SOURCE: Tremper, Ellen. “Prologue: ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ and Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes.” In “Who Lived at Alfoxton?”: Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism, pp. 35-61. Cranbury, N.J.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind.

—Between the Acts

Virginia Woolf's relations with her father, Leslie Stephen, were exceptional. Beyond overseeing her education at home, he felt for her an “elective affinity,” unique among his children. She was the one with the literary promise, visible when she was only five or six. She was the one to whom he opened his large library, granting her liberty to roam there at will—an unusual privilege during the Victorian age for a daughter.¹ And later, when he was dying, she was the one whose help he sought in editing his last book.

She repaid his love and intellectual admiration by becoming a writer whose work visibly bore the imprint of her father's interest in history, his aesthetic values, and his ideas. But Leslie Stephen's influence did not mark his daughter's writing directly. Rather it was mediated by the poet he loved best among the “moderns”—William Wordsworth. English Romanticism and Wordsworth's poetry, in particular, made possible Virginia Woolf's transformation into a writer whose imaginative merging of history and fiction colors all her work.

To be sure, Leslie Stephen would not have objected to his daughter's becoming a novelist. Katherine C. Hill quotes several letters in which Stephen asserts that his very young daughter's verbal skills might mean a career as a novelist. However, six years later, when writing to his wife, he said that writing articles would “‘be 'Ginia's line unless she marries somebody at 17’ (27 July 1893).”²

She did not marry at seventeen, and he was correct in forecasting that she would be a writer of articles. But at twenty-four, she was attempting a very different sort of expression and, sometime within a year of writing her earliest stories, beginning Melymbrosia, her working title for The Voyage Out, published in 1913.

The internal and external pressures that drove her to become a novelist are as difficult to name as is an answer to her own later question about the forces that caused the extraordinary creativity of the Brontës (CE [Collected Essays] 2, 162). An approximation, however, is found in Leslie Stephen's profound effects on his daughter. He communicated his love and admiration for literature directly and forcefully to his children through his nightly ritual of reading to them during their childhood and, to his daughters, beyond their early years.

Virginia's own words best express what this experience meant to her. In “Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen,” written by February 1905 and published in Frederic Maitland's The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen in November 1906, Virginia wrote that after finishing the thirty-two volumes of the Waverley Novels, Carlyle's French Revolution, Jane Austen, Hawthorne, some Shakespeare, “and many other classics,” “He began too to read poetry instead of prose on Sunday nights, and the Sunday poetry went on till the very end after the nightly readings had been given up” (Essays [The Essays of Virginia Woolf] I, 128). She continues:

His memory for poetry was wonderful; he could absorb a poem that he liked almost unconsciously from a single reading. … He had long ago acquired all the most famous poems of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns. Milton of old writers was the one he knew best. … His recitation … gained immensely from this fact [that he spoke from memory], for as he lay back in his chair and spoke the beautiful words with closed-eyes, we felt that he was speaking not merely the words of Tennyson or Wordsworth but what he himself felt and knew. 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.

(Essays I, 128-29)

In her later essay, “Leslie Stephen,” she added to the picture:

And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both ‘utter trash’, as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworth, stuck in his memory, and the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.

(CE 4, 76-77)

Woolf's was an unusual introduction to English poetry, both affective and intellectual, particularly of Wordsworth, who heads the list of Stephen's favorites. He remained a vital voice for her until the end of her life as the dated Victorians did not.

We have seen that Woolf, when praising Wordsworth to Ethel Smyth in 1936, said: “we only have a few pipers on hedges like Yeats and Tom Eliot, de la Mare—exquisite frail twittering voices one has to hollow one's hand to hear, whereas old Wth [Wordsworth] fills the room” (Letters [The Letters of Virginia Woolf] VI, 73). There is reason to believe that it was her father's voice that, like an auditory palimpsest, gave added depth and meaning to the printed words of the poetry. Her admiration of Wordsworth, furthermore, is reminiscent of her father's essay on the poet in Hours in a Library:

I gladly take for granted—what is generally acknowledged—that Wordsworth in his best moods reaches a greater height than any other modern Englishman. … Other poetry becomes trifling when we are making our inevitable passages through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Wordsworth's alone retains its power. We love him the more as we grow older and become more deeply impressed with the sadness and seriousness of life. … And I take the explanation to be that he is not merely a melodious writer, or a powerful utterer of a deep emotion, but a true philosopher. His poetry wears well because it has solid substance. He is a prophet and a moralist as well as a mere singer.³

The poetic revolution begun by Blake and enunciated by Wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads published in 1800 explains the “psycho-political” and social dimension of Virginia Woolf's writing, her insistence on the quotidian and on the ordinary experiences and emotions of ordinary people, and a metaphorical style that makes consciousness translucent and continuous with the world it perceives and reflects.

Hazlitt in 1825, in his essay on Wordsworth, was first to assess the deeply radical political nature of Wordsworth's approach and its shift away from both the aesthetic and implied political position of the poets of the preceding generation. Of Wordsworth, Hazlitt wrote:

He takes the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new system of poetry from them; and has perhaps succeeded as well as anyone could. ‘Nihil humani a me alienum puto’—is the motto of his works … his poetry is founded on setting up an opposition (and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the artificial. …

It is one of the innovations of our time. It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse … is a levelling one. … It takes the commonest events and objects … to prove that nature is always interesting from its inherent truth and beauty. … Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads.

… He takes a subject or story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and aspiring pretensions of his mind.⁴

As with Wordsworth's Prospectus, if we translate Hazlitt's claims for Wordsworth's poetry into more contemporary language, we may see in Virginia Stephen's earliest stories the crucial presence of Leslie Stephen and the nascence of Wordsworthian Romanticism that was to color all of her mature work.

Her father's death marked the end of an era in Virginia's life. It precipitated the break-up of the establishment at 22 Hyde Park Gate, her home in London since childhood, and the move to Bloomsbury with her sister Vanessa and brothers Thoby and Adrian. Many young writers spin their first fictions out of the material they know best: themselves and their own experience. Virginia Woolf was no exception. Her early short stories reveal the autobiographical conflicts of this difficult but adventurous time. They commemorate her father's influence on her decisions and qualities of mind which lasted a lifetime.

“Phyllis and Rosamond” of June 1906 (CSF [The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf], 289) limns the choice Virginia made, not merely by leaving behind Hyde Park Gate but also the Victorian upper middle-class social world of traditional and restricting expectations for young women. The two sisters, Phyllis and Rosamond, are twenty-eight and twenty-four, exactly the same ages as Vanessa and Virginia in that year.

There are a number of parallels between the situation of her characters and her own. Through a series of commercial metaphors, Virginia describes the case of these “daughters at home” (CSF, 18) who, like other girls of their social class, are forced to fulfill the economic expectations of their family, particularly of their mother, by making the drawing room “their place of business, their professional arena” (CSF, 18) where they practice their skills on marriage prospects. Like Phyllis and Rosamond, Vanessa and Virginia were made to go into society for the same purpose by their half-brother George Duckworth, their dead mother's favorite and representative. In the memoir “22 Hyde Park Gate,” Virginia Woolf claimed that in this respect, “he had done what he knew my mother would have wished him to do” (MoB [Moments of Being], 172). In the story Rosamond weakly resists her overbearing mother and reveals her intellectual proclivities by reading Walter Pater's “Greek Studies” (CSF, 20), as Virginia actually studied Greek with the Oxford don's sister, Clara Pater.

On the other hand, the father of Phyllis and Rosamond is a benignly hovering presence. He introduces them to two young men of his acquaintance, Mr. Middleton and Mr. Carew—humorously the names of two Jacobean authors from his library to whom Leslie Stephen would have “introduced” Virginia. Nor is he criticized as their mother Lady Hibbert is. Instead, the daughters actually side with their father: “The daughters were used to these insinuations against their father: on the whole they took his side, but they never said so” (CSF, 20).⁵ The two sisters meet at the Bloomsbury home of the Tristrams and talk to Sylvia, the daughter of the family, who has never had a marriage proposal and who represents the social and intellectual freedom that Vanessa and Virginia chose by moving to bohemian Bloomsbury. The name “Tristram” was an apt choice for these free spirits, given the oddities of the character of Tristram Shandy, but one also with which Virginia identified her father. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf wrote: “Leslie Stephen apart from his books was a figure … and lived a very real life in the minds of men like Walter Headlam or Herbert Fisher; to whom he was a representative man; a man with a standard they often referred to. If a man like Leslie Stephen likes Tristram Shandy, Walter Headlam wrote to someone, then it must be all right. That gives what I mean” (MoB, 110-11).

The young Virginia thus split her own character between the doomed, intellectually undeveloped Rosamond and the bohemian Sylvia. In this unfashionable quarter of London, Phyllis thinks: “There was room, and freedom, and in the roar and the splendour of the Strand she read the live realities of the world from which her stucco and her pillars protected her so completely” (CSF, 24). But the two young sisters feel that they have been spoiled for such freedoms, that “long captivity had corrupted them both within and without” (CSF, 26).

Such, indeed, must have been the negative feelings that Virginia harbored about herself in 1904 as she stepped out of “the cage”—her name for 22 Hyde Park Gate—replete with images of imprisonment: the “iron trellis,” the “square of wall-circled garden,” the “creepers [that] hung down in front of the window” (MoB, 116). However, she emerged with a rich intellectual legacy acquired through her father's direct encouragement, which enabled her to move successfully, although not without self-doubt, into the rigorous world of her brother Thoby and his intellectually sophisticated, free-thinking Cambridge friends.

Thus, “Phyllis and Rosamond” gives an extremely contemporaneous and close approximation of the two forces Virginia felt to be vying for her mind and life near the time of the actual writing of the story. A more sublimated representation of these forces, and one in which the attraction and strength of the intellectual life happily prevails, is found in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.” This story, found among Woolf's Monks House Papers, was published for the first time only in 1979 in Twentieth Century Literature. However, it was written during August 1906, when Virginia and her sister Vanessa were on holiday in Norfolk, staying at Blo' Norton Hall (CSF, 289). Written only two months after “Phyllis and Rosamond” and exactly two and one half years after the death of Leslie Stephen, it memorializes her father's passion for history and his hopes that Virginia would follow professionally in his footsteps as an historian and biographer.

Yet Virginia Stephen, in this second short story, did something more. Like George Eliot, focusing in Middlemarch on the sort of woman who might have lived in 1832 at the time of the first Reform Bill, she imaginatively merged fiction and history. Indeed, we begin to feel that the possibility of such a hybrid is, in fact, the point of her story.

The singular mixing of the “historiographic” apparatus with which she frames the story and its wholly fictional content suggests her lifelong efforts to create an interdependent structure based on history and imagination in her writing. This early work is thus a metaphor for Woolf's desire to be a writer of fiction who would, nevertheless, stay close to the intellect perspectives of her father and of the writers he encouraged her to read from his large library.

We clearly feel the veiled autobiographical presence both in the framing device and in the journal proper. As in the earlier tale of the two sisters and their friend Sylvia Tristram, Virginia Stephen split the representation of herself between Rosamond Merridew, the forty-five-year-old, exuberant historian-archaeologist, and Joan Martyn, the young woman in her twenties, keeping in 1480 the journal discovered by the historian. Yet although Virginia gave Miss Merridew the Christian name of her insecure avatar in the previous story, the middle-aged historian, like Sylvia Tristram, has tremendous self-assurance. More significantly, she has a profession.

Miss Merridew's surname says all there is to say about the joy with which she embraces her life's work. She happily asserts that she has “exchanged a husband and a family and a house in which [she] may grow old for certain fragments of yellow parchment” and further admits that “a kind of maternal passion has sprung up in [her] breast for these shrivelled and colourless little gnomes … with the fire of genius in their eyes” (CSF, 33). A comparable profession may well have seemed probable for Virginia who had begun writing journalistic reviews to supplement her private income. Rosamond Merridew is thus a representation of Leslie Stephen's wishes for his daughter.

Katherine Hill asserts that Virginia Woolf's approach to literary criticism—its sociological underpinnings and the informing belief that the dominant class of an age creates the new genres of literature—was influenced generally by her father's positions last enunciated in English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, which Virginia helped him edit in his final years. But Hill's essay is silent about the more difficult issues bearing on her decision to become a writer of fiction. What forces or causes in her life other than her love of literature made her pursue this path rather than follow in her father's footsteps? Virginia Hyman offers a psychological reading in “Reflections in a Looking-Glass: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf.”⁶ She describes Virginia's double need: to see herself as duplicating her father's life but yet to distance herself from him. Certainly there are temperamental proclivities that explain her choice as well. In a letter of 1940 to Vita Sackville-West, who had encouraged her to write a book about Bess of Hardwick, Woolf explained:

It is angelic of you to wish me to write another book. At the same time devilish. Havent I 20 books sizzling in my head at the moment? Then you tempt me with old Bess. It is tempting of course. But I doubt if old Bess is my bird. I think she's neither one thing or the other. I mean Orlando was imagination: Roger [Fry] fact. But Bess is after all, though much spangled with Elizabethan finery, an historic figure. I should have to grub. And I dont like shoddy history.

(Letters VI, 445)

If we agree that her fiction, as well as her life, bears the imprint of her struggle, a different answer can be found in Rosamond Merridew's position in “… Joan Martyn.” Introducing her methods, Miss Merridew (if not Virginia Stephen) self-consciously asserts:

The critics … complain that I have no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance of the truth. It is well known that the period I have chosen is more bare than any other of private records; unless you choose to draw all your inspiration from the Paston Letters you must be content to imagine merely, like any other story teller. And that, I am told, is a useful art in its place; but it should be allowed to claim no relationship with the sterner art of the Historian.

(CSF, 35)

Perhaps the critic is Leslie Stephen, but the charm for Rosamond Merridew and Virginia Stephen seems precisely in the bareness of private records that gives them the freedom to imagine.

Furthermore, the intellectual combat Miss Merridew most relishes is over the sort of evidence from the past most pertinent to the historian. Starting from the reasonable but often obscured assumption that “the intricacies of the land tenure were not always the most important facts in the lives of men and women and children” (CSF, 34), she claims to have come

upon … [prizes] that because they are so fitful and so minute in their illumination please me even better. A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne; she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of mediaeval legs; and therefore with the reality of mediaeval bodies, and so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of mediaeval brains; and there you stand at the centre of all ages: middle beginning or end.

(CSF, 34)

Indeed, her insistence on the distinction between the “prizes” most interesting to other historians and those that most appeal to her determines the key to the compromise between Leslie Stephen's professional interest in history and Virginia Woolf's own preference for the transcendent role of the imagination, of mediaeval and other “brains” in her writing. To be sure, Miss Merridew's interest emphasizes the kinds of particulars that, at least theoretically, Stephen, as distinct from others, believed are responsible for creating the character of the past and, as well, should direct the historian in his quest for this character. But more importantly, Rosamond Merridew describes the sort of “evidence” that most appeals to Woolf in the creation of fictive worlds. The subject and texture of Woolf's imaginative writing are spelled out in a way that remarkably heralds her later career. The desire for stockings—the stuff of the banal quotidian world—and the mind to which, physically and figuratively “proceeding upward step by step” they lead, represent the pith and marrow of her novelistic writing. The same democratic impulse that privileges the quotidian and thought and feeling in Woolf's later work is also strikingly present in “… Joan Martyn.” Further, her attention to the world of nature, a result, as well, of her father's interest in and love of the natural world, which would much later transform into the idiosyncratic and totally original description of “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse, is equally present here.

Clearly Woolf's sympathies and approach do not amount to a mere reductive repetition of the values and techniques of English Romanticism. To make this argument would be to violate the evidence of her fiction as well as of her own notion, expressed in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” that each age enters into a complicitous agreement with its authors to create new conventions through which the ideas of that age are expressed. However, the spirit of Wordsworth hovers over the pages of “… Joan Martyn,” reminding us of the origins of Woolf's political and literary patrimony. Since Virginia had just written a review for The Times Literary Supplement in June 1906, “Wordsworth and the Lakes,” for which she received 9.7s, the poet's felt presence is not a surprise. “‘This is the largest sum I have ever made at one blow,’ she announced proudly to Violet Dickinson.”⁷ Her financial success made an impression on her. But so, it seems, did Wordsworth's habits of carefully recording his impressions of the landscape and his reactions to it because Virginia, in the poet's manner, attempted a minute description of the countryside of Norfolk in the journal she kept during her stay at Blo' Norton. However, she seemed subtly aware of an important difference between her journal and Wordsworth's: the absence in hers of self-conscious examination of the effects of this landscape on her imagination and feelings. She wonders about her inability to respond to what she sees every day.

It is one of the wilful habits of the brain, let me generalise for the sake of comfort, that it will only work at its own terms.

You bring it directly opposite an object, & bid it discourse; it merely shuts its eye, & turns away. But in one month, or three or seven, suddenly without any bidding, it pours out the whole picture, gratuitously. … Like the light that reaches you from the stars, it will only shine when some time after it has been shed.

So then, to come to the heart of the discourse, there is no use in presenting here a picture of Norfolk; when the place is directly beneath my eyes. I see at this moment a wall, coloured like an apricot in the sun; with touches of red upon it. The outline & angles of the roof & the tall chimney are completely filled with pure blue sky. …

(APA [A Passionate Apprentice], 313)

Saying there is no use in description, she yet continues to describe. We must conclude that by “presenting” she means something other than the marketplace use of the word, depending rather on its root significance of spatial and temporal immediacy. She seems to take a leaf out of Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, The Prelude, the famous “spots of time” episode of Book XII. There he asserts that “An ordinary sight” from the past, coupled with another and remembered in the present, or one from the past evoked by its repetition in the present, has “A renovating virtue, whence … our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired” (Wordsworth [Selected Poems and Prefaces], 345). Both for Wordsworth and Woolf, the active imagination transforms these otherwise meaningless, ordinary sights from nullities into meaningful, even restorative memories. After Wordsworth describes two chance sights from the landscape of his childhood, the gibbet and the murderer's name carved into the grass and the girl with the pitcher on her head, straining against the wind, thus married through spatial and temporal propinquity, he sums up the significance of such memories for the present.

… When, in the blessed hours
Of early love, the loved one at my side,
I roamed, in daily presence of this scene,
Upon the naked pool and dreary crags,
And on the melancholy beacon, fell
A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more sublime
For these remembrances, and for the power
They left behind? So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.
Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours.

(Wordsworth, 346)

Wordsworth does not consider the mechanics of the re-presenting of these memories to the consciousness while Woolf simply implies that it is an unwilled process. Nevertheless, they both believe that the faculty of the imagination creatively superimposes itself on remembrance. The imagination, by simultaneously insisting on the emotional importance of the memories, thus gives new meaning to the notion of “seeing” or “presenting.” The organically assimilated vision in Wordsworth's prose and poetry was conspicuously absent, Virginia felt, in her own journal.

However, while Virginia hoped that her untoward brain, refusing thus far to “discourse” or speak to her, might still have a surprise in store for her several months hence, her other literary venture, going forward at the same time, was a less direct but more successful attempt to capture the present moment and turn it from the forgettable into a moment of being. As an experiment in the imaginative sphere, imbued with the values of Romanticism, “… Joan Martyn” is a thoughtful compromise with the expectations of Leslie Stephen. Its obvious concern with the ordinary and diurnal, the metaphorical attention to landscape and its continuity with the perceiving imagination, and, finally, the democratic political impulse of the young and inexperienced writer of the diary are all reminiscent of the methods and ideas of Wordsworth, her father's favorite. In more than one sense, then, it is the story of “fathers” and a daughter.

Joan's story begins with an historical comparison between the time of her own mother's girlhood and the present. She writes: “The state of the times, which my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary for us to keep much within our own lands” (CSF, 45). However, the present necessity of barring the Gates against fearful intruders—the historical reality of the Wars of the Roses, which ended in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field⁸—is then metaphorized in a powerful natural image:

I am very bold and impatient sometimes, when the moon rises, over a land gleaming with frost; and I think I feel the pressure of all this free and beautiful place—all England and the sea, and the lands beyond—rolling like sea waves against our iron gates, breaking, and withdrawing—and breaking again—all through the long black night.

(CSF, 45)

We hear the power of Wordsworth's poetic descriptions in The Guide to the Lakes. His imagination is felt everywhere as he appropriates the landscape of the Lake District. She thus commends his description in her review.

But all through this minute and scrupulous catalogue there runs a purpose which solves it into one coherent and increasingly impressive picture. For all these details and more ‘which a volume would not be sufficient to describe’ … are of such interest to him [Wordsworth] because he sees them all as living parts of a vast and exquisitely ordered system. It is this combination in him of obstinate truth and fervent imagination that stamps his descriptions more deeply upon the mind than those of almost any other writer.

(Essays I, 107)

Metaphors of organicity, used by Coleridge in his description of the imagination,⁹ enter organically and become truth in Wordsworth's writing. Virginia apprehends this phenomenon from the ability of his imagination actually to apprehend the organic connection of the parts of the ecosystem which he visually, auditorially, and tactilely perceives and records.

Similarly, Virginia, conscious of metaphor as a vehicle for the imagination's appropriation of the world before it,¹⁰ imputes to Joan the power to register it through metaphors—here, the presence of the world become the pressure of sea waves against the gates. Virginia's “own” imagination is very much under the influence of Wordsworth's language in the “Guide” as she borrows words and phrases from it, transforming them and making them serve her particular needs. And so we find that Wordsworth's “birch with its silver stem”¹¹ becomes Virginia Stephen's “beech … with silver gems” (CSF, 56). The suggested auditory remembrance of his words is also joined by a more conscious effort to replicate Wordsworth's precise rendering of the complexity and beauty of the natural world. Attracted to Wordsworth's “general survey” of the countryside, she then extols his “very penetrating eye” and paraphrases in her review his closer description of “the rocky part of a mountain [which] is blue or ‘hoary grey’, with a tinge of red in it ‘like the compound hues of a dove's neck’” (Wordsworth's Guide [The Guide to the Lakes], 28; Essays I, 106). There she praises, as well, his inclusion of “sober details [that] … give a tone of solidity to the whole, and suggest the rough surface of the earth, which is as true a part of the country as its heights and splendours” (Essays I, 106).

Wordsworth writes:

The general surface of the mountain is turf, rendered rich and green by the moisture of the climate. Sometimes the turf … is little broken, the whole covering being soft and downy pasturage. In other places rocks predominate; the soil is laid bare by torrents and burstings of water from the sides of the mountains in heavy rains; and not unfrequently their perpendicular sides are seamed by ravines … which, meeting in angular points, entrench and scar the surface with numerous figures like the letters W and Y.

(Wordsworth's Guide, 27)

Virginia similarly describes the color and the texture of the “surface” of Norfolk when she writes:

Walsingham, as all the world knows, is but a very small village on the top of a hill. But as you approach through a plain that is rich with green, you see this high ground rising above you for some time before you get there. The midday sun lit up all the soft greens and blues of the fen land; and made it seem as though one passed through a soft and luxurious land, glowing like a painted book; towards a stern summit, where the light struck upon something pointing upwards that was pale as bone.

(CSF, 58)

The “compound hues” of the fen land, “the soft greens and blues,” followed by the “soft and luxurious land,” reminiscent of Wordsworth's “soft pasturage,” and then the shift to the vertical plane, to “something pointing upwards,” like Wordsworth's “perpendicular sides … meeting in angular points,” all suggest Virginia Woolf's extraordinary aural recall, exercised frequently in her many allusions to Romantic poetry. As she said of her father's, her own “memory for poetry was wonderful.”

The description Joan gives of ascending to the “stern summit” of Walsingham also seems a reworking of Wordsworth's description from the Guide of his ascent of Scawfell Pike on which she particularly remarks in her review. Wordsworth's sense of reverence for the wonders of nature, his own variety of religious experience, is transformed by Virginia into the only sort of religious ecstasy possible for Joan in the year 1480. Wordsworth, describing the coming of a mountain storm and then his safe reaching of the summit, says:

I know not how long we might have remained on the summit of the Pike … had not our Guide warned us that we must not linger; for a storm was coming. We looked in vain to espy the signs of it. Mountains, vales, and sea were touched with the clear light of the sun. ‘It is there,’ said he, pointing to the sea beyond Whitehaven, and there we perceived a light vapour unnoticeable but by a shepherd accustomed to watch all mountain bodings. … Great Gavel, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw, were wrapped in storm; yet Langdale, and the mountains in that quarter, remained all bright in sunshine. …

I ought to have mentioned that round the top of Scawfell-PIKE not a blade of grass is to be seen. Cushions or tufts of moss, parched and brown, appear between the huge blocks and stones that lie in heaps on all sides to a great distance, like skeletons or bones of the earth not needed at the creation, and there left to be covered with never-dying lichens. …

… Afterwards we had a spectacle of the grandeur of earth and heaven commingled; yet without terror. We knew that the storm would pass away, for so our prophetic Guide had assured us.

(Wordsworth's Guide, 115-16)

Joan, in her account, says:

At last I reached the top of the hill, joining with a stream of other pilgrims, and we clasped hands, to show that we came humbly as human beings and trod the last steps of the road together, singing our Miserere. …

But then the pale cross with the Image struck my eyes, and drew all my mind, in reverence towards it.

I will not pretend that I found that summons other than stern; for the sun and storm have made the figure harsh and white; but the endeavour to adore Her as others were doing round me filled my mind with an image that was so large and white that no other thought had room there. For one moment I submitted myself to her as I have never submitted to man or woman, and bruised my lips on the rough stone of her garment. White light and heat steamed on my bare head; and when the ecstasy passed the country beneath flew out like a sudden banner unfurled.

(CSF, 59)

The something “pale as bone” is a transformation of the skeletons and bones of Scawfell Pike. Woolf recalls Wordsworth's contrast of storm and sunshine in “the sun and storm” that have weathered the figure of Mary. Wordsworth's reverential “unwilling to lose the remembrance of what lay before us” and “the spectacle of the grandeur of earth and heaven commingled” reappear in “when the ecstasy passed the country beneath flew out like a sudden banner unfurled.”

However, an even more remarkable borrowing is from stanzas III through V of “Resolution and Independence.” Joan, describing her pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, says:

And my brain that was swift and merry at first, and leapt like a child at play, settled down in time to sober work upon the highway, though it was glad withal. For I thought of the serious things of life—such as age, and poverty and sickness and death, and considered that it would certainly be my lot to meet them; and I considered also those joys and sorrows that were for ever chasing themselves across my life. Small things would no longer please me and tease me as of old. But although this made me feel grave, I felt also that I had come to the time when such feelings are true; and further, as I walked, it seemed to me that one might enter within such feelings and study them, as, indeed, I had walked in a wide space within the covers of Master Richard's manuscript.

(CSF, 58)

Like Joan, Wordsworth is travelling in “Resolution. …”

III

I was a Traveller then upon the moor;
I saw the hare that raced about with joy;
I heard the woods and distant waters roar;
Or heard them not, as happy as a boy:
The pleasant season did my heart employ:
My old remembrances went from me wholly;
And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.

IV

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low;
To me that morning did it happen so;
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.

V

I heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky;
And I bethought me of the playful hare:
Even such a happy Child of earth am I;
Even as these blissful creatures do I fare;
Far from the world I walk, and from all care;
But there may come another day to me—
Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.

(Wordsworth, 166)

Wordsworth's meeting with the Old Leech Gatherer makes more pointed the self-conscious study of his feelings, the subject of the entire poem. Joan, as well, sees that it is possible to “enter within such feelings and study them,” comparing the feelings with the play of her imagination when she had, figuratively, “walked in a wide space within the covers” of a travelling minstrel's book.

The complex “Klein bottle” or self-devolving image of her imagination's entering a work of art as it does the emotions that, likewise, it engenders, is suggested through another Wordsworthian image. Because Virginia had already cited it as an example of his “obstinate truth and fervent imagination” in her review of his Guide and then turned it to her own and very interesting account in the story, we are convinced of its special importance to her. Wordsworth, describing trees, says: “and the leafless purple twigs were tipped with globes of shining crystal” (Wordsworth's Guide, 127). Joan says: “I saw them [italics mine] as solid globes of crystal; enclosing a round ball of coloured earth and air, in which tiny men and women laboured, as beneath the dome of the sky itself” (CSF, 58).

The pronoun “them” has an ambiguous antecedent. Does Joan mean to refer to her “feelings” or to the “covers” of Richard's book? The confusion instructively suggests Virginia Woolf's dependence on Romantic metaphors for mind in which the world or the work of art is enfigured as an extension of, and continuous with, the imagination. Hermione Lee has similarly developed the idea of Woolf's use of metaphors of transparency and fire as important proof of the connection between her and the writers of the Romantic Movement.¹²

Woolf relies on such images, particularly on the figure “solid globes of crystal” and on similar ones in this story like the protective glass covering of a picture mentioned by Giles Martyn. She seems aware of the sometimes “transforming” or “preserving” properties of glass, especially as she borrows the dominant metaphor, the solid globes of crystal, from Wordsworth. Such metaphors and other similarities in perspectives and values represent important proof of the privileged position that Woolf accords to Romantic self-consciousness and to the textures of ordinary life.

Thus, the wave metaphor from the natural world in the beginning of Joan's narrative, conveying the historical moment, but equally an indication of the characteristic imagination of the narrator, is succeeded by a direct discussion of the capacity of imaginative literature to reveal the truth about the lives and the emotions of historical figures. Indeed, Joan sees imaginative literature as an alternative means both of apprehending and representing historical reality. Through it Virginia Stephen worked a compromise with her father.

Joan's family's reaction to “Mr John Lydgate's” “The Palace of Glass,”¹³ “a poem written about Helen and the Siege of Troy” (CSF, 46) and a gift from her father—“my father has sent me a manuscript from London” (CSF, 46)—is the compromise with Leslie Stephen dramatically rendered. Virginia made her intentions clear through Joan's comment.

Last night I read of Helen, and her beauty and her suitors, and the fair town of Troy and they listened silently; for though we none of us know where those places are, we see very well what they must have been like; and we can weep for the suffering of the soldiers, and picture to ourselves the stately woman herself, who must have been, I think, something like my mother. My mother beats with her foot and sees the whole processions pass I know, from the way her eyes gleam, and her head tosses. ‘It must have been in Cornwall,’ said Sir John [the priest], ‘where King Arthur lived with his knights.’

(CSF, 46-47)

The beauty of this poem and the emotions it engenders are real and powerful despite the historical ignorance of those who listen to it. The poor guess by Sir John, that Troy must have been in Cornwall, does not change the “truth” of Lydgate's words. Virginia, who was very familiar with Walter Pater's work, may well have been taking ironic pleasure in the knowledge that the site of Troy was not known until thirty-five years before she wrote her story.¹⁴ People for thousands of years have been able to appreciate The Iliad and The Odyssey despite their lack of accurate historical and archaeological knowledge.

Joan's family is equally moved by the story of Tristram and Iseult in the book of the travelling minstrel. The description of Richard suggests the singularity of the Romantic metaphors for mind that reveal the imagination and world as coextensive. In Richard's case, art is actually an extension of the mind of the individual who creates it: “He turned to me, and wound up with a flourish of one hand with the book in it” (CSF, 54). The symbolic physical extension of the arm and hand by the book he holds is then given emotional dimension as he begins to read the story of Tristram and Iseult, which, unlike that of Helen of Troy, does take place in Cornwall. Richard's extension of himself into the story is clear from his dramatic involvement. Joan writes:

He dropped his gay manner, and looked past us all … as though he drew his words from some sight not far from him. And as the story grew passionate his voice rose, and his fists clenched, and he raised his foot and stretched forth his arms; and then, when the lovers part, he seemed to see the Lady sink away from him … and his arms were empty. And then he is wounded in Brittany; and he hears the Princess coming across the seas to him.

(CSF, 56)

The same pronomial confusion that keeps us from knowing whether, in the figure of the solid crystal globes, Joan refers to her emotions or the covers of Richard's book occurs here, for it is impossible to tell whether the “he” of the last sentence refers to Richard or Tristram. The created art is the projection of the artist's imagination, an idea reinforced through the figure Joan deploys to describe looking at the manuscript “illuminations.”¹⁵

… the capital letters framed bright blue skies, and golden robes; and in the midst of the writing there came broad spaces of colour, in which you might see princes and princesses walking in procession and towns with churches … and the sea breaking blue beneath them. They were like little mirrors, held up to those visions which I had seen passing in the air but here they were caught and stayed forever.

(CSF, 56-57)

Art is not mimetic, that is, does not hold its mirror up to the world, as in the Aristotelian or Platonic conceptions of the relation of artist, audience, product, and world.¹⁶ Rather, it mirrors or expresses the imagination to give form to what is inside the creative individual.

Art both issues from the imagination and extends us. But even more significant is the contrast Joan draws between the art Richard makes—the art of pure fantasy and escape—and “ordinary thoughts,” not the proper subject, Joan at first believes, of stories. When Richard finishes the tale of Tristram and Iseult, the spell is broken, the moment of being is over: “But then the voice stopped; and all these figures withdrew, fading and trailing across the sky to the West where they live. And when I opened my eyes, the man, and the grey wall; the people by the Gate, slowly swam up, as from some depths, and settled on the surface, and stayed there clear and cold” (CSF, 56). The end of the illusion similarly affects Richard: “Meanwhile Richard was like a man who lets something slip from his clasp; and beats thin air. He looked at us, and I had half a mind to stretch out a hand; and tell him he was safe. But then he recollected himself, and smiled as though he had reason to be pleased” (CSF, 56). The ordinary world of the “grey wall,” the Gate, and the people are nothing like the intense blue skies and princesses of the illuminations. Joan says that Richard “took his manuscript from me, and tied the covers safely across it. He placed it in his breast” (CSF, 57). His actions thus invert Jasper Martyn's generous giving of the papers with their “thick cord of green silk” (CSF, 41)—the manuscript of the “ordinary” world of Joan Martyn—to Rosamond Merridew, which prefaces the diary. The kind of art that Richard creates, like Richard himself, “the strange bird” who “By dawn … was out of the house” (CSF, 57), is not always there to be relied on although it is pleasurably seductive. Indeed, Joan's mother, taking pleasure in Lydgate's poetry but calling “herself an old fool for listening to stories, when the accounts had still to be made up for my father in London” (CSF, 47), may be her first teacher in this regard.

“The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” is an imaginative rendering of the ordinary experiences of relatively comfortable but by no means extraordinarily wealthy or socially elevated people at the end of the fifteenth century. The opacity of Elizabethan and earlier prose and the paucity of extant documents of the time, hindering the reclamation of the past, are ideas Woolf would also consider nearly thirty years later in The Second Common Reader essay, “The Strange Elizabethans.” The desire to name the past, to make it come alive for herself and her readers, suggests, then, a second plausible explanation for Woolf's choice of fiction over history and her elevation of the ordinary into art. The attraction to the freedoms of fiction in the face of a disappointingly slight historical record is represented by the historian Drew Gilpin Faust in her review of Celia: A Slave. Faust remarks of the difficulties that beset the author:

But his scanty sources compel him to guess, to speculate, to improvise, in ways that frustrate a reader eager to know more of what Celia thought and said, of how her lawyers debated their course of action. … In a work such as Mr. McLaurin's, history forcefully displays both its compelling strengths and its debilitating weaknesses as a mode of insight into the human experience.

… that we must be satisfied with shadows and outlines because of the irremediable incompleteness of the historical record reminds us of how every historian is compelled to create the past out of the pieces of it that survive. Celia's story almost inevitably evokes a work whose author bypassed the constraints of history for the freedoms and challenges of fiction: Toni Morrison's extraordinarily powerful novel Beloved, the tale of an escaped slave woman who kills her infant daughter to prevent her return to bondage.¹⁷

Similarly, when history provided her with so few Paston families, Woolf was drawn to invention, but invention based on historical evidence and her own experience. The family of Joan Martyn is one Woolf could have known well had she been alive in 1480, being much as her own family would have been, transported back four hundred years. Joan Martyn, herself, is like Virginia Stephen, a young woman with a talent for writing and “history” recording and, for this reason, her father's particular joy.¹⁸ Joan mentions her father's reaction to her diary:

My father came in yesterday when I was sitting before the desk at which I write these sheets. He is not a little proud of my skill in reading and writing; which indeed I have learnt mostly at his knee.

But confusion came over me when he asked me what I wrote; and stammering that it was a ‘Diary’ I covered the pages with my hands.

‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘if my father had only kept a diary! But he, poor man could not write even his own name. There's John and Pierce and Stephen all lying in the church yonder, and no word left to say whether they were good men or bad.’

(CSF, 60-61)

Virginia's choice of “Stephen” for the last-named ancestor of Giles Martyn, recalling her own patronymic, thus suggests the possibility of her intimate knowledge of these people and, possibly, as well, the role played by her father in the acquisition of this knowledge.

The connection between the present and the past is also the note sounded positively at the beginning of the narrative when Rosamond Merridew talks with the farmer Jasper Martyn. As the owner of Martyn Hall and, more importantly, of the journal manuscript written by his ancestor Joan Martyn, whom he refers to as his grandmother, he is the representative Englishman, tied to the land and to its history, and valuing the company of his ancestors through the written records they have created down through the centuries. Their personal accounts, in both senses of that word—their stories and their stud books—are a kind of “memory” of the past, connecting Jasper to it through his reading of them. Further, the creation of these memories, first through the writing, and their re-creation through the reading, form an indissoluble imaginative link between reader and writer. Indeed, these memories explain, as well, Rosamond Merridew's more impersonal and professional interest in stockings, to legs, to bodies to mediaeval brains—her interest, that is, in a moment of being or spot of time in the cultural past of the nation. Similarly, these “memories,” we shall see, informed Woolf's sense of historiography both in “Anon” and “The Reader,” and in her cultural criticism in general. When Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel Smyth that she would “thread a necklace through English life & lit,”¹⁹ the metaphor implied by her image transforms the moments on this continuum into pearls or beads, moments of be(ad)ing or spots of time with their renovative, even generative, effect on her audience or readers in the present.

All the “readers” in “… Joan Martyn” agree on the importance of the written word that commemorates the present, thus transforming it for later generations into the potentially accessible past. Rosamond Merridew, from a professional point of view, Jasper Martyn with his very personal interest in his ancestors, and Joan's father, Giles, with his prescient understanding of the importance of the historical record are all firmly convinced. Only Joan is diffident, but her diffidence stems from a certain modesty about her powers as an observer and recorder, and of the unimportance, as she sees it, of what is available for her to observe and record. Indeed, the entire story records Joan's coming to terms with the very act of journal-keeping, making history “out of the ordinary,” which provides the material for a new kind of art.

The story begins as very much centered on women. With the exception of Jasper Martyn, the characters first introduced are all female: Rosamond Merridew, the narrator of the frame story, the housemaid of Martyn Hall, Mrs. Martyn, the journal-keeping Joan, and Joan's own mother. One can see why Louise DeSalvo, who not only edited and named the untitled story but also wrote about it in the critical essay “Shakespeare's Other Sister,” claims importance for this early work as a “meditation upon the relationship between the woman as historian and history and upon the need of women such as Merridew to write women into history.”²⁰ Although there is truth in her assertions, there are other, more compelling issues that surfaced for Virginia Stephen as she wrote this narrative in 1906.

The presence of men in this story is, indeed, delayed. However, their entrance—both of Jasper Martyn, who returns from his work in the fields and satisfies Rosamond Merridew with a history of his ancestors, and of Giles Martyn, the father of Joan, absent for most of her journal-keeping—makes possible the formative relationships and turning points of the narrative. This, then, may be a story about mothers, but it is even more significantly a story about “absent” fathers.

Rosamond Merridew is what Joan Martyn may well have become if she had lived four hundred years later. The historian's insistence on the importance of the recording of the quotidian world in her sort of historiographical account of reality is doubled in Joan's registering the impressions of the diurnal round in her journal. But Jasper Martyn, even before Rosamond opens Joan's journal, sounds the recognizably Woolfian note of the importance of the texture of the ordinary in imaginative as well as historical writing. His wife Betty has shown Miss Merridew over the house while he shows her the portraits of his ancestors—history in themselves. He saves the best for last: “‘Stop a moment,’ he interrupted, ‘we're not done yet. There are the books’” (CSF, 40). With “temperate voice” he hands her the first lot, “merely saying” “‘that's no. I: 1480 to 1500’” (CSF, 41). His casualness about the great age and possible historical importance of these and the other papers is paradoxically a function of his sense of the continuity between the present and the past. It suggests his belief that this continuity is the result of the essential sameness of the human consciousnesses spanning the centuries. He simply recognizes his ancestors' consciousness as his own and his wife's. Miss Merridew asserts:

No words of mine … can give the curious impression which he produced as he spoke, that all these ‘relations’ Grandfathers of the time of Elizabeth, nay Grandmothers of the time of Edward the Fourth, were just, so to speak, brooding round the corner; there was none of the pride of ‘ancestry’ in his voice but merely the personal affection of a son for his parents. All generations seemed bathed in his mind in the same clear and equable light: it was not precisely the light of the present day, but it certainly was not what we commonly call the light of the past. And it was not romantic … and the figures stood out in it, solid and capable, with a great resemblance, I suspect, to what they were in the flesh.

(CSF, 43-44)

The apparent paradox of Wordsworthian Romanticism, as Miss Merridew also asserts here about Jasper Martyn's view of the historical past, is that its “friendly” acquisition of the personal past through memory is not romantic. On the contrary, Wordsworth mythologizes the restorative value of the past for the present rather than its specific attributes. Rosamond Merridew and Virginia Stephen are attracted to Martyn's demythologized view of his ancestors because it makes them more real. That sense of continuity with one's “grandfathers” and “grandmothers,” of whom Martyn speaks, and his way of talking about them are both explicit in Virginia Woolf's commendation of Leigh Hunt, written fifteen years later. Woolf transcribed into her diary a long passage about Coleridge from Hunt's autobiography,²¹ following it with these more general remarks on the Romantics:

L. H. was our spiritual grandfather, a free man. One could have spoken to him as to Desmond. A light man, I daresay, but civilised, much more so than my grandfather in the flesh. … These free, vigorous spirits advance the world, & when one lights on them in the strange waste of the past one says Ah you're my sort—a great compliment … Shelley died with H.'s copy of Lamia in his hand. H. wd. receive it back from no other, & so burnt it on the pyre. Going home from the funeral? H. & Byron laughed till they split. This is human nature, & H. doesn't mind owning to it. Then I like his inquisitive human sympathies: history so dull because of its battles & laws; & sea voyages in books so dull because the traveller will describe beauties instead of going into the cabins & saying what sailors looked liked, wore, eat, said: how they behaved. …

(Diary [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] II, 130)

She applauds the recognizable emotions of Hunt, his natural reaction to death—the release of pain through laughter that Woolf realized she herself would have expressed, if allowed, at her own mother's death²²—and the cataloguing of the commonplace items that constitute his “inquisitive human sympathies.” These items are the basis of another kind of history, appreciated by Woolf in 1921 as Rosamond Merridew appreciates Jasper Martyn's idiosyncratic “ancestor worship.” She says of it: “They are, he would have told me, all flesh and blood like I am; and the fact that they have been dead for four or five centuries makes no more diffence [sic] to them, than the glass you place over a canvas changes the picture beneath it” (CSF, 44).

Similarly, Jasper Martyn adds of his “grandmother” Joan that she was “not remarkable” (CSF, 45). His simplicity, which keeps him from seeing the antiquarian value of his family treasures, actually masks a profound grasp of the nature of human consciousness, central to this story, and to all of Woolf's later fiction and criticism. Indirectly, he thus restates a tenet of Wordsworthian Romanticism—the importance of the ordinary and of the “not remarkable” mind that engages it.

Joan contrasts, throughout her journal, the ordinary and solid world of accounts, impending marriage contracts, and the sometimes sordid one of poor peasants, highway robbers, and “Sanctuary” men, “prowling out of bounds in search of food” (CSF, 52), with Lydgate's fictive world. The cottage of the peasant woman Beatrice Somers, “more like the burrow of some rabbit on the heath than the house of a man” (CSF, 52), is “a nightmare” (CSF, 53) to Joan from which she is happy to awake upon entering her own clean and prosperous home. However, a sympathy for the poor, unlike the chief steward Anthony's disdain when he speaks to Beatrice “as he would have spoken to some animal who had strong claws and a wicked eye” (CSF, 53), begins to glimmer in Joan as she recognizes that the lines in her mother's face “and some of the sternness of her voice, had come there … because she always saw not far from her such sights as [Joan] had seen today” (CSF, 53). Perhaps Julia Stephen's untiring concern for the poor served as the model for this description. However, Wordsworth's lines from “Tintern Abbey,” in which the joys of unexamined childhood are contrasted with the deeper pleasure, because mixed with pain, of maturity's achieved ability to examine, suggest the basis for the entire episode of the visit to the cottages.

… For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. …
… That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. …

(Wordsworth, 109-10)

Joan establishes one term of the Wordsworthian comparison between youth and age when she describes her walk with her brother Jeremy and the steward Anthony to the cottages.

He [Anthony] is for ever trampling our fields, and knows them better and loves them more, so I tell him, than any human creature. … And, as we have trotted by his side since we could walk alone, some of his affection has become ours too; Norfolk and the parish of Long Winton in Norfolk is to me what my own grandmother is; a tender parent, dear and familiar, and silent to whom I shall return in time. O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world! Marriage or any other great joy would confuse the clear vision which is still mine. And at the thought of losing that, I cried in my heart, ‘No, I will never leave you—for a husband or a lover,’ and straightway I started chasing rabbits across the heath with Jeremy and the dogs.

(CSF, 52)

Wordsworth's ruminations terminate fruitfully, not in chasing rabbits (Wordsworth's “glad animal movements” are foregone by the time of the writing of the poem) but in his embracing of maturity and philosophic wisdom. For Joan the process of moving from the pleasures of childhood's joyful spontaneity and its rejection of the responsibilities of maturity to an acceptance of them is delayed until she returns from bearing witness to the suffering of humanity through the visit to Beatrice Somers. The sense of community she begins to feel enters into her description and metaphor-making as well.

Possibly the summer of 1480 was a hiatus in the ducal wars that had plagued England for the previous twenty-five years. Certainly, Joan's appreciation of ordinary life seems to have returned with the arrival home of her father and brothers from London. Whatever the cause, the minstrel Richard's inspiration or her father's presence, her susceptibility to “figures,” the heightened sensitivity, that is, of her imagination, is apparent.

Figures are particularly important in Joan's description of the pilgrimage to Walsingham that she now makes to express her thankfulness. The Wordsworthian trope, the “solid globes of crystal,” now becomes thematically significant. For as Joan walks to Walsingham, her examination of her feelings, which she has compared with her metaphorically walking “in a wide space within the covers of Master Richard's manuscript,” is, indeed, one of the sights mysteriously promised by Richard to those who but look. Her feelings, the globes of crystal containing the “round ball of coloured earth and air, in which tiny men and women laboured,” are her imagination enriched by the contemplation of ordinary men and women working on the earth. The landscape, through which she literally walks, is “a soft and luxurious land, glowing like a painted book” (CSF, 58). Her life, now that she is ecstatically alive to the miracle of the ordinary, has become an illuminated manuscript.²³

Joan's sense that real writing is about romantic princes and princesses begins to founder as she describes the preparations for her unromantic marriage to the elderly Sir Amyas. She thinks at first that her life is nothing but the uncompelling workaday world “at the time of the Civil Wars” (CSF, 59). Joan describes her mother's “theory of ownership” (CSF, 59), attention to which must take the place of Joan's “reading of Princesses” when she is a busy and responsible married woman. However, from the romantic point of view, Joan is uncompelled by it. Her mother uses wave metaphors, “turbulent waters” and “tides,” which must be kept from the land and that “one day … will abate” (CSF, 59). Her figures remind us of Joan's own “crashing waves” at the beginning of the journal, meant to convey the danger of the times. But her mother draws on such images for her account of a millennial reality of peace and democracy in a future prepared for by women like her. Of her mother's theory, Joan reports:

… deeply though I honour my mother and respect her words, I cannot accept their wisdom without a sigh. She seems to look forward to nothing better than an earth rising solid out of the mists that now enwreathe it. … Then she would dream of certain great houses … and there would be cheer for guest or serving man at the same table with the Lord.

And you would ride through fields brimming with corn, and there would be … cottages of stone for the poor. As I write this down, I see that it is good; and we should do right to wish it.

(CSF, 60)

Besides reinforcing Joan's sense of the inalienable rights of men, first developed when she visited the cottages with Anthony, the surprising element of Joan's description is her declaration that her own writing makes her see the truth and goodness of her mother's vision. Thus, while the seductiveness of fantasy still lingers, the ordinary as subject begins to prevail for Joan who adds: “Yet what it is that I want, I cannot tell, although I crave for it, and in some secret way, expect it” (CSF, 60).

Joan's developing self-conscious sense of authorship is made even more important in “Last Pages” through the record of her conversation with her father concerning the importance of using her writing skill to record history. But the two do more than discuss Giles Martyn's desire to add a description of himself to the historical record. He ends by saying: “My fathers were much as I am. … Why they might walk in at the door this moment, and I should know 'em, and should think it nothing strange” (CSF, 61).

This conversation impresses upon Joan and equally upon us the sense of the repetitiveness of ordinary life, of the similarity between the present generation and her ancestors, the idea of history first expressed by Jasper Martyn to Rosamond Merridew. And so the story, in its insistence on the value of recording such “immemorable” existence and consciousness of it, has come full circle. That it should be her father who strengthens Joan's conviction of this truth is significant as is his injunction, “‘Well then Joan, you must keep your writing, … or rather, I must keep it for you … our descendants shall have cause to respect one of us at least’” (CSF, 61).

Giles then asks Joan to accompany him to the church, where, he says, “‘I must see to the carving on my father's tomb’” (CSF, 61),²⁴ a request that is reminiscent of Jasper Martyn's guided tour for Miss Merridew of his ancestral portraits. Joan's thoughts, as she walks, are turned to her pride in her writing: “there were few women in Norfolk who could do the like” (CSF, 61). Only her pride has kept her at her labors “For, truly, there is nothing in the pale of my days that needs telling; and the record grows wearisome” (CSF, 61). The pull of the fantastic, the desire to write about “Knights and Ladies and of adventures in strange lands” (CSF, 62) is still strong despite her father's commendation of her writing about the diurnal round. However, this is her last expression of such a desire. Fittingly, her final embrace of the wonder of ordinary life and the fiction that depends on it is effected through a transition that may well be based on Wordsworth's Guide. For Joan's “Captains” and “soldiery” (CSF, 62) seen in the clouds seem a reworking of one of Wordsworth's stories of a similar exercise of the imagination in the Guide.

While we were gazing around, ‘Look,’ I exclaimed, ‘at yon ship upon the glittering sea!’ ‘Is it a ship?’ replied our shepherd-guide. ‘It can be nothing else,’ interposed my companion. … The Guide dropped the argument; but before a minute was gone he quietly said, ‘Now look at your ship; it is changed into a horse.’ … We laughed heartily; and, I hope, when again inclined to be positive, I may remember the ship and the horse upon the glittering sea; and the calm confidence, yet submissiveness, of our wise Man of the Mountains.

(Wordsworth's Guide, 114-15)

The movement from the fantastic to reliance on the wisdom of his guide, the down-to-earth “Man of the Mountains,” is mirrored in Joan's story, which also ends in reliance on her realistic mother's opinion. Describing the clouds as shapers of the fantastic, she adds: “But as my mother would say, the best stories are those that are told over the fire side. … I have always thought that such stories came partly out of the clouds, or why should they stir us more than any thing we can see for ourselves? It is certain that no written book can stand beside them” (CSF, 62). Reality is more interesting than fantasy. Joan allies herself with the tradition of writing about the ordinary of which she is the fictional ancestress. Wordsworth's self-imposed task was to give this assertion concrete form in Lyrical Ballads. When she says “No book can stand beside” the tales of true life, she is thinking of books that have already been written, for none, in her experience, takes the ordinary as subject. However, her assertion “that such stories come partly out of the clouds” suggests Virginia's attraction to writing, which takes the real and historical for its subject but orders it according to the greater freedoms of fiction.

She renders her final reconciliation of history and imagination through Joan's desire, in the church, to “do some small act that would give [the ancestors in their sarcophagi] pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of—a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person” (CSF, 62). For Joan and her father, as for Jasper Martyn after them, these dead ancestors are “living,” familiarized and loved through an act of imagination. For Virginia the imaginative act of writing was equally one of love, dedicated to her father, her own ancestor, who had empowered her.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf wrote in “Leslie Stephen” (1932): “Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts—very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet ‘Read what you like,’ he said, and all his books … were to be had without asking” (CE 4, 79-80).

2. Katherine C. Hill, “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution,” PMLA 96, no. 3 (1981): 352.

3. Leslie Stephen, “Wordsworth's Ethics,” Hours in a Library in Leslie Stephen: Selected Writings in British Intellectual History, ed. Noël Annan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 202. The similarity between father's and daughter's words is probably not coincidental. Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past”: “When I read his [Stephen's] books I get a critical grasp on him; I always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if I'm reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct; to stiffen my fluid vision” (MoB, 115).

4. William Hazlitt, “Mr. Wordsworth,” in The Spirit of the Age, vol. 11, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Macmillan, 1932), 86-87.

5. Describing her father in “A Sketch of the Past,” written thirty-three years later, Virginia Woolf wrote: “Indeed I was on his side, even when he was exploding” (MoB, 112). The narrator's assertion that Rosamond and Phyllis took their father's side seems, then, to have had an autobiographical basis.

6. Virginia Hyman, “Reflections in the Looking-Glass: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf,” Journal of Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (June 1983): 197-216.

7. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals: 1897-1909, ed. Mitchell Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 309. Hereafter cited parenthetically as APA.

8. Article, Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 8 (Chicago: Britannica Inc., 1964): 478-79.

9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1958), 169.

10. Indeed, later in the narrative, she has Joan say: “But figures are slippery things!” (CSF, 57) and “In sober truth, and without metaphor” (CSF, 58).

11. William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, intro. and notes E. de Selincourt (London: Humphrey Milord, 1926), 29. A reprint of the 1906 edition Virginia reviewed. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Wordsworth's Guide.

12. Hermione Lee, “A Burning Glass: Reflection in Virginia Woolf.” Lee considers Woolf's metaphors but not her subjects, political views, or other aspects of Woolf's craft as evidence of her relationship to Romanticism.

13. In a note to the story, Susan Dick says: “As Susan M. Squier and Louise A. DeSalvo point out, VW is probably referring here to John Lydgate's Temple of Glas, which she seems to have confused with his Troy-book” (CSF, 290).

14. Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, first published in 1873, devotes a chapter to the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who in 1871 discovered the site of ancient Troy.

15. Illuminations, the term for the handpainted illustrations in mediaeval and renaissance manuscripts, although only implied here, would be a significant example of the metaphors dependent on light and fire that Lee has isolated as characteristic Romantic metaphors for the imagination.

16. See The Mirror and the Lamp for a full account of the difference between mimetic and Romantic expressive theories of art.

17. Drew Gilpin Faust, review of “How Master Lost His Concubine,” by Melton A. McLaurin, New York Times Book Review (17 November 1991): 30-31.

18. Louise DeSalvo, in “Shakespeare's Other Sister,” New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 61-81, says:

    Soon Joan's father finds out about her Journal. He is envious and realises that he is too lazy for such a task. He encourages her to continue keeping it; she has learned to read and write from him.

    (76)

    There is nothing in Joan's reporting of her father's reaction to her and her journal keeping to indicate anything but his pride in her abilities. His emotional outburst, such as it is, concerns his regret over his own father's inability to write and so leave an historical record of his fathers before him as Joan is doing for the present moment. The issue of the sex of the historian does not appear as relevant to Giles Martyn as it does to DeSalvo. Perhaps DeSalvo has distorted her reporting of the interaction between daughter and father to bolster her thesis that this is a story about women's need to empower themselves by becoming historians who write women into the historical record. Correlatively, DeSalvo sees the male characters as the cause of the women's compromised power and skill—an idea that is borne out neither by the strong figure of Joan's mother nor her father's pride in her writing ability. Leslie Stephen was as proud and encouraging of his daughter's efforts as Joan's father was of hers.

19. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf V, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 327. All other references to the diaries will be to the five volumes of this edition (1977-84) and cited parenthetically as Diary.

20. DeSalvo, “Shakespeare's Other Sister,” 66.

21. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, vol. 2, chapter XVI, 1850: 223.

22. Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past,” commenting on when she was brought by George Duckworth to see her dead mother, says: “a desire to laugh came over me, and I said to myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since, ‘I feel nothing whatever.’” (MoB, 92).

23. Joan's heightened imagination causes her to see ordinary life in a way that is comparable to Wordsworth's account of the aim of the poems in Lyrical Ballads.

    The principle object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

    (Wordsworth, 446-47)

24. Giles Martyn's decision to see that his father's tomb is carved seems a deliberate imaginative rewriting of history by Virginia Stephen since John Paston, also of Norfolk, “delayed to make his father's tombstone” (CR [The Common Reader], 8).