Posts tagged Winifred Holtby

“These are the moments of revelation which compensate for the chaos, the discomfort, the toil of living. The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation: it is understanding. The artist’s intuitive vision; the thinker’s slow, laborious approach to truth, climbing through the alphabet of A, B, C, D, up to R, on the long way to Z; the knowledge that comes to the raw girl, to the unawakened woman—this is life; this is love. These are the moments in which all the disorder of life assumes a  pattern; we see; we understand; and immediately the intolerable burden becomes tolerable; we stand for a moment on the slopes of that great mountain from the summit of which we can see truth, and thus ‘enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable.’

“To think this, to believe this, is to rule out of the novel-form the conventionally accepted ‘happy ending.’ For marriage, once the postage-stamp fixed on any heroine of fiction to insure her immediate transport to felicity, does not necessarily secure that perception; sexual satisfaction does not necessarily secure it; the gratification of ambition does not secure it; Arnold Bennett’s dream of a first-class hotel at Brighton does not secure it; nor the political plumbing of H. G. Wells, with international bath-taps polished, hot and cold water laid on, the Universe Limited scrubbed and disinfected to its last bolt and turncock. The only expedient that will secure it is a certain development and discipline of character. And this, perhaps, is why Mrs. Woolf holds that in novel-writing, character-creation is the all-important quality.”

—Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir

“But directly we say that the business of the artist is to provide us with a vivid and complete experience, no more, no less, we reopen the whole question. What sort of experience, we may ask, and how is he to make it vivid and complete? Behind the choice of what experience he shall offer us lie other choices, between one sense and another, between the senses and the reason, between optimism and pessimism, between black and white. Morality lies behind it, and an ethical as well as an aesthetic convention. Further, behind such a choice lies the influence that it must have upon its readers. The morality of the artist which affected his choice may differ from the morality of his work, which affects his readers. But both must be considered; and Mrs. Woolf herself has been driven, by her own sense of truth and reality, to recognise this. She lay down a sharp line of distinction between the Edwardians and Sterne or Jane Austen in one essay; but directly she began to deal with the facts instead of the theory her sharp line quivered. For one thing, she could not disguise even from herself the fact that though art may be, theoretically, ‘an end in itself,’ it concerns morality… . We may cling to a doctrine of pure aesthetics as closely as we choose, but the thing is round us; the watchdogs of the Lord bark at our heels; the yoke of His burden is laid upon our shoulders. And Mrs. Woolf knows it. She knows that there is, at bottom, no division… . For good or evil, with or against our wills, we are all moralists, poets and novelists, Christians and Satanists, Stoics and Epicureans, Baudelaire and Dante, Sophocles and Chaucer, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Some proclaim the moral, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dickens and Tolstoi. Others let it take possession of the reader’s imagination unawares. But the moral is there and will have its effect.”

— Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir

“Meeting all contacts with the world lightly yet courageously; withdrawn, but not disdainful; in love with experience, yet exceedingly fastidious; detached, yet keenly, almost passionately interested; she watches the strange postures and pretences of humanity, preserving beneath her formidable dignity and restraint a generosity, a belief, and a radiant acceptance of life unsurpassed by any living writer.”

— Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir

“‘Every second Englishman reads French’! One thinks of every second Englishman—in Halifax and Bristol, Great Brissenden and Bethnal Green. One thinks of the proportion of the population educated at elementary schools; how that only 15 per cent. of all English boys and girls ever have any further education after leaving school at fourteen; and of the minority of even that 15 per cent. who can read any other language but their own. And then one returns to the sentences ‘Every second Englishman reads French,’ ‘Ladies desire Mozart,’ and remembers that, even though such statements are to be taken little more seriously than the statement that nineteen English counties could be seen from Orlando’s oak-tree, yet that particular hyperbole was only possible to a woman brought up as Leslie Stephen’s daughter had been brought up, among people who took culture and taste, a knowledge of classical literature, and acquaintance with music and painting and language, entirely for granted.”

—Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (1932)

See also http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/virginia-woolf-a-critical-memoir-by-winifred-holtby-432097.html