The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile.

—“Friendships Gallery” (284)

If Orlando (1928) has typically been read as the literary consequence of Woolf's call for a new “art” of biography that could negotiate the tension between fact and fiction—between the “granite” and the “rainbow” of life, as Woolf's metaphor figures it in her review essay “The New Biography” (1927)—the early biographical sketch “Friendships Gallery” questions Orlando's pride of place in that critical narrative.¹ The laughter of the Comic Spirit in “Friendships Gallery” is a harbinger of the revisionary spirit that runs through Virginia Woolf's early essays and prose fiction and into her later work. Its text bound in violet leather and typed with purple ink, Woolf's gift to her childhood friend Violet Dickinson is the direct antecedent to the later “mock” biography Orlando, and in that capacity “Friendships Gallery” illustrates Woolf's growing control over her literary inheritance as she satirically mocks the failures of biography and novels to capture the “granite” and the “rainbow” of individuals' lives. For Woolf, the ideological connection between these traditional narratives of experience must necessarily come under investigation, particularly if a woman's life is to be told. Her narrative's self-conscious, satiric use of established forms illustrates how these forms in turn could be reconstructed for different ideological ends.

The comic tropes of Woolf's “Friendships Gallery” (her emphasis on Violet's physical height and persistent laugh, the disruptions of narrative time) as well as the biographer's self-conscious rejection of sentimental and realistic narrative forms suggest the sketch's pivotal position in Woolf's feminist revisions of literary traditions. In this more “proper writing of lives” (15 April 1908, Letters [The Letters of Virginia Woolf] 1: 325), “Friendships Gallery” tells Violet Dickinson's history by way of a dialogic emphasis on voice, in order to convey the energy and strength of Violet's character from birth through middle age—a range of female experience not traditionally recorded within the conventions of either the nineteenth-century biography or novel. By explicitly calling on both the historiographic and novelistic conventions for writing a woman's life, Woolf's biographical sketch of Dickinson reveals how these narrative forms can limit a woman's material existence within a capitalist society's histories and stories. Woolf therefore explicitly writes into her narrative what patriarchal ideologies and, consequently, history often elide: a woman's individual character, expressed through body and voice.

Since the tension between biographical truth and literary fiction is explicitly worked out in the pages of this early biographical sketch, “Friendships Gallery” offers early evidence for Woolf's goal of a new “art” of biography that strives to capture “the truth of real life and the truth of fiction,” however “antagonistic” and “incompatible” those truths may be (“The New Biography” [1927], 154-55). John Stape's assertion that we find the roots of Orlando in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” (1906), “Memoirs of a Novelist” (1909), and “The Jessamy Brides” (1927) is therefore appropriate but incomplete (xi). While these three texts certainly contribute to the development of Woolf's art, I believe that “Friendships Gallery” best represents the complex root system from which Orlando grows. In the pages of “Friendships Gallery,” we see nearly all of the qualities Stape identifies in his description of Orlando: a “hybrid genre of mock forms,” “simultaneously a novel, a treatise on biography, a study of the art of fiction, a work of feminist social criticism, a revisionist literary history and the fantastically reinvented life history of Woolf's friend” (xi).

The sketch's three chapters each offer a view of Violet's character that balance, in varying combinations, the “truths” of life and fiction: the first, untitled, chapter comically tells of Violet's birth, childhood, and first season; “Chapter Two: The Magic Garden” offers not only a comic but also a fantastic narrative of Violet's early years in society; and, finally, “Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep” shifts almost completely into the realm of the fantastic by relating Violet's trip to Japan as a tale of a giant princess who saves a village from monsters by laughing and brandishing her umbrella. After briefly placing “Friendships Gallery” in the context of Woolf's other early biographical writings and noting its critical reception since its publication in 1979, I will identify three ways in which this early comic sketch anticipates Orlando and the feminist concerns of Woolf's later work: first, through her questioning of a third-person, omniscient narrative style typical of historiography and biography; second, through her revisions to Meredith's definition of the Comic Spirit, embodied by Violet's character in “Friendships Gallery”; and third, through her choice of romance and fantasy as alternative narrative forms for the telling of a woman's life. My goal is not only to recover an early sketch for further critical study but also to identify the importance of “Friendships Gallery” to our critical narrative of Woolf's development as a feminist writer.

“Friendships Gallery” is only one of several biographical sketches that Woolf, as an aspiring chronicler of the past,² composed for family and friends or for general publication in advance of her more famous and irreverent Orlando. When we hear that Woolf had been asked by F. W. Maitland to contribute to his biography of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a man whose name had become synonymous with the compendious Dictionary of National Biography, we might expect Woolf to have felt as burdened by her literary past as her character Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day (1920), who labors at her grandfather's biography, “half-crushed” by the weight of “the great poet, Richard Alardyce” (15), and his many letters and manuscripts. Yet far from suffering under the weight of this legacy, Woolf repeatedly adapts her inheritance to her own literary and feminist goals.³ Like her travel journals and earliest fiction, Woolf's biographical sketches⁴ put into practice a more “proper writing of lives” than she had found in the many histories, biographies, and memoirs she reviewed during these same years, a method that questioned patriarchal ideology by questioning the established methods of biographical writing. In her biographies, Woolf chose to emphasize individual voices from the past, to advocate storytelling as a way to recover those voices and bodies of the past for the contemporary reader, and, perhaps most importantly, to avoid historians' and biographers' replication of a patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, in which men's lives turn on their active engagement with the social world, and women's lives turn on their passive appearance and the “invisible” work they accomplish within the home.⁵ Acknowledging her independent, subjective perspective by writing herself into the biographical text, Woolf continually pursues the individual character of her subjects by re-presenting their speech and thoughts as well as their actions, so that the historical past lives again in the reader's present experience. Her biographical sketches anticipate the need to balance the “truth of real life and the truth of fiction,” the hallmark of what Woolf will identify as the new art of biography (“The New Biography” [1927], 154); their narrative forms illustrate a dialogic writing of lives commensurate with her feminist goals. In “Friendships Gallery,” however, we can see Woolf altering the balance from historical narrative (the “truth of real life”) to the possibilities of fiction (the “truth of fiction”), as her writing notebooks confirm.⁶ “Friendships Gallery” therefore provides a crucial link in our understanding of Woolf's development as a feminist materialist artist, one concerned with economic relations and with the life of the body and the mind within a patriarchal culture.

When “Friendships Gallery” was first discovered, however, the sketch was quickly linked with Woolf's better-known mock biography of another female friend, Vita Sackville-West, and it has since shared a critical fate similar to Orlando's within the Woolf canon of literary works.⁷ The prevailing critical evaluation of Orlando read Woolf's novel through the lens of Nigel Nicholson's oft-quoted line “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”⁸ Woolf's biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson is introduced in similar terms by Ellen Hawkes, who edited the previously unpublished sketch for Twentieth Century Literature in 1979. In Hawkes's introduction, “Friendships Gallery” becomes “an early example of Virginia Woolf's way of expressing her affection and admiration for a woman friend”—a “spoof biography of Violet Dickinson [that] begins and ends in love” (270).⁹ While both “Friendships Gallery” and Orlando are certainly motivated, as Woolf's letters and diary entries bear out, by the “affection and admiration” Woolf felt “for a woman friend,” this perspective limits the critical import of the particular stories each “biography” tells, and, in the case of Orlando, inappropriately limits the intended audience for the book. Both texts become only “love letters,” to be read more for the affection conveyed rather than for the form and content of the narratives told.

While the prevailing critical view of Orlando has shifted over the years, that for “Friendships Gallery” has not. In her biography Virginia Woolf (1996), Hermione Lee replicates Ellen Hawkes's approach, identifying “Friendships Gallery” as “a spoof love-letter-cum-biography” and therefore “an early Orlando” (13). Although Hawkes concludes her introductory comments by acknowledging the “reverberations here of [Woolf's] serious themes,” her list of themes is not fleshed out within the necessarily brief editorial space.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Hawkes's decision to frame “Friendships Gallery” foremost as a “panegyric” subordinates the narrative's role in cultural, feminist criticism, since Hawkes's choice elides Woolf's explicit play with the genres of biography, the novel, and the romance—a sign of Woolf's search early in her literary career for narrative forms by which to accomplish her explicitly feminist goals. A critical approach that reads “Friendships Gallery” alongside Orlando for the narrative forms by which Woolf conveys her “affection and admiration” reveals how these two biographical sketches underscore Woolf's continuing concerns with re-presenting individual experience, particularly women's experience. Together, “Friendships Gallery” and Orlando mark an early and later revision of available narrative forms into a new, and particularly comic, art.

Like Orlando, “Friendships Gallery” offers a satiric commentary both on the necessarily imaginative role a biographer plays in re-presenting experience and on the historiographic methods that traditionally mask this subjective view. Woolf's narrative places the biographer's construction of character in the foreground of the sketch, thereby encouraging her reader to see historical texts as subjective, interested readings of past experience rather than as the objective, disinterested truth historiography often purports to be. As she will in Orlando, Woolf's narrator adopts a masculine biographical persona when writing the sketch of Violet Dickinson—a rhetorical move that emphasizes not only how “biographer” is a role one assumes within the biographical narrative but also how this role is usually “played” from a masculine point of view. Though the sketch is written in the first and second person, the biographer's professed lack of knowledge of women and the solitary life the biographer leads indicates this masculine persona:

I will not say how they [the ladies] do these things; for that would require a surgical knowledge of anatomy, neither polite [n]or possible; for living as I do, in a garret with one dirty char woman who brings me Lloyds Weekly and a bunch of kippered herrings tied by the tails like candles, on Friday nights, …

(283)

Given this character sketch in “Friendships Gallery” and the use of the masculine pronoun in Orlando—“Happy the mother who bears, happy still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist of poet” (15)—Woolf appears to be drawing attention in both mock biographies to the presumed sex and gender of the biographer, making the reader aware of the gendered, subjective position of the supposedly “objective” historical voice.

The constraints of propriety, coupled with class position, emerge in this same narrative aside, emphasizing further the degree to which the biographer's own material circumstances must necessarily influence his representation of Violet's life. In describing the food consumed by ladies having tea in Violet's garden, the biographer cannot pretend to have an objective view of the scene:

how can I imagine the taste of the cutlets which Lady B__th eats off silver, beneath the eyes of six flunkeys in livery? Cutlets may change their shape beneath such a radiance; and Heaven knows what exquisite nerves are stimulated and begotten by mutton eaten off silver. And as it is with mutton, so it must be with other things; with books, with pictures; with love with life; this is a very good reason why I should not attempt to describe what I do not know—why I should continue to adore it.

(283)

Anticipating the narrator in A Room of One's Own (1929), Violet's biographer insists on the influence that good food in pleasant surroundings will have on the creative and intellectual faculties.¹¹ And, like the narrator of A Room of One's Own who “take[s] the liberty to defy that convention of novels” (10) and describes the quality and quantity of food eaten at the men's college, Violet's biographer defies a related convention of biography by insisting on how the material experience of eating limits a biographer's sympathetic imagination. Woolf's biographical persona thus abandons all claims to objectivity: the subjective emphasis falls, as it does in A Room of One's Own, on the material conditions that allow or prevent a greater understanding for another's point of view.

The difficulty of composing with propriety while still crafting a “true” history marks another aspect of biography that Woolf questions in her comic sketch, as she will in her later work. In “Friendships Gallery,” such self-censorship limits Violet's “sincere historian” right from the opening of the sketch:

Forty years ago, our sincerity does her credit, a child was born in a Somersetshire manor house. Whether she was born laughing or crying or both at once or whether she merely accepted the situation and made the best of it, a sincere historian anxious to use only those words that cannot be avoided has no means of telling.

(275)

Restricted by the biographical conventions emerging from nineteenth-century social mores, Violet's biographer can only recount the difficulty of maintaining his goal of sincerity and cannot provide sincere speech itself. A paragraph later, the biographer's narrative is thwarted again by these prescribed bounds of speech:

Now the history of Christian names is so interesting that if I had the freedom of my mother tongue, as I have not for a reason to be told in the appendix,^I I would here expound it;¹² I will only say that forty years ago a Christian name was a Christian name; and that if you wished your daughter to answer with credit in this world and the next you branded her with the virtues of the faith from the very beginning.

(275)

Lacking the “freedom of [his] mother tongue,” the biographer claims not to be able to convey an important context for Violet's name; in place of the unspeakable, Violet's biographer includes the scene of Violet's baptism, but does so in order to turn the serious occasion of Christian naming through baptism into a merely arbitrary event, concluding how “nearly Violet was Mary, how easily Dickinson might have been Jones” (275). Violet's biographer thus both criticizes the social censure of his “mother tongue” and renders such censure ineffective, even detrimental to those social mores that required “a Christian name.” The biographer of Orlando will encounter and then surmount similar narrative difficulties by comically drawing the reader's attention to the censorship while offering a pointed commentary on the hypocrisy of the restrictions. When faced with the “truth” of Orlando's change from man to woman, Orlando's biographer is caught between “spar[ing] the reader what is to come” and adhering to “Truth, Candor, and Honesty, the austere gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer” (134). Woolf's satire on the hypocrisy of such claims to “Truth, Candor, and Honesty” soon becomes clear in the masque the biographer describes, a spectacle that in turn foreshadows the Victorian interval of Miss La Trobe's play in Between the Acts (1941). As “our Lady of Purity,” “our Lady of Chastity,” and “our Lady of Modesty” all dance attendance on the scene of Orlando's transformation, they try to “cover Orlando with their draperies” and “to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets”; “Truth,” however, “blare[s] out” and thrusts their offices from the room (136). Their departing speech invokes the qualities their names suggest, but only to reveal how ignorance and greed masquerade behind their seemingly pure draperies of faith and social respectability:

For there, not here […] dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt those who love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers and doctors; those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease.

(137)

As in “Friendships Gallery,” the biographer of Orlando acknowledges the limitations that censor his narrative, but does so in a way that such limitations appear ill-conceived and hypocritical—indeed, worthy of our laughter. Not being able to speak the truth ultimately works against the censor's goals: the reader learns that Violet's naming was a completely arbitrary event, rather than one with some meaning, and that the supposed protectors of society's modesty, purity, and chastity are, in fact, blindly faithful and self-serving citizens.

Woolf's strongest indictment in “Friendships Gallery” of biography's claims to omniscience and objectivity occurs with the laugh of the Comic Spirit, a laugh that neatly captures the tone and historiographic method Woolf advocates for the more “proper writing of lives” in both “Friendships Gallery” and Orlando. The occasion of the laugh is the biographer's hyperbolic claim that Violet's decision to purchase “a cottage of one[']s own” (288) will be seen by future historians as “the beginning of the great revolution which is making England a very different place from what it was” (288). The biographer supports the hyperbole of his mock-heroic claim by citing a parody of the Cambridge historian George Trevelyan, anticipating what Trevelyan will write about this “momentous change”:

That act of hers typifies a really momentous change which will be described one of these days by Mr George Trevelyan in his work of The Social Life of the Nineteenth Century. “A new spirit” he will write, “breathed, like the wind of a rosy dawn, from the works of George Meredith, and stirring the dusty and arid leaves now beginning to shrivel on the stunted bushes of modern life, caused them to drop those perfectly inefficient shields, relics of a purblind aristocratic age, and to put forth whatever of youth or Spirit yet remained in them. Not much in most cases!” There he laughed; and then went on sprinkling his page with notes to tell us how gently born ladies took to eating porridge off earthen ware, without stays, and how they dug in their gardens, and how muscles grew on their arms, and their husbands called them “Comrade” and how children in vast quantities mostly of the male sex were born to them, and how they toiled for human brotherhood, and the sap of life sang in their veins. The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile.

(284-85)

Woolf's parody of Trevelyan's choice of historical subject and style is both prescient and topical: although Trevelyan did not compose his British History in the Nineteenth Century until 1922 and his English Social History until 20 years later, Woolf captures the cadence and spirit of Trevelyan's historiographic methods for social history,¹³ perhaps in part because of her familiarity with Trevelyan's ideas by 1907, the year she composed “Friendships Gallery.” Not only were George Trevelyan and his brother Robert well known to the young men of Bloomsbury during their Cambridge years,¹⁴ but also Trevelyan lectured on the French Revolution at Morley College in 1905, the same year Woolf lectured on history and composition for her Morley College students (Rosenbaum 167). It is likely that Woolf also read Trevelyan's essays for the Independent Review, since work by Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Desmond McCarthy, and Leonard Woolf appeared in the Review during its first year (1903-04) and until its demise in 1908 (Rosenbaum 9). Trevelyan's essay titled “Clio, A Muse,” published first in the Independent Review in 1903, might well have caught Woolf's historiographic eye. Arguing for a literary, rather than the increasingly favored scientific, approach toward the writing of history, Trevelyan believes that history should be told as a “narrative,” a “tale,” that could recapture the past in almost Wordsworthian terms (148, 150). Trevelyan particularly values a historical method that includes humor: “The ‘dignity of history,’ whether literary or scientific, is too often afraid of contact with the Comic Spirit” (146), he claims. His laugh in “Friendships Gallery” (“There he laughed”), followed by his carefree gesture of “sprinkling his page with notes,” suggests that Woolf parodies Trevelyan with knowledge of his desire to include humor in historiography, as well as with knowledge of his highly metaphorical style.

Yet what of the Comic Spirit who laughs after the parody of Trevelyan's historiographic style? It may well be the one Trevelyan calls for in “Clio, A Muse,” but it might also be George Meredith's Comic Spirit, which Trevelyan describes in some detail in his study of The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, published in 1906 and reviewed by Woolf's brother-in-law, Clive Bell, for the Cambridge Review that same year (Rosenbaum 278). In one of the few critical commentaries on “Friendships Gallery,” critic S. P. Rosenbaum hears echoes of Trevelyan's study of Meredith in Woolf's parody, identifying the connection as the result of “G. M. Trevelyan, fresh from his championing of Meredith” (374). Rosenbaum does not go on to explain Meredith's influence on the Trevelyan parody, but presumably the connection rests with the Comic Spirit as introduced in Meredith's Essay on Comedy (1897) and the Meredithean democracy and pastoral landscape of Violet's cottage, where, as Violet's biographer explains,

fashionable London “mak[es] believe” with a pruning hook and knife that it loves the country; as you have seen little town bred children dig holes in a corner of the Square Garden and pretend that they are really camping out with tinned food, in the Indian jungle, and that the cats are roaring lions.

(289)

As Trevelyan describes Meredith's philosophy on society, Meredith

detects one of the chief causes of the slack, good-humoured, and unthinking spirit, in the inheritance by individuals of immense quantities of unearned wealth. In consonance with the general tenor of his philosophy, he thinks that in most cases irresponsible wealth, especially when inherited in youth, dwarfs the growth of character and intellect by sheltering men unnaturally from the education of strife. …

(200)

Physical labor, then, in combination with the benefits of nature, should transform Violet's “unthinking” aristocratic guests into “Comrade[s]” of a new, more advanced and democratic age—a moment that Trevelyan, “fresh from his championing of Meredith,” would find worthy of recording in the history books.

The tone of the biographer's description of Violet's aristocratic friends, however, indicates there is more “play” than substantive transformation at Violet's pastoral cottage. Woolf's allusion to the Comic Spirit—and Rosenbaum's decision not to explain this allusion—in turn begs the following questions: At what or whom does the Comic Spirit laugh in the parodic passage quoted above? At Violet's decision to build her cottage? At Violet's aristocratic friends who visit her to “labor” on the pastoral land? At the parody composed in Trevelyan's voice, which anticipates the intonations and phrasing he will use in his later histories? And what is the intended effect of the laugh on the reader's understanding of the scene: critical, sympathetic, or both?

To answer these questions and arrive at a reading of Woolf's extended parody of historiographic practice, we must pause here and untangle Woolf's view of the Comic Spirit in 1907 from Meredith's Comic Spirit and Trevelyan's reading of Meredith's Comic Spirit—distinctions Rosenbaum does not pursue in his reading of Woolf's parody. For Woolf, the Comic Spirit shares qualities with Meredith's, but differs significantly in terms of motive, as Woolf's essay “The Value of Laughter” on 15 August 1905 for the Guardian makes clear. While Rosenbaum feels “the essay as a whole is more Meredithean and Aristotelian” (159), Rosenbaum's assessment elides several important differences between Meredith's and Woolf's views.¹⁵ Woolf's observation in her essay that “[d]irectly we forget to laugh we see things out of proportion and lose our sense of reality” (Essays [The Essays of Virginia Woolf] 1: 59) does correspond to Meredith's view that the laugh of the Comic Spirit “cures [society's] sickness […] whenever men wax out of proportion,” since “the spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light over them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter” (qtd. in Poetry 192-93). Woolf's claim that “the comic spirit concerns itself with oddities and eccentricities and deviations from the recognised pattern” (59) might not seem incommensurate with Meredith's claims. Yet Woolf locates the curative laughter within individuals, not “overhead,” and places the term “comic spirit” in lowercase rather than uppercase letters, further marking its earthly origins. Most importantly, Woolf genders and sexes Comedy as feminine and female, and here departs from Meredith's view of the Comic Spirit as a reconciling force between the sexes. Meredith aligns women with the Comic Spirit, but only to grant them equal opportunity in their “battle with men, and that of men with them”:

as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker. …

(qtd. in Poetry 188-89)

Woolf, by contrast, assigns women and children the shaping powers of the comic spirit, a power to reveal patriarchal ideologies that may be detrimental to men's and women's lives:

Women and children, then, are the chief ministers of the comic spirit, because their eyes are not clouded with learning nor are their brains choked with the theories of books, so that men and things still preserve their original sharp outlines. All the hideous excrescences that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps and conventions and dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much as the flash of laughter which, like lightning, shrivels them up and leaves the bones bare. It is because their laughter possesses this quality that children are feared by people who are conscious of affectations and unrealities; and it is probably for this reason that women are looked upon with such disfavor in the learned professions. The danger is that they may laugh, like the child in Hans Anderson who said that the king went naked when his elders worshiped the splendid raiment that did not exist. […] There is nothing, indeed, so difficult as laughter, but no quality is more valuable. It is a knife that both prunes and trains and gives symmetry and sincerity to our acts and to the spoken and the written word.

(60)

The laugh of the Comic Spirit in “Friendships Gallery” may indeed provide “symmetry and sincerity” to the biographer's act of composition and to the historiographic enterprise more generally, given that the laughter occurs directly following the parody of Trevelyan's history of the century. Yet this laughter also “prunes and trains,” giving outline to the founding patriarchal and class ideologies hidden by the draperies of social custom. Far from echoing Meredith's Comic Spirit of reconciliation, Woolf's comic spirit cuts through ideological “excrescences” to divest them of their power.

In “Friendships Gallery,” the character of Violet Dickinson embodies the Comic Spirit Woolf describes the previous year in “The Value of Laughter.” Physically disruptive as she navigates her large body through the social world, Violet's comically exaggerated size signifies not only difference but also productive difference in the terms established by Woolf's essay: it “prunes and trains” the layers of patriarchal custom she encounters. The biographer emphasizes Violet's physical attributes—her great height—to locate the disruption Violet causes to established social norms, and how such disruption often reveals the economic basis of those norms. Playing upon Violet's unusual height—as she does not do in her brief biographical sketch from 1902¹⁶—Woolf has Violet's biographer present Violet's early years according to her rapid growth:

But there never was such a child for growing.

“Nurse, bring the weighing machine” said the doctor.

“It's the foot rule you want, Sir,” said Nurse; “if I may make so bold.”

(275)

The biographer's exaggeration of Violet's size reflects an approach to the body that echoes a long tradition of comic novelists such as Sterne, Cervantes, and Rabelais. However, such exaggeration is also at odds with the conventional focus of biography. In Woolf's biographical sketch, the development of the subject's mind and character is neatly acknowledged only to be undercut by an insistence on Violet's unruly body:

Miss Violet Dickinson grew to be as tall as the tallest hollyhock in the garden before she was eight; but after all our concern is with her spiritual progress. True, her size alarmed her family; her position in the ball room they thought might be seriously prejudiced. …

(276)

By suggesting that Violet's “spiritual progress” is related to her success “in the ball room,” Violet's biographer ironically reveals how, far from being discrete, any “spiritual progress” is closely tied to the very material fact of Violet's height—a connection symbolized by the heavy weight of a gold cross bestowed on Violet before her first ball. The gift of the cross from Violet's godmother to Violet, intended to make Violet attractive as a “Beacon of Godliness” rather than be seen as a “Maypole of Derision” (276), echoes the import of the biographer's claims but without the biographer's irony: both the biographer's narrative and the gift of the cross attempt to distinguish between the spiritual and the material, only to confirm the necessary link between them in a society that values physical beauty and material wealth as the signs of “spiritual” success. In the case of a woman, the connection is even more pointed: physical beauty and material wealth are the established criteria for a woman's success “in the ball room” with her potential suitors. As she grows older, Violet's height continues to challenge established views of women and class: “[S]triding along a country road” and “need[ing] only a couple of terriers at her heels and a whip in her hand to look the part which in effect she did not play; the Squires sporting daughter” (288), Violet is an avatar of the sporting Orlando who strides, dogs at heel, across her lands (97, 320) and of Miss La Trobe who appeared “swarthy, sturdy and thickset; strode about the fields in a smock frock […] often with a whip in her hand” (58). Importantly, Violet's great stature is resignified at the end of the sketch in the fantastical “Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep.” There, Violet becomes a “Giantess,” one of two beneficent Giant Princesses, whose size represents the bounty of her good deeds. Rather than existing only as a disruptive force to society, Violet's great height is located back within the realm of the social, yet in support of a different social role for women and different feminine ideals: independence, strength, generosity, and, significantly, a principle of exchange rather than accrued material gain.

Violet's voice matches the physical height and ideologically disruptive force of her body. Through its strength, Violet challenges social proprieties with her loud and frequent laugh, and she voices revolutionary ideas. Woolf's decision not only to value but also to record Violet's voice stands in marked contrast to the palpable silence of women's voices in much history and biography. While Woolf regrets the loss of her mother's voice from records of Julia Stephen's life,¹⁷ in the role of Violet's biographer Woolf has the advantage of the “truth,” factual or fictional, of Violet's speeches:

Here again I would digress. But this is one of Violets earliest sayings.

Her mother; “I wish you would learn to write Violet.” Violet[:] “I wont write; I'd rather talk.”

(275-76)

The biographer's “digression” reveals, in fact, an extremely important quality of Violet's character, one that first opens the sketch—her nurses “agreed that she was the cleverest child,” “the noisiest child,” “the child with the finest lungs in the Parish” (275)—and recurs throughout. Like the comic portrayal of her height, Violet's insistent voice disrupts the established order of her class-based society to reveal the ideology that perpetuates it, thereby offering further evidence that Violet embodies the revolutionary force of the Comic Spirit as Woolf conceives it in her 1905 essay. While visiting the grounds of an aristocratic, Elizabethan home and noticing the gardener at work, Violet takes the unusual approach of rising to greet him:

“Good day” she began, with a heartiness that made the bent old creature straighten himself and look at her. Yes, she was a real lady; and—what was that odd feeling she gave him? [His usual] 18 crust of his demeanor which sheltered all [the] of the untaught man] and protected him from ladies and gentlemen and gave him a body wherewith to appear decently in their eyes, the crust that they both agreed to accept for the real man since the real man was not presentable, [a]

(286)

Violet's address liberates the gardener's character from the constraining “crust of his demeanor” that he and his employers “had agreed to accept for the real man,” revealing revolutionary, democratic sentiments within. The contradiction between their quotidian conversation about roses and his wife's illness and his violent gesture with his shears ushers the narrative into the register of the mock heroic and would seem to make him a comic figure. However, the tone of the narrative shifts at the end of the scene to a less hyperbolic and more reflective acknowledgment of his class difference: “He forgot for the first time for twenty years that half hours are the property of the C[eci]l family, and have been so ‘for centuries and centuries I dessay’” (286).¹⁹ Violet's address and her genuine interest in his concerns may invoke mock-heroic revolutionary fervor, but the shift in tone suggests that she has, like the comic spirit of Woolf's description, “give[n] symmetry and sincerity” (Essays 1: 60) to their exchange, “piercing” through generations of class-based difference with her “voice and friendly gaze.”

Violet's meeting with the gardener precipitates another scene in which Violet's voice challenges the ideology of class in order to reveal two material bases of her society: inherited wealth and drains. Once back within the aristocratic house, Violet finds in her Bible

a phrase for her discontent among so much that was old and beautiful which ended with “moth and rust” and suggested a figure to her mind of bodies encrusted with precious stones as some beetles are crusted with dry excrescences, trying painfully to scrape themselves smooth against gleaming walls of steel. It was not you perceive that she had no love of beauty but that—how can I explain it?—there was some illicit connection in her mind between beauty and riches, beauty and luxury, beauty and selfishness tyranny and vice.

(286-87)

The “illicit connection” Violet intuits between “beauty and selfishness tyranny and vice” will be explained in great detail by Woolf in Three Guineas (1938) as a connection forged by a capitalist and patriarchal society that signifies beauty as “riches,” “luxury,” “selfishness tyranny and vice” in order to further its own ideological ends. Orlando senses a similar illicit quality to material possessions, especially when they are divorced from the human life that animates them with purpose and pleasure (111-12, 147-48). But in 1907, Woolf had already expressed these thoughts, in quite similar terms, in her essay on laughter: just as Violet's biographer notes how “so much that was old and beautiful which ended with ‘moth and rust’ and suggested a figure to her mind of bodies encrusted with precious stones as some beetles are crusted with dry excrescences,” we hear in Woolf's essay how “[a]ll the hideous excrescences that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps and conventions and dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much as the flash of laughter” (Essays 1: 60). Violet, like the comic “knife that prunes and trains,” can cut through the crust of ideology to see—and encourage others to see—the “original sharp outlines” within the illusions of everyday experience (60).

At dinner, Violet's voice is granted the power to reveal the cultural ideologies that mask the physical evidence of bodies and of lived experience in and around the decaying Elizabethan house. Violet quickly disrupts the complacent complicity of her hosts by revealing this materiality:

[A]nd the question which she put with tremendous animation, to her host at lunch “Do tell me on what system is your drainage managed?” was the first shot of an attack which threatened the whole of the Elizabethan pile. They were sitting in the long gallery watching with calm benignant eyes the daily performance of sun and earth which had so often been repeated in front of them that they could almost prompt the actors. You had the impression, until Violet spoke, of an audience such as the audience of the hills beholding an evening sky; or the long gallery was a tranquil creek where ships that had done their voyages came to anchor. And then Violet spoke.

(287)

The audience to Violet's question—her act of speech—prefigures the audience that Woolf will assemble for Miss La Trobe's play in Between the Acts. Like the voice that exclaims “All that fuss about nothing” (138) during the Restoration act of the play, Violet's question breaks the complacent illusion of security under which her hosts exist, to reveal the material condition of their lives. The fact that “[n]o one could tell her how the drains were managed, for no one remembered that there were drains” (297), indicates the degree to which these members of the aristocracy have become unconscious of their own bodily existence and their necessary connection with the materiality of their surroundings—including the presence of their own gardener, whom Violet names when they cannot. It is Violet, then, who, in her role as the Comic Spirit, “laughed meanwhile” (284) when her aristocratic friends follow her to “a cottage of [her] own” where there are “real drains, and real roses” (288). Their growing awareness of their material condition marks “the beginning of the great revolution,” a beginning mock-heroically elevated by Violet's biographer, who in turn seems to join in the laughter and encourages the reader to do so as well.

While Woolf's biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson illustrates Woolf's frustrations with the methods and discipline of historiography conveyed contemporaneously through her reviews, her travel journal, and her other biographical sketches, “Friendships Gallery” is particularly important for its bearing on Woolf's evolving theories of fiction. The biographer's self-conscious rejection of “sentimental” and realistic narrative forms illustrates the pivotal position the sketch holds in an evaluation of Woolf's revisions of her literary inheritance. In this final section, I would like to explore Woolf's early revisions to received novelistic forms, particularly her allusions to romance and her use of fantasy. Both genres offer ways to capture the “truths” of a woman's life, truths that otherwise escape from the ideologically complicit narratives of experience valued by a patriarchal society.

Through Violet's biographer, Woolf criticizes the fictional methods available for recounting a woman's life, drawing attention to the ideological implications of nineteenth-century novelistic forms. Calling upon but redeploying the narrative conventions of the sentimental novel²⁰ and the realist novel, Woolf's biographical sketch of her friend Violet Dickinson frequently questions and then rejects the “realistic” representation typical of biographies and novels, narrative modes that can limit a woman's body and voice.²¹ Instead, Woolf privileges a more “realistic”—more truthful—presentation of Violet's life through a dialogic narrative form that borrows from fantasy and the romance while still emphasizing the material conditions shaping her subject's body and voice.

In revising the narrative forms available for telling a woman's life, Woolf encourages her readers to recognize how existing narratives of experience, particularly the sentimental novel, influence a woman's material existence, since they record a woman's life according to her importance within a patriarchal society.²² In the conventional biography and bourgeois novel, women's lives only become worthy of note when women become valuable as a commodity through marriage, at the season when they “c[o]me out” (“Memoirs of a Novelist” 70). In recognition of this narrative convention, Violet's biographer pauses five pages into the sketch to reflect on the decisions he has made thus far for a reader who presumably knows the established methods for telling a woman's life in history and in fiction:

Now there should be here some more tremendous division than a blank space of white paper; and I suspect that my artistic skill would have been more consummate had I thrown these first pages into the waste paper basket or enclosed them [between]

                                                            Her First Season

and leave such details as birth parentage education and the first seventeen years of her life to be taken for granted. […] But then this Biography is no novel but a sober chronicle; and if Life will begin seventeen years before it is needed it is our task to say so valiantly and make the best of it.

(279)

Taking a stand against the prevailing assumption that “the first seventeen years of [a woman's] life [are] to be taken for granted,” Violet's biographer satirically decides that “if Life will begin seventeen years before it is needed it is our task to say so valiantly and make the best of it.”²³ Violet's biographer thus lays claim to a higher authority than the established biographical and novelistic methods for recounting a woman's life and thereby revises the standards of woman's biography: “this Biography” will consider all of the years Violet has lived, even if those experiences are deemed by others to be a “mere waste of time” (279). Orlando's biographer wrestles with similar difficulties when Orlando, now a woman, provides none of the actions deemed appropriate for the writing of a woman's life, such as falling in love with a gamekeeper (268). Orlando's biographer chooses to defy convention by remarking on his difficulties and by resolving to “look out the window” to discover “Life” in all its sensory and sensuous experience, including the “Laughter, Laughter!” from the moths, until his human subject does or says something he can legitimately record (269-71). Both biographers' responses question the prevailing view that women's lives only become worthy of note when women become valuable as a commodity through marriage at the season when they “c[o]me out” or through a relationship with a man. By criticizing the ideologically tempered techniques of novels as well as biographies, Woolf censures the patriarchal ideology replicated within both narrative forms. To tell Violet's life, both must be revised.

While Violet's biographer insists that “Friendships Gallery” differs from a novel, the biographer does not refrain from using novelistic forms of representation if they can enhance the reader's experience of Violet's life and character. An ironic frame, however, accompanies their inclusion:

The day after a ball is always used by sentimental novelists endowed with words, for an effective contrast; not only does it change the scene and relieve the strain of prolonged attention—I give away these secrets the best in my possession, but it reveals quite naturally a different side of the heroes character. And so it was with my heroine, if a living woman can be called by such a title. The critics dispute it.

(277)

The biographer's need to explain why the methods of “sentimental novelists” could be used speaks to the presumed distinction between the genres of biography and fiction. However, because “[t]he day after a ball” provides “an effective contrast,” Violet's biographer is willing to embrace this novelistic device for its ability to convey Violet's character. Woolf shows, through Violet's biographer, the compatibility of novelistic and biographical methods, and how fictional devices that foreground character could benefit a biographical narrative—an oft-repeated point in her early essay reviews like “Their Passing Hour” (1905) and “Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle” (1909), and one developed further in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923) and “Character in Fiction” (1924). Violet's biographer even contemplates the benefits of shifting the usual emphasis of biography from intellectual development to a broader psychological portrait of his subject, one that could capture the “flight of her mind, rising like a cloud of bees” (282) and would pursue the sort of “intricate labyrinths” that “modern novelists” (281) might enter, anticipating the narrative methods Woolf will adopt for her fiction.

The literary technique that best allows Violet's biographer to present Violet's character for the reader comes not from the novel per se but from one of the novel's antecedents: the romance. If conventional biographies of women's lives and the sentimental novel both elide those years that precede a woman's entrance into “the world”—those years considered a “mere waste of time” to describe, according to her biographer's ironic comment—the romance narrative can, by contrast, accommodate and value the early education Violet receives from her women teachers as well as the ways in which Violet's lessons are given: through the exchange of personal stories rather than the reading of “official” history.

Woolf offers a pointed satire of the “formal” education many middle-class daughters receive through the persona of Violet's biographer, who reveals the discrepancy between the professed goal of Violet's education and the alternative “history” she acquires during those hours. Since Violet is educated for her role as a commodity rather than the development of her character, Violet's biographer moves directly from the scene of her first ball to her morning lessons, since “it was the morning when Fräulein Müller came to ‘finish’ her with a German polish” (277)—a juxtaposition that highlights the ideological continuity between the two scenes. Violet's biographer explains the prevailing view of a young woman's education through the metaphor of science, marking her parents as doctors:

A time comes however, when parents and guardians can tell the precise second, when book learning has yielded exactly the number of drops which taken internally benefit the system of a maiden; a teaspoonful in excess has been known to ruin the constitution for life; some maintain that a little external polish is no bad thing.

(278)

The extended metaphor of education as the “finish” or “polish” applied to a young woman's body or administered “internally” illustrates the importance of social appearance over character. Yet Violet seems to tarnish under the “polish” of history she receives from Fräulein Müller, and Violet's education soon comes not from the “history” in textbooks but from the personal stories of her female teachers. Though Violet's lesson on the history of drama begins with the textbook, Fräulein Müller's candid acknowledgment that Violet will not be successful “in the society of Bath” (278) for her knowledge of Elizabethan drama leads to Fräulein Müller's narration of her own experiences in the social world: “when the lunch bell rang Fräulein Müller was wiping her eyes saying ‘Ah my dear Miss Violet, I have never told any one what I have told you’” (278). Providing Violet with first-hand experiences of the social world in place of the more “conventional” (and, by comparison, less practical) education, Fräulein Müller and Violet's other governesses offer their pupil what the heroine of Frances Burney's novel Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) desires so much after her first experiences in the “world”: Evelina writes, “But, really, I think there ought to be a book, of all the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people upon their first introduction into public company” (89). Violet's female teachers provide her with scenes from just such a book.

The way in which Violet learns this knowledge of the world suggests the earlier novel form of the romance, represented by even so late an example as Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752).²⁴ Within the feminine world of the romance, friendships between women are valued; to tell one's own “story” or history in response to another's is a compliment and an act that builds trust. Within the patriarchal social world of the bourgeois novel, by contrast, women are often encouraged to compete with one another for a man's affection, forging envy and jealousy instead of friendship and confidence. Further, in the novel a young woman is judged according to her innocence, not her experience—even her innocence of the sort of experiential knowledge that could in fact help her to preserve her innocent character. In Violet's biography, the reader sees the plot of the romance played out in place of the novel's preferred plot: rather than keeping Violet ignorant of previous women's experiences and leaving her to rely on her innocence,²⁵ Fräulein Müller and Violet's other instructors share their own stories and the stories of women they know. These stories, paired with sanctioned instruction, become alternative “history” lessons, creating a genealogy of women's experience for Violet to learn by heart:

Keats sang of German life in

(278-79)

Violet's association of Wordsworth with “a plain Somersetshire girl” and her financial difficulties could be compared to Arabella's “foible” of reading romance as history, except that in Violet's case the two narratives are held in tension: one does not replace the other. Instead, the alternative education that Violet's governesses provide for her forges connections between life and literature. Violet begins her time in the world with an “island” of literary and personal stories that will serve her as she experiences the “immense ocean” of life—a stability of self in relation to the world that Rachel in The Voyage Out (1915) yearns for as she ponders Ibsen and Gibbon, and which Orlando struggles to achieve and finds only after many voyages across the centuries. According to Violet's biographer, her governesses' dramatic narratives about life—history, literature, stories of any kind—thus exist in connection with present experience, not separate from it. This connection between stories of the past and stories of the present, between official and unofficial narratives, is made possible by storytelling, the act of one person speaking to another. The result offers extraordinary potential for broadening women's experiences, as they acquire, like Violet, alternative histories of the past not provided by the high “polish” of the official books.

While the first chapter of “Friendships Gallery” illustrates the value of female friendships and an education inspired by the romance narrative, Violet's biographer tells two alternative “histories” of women's experience during the sketch for the reader to experience directly, both of which partake of the fantastic: a scene in “Chapter Two: The Magic Garden” and the whole of “Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep.” Interwoven into the everyday, the fantasy of “Friendships Gallery” anticipates the balance of realism and fantasy in later works like Orlando. Shown taking tea in “The Magic Garden” of an aristocratic home, Violet and her friends have a mythic and fantastic beauty that still insists on their three-dimensional material existence:

There were gigantic women lying like Greek marbles in easy chairs; draped so that the wind [blew]

This is a picture of noble English ladies at tea, as true as I can make it, and if it is not spoiling the harmony, I would further suggest that these ladies think, eat and breathe—live in short, besides existing or whatever the polite word for it is, within the pages of Burke.

(282-83)

Violet's biographer decides not to forego a fantastical description that communicates the aesthetic “harmony” of the scene, but instead to supplement the ideological implications of that narrative with the equally material presence of the ladies' eating and drinking bodies. Painting a tableau of Greek goddesses who “looked upon a vision of a jocund world” and of women as “flowers [that] strayed from the beds,”²⁶ the biographer conjures an idyllic, mythic, and extremely feminine scene of ladies at tea while also suggesting a vision of women's autonomy and independence from the demands of patriarchal social norms, not unlike the world presented in The Convent of Pleasure (1668) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. The stylized poses of the “flowers” and “statues” indicate the staged quality to their performance—a performance of gender and class that Violet will soon indict, as we saw in the previous section, however beautiful it appears. In anticipation perhaps of that moment when Violet will reveal the material necessity of drains, the biographer's description insists on the ladies' three-dimensional existence. Violet's biographer is conscious of and determined not to replicate the biographical and historical methods of those like Burke, who negate women's bodies through a “polite” propriety complicit with patriarchal ideologies of the feminine. Instead, Violet's biographer asserts the intellect, sexuality, and the corporeality of the ladies' existence.

If “The Magic Garden” both invokes and complements the available narrative methods for describing a woman's life, the third chapter of Violet's biography, “A Story to Make You Sleep,” abandons the conventions of biography and realism entirely to offer a fantastic “story” in place of “history.” The story begins at the conclusion of Chapter Two: “In Japan they have a story, [which is] fast becoming myth, which mothers tell good children as a treat, or sick children who cannot sleep at night. […] 27 the effect of the direct address in this third chapter is slightly different: here, the reader plays the more intimate role of child to the narrating mother/biographer—a bond of intimacy quite uncharacteristic of conventional historiography and biography, and in this alternative mode, we hear an echo of the storytelling relationship between Violet and her governesses.

The “story” told in Chapter Three is loosely based on Violet Dickinson's and Lady Robert (Nelly) Cecil's trip to Japan, an event known to the sketch's intended reader, if not to others. Its characters share qualities with the first and second chapters of the sketch, respectively: in this final story, the two women become Two Princesses, a Giantess (Violet Dickinson) and the Mistress of the Magic Garden (Nelly Cecil). Elevating to mock heroic status the help both women provide to those in need, the storyteller describes how the two princesses assist the people of “Tokio” by curing their ills, bringing good luck, encouraging laughter, and, at the story's end, by slaying a sea monster with “certain magic wands called ‘Umbrellas’” (300). While the Rabelaisian presence of the women and the destruction caused certainly fulfill certain narrative tropes of the comic novel, the “story” form of tale is significant for “Friendships Gallery” as a whole. It is through the narrative tropes of myth and fantasy—through storytelling—that Violet's biographer can convey “truths” about Violet's character otherwise lost from conventional biographical methods: her independence, her generosity, and good spirits.

To shift an ostensibly biographical narrative into the register of the fantastic defies the “factual” conventions of historiography and biography. Yet, as Violet's biographer has made clear throughout “Friendships Gallery”—and as Orlando makes clear 20 years later—the methods of fiction are not incompatible with those of a “truthful” narrative. In contrast to literary realism and its affiliation with the didactic, mimetic, and ideologically suspect goals of historiography and biography, the romance and the fantastic explicitly acknowledge the implicit “fiction” of historical and novelistic claims to truth. While popular romances and fantasies can affirm the patriarchal ideologies found in historical narratives and realistic novels, these less-sanctioned forms hold out a narrative space in which to figure an alternative view of experience, particularly of women's relationship to cultural expectations within a patriarchal and capitalist society. The romance and the fantastic thus allow the expression of a different “economy” of power, a “fantasy of power,” according to Nancy Miller, “that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects” (41). And aligned as they are in “Friendships Gallery” with Woolf's “comic spirit,” the resulting narratives provide not only an alternative view on women's lives within a patriarchal society but also one that indicts society through laughter. With the comic force of Violet's address to the gardener and his longtime employers, Woolf's “Friendships Gallery” breaks through the “crust” of the past to “prune and train” the ideologies of literary and biographical conventions toward a more feminist future.

Notes

1. Beth A. Boehm's “Fact, Fiction, and Metafiction: Blurred Gen(d)res in Orlando and A Room of One's Own” (1992) exemplifies critical discussions of Woolf's interest in biography that fail to acknowledge Woolf's early interest in the relationship between fact and fiction. Hermione Lee, by contrast, offers a rich discussion of Woolf's early views of biography in the first chapter of her biography Virginia Woolf (1996), especially pages 10-14.

2. Woolf's early journals and letters, as well as her father Leslie Stephen's memoirs, indicate that the young Virginia Stephen planned to be a historian, not a novelist. See Letters 1: 166 and 1: 190, and Leslie Stephen xxviii.

3. For a discussion concerning the continuity between Woolf's and her father's views of biography, see Katherine C. Hill. While Julia Briggs's essay on Virginia Woolf provides a brief overview of Woolf's relationship to established biographical methods and her response to them in Night and Day, Briggs does not extend her insights to Woolf's questioning of historiography in general and only gestures briefly in conclusion toward the role Woolf's revisions to biographical methods play in her development of a new narrative form for prose fiction.

4. These early biographical sketches fall into two categories: serious and comic. Her serious sketches include her contribution to F. W. Maitland's biography of her father in 1906 and her biographical sketch of her sister Vanessa, written upon the birth of Julian Bell in 1908, published in Moments of Being as “Reminiscences.” The comic sketches are more numerous: an early biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson (composed in 1902 but not necessarily shared [Bell 82-83]); the comic lives of her Aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen and her Aunt Mary Fisher (written around 1904, but now lost [Letters 1: 163-64]); the life of her dog Shag (published under the title “On a Faithful Friend” in 1905 [Essays 1: 12-15]), which anticipates her later mock biography of the Brownings' dog Flush (1933); the second, more elaborate biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson titled “Friendships Gallery” in 1907; and notes for a biographical sketch of her friend and brother-in-law Clive Bell, made in 1908 during their trip to Italy (Passionate 383-84).

5. See Nancy Armstrong, John Berger, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

6. As Mitchell Leaska remarks in his introductory headnotes to Woolf's early journals, Woolf begins writing a few short stories in June 1906: “Phyllis and Rosamond” and “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.” During August 1906, Woolf also wrote the untitled story now published under the editorial title of “The Journal of Mistress Martyn.” By fall 1907, soon after she writes “Friendships Gallery” for Violet Dickinson, Woolf begins her first long work of fiction, which will be published in 1915 as The Voyage Out.

7. John Stape offers an overview of Orlando's critical reception in his introduction to the Blackwell edition of Orlando (1998), xii-xiii.

8. Until Harcourt Brace's current edition of Orlando appeared in 1993 in conjunction with Sally Potter's film Orlando (1992), the earlier Harcourt edition had Nicholson's comment running prominently across the top of the book's front cover.

9. Hawkes echoes this view in her essay “Woolf's ‘Magical Garden of Women’” in Jane Marcus's New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (1981), but with greater emphasis on the power of female friendship to change the social world (40-42, 56).

10. Hawkes notes at the end of her introduction to “Friendships Gallery,” without further discussion, that:

    there are traces of [Woolf's] ideas about the limitations placed upon young women by society; their meager education; their special relationships with their women teachers; their desire to be themselves, to have a life and a room or a cottage of their own; their need to experiment, to rebel, to bring change in others' lives.

    (273)

11. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf's narrator explains more fully the experience Violet's biographer lacks yet still “adore[s]”:

    And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.

    (11)

12. The manuscript of “Friendships Gallery” included annotations made in Woolf's hand for (primarily) Violet's eyes. The biographer's promise of an “appendix,” signaled by a raised roman numeral “I,” directs the reader to an appendix that does not exist; instead, the reader encounters in the margin of the page Woolf's handwritten notation that designates the appendix as “missing.” Woolf's appended note about the “missing” appendix would thus seem to play with scholarly practice and the formalities of scholarly editing. Like the “Preface” and “Index” to Orlando, this “missing” appendix is a comic parody of such practice, much as Cervantes mocks the scholarly conventions of histories and stories in “The Author's Preface” to Don Quixote (1605) and Sterne transposes—or even omits—chapters of his narrative in Tristram Shandy (1759).

13. Compare, for instance, Trevelyan's description of the birth of the Renaissance in England as recounted in his British Social History:

    Shakespeare's England had a charm and a lightness of heart, a free aspiring mind and spirit not to be found elsewhere in the harsh Jesuit-Calvinist Europe of that day. […] The music of the Elizabethan madrigal and the lyric poetry to which it was wedded, expressed the reasonable joy in life of a people freed from mediaeval and not yet oppressed by Puritan complexes and fears; rejoicing in nature and the countryside in whose lap they had the felicity to live; moving forward to a healthy agricultural and mercantile prosperity, and not yet overwhelmed by the weight of industrial materialism.

    (97-98)

    And:

    The Elizabethan English were in love with life, not with some theoretic shadow of life. Large classes, freed as never before from poverty, felt the upspring of the spirit and expressed it in wit, music and song. […] The Renaissance, that had known its springtime long ago in its native Italy, where biting frosts now nipped it, came late to its glorious summer in this northern isle. …

    (139)

14. George Trevelyan was familiar enough with the Stephen family to visit Gordon Square on 2 December 1906 to walk with Adrian Stephen, Woolf's youngest brother, soon after the death of Toby Stephen, her elder brother, from typhoid on 20 November (Letters 1: 255-56).

15. In her essay “Four Stages in Woolf's Idea of Comedy: A Sense of Joviality and Magnanimity,” Sally A. Jacobsen also elides key differences between Woolf and Meredith, arguing that Woolf “follows Meredith” in “The Value of Laughter” (217).

16. In contrast to “Friendships Gallery,” the tone of Woolf's earlier sketch is earnest and admiring, and lacks the humor of the later character study. In the 1902 sketch, Violet's height is remarkable only for the ways in which it does not detract from her character: “She came down to dinner in flowing & picturesque garments—for all her height, & a certain comicality of face, she treats her body with dignity” (Bell 82). Violet's own comic acceptance of her body captures Woolf's attention in the later sketch to an even greater degree.

17. In “Reminiscences” (1908), her biographical sketch of her elder sister Vanessa, Woolf writes of their mother:

    It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke.

    (36)

    For Woolf, Julia Stephen's “sayings and vivid ways of speech” could begin to capture the life of her character, beside which Woolf's own and other written biographical efforts pale by comparison. The daily sayings of Julia Stephen would not have been seen—and she most likely would not have seen her own sayings—as worthy of transcription and preservation like the sayings of Johnson, recorded for posterity by Boswell. Woolf implies that they are, if we ever want to know Julia Stephen.

18. In transcribing Woolf's manuscripts for publication in Twentieth Century Literature, the editors used [word] (that is, square brackets) to designate a deletion editorially restored and

19. The biographer's inclusion of the gardener's own voice resembles Woolf's inclusion in her journal narrative of the voices of the people she meets in the scenic landscape around Playden in 1907; in both narratives, hearing the voices of individual people dramatizes the scene and embodies more fully the individual character and subject position of speaker.

20. In Sentimental Modernism (1991), Suzanne Clark identifies the word sentimental with a narrative form beginning in the eighteenth century that is “connected to the pathetic appeal—the appeal to emotion, especially pity, as a means of moral distinction and moral persuasion” (20). Further, the “sentimental locates moral values in the (feminized) heart and denies the importance of external differences” (22). Woolf, by contrast, questions a narrative form that denies the determining influence of “external differences” and how they affect the “heart.”

21. The histories of the biography and the novel intersect at several points. In The Rise of the Novel (1962), for example, Ian Watt notes the connection between the novels of Defoe and the episodic rogue biographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, known for factual detail of events, most particularly the trickery and deceptions of their subjects (106). The connection between autobiography and the novel, according to Watt, can be more definitively linked to the novel's similarities to the confessional autobiography or personal memoir (75, 292), as well as to the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century. In all cases, the novel's and the biography/autobiography's narratives were expected to tell the life of an individual according to an outside standard of experience. It is this “standard,” necessarily invested in a particular ideology of social behavior, against which Woolf writes her narratives of female experience.

22. Describing Vanessa's reception by family and friends after their mother's death for her nephew Julian Bell, Woolf comments on how debilitating textual images of femininity can shape society's expectations for women in everyday life:

    People who […] love to invent a melodramatic fitness in life, as though it were a sensational novel, acclaimed her now the divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues, and with a certain haziness forgot your grandmother's sharp features and Stella's vague ones, and created a model of them for Vanessa to follow, beautiful on the surface, but fatally insipid within.

    (“Reminiscences” 55)

    Woolf's description illustrates how hegemony authors and reproduces itself through various cultural practices already in place, as friends applied a patriarchal ideology found in the melodrama and the sensational novel to the family's experiences and Vanessa's future.

23. See Woolf's mock review titled “Memoirs of a Novelist” (1909) for another satire of conventional biographical techniques that elide the first 17 years of a woman's life. Woolf's commentary implies the importance of those early years to the developing character of the fictional Miss Willatt, a period in which certain qualities will become “characteristic.”

24. Operating consciously and ironically under the tradition of the extremely popular French romances of Madeleine de Scudéry, the narrative of Lennox's novel follows the adventures of Arabella, who reads the legacy of her mother's romances as histories rather than as the chivalric fictions others believe them to be. Although Arabella's proclivity toward understanding her world through the lens of the romance is deemed a “foible” of which she must be cured, Lennox's narrator clearly asks the reader to recognize, as Arabella says in her own defense, that “the Difference [between the world of the romance and the world of Georgian upper-class life] is not in Favor of the present World” (380).

25. The theme of a young, uneducated woman left to learn about and survive the ways of the world on the basis of her innocence alone extends over several centuries, to include such characters as the titular characters of Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Burney's Evelina, Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Isabel Archer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady.

26. An early version of this scene appears in Woolf's journal for 1903 under the title “An Afternoon with the Pagans” (Passionate 184-85). Woolf reflects that, far from being Barbarians as Matthew Arnold claims, the “English aristocracy […] are very strong believers in the Gods […] of the very picturesque Pagan mythology” (184). Katie (Countess of Cromer) is described as “that divine Giantess,” “a great benevolent goddess” (185), two expressions that will be used in “Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep” for Violet, who was not in attendance at this party in 1903, and for Nelly (Lady Robert Cecil), who was. A letter to Violet Dickinson in June 1907, and therefore close to the gift of “Friendships Gallery” in August, describes Nelly Cecil, Violet, and Kitty Maxse “as beings moving in a higher world, with voices like the ripple of Arcadian streams” (Letters 1: 297), echoing the mythic and pastoral scene presented here.

27. The biographer's direct address to the reader in the earlier chapters is more comic: as in Orlando, the reader is asked to excuse the biographer's omissions, trust the biographer's narrative approach, and make use of his or her imagination when the biographical “facts” are not enough. One extended address to the reader, when the reader is asked to play the role of a visitor to Violet's cottage (290), constructs a scene of interpellation that is closer in tone to that of “Chapter Three,” if still humorous in spirit.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818. New York: Penguin, 1985.

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