1In her essay “The New Biography” (1927), Virginia Woolf expressed her belief that some recent biographers had finally succeeded in making it new for the genre. She had in mind the work of Lytton Strachey, the French author André Maurois, and chiefly Harold Nicolson, whose book, Some People, she was reviewing in the essay. To her mind, these three biographers, who form her “new school of biographies” (Woolf 1994, 475), had managed to break away from the conventions of Victorian biography, a genre steeped in hero-worship and polluted by the restrictive moral values of the nineteenth century. The break away from Victorian hagiographical biography motivated the New Biographers to a great extent, as critics such as Floriane Reviron-Piégay have shown. In Eminent Victorians: Outrageous Strachey? The Indecent Exposure of Victorian Characters and Mores, she shows for instance that Strachey’s debunking of heroes had much to do with discrediting the historical method used by Victorian biographers.
2Furthermore, a large part of Woolf’s essay “The New Biography” is devoted to providing a history of the genre, the intention being to place this revolution in life-writing on a broader cultural timeline, which goes further back than the Victorian age. In doing so, Woolf bridges previous periods, reaching over and beyond the nineteenth century, back to the eighteenth century, which, as I shall argue, she considered a golden age for life-writing.
3In “The Art of Biography” (1939), Woolf considers true biography to have been born in the eighteenth century, when “curiosity expressed itself in writing the lives of private people” (Woolf 2011, 181). This confirmation, published more than a decade after her earlier essay, “The New Biography,” shows that Woolf’s preference for eighteenth-century biography remained until the end of her career. In the same essay, she also expresses disaffection for the genre, her view being that there had been few great biographers. According to her, the great biographers included Johnson and Boswell, whose biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, first published in 1791, is still considered one of the great biographies in the English language to this day. M. C. Newbould is one of the critics who contributed to bringing essential insight into Woolf’s relation to eighteenth-century literature. She comments on Woolf’s relation to that specific century by pointing out that “throughout her career as a writer, in both her critical and fictional work, Woolf repeatedly discloses her fascination with the literary past and seeks new ways in which to make it seem fresh to her early twentieth-century readers, using it both as a site of historical investigation and as a source of fictional inspiration” (Newbould 2010, 71). In her study, Newbould describes the way in which Woolf worked literary material from the eighteenth century into avant-garde fiction writing. I would like to explore the way in which these dialectics can apply more specifically to Woolf’s concepts of biography.
- 1 For more on this topic, see for instance Spiropoulou 2018. Another important reference is Marcus 20 (...)
4While my focus is on Virginia Woolf in particular, I also wish to see her as part of a group, here labeled “the New Biographers,” who influenced each other, shared a common set of principles and regarded the praxis of biography as a form of art. This “club” included Lytton Strachey, Woolf’s Bloomsbury friend, the author of Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928), as well as Harold Nicolson, the author of Some People (1927), The Development of English Biography (1928) and over a dozen full-length biographies. Nicolson’s literary career may not be as familiar to the public as Woolf’s or Strachey’s; he was mainly known to be a diplomat during the interwar period. He was also the husband of Woolf’s close friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West. Some People earned Woolf’s rare and unqualified praise and was lauded in her essay “The New Biography.” All three contributed to that modernist form of biography writing that Woolf designated as “the New Biography.” This article aims to better understand the special relationship that these modernist life-writers shared with their forbears from the eighteenth century. It thus studies the literary history of Woolf’s “new school” in relation to that age of transition in literature by examining the way in which the New Biographers interacted with the works of three major authors of the eighteenth century: Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Laurence Sterne.1 I argue that the New Biographers can be said to cultivate a sense of kinship with these life-writers of the eighteenth century, thus complexifying the dynamics of innovation and renewal in the biographical forms they sought to craft.
- 2 See Young 2007, which assesses the legacy and the influence of the Stephens of the eighteenth centu (...)
5The Stephens were seen by some of their close friends as taking on an eighteenth-century attitude.2 Leonard Woolf, himself, seems to have been quite struck by this impression. In the earliest volume of his autobiography, Sowing, Leonard Woolf compares Virginia’s brother Thoby to Johnson, claiming that his character and even his style of writing was an “eighteenth century” kind of old-fashioned (L. Woolf 1960, 137). Elsewhere Leonard Woolf links the whole Stephen family directly to the person of Samuel Johnson:
All male Stephens – and many of the females – I have known have had one marked characteristic which I always think of as Stephenesque, and one can trace it in stories about or the writings of Stephens of a past generation whom one never knew, like the judge, Sir Fitzjames Stephen, and the two James Stephens of still earlier generations. It consisted in a way of thinking and even more a way of expressing their thoughts which one associates pre-eminently with Dr Johnson. There was something monolithic about them and their opinions, and something marmoreal or lapidary about their way of expressing those opinions, reminding one of the Ten Commandments engraved upon the tables of stone, even when they were only telling you that in their opinion it would rain tomorrow. (L. Woolf 1960, 200)
6In this passage from his autobiography, Leonard Woolf refers to the father of Virginia’s great-grandfather Sir James Stephen, also named James Stephen, who lived from 1758 to 1832 and was one of the main lawyers involved in the abolition of slavery, as was his son after him. Leonard sees a strand in the Stephen siblings that was inherited from the Enlightenment, basing their interpretation of the physical world on rational reasoning. “Marmoreal” and “lapidary” blend to create an impression of reason based on solid rock, with no room for sentimentalism. The upbringing of the siblings took place in an environment that favoured conversation and the sharing of ideas; this can explain the ease with which these young people were able to form sound ideas and express them with accuracy and precision.
7Lytton Strachey also left Leonard Woolf with an impression that can be considered similar to some extent. However, according to Woolf, the inspiration for Strachey came from the other side of the Channel, where the French Enlightenment had flourished. Woolf provides the following vivid portrait of his close friend, in the same first volume of his autobiography:
Lytton was a very strange character already when he came up to Cambridge in 1899. There was a mixture of arrogance and diffidence in him. His mind had already formed in a Voltairean mould, and his inclinations, his passions, the framework of his thought belonged to the eighteenth century, and particularly to eighteenth-century France. (L. Woolf 1960, 133)
8Unlike Johnson, who, for some, embodies the clichés linked to decorum and the English character in general, Strachey is said to display traits that can be associated with certain personas of the French Enlightenment, such as Voltaire. This similarity brings Leonard Woolf to return to the subject later on in his autobiography. He writes, “certainly, to Lytton, the eighteenth century was more congenial and, in a sense, more real than the nineteenth or the twentieth” (L. Woolf 1960, 207). As with the Stephen siblings, Leonard feels that the particular way of thinking about the eighteenth century structured his friend’s mindset.
9Leonard Woolf was not wrong in his early observations; the eighteenth century was central to the New Biographers. Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson all wrote profusely about figures of the eighteenth century in their essays. Lytton Strachey’s collection, Books and Characters (1922), comprises essays on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Madame Deffand, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Rousseau. The same passion was shared by Harold Nicolson, who, some years after Strachey’s and Woolf’s deaths, published The Age of Reason (1960), a full-length study comprising portrayals of eminent characters of the eighteenth century such as Johnson, Boswell, Swift, Gibbon, Pope, and criticism of their works. Their focus, he claimed, was on the liberated and enlightened aristocrats as well as the intellectual discourse of the salons, quite remote from the moralistic restraints that were to develop in the nineteenth century.
10The depiction which Virginia Woolf derives from the letters and diaries of these figures reveals her keen interest in the social history of the eighteenth century. Woolf’s essay “Mr Howell on Form” discusses literary form in the eighteenth century. She writes:
We need neither persuasion nor force to make us enjoy the form of Pope or Peacock, Jane Austen or Gray; one might go farther and say that half our pleasure in reading the writers of the eighteenth century comes from the delight we take in their sense of form. In the case of the Victorians it is more difficult; in the case of our own generation it is impossible to see that such a thing as form exists. But it is likely that this is in part the result of trying to squeeze our voluminous moderns in the finely shaped mould of The Rape of the Lock, or of the Princesse de Clèves. (Woolf 1990, 324)
11Woolf’s loathing of Victorian literature has been so thoroughly documented that the breaking away from the forbears of the previous century has become a defining feature of Woolf as an object of study. Yet Woolf praises eighteenth-century literature as much as she disdains Victorian literature. This passage shows that Woolf’s attitude towards the past was not monolithic. The keenness with which she refers to the eighteenth century supports the idea that Woolf’s relation to the past is complex and varied. In praising the eighteenth-century writer’s sense of form and claiming that writers of the Victorian, Georgian and even Edwardian ages have been imitating it ever since, Woolf acknowledges a dialectic between old and new forms, also apparent in the tensions between innovation and formal renewal in her own writing. Woolf’s enthusiasm for the literary figures of the eighteenth century was a common feature among the New Biographers. From their abundant prose about the subject, there emerges a specific modernist construct of eighteenth-century life-writers.
12Of all the figures of the eighteenth century, it was Johnson and Boswell that the New Biographers were the most enthusiastic about. In his essay “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” in Books and Characters, Strachey writes:
No one needs an excuse for re-opening Lives of the Poets; the book is too delightful. It is not, of course, as delightful as Boswell; but who reopens Boswell? Boswell is in another category; because, as everyone knows, when he has once been opened he can never be shut. (Strachey 1922, 67)
- 3 For more on this aspect of Nicolson’s principles of biography, see Thirriard 2021.
13Likewise, in Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography, Johnson is no less than “the real founder of pure biography” (Nicolson 1928, 79). In Nicolson’s conception of the genre, biography comprises a combination of history, the individual and literature – that is to say, a text written with artistry.3 Nicolson claims that “his observations, when collected together, constitute perhaps the best definition of biography as an art which has yet been formulated” (Nicolson 1928, 80). As for Boswell, according to Nicolson, he was a genius of biography, he “discovered and perfected a biographical formula in which the narrative could be fused with the pictorial” (Nicolson 1928, 87); in other words, his method was cinematographic. Nicolson claims that Boswell’s narrative construction fascinates the reader as much as Johnson does as a subject. The process of writing conveys a sense of being written on the spot. In his article “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility” (1956), Northrop Frye develops a notion that the New Biographers themselves had used a few decades earlier about the importance of giving primacy to “literature as process” over “literature as product” (Frye 1956, 145).Northrop Frye also recognises this experience in both Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Richardson’s Pamela, in which the genesis of the narrative seems to be given to witness while reading. In the same way, Boswell’s technique gives a feeling of direct contact with the subject, in the sense that the biographer is portrayed as depicting his own discovery of Johnson. Nicolson thus praises Boswell for having “invented actuality” (Nicolson 1928, 87)—which Boswell seems to have been well aware of, as Nicolson’s quote from Boswell’s biography of Johnson shows: “my readers will be as near as may be accompany [sic] Johnson in his progress, and, as it were, see each scene as it happened” (ibid., 105).
14Woolf also underlines the ‘power to omit’ (Woolf 1990, 324), which she defines as the following:
In contemplating them, one is led to imagine an art of suggestion, a shorter, denser, richer form of literature refusing to waste itself in repetition or explanation, an art recognising the ludicrous incapacity of words to repeat even a simple emotion exactly, but the magical power of the right words to do more – to abstract and exalt it. (ibid., 325)
- 4 For more on this topic, see Hirsh 2003.
15Economy was a skill Woolf performed in her writing and valued in the biography of others, as can be seen in her reception of Roger Fry’s post-impressionistic experiments with art.4 The hyperbolic term ‘magical power’ alludes to Woolf’s enthusiasm for eighteenth-century literature, which is a recurrent topic in her essays. Woolf reproduces the metaphor when talking of “the shrine of form” (ibid., 325), suggesting a revered object, something fundamental to return to in celebration and commemoration, setting the eighteenth century as a milestone for modernist literature. These characteristics are also to be found in Woolf’s ideal for biography, expressed in her essay “The New Biography,” in which she praises Strachey and Nicolson for their formal economy. She writes:
Victorian biographies are laden with truth; but always we rummage among them with a sense of the prodigious waste, of the artistic wrongheadedness of such a method.
With the twentieth century, however, a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference of size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their weight. Mr Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume […]. Few books illustrate the new attitude to biography better than Some people, by Harold Nicolson. (Woolf 1994, 475)
16Woolf sees the New Biographers as having renewed the genre. At the same time, she recognises the characteristics of this “New Biography” in the modes of life-writing practised by eighteenth-century writers, with explicit reference to Johnson and Boswell.
17Woolf’s praise of Johnson is the most extensive, with at least twenty-six essays alluding to him (Rosenberg 1995, 49). Rosenberg’s study of Woolf’s reading notebooks shows that Woolf repeatedly turns to Johnson as an authority when she researches her early articles and essays (ibid.). In her essay entitled “Saint Samuel of Fleet Street” (Woolf 1994, 309), her praise of Johnson is so extravagant that it can even appear startling to the reader. Here is the opening passage:
If this were the age of faith, Dr Johnson would certainly be Saint Samuel, Fleet Street would be full of holy places where he preached his sermons and performed his miracles, and the Boswells, the Thrales, and the Hawkinses would all be exalted to the rank of prophets. Our age has somehow lost the art of making haloes; but a man may fairly be said to be a Saint when cabmen, who can scarcely be said to secrete Rasselas in their pockets, quote Johnson’s sayings or invent Johnson’s sayings on a wet night [.] (ibid., 310)
18The underlying mockery behind the hyperbole and the satire of the Victorian hagiographic style prevent us from taking the passage too seriously; however, the tone is more amused than ironic. Woolf goes on: “Then indeed, he has eaten his way into the fabric of life and performs all the functions of the gods” (ibid., 310). According to Woolf, Johnson is made of the stuff of saints because, despite his grumpiness and moodiness, he was one of the very few authors who loved his fellow human beings. Woolf shows she is aware of the “mythmaking”, as she words it, which enables even those who have never really read Johnson – “cabmen” – to contribute to the monument. She also makes her view clear that Johnson’s texts such as The Rambler or The Tour to the Hebrides illustrate the qualities of Johnson’s writing. Woolf praises prose that is “brief, pointed, almost elegant […], that has vigour and vivacity” (ibid., 311), again not unlike the characteristics of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell’s post-impressionistic experiments in painting. The similarities between the praxis of the Bloomsbury group artists and these aspects of eighteenth-century literature can be seen as mirroring each other. Woolf’s expertise in the eighteenth century, gained through her education, enables her to recognise the affinities between her praxis and that of Johnson.
19Woolf’s awareness of her own myth-making raises the question of the constructed nature of her representation of Johnson. First, it leads us to consider the extent to which this enthusiasm for the eighteenth century was influenced by the work of Woolf’s own father on the eighteenth century, for instance Stephen’s collection of essays Hours in a Library, or his histories of eighteenth-century literature and thought. Andrew McNeillie, who collected and edited the first four volumes of Woolf’s essays, points to the connection between Hours in a Library and Woolf’s Common Reader on historical, moral and artistic levels (Woolf 1994, xii). Woolf herself willingly acknowledges this connection in “Sketch of the Past,” when she relates how she turns to the Dictionary of National Biography, which her father Leslie Stephen edited, as a source of information when reviewing, and how her father’s criticism serves to “fill out,” “correct,” and “stiffen” her “fluid vision” (ibid., xii). Leslie Stephen was a fervent reader of biographies and memoirs, and much of the historical education he gave to his daughter was based on reading biographies. Acknowledging Stephen’s influence on Woolf’s reading of eighteenth-century writers suggests that Woolf was exposed to her father’s Victorian perspective of them. Katherine C. Hill has thoroughly documented Leslie Stephen’s impact on Woolf. Her article “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution” gives insights into the link between Leslie Stephen’s and Virginia Woolf’s vision of literature, essential to any understanding of Woolf’s own literary perspectives. Referring to Woolf’s diary, Hill writes,
[a]s a result, when Woolf began her career as a literary critic she said that she saw much of English literature from Stephen’s peculiar angle of vision: ‘Thus many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief.’ (Hill 1981, 354)
20Virginia Woolf was mainly home-schooled, apart from the very few courses she followed at King’s College (though she did not sit any exam). Leslie Stephen took it upon himself to educate his daughter. Hill describes the intense history programme he had conceived for Virginia in 1897, giving much importance to the study of biographies, including Froude’s Carlyle (353). Stephen was convinced of the need for a solid background in history and biography to undertake the study of literature, bringing together social history and literary history. Woolf shared her father’s assumption that the history of literature followed the history of society, as expressed in her essays (Hill 1981, 355).
21Woolf shared much ground with her father on life-writing. In several aspects, the opening pages of Stephen’s biography of Samuel Johnson are similar to the principles Virginia Woolf develops in “The New Biography,” in particular the importance of the anecdotal in revealing a subject’s personality, and the need for biographers to be liberated from their subjects. Woolf writes in “The New Biography”, “one of the great distinctions, one of the great advantages, of the new school to which Nicolson belongs is the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity” (Woolf 1994, 476). These characteristics also apply to the first pages of Stephen’s Johnson; the reader is treated to several anecdotal passages which deliver the ‘essence’ Woolf alludes to. Stephen writes:
Perhaps the most whimsical of his performances was when, in his fifty-fifth year, he went to the top of a high hill with his friend Langton. ‘I have not had a roll for a long time,’ said the great lexicographer suddenly, and, after deliberately emptying his pockets, he laid himself parallel to the edge of the hill, and descended, turning over and over till he came to the bottom. (Stephen 1882, 4)
22The tone in this passage is clearly one of affectionate mockery, with emphasis on the lifelong childish trait of character of Johnson the bigwig. Stephen entitles the chapter on Johnson’s literary career “Johnson as a Literary Dictator,” again showing he is unimpressed with the importance of his subject’s status. He bases much of his life narrative on Boswell’s precious contribution to our knowledge of Johnson. Stephen reproduces the close attention Boswell gives to the specific details which Woolf describes as “characteristic” of Johnson’s idiosyncrasies (Woolf 1994, 477). As Rosenberg explains, Leslie Stephen appreciated Johnson’s conversation, but mainly as related by “Bozzy,” as Stephen nicknamed him (Rosenberg 1995, 24). Rosenberg points out that Boswell greatly contributed to Johnson’s reputation as a prodigious conversationalist. He quotes Boswell:
[Johnson’s] language was accurate, and his sentences so neatly constructed, that his conversation might have been all printed without any correction […]. [H]e seemed more correct than others, by the force of habit, and the customary exercises of his powerful mind. (Rosenberg 1995, 24)
23Considerations regarding the veracity of such a claim put aside, the passage mirrors to some extent that impression Leonard Woolf had of the Stephen siblings mentioned earlier and of the importance given to conversation in the family. Not only does Woolf also offer conversation to her readers, but she goes beyond and engages in conversation with Johnson’s writing. Conversation played an essential role within the Bloomsbury group and shall be discussed further in relation to the remaking of Johnson by the Bloomsbury life-writers.
- 5 For more discussion on the role of personality in the new biography, see Thirriard 2021.
- 6 See Saunders 2013.
24Boswell’s Johnson is also an important element in Virginia Woolf’s perception of Johnson. In Woolf’s review of Some People in “The New Biography,” she considers Nicolson to be the new Boswell, implying a renaissance in biography. Indeed, in Woolf’s history of biographers, prior to Nicolson, James Boswell was the one biographer to stand out. In writing his Life of Samuel Johnson, he succeeded in recreating his friend’s “incalculable presence,” Woolf comments. “All the draperies and decencies of biography fall to the ground. We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists of personality” (Woolf 1994, 474).5 According to Woolf, not only does Boswell’s genius bring Johnson to life, but the reader also becomes aware of Boswell’s own presence and character in the process. This raises the question of whether the Johnson encountered by Woolf was the true Johnson, or whether it was Boswell’s unique representation of him. According to Jean Viviès (2003), Johnson’s representation in cultural history is a construct; Viviès points out that several contemporary critics refuse to see Boswell’s magnum opus as the greatest English biography, as it has no narrative frame: the narrative is interrupted by letters, notes from conversation, journal entries and other materials. This brings Viviès to the conclusion that “several modes of representation are then juxtaposed […]. Generically, the text wavers between biography, testimony, and even autobiography” (as Boswell himself is a pivotal character in the narrative of Johnson’s life) (Viviès 2003, 159). These precise features must have appealed to Woolf, as she felt they mirrored the very techniques she was experimenting with in her own writing. The blurring of genres, for instance, can be perceived in texts such as To the Lighthouse, where fiction and autobiography blend, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which mix fiction and essay writing, and, of course, Orlando, a fantasised biography of Vita Sackville-West. In “The New Biography,” Woolf praises Nicolson for finding that “alchemy” which enables him to write about people and himself at the same time (Woolf 1994, 477). “Indeed,” Woolf writes, “by the end of the book we realize that the figure which has been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author.” (ibid.) This blending of biography and autobiography is a pivotal feature in Woolf’s life-writing, and her texts have often been recognized as steeped in autobiographical representation or “self-impression”, according to Max Saunders’s concept, a central preoccupation for modernist writers.6
- 7 This point is discussed in more detail in Thirriard 2021.
25In his introduction to The Life of Johnson, Boswell writes that Plutarch served as his model, and, in Plutarchian style, “character” was the core focus. Revealing character through anecdotal episodes in a life, as Plutarch did, was also the New Biographers’ chosen method. In “The New Biography,” Woolf praises Nicolson’s “observant eye” (Woolf 1994, 476) and his capturing of the essence of the subject, that is to say that which defines him or her as an individual. Woolf praises this as being a “new phase in the biographer’s art” (ibid., 476). Likewise, as Viviès argues, Boswell sought to follow Plutarch in revealing the character of his subject through words, jokes and gestures, not through major deeds (Viviès 2003, 159). The result is a constructed representation. In Viviès’s words, “Johnson […] results from a patchwork of pages, sentences and words” (ibid., 162). Fragmentation and multifariousness also characterise the modernist self that Woolf sought to represent in her own narratives, and the predominance of interpretation over description in Boswell’s text most certainly struck a major chord with Woolf and the New Biographers, whose artistic contribution to biography comes from the staging of their subjectivity in their narratives.7
26Although Johnson was mediated through Leslie Stephen, there is significant divergence in the daughter’s and the father’s readings of him. Rosenberg’s Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers provides a study of the main features of Johnson’s thought and writing, as well as a thorough comparison between the father’s and the daughter’s reception of Johnson. Rosenberg suggests that Stephen had a Victorian and a monolithic approach to Johnson; that is to say, he read Johnson through the paradigm of his own time and his concerns regarding his atheism and his pragmatism tainted his analysis of Johnson’s writing (Rosenberg 1995, xx). To Rosenberg, Woolf, on the other hand, was able to open up to Johnson’s writings and provide an interpretation that was dialogical, allowing her to detect and exploit the conversational dimension of his work. Both Woolf and Johnson wanted to engage profoundly with their readers, and, although Johnson had struggled to integrate that conversational aspect into his own writing, Woolf did perceive it. Rosenberg explains this dialogical aspect: “it is only in the reading process, the interaction and dialogue between reader and text, that meaning is created” (Rosenberg 1995, 53). In her introductory essay in the first volume of The Common Reader, Woolf quotes Johnson:
There is a sentence in Dr Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books […]. “… I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning must finally be decided all claim to poetical honours […].” (Woolf 2003, 1)
27Woolf insists that the common reader reads for his or her own pleasure, and not to instruct or to inform others. He or she reads for himself or herself in a natural manner, with no predesigned method. In this, Woolf’s perspective sharply diverges from Leslie Stephen’s conviction that literature should have an educational function. Woolf wants her readership to interact with her writing so as to produce an experience in the reader, an experience which requires neither erudition, nor the mediation of the critic.
28Woolf shared Johnson’s avidity for biographies. Johnson claimed, when writing in The Idler no. 84, that biography was “the most eagerly read” of all narrative writing (Parker 2000, 324). More than a century later, in “I am Rossetti,” Woolf writes, “As everybody knows, […] the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible” (quoted in Parker 2000, 324). From Parker’s analysis of Johnson’s principles for biography emerges the primordial place given to character. In The Idler no. 84, Johnson states: “Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not forgot, in his account of Catiline, to remark that ‘his walk was now quick, and again slow,’ as an indication of a mind revolving with violent commotion” (quoted in Parker 2000, 324) and Johnson regrets that the chroniclers he reads have “so little regard to the manners or behaviour of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral” (quoted in Parker 2000, 324). Over a century later, Woolf thinks much the same thing about the state of the art of biography. In “The New Biography,” Woolf comments on Sir Sidney Lee, her father’s successor at the DNB, and his principles for biography,
“The aim of Biography,” said Sir Sidney Lee, who had perhaps read and written more lives than any man of his time, “is the truthful transmission of personality”, and no single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole problem of biography as it presents itself to us today. On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (Woolf 1994, 473)
29Woolf believes Lee’s own biographical writing to have failed to reach the very aim he himself had set. In her essay, she stresses the importance of personality. Although historical fact is as hard as granite and is expected to deliver “an efficacious and supreme” truth, of which Sidney Lee’s biographies are said to be full, Woolf concludes: “we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that though both are stuffed with truth, he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality” (Woolf 1994, 473). She then turns to the change brought by the New Biographers, as illustrated by the technique developed by Harold Nicolson, which compares well with what Johnson expresses in The Idler no. 84:
They approach their bigwigs fearlessly. The man himself is the supreme subject of their curiosity. Further […], they maintain that the man himself, the pith and essence of his character, shows itself to the observant eye in the tone of the voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passage. (Woolf 1994, 476)
30The term “anecdote”, or the anecdotal, is an essential one for the life-writers discussed here, whether Johnson or Boswell from the eighteenth-century or the New Biographers from the twentieth. They all shared the belief that the essence of character was to be found in the idiosyncrasies of the individual and that a subject’s character was revealed in those minute details visible only to the alert observer. Woolf explains this point further in “The New Biography”:
The man himself is the supreme object of their curiosity. Further, and it is this chiefly which has so reduced the bulk of biography, they maintain that the man himself, the pith and essence of his character, shows itself to the observant eye in the tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passing. Thus in two subtle phrases, in one passage of brilliant description, whole chapters of the Victorian volume are synthesized and summed up. Some People is full of examples of this new phase of the biographer’s art. Mr. Nicolson wants to describe a governess and he tells us that she had a drop at the end of her nose and made him salute the quarterdeck. He wants to describe Lord Curzon, and he makes him lose his trousers and recite ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. He does not cumber himself with a single fact about them. He waits till they have said or done something characteristic, and then he pounces on it with glee. (Woolf 1994, 477)
31In Woolf’s appreciation of Some People, Nicolson was able to shake off all preconceived ideas which traditionally come with the eminent figure of Lord Curzon. Woolf states that Nicolson has no fixed scheme of the universe, nor any Victorian standard – such as courage or morals –, to which he conforms. He succeeds in reaching the essence of character, thus revealing his subject Curzon as he is in himself, not on a pedestal, despite the respect owed to him due to his status, and even despite Nicolson’s fondness for his superior. Nicolson’s propensity for gleeful wit in Some People resembles the type of humour that can be found in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
32Laurence Sterne is another eighteenth-century figure whose influence on the New Biography needs to be taken into consideration as the techniques he used in his life-writing, albeit fictional, strongly appealed to the New Biographers. The same question pertaining to the anecdotal in the New Biographers’ perspective on life-writing brings us to Sterne’s milestone text The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). This fictional (auto)biography is supposed to relate the life of the eponymous main character, but as one digression leads to another, volume after volume, the reader realises that the most anecdotal element in the narrative is Tristram Shandy’s own life. Indeed, instead of an account focused on Tristram Shandy’s life, the reader is treated to a hilarious prosopography of the Shandy family, as well as a satirised portrait of eighteenth-century society. Through the string of insignificant actions and idiosyncrasies of each protagonist, the reader perceives the multifarious personality traits which form the intricate and contrasting characters dwelling at Shandy Hall. Sterne’s biography captivated both Woolf and Strachey, who discussed the book. The reference became familiar enough for Woolf and Strachey to refer to it as a concept – “Tristram Shandy” – as in a diary entry of June 1925, in which Lytton, after disapproving of Mrs. Dalloway, suggests to Woolf: “You should take something wilder and more fantastic, a framework that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy’” (Woolf 1980, 32). Strachey may have inspired Woolf to adopt the fantastical mode she chose for her fictionalised biography of Vita Sackville-West, Orlando. The possible influence of Tristram Shandy on Orlando can provide an explanation for multiple passages regarding the characterisation of the intrusive and subjective narrator-biographer, as well as the pseudo-metatextual elements – the footnotes correcting the author in Tristram Shandy and the index in Orlando. The question of time, of temporal duration within a life, and its transposition in a narrative are recurrent in both works. The following is from Sterne’s volume II, chapter 8, in which Tristram is not yet born, but his mother is in labour:
It is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was order’d to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife;---so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come; – tho’, morally and truly speaking, the man, perhaps, has scarce had time to get on his boots.
If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell and the rap at the door; – and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three fifths, – should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time; – I would remind him, that the idea of duration and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas. (Sterne 1998, 83)
33The play with narrative time is a trope in both Sterne’s and Woolf’s texts. Sterne exposes the biographer’s struggle with, on the one hand, the discrepancy between time measured by the pendulum and plastic time that imprints itself on the mind, and, on the other hand, the discrepancy between the latter combination of the two and a third element, the pace of narrative time as written on the page. The point developed by Sterne finds a strong echo in Orlando; in the following passage, the phenomenological perception of time eludes all scales:
Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. (Woolf 2004, 59)
34In this case too, Woolf adopts a dialogical approach to Sterne’s text, not because she has to rely on the latter as a source of knowledge or of know-how, but rather because the questions raised by Sterne resonates deeply with the questions Woolf and the Modernists were tackling in their own time. Through his writings, Sterne interacted with – and satirised with no restraint – the philosophers of his time. Woolf’s text too can be seen to parody the self-confidence with which historians falsely claim to establish truths.
- 8 However, it took much of the twentieth century for that Victorian reception of Tristram Shandy to w (...)
35Let it be recalled that Sterne’s text had been largely disapproved of by the Victorians, including Leslie Stephen, not only for the implied obscenity of some passages, but also because it was considered to have guilefully plagiarised several authors. M.-C. Newbould makes a significant point in stating that: “Victorian critical attitudes toward Sterne provided a particularly rich field in which Woolf could forage when seeking to debunk the apparently erroneous opinions of her forbears, and to consider how she might go about creating authorial persona as critic and writer” (Newbould 2010, 76). This also applies to Strachey and Nicolson. Woolf and the New Biographers were able to go beyond the Victorian reception of the text and develop their own novel reading of Sterne’s text.8 In Tristram Shandy, Sterne was able to create a comical and intriguingly modernist type of collage of snips of literary and cultural history. The text itself converses with previous and contemporary authors as well as philosophers. Likewise, in Orlando, Woolf interacts with Bergson’s works on the perception of time and duration, complexifying the very notion of the relation between various scales of time, of measured time, and perceived time. Woolf, Nicolson and Strachey continued through their writing careers to develop strategies that could expose the gap between clock time and the imprint of time on the mind, which Woolf calls “mind time” in Between the Acts (Woolf 1998, 8).
36The New Biographers have also shown instances of tension and contradictory attitudes towards the eighteenth century, however, revealing a complicated and ambiguous relationship with the past.
37Woolf and Strachey displayed an ambiguous if not contradictory attitude towards the renewal of form. On the one hand, as explained, the New Biographers hailed the method of eighteenth-century life-writers as being the right method; on the other hand, Woolf and Strachey loathed the authors who copied other authors. Woolf reacted harshly towards those who mimicked the work of others, as can be read in Woolf’s private writings. She applies the term imitating to authors who want to achieve the same effect as the writer they admire, with no originality, nor creative contribution of their own. Strachey was also weary of imitators. One telling example concerns Harold Nicolson, whose relationship with Woolf and Strachey was very difficult when they first met. Strachey and Woolf despised Nicolson, whom they knew to be the author of Tennyson, published in March 1923. Virginia writes to Strachey’s sister, Pernel, telling her just how bad she had found the book:
I’ve been trying to read Tennyson [sic], by Harold Nicolson. I threw it onto the floor in disgust. To purify myself I said I will at once write to Pernel […]. This train of thought is becoming a little depressing – but its [sic] due to Harold Nicolson. Of course, he’s due to Lytton; and Lytton is more or less due to you. What these skilful imitators don’t realise is that it is absolutely essential, if you are going to […]. (Woolf 1978, 62)
38Woolf does not bother to complete her sentence; she breaks off here and comes back to the letter after dinner only to talk about something completely different, as if she had pushed Nicolson to the back of her mind. In 1923, Woolf considered Nicolson to be no more than a copycat. Strachey even refused to write the review of Tennyson that had been commissioned by his Bloomsbury friend Keynes for The Nation and Athenaeum: “I’m sorry to say I can’t face Lord Tennyson […] Harold Nicolson’s book is so disgusting and stupid” (Lee-Milne 1980, 202).
- 9 On 15 September 1924, Woolf wrote the following to Vita Sackville-West: “Leonard is sending Mr. Nic (...)
39If Strachey’s fierce dislike of Nicolson as an author and as a person persisted, Woolf’s abhorrence for Nicolson was quick to fade. She soon realised the innovation Nicolson was bringing to the genre and, in 1924, she begged Nicolson to let the Hogarth press have Byron.9 However, the anecdote provides insight into Woolf’s and Strachey’s relation as writers to the texts of their predecessors. A couple of years later, in “The New Biography,” Boswell is hailed as having invented a revolutionary method for telling lives, and Nicolson is acclaimed as having adopted the same method as Boswell. Hence, integrating, mirroring, explicitly or implicitly referring to works of forbears are to be considered as a conscious, dialogical posture in their own writing. This is to say that Woolf interacts and converses with previous works, while maintaining her own identity as an artist and writer.
40T. S. Eliot’s developments on the status of the modern in relation to the traditional can also offer insight into the New Biographers’ relation to history and to the historiography they sought to question and modernize. In Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Eliot describes tradition as an ideal order of monuments, already complete. To make an addition to the canon disturbs that order: when a new work of art is created, something happens to all the works that precede it. “For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (Eliot 1975, 8). A decade earlier, Lytton Strachey had written a similar formulation in a 1904 letter to Leonard Woolf, after completing his dissertation on Warren Hastings, which, to his disappointment, failed to get him the fellowship at Trinity he aimed for:
I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved in ours. We are – oh! In more ways than one – like the Athenians of the Periclean Age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We are greater than our fathers […]. (quoted in Holroyd 1967, 100)
- 10 This derives from Bloom’s founding principle, which is formulated as follows: “[p]oetic Influence – (...)
41T. S. Eliot’s statement compares to Strachey’s intuition by suggesting that all the works of the past have to be realigned so as to make room for the shift. Likewise, in history, the relations between all the facts of the past have to be realigned. Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, highlights the ambivalence of Eliot’s position as an artist. He writes, “[i]s there not a shibboleth bequeathed us by Eliot that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice?” (Bloom 1997, 31). The poet is an intruder who wants to shake everything up, but also defers to tradition.10 The psychological dimensions of the artist being presented as an intruder, bringing with him or her the new, is a form of aggression against their predecessors, in a way, a murderousness which can be linked to an oedipal killing of the father. By extension, this can also account for the irreverence perceived in the iconoclasm of the New Biographers, which targeted the heroes of the Victorian age, as in Lytton Strachey’s scathing Eminent Victorians.
42Harold Bloom’s Freudian reading of Eliot raises the question of whether it is possible to write in the father’s place without either killing him or being overwhelmed by him. Virginia Woolf herself very clearly acknowledged that, had it not been for her father’s death, she would most probably never have become a writer: “[h]is life would entirely have ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; – inconceivable” (Woolf 1980, 208). However, how can we claim the authority of past literature without destroying it or utterly submitting to it? Eliot uses the notion of tradition to establish his own autonomy, allowing himself to stand apart from his contemporary audience, but also referring to the merits of Donne and other metaphysical poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to break away from his contiguous past. The New Biographers do the same when they look back to Johnson’s and Boswell’s practices of biography and to the eighteenth century as a golden age for biography. The bridge which stretches across from the eighteenth century to the twentieth enables the New Biographers to build a platform and raise themselves over the mass of Victorian hagiography and what they considered the flawed practice of biography.
43Finally, Woolf’s gender led her to diverge from her fellow New Biographers, and this involved distancing herself from her eighteenth-century idols. Despite Woolf’s open reverence for Boswell, Johnson and Sterne, and after following their principles of author anonymity at the beginning of her career, Woolf’s pragmatism seems to have led her to realise that toeing their line was not fully rewarding for a woman writer, especially one who wanted to create a voice for women on the literary scene. Seeking that new voice for women who had been rendered invisible by centuries of patriarchal domination of the public sphere led Woolf to seek new forms which necessarily entailed breaking away from the past. Although criticism concerning the feminine or feminist dimension of Woolf’s writing is extremely abundant, Anne E. Fernald’s article “A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century” deserves to be cited in relation to this particular topic. According to Fernald, even if Woolf was influenced by eighteenth-century cultural aesthetics, which found expression in the way writers combined their practice as novelists and as journalists (Fernald 2005, 159), she also read the public sphere more critically:
Woolf recast the rise of the public sphere more critically, mercilessly satirizing its masculinity in Mrs Dalloway (1925), while in Orlando (1928), lamenting the impotence of an all-female counter-public sphere. Then finally, Three Guineas (1938) represents the third phase of extreme scepticism as to the public sphere’s capacity to represent or include women. (Fernald 2005, 159)
44So Woolf finally adopted a more ironic and ambivalent attitude towards the eighteenth century. Early in her career as a writer, Woolf readily adhered to the eighteenth-century principle of anonymity for the writer in the public sphere, but, by the 1920s, she had become aware that authorial anonymity could not solve the issue of the problematic absence of women in the literary sphere.
- 11 See Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) in which Woolf criticizes Edwardian authors, (...)
45The eighteenth century was part of Woolf’s family culture, and was, to begin with, mediated through her father, Leslie Stephen. Not only do we perceive Woolf’s enthusiasm for the period, but we can also sense benevolent, if often ironic affection for it. What transpires is indeed a strong affective component in this special relationship, a sense of kinship with the writings of Johnson, Boswell and to some extent, Sterne, that goes beyond intellectual, cultural and artistic considerations. Woolf’s expertise in the eighteenth century, gained through her education, enabled her to recognise the affinities between her praxis as an essayist, novelist and biographer and that of the writers of the “Age of Sensibility,” in Northrop Frye’s wording. Looking for an illustrative analogy, Frye himself establishes a parallel between eighteenth-century sensibility and that of the New Biographers when he refers to Woolf’s “Mrs. Brown”: “when we compare Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf on the subject of Mrs. Brown we generally take the side of Virginia Woolf” (Frye 1956, 145).11 What has become clear is that Woolf and the New Biographers engaged with eighteenth-century texts dialogically. A priori, there needs to be common ground to trigger a conversation. Woolf and the New Biographers related in many ways to the mindsets of eighteenth-century writers. However, these texts were not only sources of inspiration, and Woolf and the New Biographers did not merely seek to mediate their new debunked reception of these texts; they also actively conversed with these texts, exploring, questioning, and reacting to them in their own writings. The notions of renewal and of remaking are central in defining the New Biographer’s concepts of life-writing.
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