“One might say, I continued, laying the book beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages (Jane Eyre) had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks the jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she (Charlotte) will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly (…) She was at war with her lot.”13
That Charlotte Brontë had genius was recognised first by William Makepeace Thackeray, who eulogised Jane Eyre as “the work of a great genius”. I happen to disagree with Mrs. Woolf, to the point perhaps of abandoning my politeness. What the Bloomsbury lady says is that (my reformulation):
“… Jane Austen wrote, abandoning herself to simplicity and spontaneity (and humour), as a woman, without any existentialist Angst. Charlotte Brontë wrote as a woman, who kept complaining about the world treated her, hence…”
Yet where then not sufficient, solid arguments for Charlotte, and most women, to complain about the way society was treating them? And to let that transpires through a novel is to be welcomed.
Woolf’s then begins to formulate her view of how women should “exist” in literature:
“But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sees are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring our and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? 14
This is a powerful statement, and nowadays perhaps even more relevant. It is followed by another crucial warning:
“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It its fatal to be a a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman.”15
One might be tempted to interpret the above-quoted as an indirect appeal for some kind of “androgyny" ”, yet I believe it is just another way of underlying, again, that simple, unequivocal appeal for anyone venturing into the varied avenues of the belles lettres, at times thorny, at times flowery: when you write, you should forget about your sex.
It must be said that Wool’s tour de force through the steppes and the mountains of “Women and Fiction” circumscribed itself, mostly, to the English-speaking word. In particular the French-speaking world will provide, not doubt whatsoever, a more complex, and perhaps even more intriguing panorama. From the 16th century, French women writers (albeit almost always coming from the aristocracy, be either the well-endowed or the less fortunate regarding property and cash) would play a key role in the emergence and development of the French novel.
Even the way Mrs. Woolf used the English language does provide difficulties for other languages. The very expression “of one’s own” is almost untranslatable in many languages. In German, for example, the usual translation is “Ein Zimmer für sich allein”, which, retranslated into English, means in fact “a room for oneself alone”. Far away from the emphasis on possession, of “property”, evident in the English original, though Woolf does not specify throughout the whole essay whether that “room” should be legally “owned” by the woman.
Summa summarum, rather “A life of one’s own”, that writing would be more inspiring, more enlightening and could reach peaks of spontaneous, contagious beauty, if it is rooted in a life constructed beyond sex, beyond false allegiances, beyond fashionable disguises.
Virginia Woolf enjoys the privilege of being re-born incessantly, and sought-after as a feminist of la première heure, very much alive in our epoch. See, for example, a recent article in Le Figaro, France.
“This week our review of the greatest essays and essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, “A Room of One’s Own” (…) And how, despite all that, it sill manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.”
Some readers of this blog might ask themselves why did I begin the contribution on Mrs. Woolf by her essay on the Greek language, and not on the one providing the title of the contribution. I wanted to explain why is it that Virginia Woolf appears now, rather than much later, but above all, I wished the reader to understand that only a woman who has bathed herself in that glorious ocean of Ancient Greek, who took possession of the tools provided by that “mother of all languages”, “that were everything began”, “the language of the Gods”, could have written such a splendid and lively essay on the destiny of women, which confirms her status as one of the most intelligent, one of the most original and penetrating female minds of the 20th century.
JCHK 2024.
1Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”, Grafton. An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, first edition 1929, Pg. 30. Out underlying.
2https://antigonejournal.com/
3Consult https://antigonejournal.com/2023/on-not-knowing-greek/. First edition 1923.
4Woolf (1923), p. 23.
5Woolf (1923), p. 20. Plato Symposium 196e; the phrase “even if he was formerly uncultured” is a quotation from a lost play of Euripides, Stheneboea (fr. 663)
6Woolf (1923), p. 20.
7THE PERFECT LANGUAGE. Review of the second volume of W.R. Paton’s Greek Anthology (Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1917), Times Literary Supplement 801 (24 May 1917) , following Woolf (1923 ( p. 32).
8Woolf (1929(, PP. 7-8.
9PP. 42-43.
10PP. 43-44.
11Pg. 64.
12Pg. 73.
13Pg. 76.
14Pg. 95.
15Pg. 112.
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