Virginia Woolf

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)

She had an absurd meeting, arranged by Violet Trefusis and Raymond Mortimer, with Violet’s mother Mrs Keppel, the ex-mistress of Edward VII. Both had anticipated having nothing to say to each other, but (Violet remembered) they did find one congenial subject: ‘Personally I’ve always been in favour of six cylinders though I know some people think four are less trouble.’ ‘My dear Mrs Keppel, you wouldn’t hesitate if you saw the new Lanchester with the fluid fly-wheel!’ Neither (Violet Trefusis commented) knew a thing about motors, but both thought ‘they were on safe ground’.20 It was just the sort of anecdote Lytton would have enjoyed.

In a political discussion about the empire, Harold the diplomat argued for the benefits of colonial rule: ‘our English genius is for government.’ Raymond opposed him: ‘The governed don’t seem to enjoy it.

We can allow ourselves this 1920s picture of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, dancing the Chicken Strut or the Memphis Shake together, with Leonard, pehaps, winding up the gramophone, after tea on a June afternoon.

In Downhill All the Way, Leonard remembers them returning from an evening spent with Vanessa in her studio in Fitzroy Street. (This was in 1930.)A drunk woman was being abused by two passers-by and was then accosted by a policeman who seemed to Leonard to be ‘deliberately trying to goad her into doing something which would justify an arrest’. He lost his temper, challenged the policeman in front of a small crowd, and made him let the woman go. What Leonard omitted to mention in his reminiscence was that he and Virginia had been to a fancy-dress party for Angelica’s eleventh birthday. Virginia was dressed as a (‘mad’) March Hare, with a pair of hare’s ears and paws. Roger Fry, at the party, had been a wonderfully characterful White Knight. And Leonard was ‘wearing a green baize apron and a pair of chisels as the Carpenter’. But as he tackled the policeman (‘Why dont you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame’), ‘holding his apron and chisel in one hand’,114 he forgot all about his comical fancy-dress in his anger and his determination to see justice done.