Woolf has the capacity to get to the essence of a writer’s or a period’s defining qualities and express her insights in often colloquial, unadorned language, to achieve what that first quotation demonstrates the Elizabethans found impossible. Here is the quality that shines through most of these essays. From feeling an affinity with the ‘contrasts’ in those earlier works, ‘he leaves us in the lurch’, and becomes ‘more remote, inaccessible, and obsolete than any of the Elizabethans.’ The ‘imperious lover’ is followed by the ‘servile and obsequious’ figure writing eulogies for wealthy patrons, and all the ‘psychological intensity and complexity’ that characterised the satires and love poems changes. She traces three main phases in the writing career of John Donne. 1586) finds herself cold at night when staying at court, and writes a letter soliciting the Lord Chamberlain for a better room that could have been put ‘more simply and with greater force’ by a housemaid of the same age.
It was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things.īut when it descends to down-to-earth matters, it’s filled with ‘awkwardness’ – as when Lady Sidney (d. For now I’ll just note a few high points.Įlizabethan prose, for all its beauty and bounty, was a very imperfect medium. In another post I hope to consider the essays on some of the women writers Woolf discusses.
For the piece on Donne, for example, her reading included, apart from the two-volume edition of poems of 1896 by Chambers and another in two volumes by Grierson (1912), Sir Edmund Gosse’s two-volume Life and Letters Lady Anne Clifford…Her life, Letters and Work by GC Williamson, and The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford.
Woolf’s reading was eclectic and formidable the notes appended show that for each essay she’d consult a daunting set of sources. My Vintage Classics paperback edition of 2003
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