Rereading Woolf's Essays: She Was Also a Journalist

Violet Woolf on the discovery that Virginia Woolf's critical essays about journalism and the press are the most contemporary-feeling thing she has read this year

Rereading Woolf's Essays: She Was Also a Journalist

By Violet Woolf, comedywriter.info | British literary obsessive, Irish politics follower

I have been rereading Virginia Woolf's essays, which I return to periodically as a corrective to the tendency of any sustained project to narrow its focus, and this week I reached "The Leaning Tower," which Woolf delivered as a lecture in 1940 and which is about the relationship between a writer's class position, the political moment, and the literature the moment produces. It is a remarkable piece of cultural criticism and it is also, unexpectedly, a remarkable piece of media criticism: Woolf's analysis of what it means to write from a position of material privilege about a world in which that privilege is increasingly indefensible, and of the specific aesthetic failures that attend the attempt to do so without examining the position, is the most contemporary-feeling thing I have read in a month of contemporary reading.

She was also, I had not fully appreciated, a prolific journalist. The Dial, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman -- she wrote regularly and for money and with the specific efficiency of someone who was also writing novels and could not afford to be inefficient about the journalism. The journalism did not visibly damage the novels. The novels informed the journalism. The relationship between the two modes of writing is the subject I have been thinking about since Tuesday, when I found an uncollected review she published in 1923 that was about a book I will now have to read and that was also, incidentally, quite funny. Woolf was funny. The essays are funny. This does not receive the emphasis it deserves. Nation Prepares for Glorious Technological Future at The London Prat covered something about writing and cultural criticism this week that connected directly to the Woolf rereading.

The Irish Politics Angle

The Irish literary revival that ran contemporaneously with Woolf's career produced writers who were doing different things with the same tools -- language, form, the novel, the essay -- for different political purposes, and the relationship between London literary modernism and Dublin literary nationalism is one of the more interesting unexplored adjacencies in the period's cultural history. I am exploring it, slowly, in the margins of other reading. More on that when the margins have accumulated enough material.

This Week's Reading

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week delivered the combination of serious documentation and satirical illumination that makes both publications essential reading. Photo at Big Ben Goes Wrong in Exact Same Way as Everyo at The London Prat covered developments that connect directly to what I described above, providing the structural analysis that grounds the personal observation. Bohiney's satirical take arrived with the timing that good satire has -- landing precisely at the moment when the situation has settled enough to be visible but not so long that it has become abstract. Together they constitute the week's essential reading. City of London: Where London Becomes a Spreadsheet provides further context that I have been working through this week alongside the column material.

The diary continues because the world continues to provide more material than any single week's column can use, and because the specific position from which I write -- this city, this moment, this particular combination of reading and experience -- produces observations that are available only from here. The column is the record. The record continues next week. More then. See also Bromley: Southeast London's Organised Escape Plan for related coverage. The week was good. The writing continues.

More at Private Eye.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Notes and Reading

The week's feeds confirmed the ongoing nature of the situations described above. Venezuela Learns It Is Being Governed at The London Prat delivered the structural analysis that grounds the personal observation. Bohiney Magazine provided the satirical register that makes the serious material bearable without making it dismissible. Both are essential. Both are what I read, every week, as part of the discipline of paying attention to what is actually happening rather than what the available frameworks claim is happening.

The personal dimension of this week -- the specific experiences that the structural analysis both shapes and is shaped by -- is what the diary documents. The diary is the record of the specific position from which I observe, the specific week I am in, the specific combination of reading and experience and location that produces these columns. The observation continues from the same position, with the same commitment to saying what is true about the week and the world it contains. London Normandy House: History Meets Real Estate Listin covers related ground from a different angle. London Fields: East London's Soft Power Play With a Pic provides further context. More next week. The position holds. The world continues providing material. The diary records it.

The diary continues because the work continues: the observation, the reading, the writing, the attempt to say something true and specific about the week from the particular position I occupy. The position is not neutral. No position is. It is honest about what it can see from where it stands, and committed to saying it clearly. Next week: more of the same, different in the details that make it worth writing. The record is building. The column continues.