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VIRGINIA WOOLF
This volume aims to situate Virginia Woolf as a writer
who, despite her fame as a leading modernist, also drew
&
Heritage
on a rich literary and cultural heritage. The chapters in
this volume explore the role her family heritage, literary
tradition, and heritage locations play in Woolf ’s works,
uncovering the influence the past had on her work, and
particularly her deep indebtedness to the Victorian period
in the process. The volume looks at how she reimagined
& Heritage
heritage, including her queer readings of the past. It also
aims to examine Woolf ’s own literary legacy: with essays
examining her reception in Romania, Poland, and France
and her impact on contemporary writers like Alice Munro
and Lidia Yuknavitch. Lastly, Woolf ’s standing in the
increasingly popular field of biofiction is explored. The
collection features an extended chapter by David Bradshaw
on Virginia Woolf ’s relationship with her cousin H.A.L.
Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin,

Fisher, and an extended chapter by Laura Marcus on Woolf
and the concept of shame. and Anne Reus, eds.
Edited by
Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin, & Anne Reus
Virginia Woolf and Heritage:
Selected Papers from the Twenty-sixth
Annual International Conference on
Virginia Woolf
This volume is dedicated to Professor David Bradshaw
for his lifelong contributions to Woolf Studies
Virginia Woolf and Heritage:
Selected Papers from the Twenty-sixth
Annual International Conference on
Virginia Woolf
Edited by
Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin, and Anne Reus

© 2017 Clemson University Press
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-942954-42-2 (print)

eISBN: 978-1-942954-43-9 (e-book)
For information about Clemson University Press,

please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
Typeset in Minion Pro by series editor Wayne Chapman,

with production and design specialist Charis Chapman.
Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk.
Cover art provided by John Haddock.
iv
Table of Contents
Jane de Gay, Anne Reus, and Tom Breckin – Introduction
List of Abbreviations
Heritage: A Debate
Jane Goldman – “Her—it—age!”: Virginia Woolf and Syllabic intervention—
Or, “Heritage is a Kim Novak word”............................................................................. 2
Heritage, Education, and Mentoring
David Bradshaw – “The Very Centre of the Very Centre”: H. A. L. Fisher,
Oxford, and “That Great Patriarchal Machine”......................................................... 10
Beth Rigel Daugherty – Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage: Lessons, Readers,
and Class......................................................................................................................... 30
Kaylee Baucom – Teaching Virginia Woolf in Sin City: Vegas Entertainers and
a New Feminist Heritage.............................................................................................. 36
Jean Mills – Out-takes from Upstarts: Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison,
and the Heritage of Dissent, or, “There She Wasn’t?”............................................... 42
Marion Dell – Virginia Woolf ’s Female Heritage: The Legacy of Anny
Thackeray Ritchie, Woolf ’s “Transparent Medium”.................................................. 47
Heritage Spaces
Maggie Humm – Virginia Woolf and the Artistic Heritage of St. Ives.......................... 54
Ann Martin – “The little bit of power I had myself ”: Lady Lasswade’s Shifting
Sense of Place in The Years........................................................................................... 60
Marlowe A. Miller – Through the Arch: The Country House and the Tradition
of English Tyranny in Woolf ’s Between the Acts....................................................... 67
Leslie Kathleen Hankins – Heritage Hoarding: Artifacts, Archives, and
Ambiguity, or, the Saga of Virginia Woolf ’s Standing Desk.................................... 73
Hana Leaper – “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding,
O Death!”: Vanessa Bell’s Death of the Moth Dust Jacket as Monument
to Virginia Woolf........................................................................................................... 80
Literary and Cultural Heritages
Jeanette McVicker – Virginia Woolf in Greece: “Curious contrasts!”:
Hellenism and Englishness.......................................................................................... 90
Elizabeth Gourd – Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient
Greek Tradition.............................................................................................................. 96
Elizabeth Anderson – Silence, Darkness, and Dirt: Mysticism and Materiality
in The Years and Between the Acts............................................................................. 102
Davi Pinho – Virginia Woolf Reads the Romantics....................................................... 109
Danielle Gilman – A Critical Heritage: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, and
Walter Scott.................................................................................................................. 115
v
Lois Gilmore – “Where Childhood’s dreams are twined”: Virginia Woolf and the
Literary Heritage of Lewis Carroll............................................................................. 121
Queer Pasts
Gaura Narayan – Sex and Literary History in Orlando.................................................. 128
Matthew Clarke – Queer Elizabeth: Early/Modern Feeling in Orlando and
Elizabeth and Essex...................................................................................................... 134
Kathryn Simpson – Persuading Rachel: Woolf and Austen’s “little voyage
of discovery”................................................................................................................. 141
Mary Wilson – “The world…seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer”:
History, Heritage, and the Queer Domesticity of Between the Acts...................... 148
Modernism and Heritage
Savannah Pignatelli – Resetting the Type: An Exploration of the Historical
Sense in Mrs. Dalloway............................................................................................... 156
Jeanne Dubino – Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African
Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own................................. 162
Vara Neverow – Leonard Woolf ’s Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo:
Satirical Heritage as Apocalyptic Prophecy............................................................. 168
Diane F. Gillespie – Virginia Woolf and the War on Books: Cultural Heritage
and Dis-Heritage in the 1930s................................................................................... 176
Mary Anthony, Carly Carman, Malyn Maloney, Emma Slotterback –
Gender Roles and the War Machine: An Undergraduate Roundtable on
Virginia Woolf ’s Legacies........................................................................................... 183
Writing Lives and Histories
Heidi Stalla – The Play of Fact and Fiction in Virginia Stephen’s “The Journal
of Mistress Joan Martyn”............................................................................................ 190
Ella Ophir – “Writing the history of my own times”: Virginia Woolf and
the Diary....................................................................................................................... 196
Kristin Czarnecki – Heritage, Legacy, and the Life-Writing of Woolf and Rhys........ 202
Laura Cernat – Life as Legacy: Truth, Fiction, and Fidelity of Representation
in Biographical Novels Featuring Virginia Woolf................................................... 208
Anne-Laure Rigeade – From the Author to the Icon: A Heritage of
Virginia Woolf in French Biographies and Biofictions........................................... 217
Lucy Smith – Flights of Archival Imagination: Woolf ’s Transcendent
Materiality in Contemporary “Archive Fiction”...................................................... 223
Woolf’s Legacies
Adriana Varga – “A shadow crossed the tail of his eye”: The Reception of
Virginia Woolf in Romania: Heritage Transformed............................................... 230
Paulina Pająk – Woolf ’s Imaginarium: Exploring Virginia Woolf ’s Legacy
to Contemporary Polish Culture............................................................................... 236
Eva Mendez – An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing
with In-Authority........................................................................................................ 244
vi
Catherine W. Hollis – Thinking Back through Virginia Woolf:
Woolf as Portal in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children....................... 251
Gill Lowe – The Malicious Gene: An Evolutionary Games Strategy?
Woolf ’s Hawkish Inheritance..................................................................................... 257
Finale
Laura Marcus – “Some ancestral dread”: Woolf, Autobiography, and
the Question of “Shame”............................................................................................. 264
Notes on Contributors.............................................................................................. 282
vii
Introduction
by Jane de Gay, Anne Reus, and Tom Breckin
I’ve thought of an entirely new book: it may be two: Each more entirely new
than the other. So my fortune gilds the future for me—if my father didn’t leave
me pearls, this was by way of a makeshift. (L3 344, 8th March 1927)
W
ith these words, Virginia Woolf shared with Vita Sackville-West the first
inkling of Orlando, a novel that would be deeply concerned with heritage:
with history, genealogy, literary tradition, an ancient city, and a stately
home. The lines also reveal Woolf ’s rich, complex, and often conflicted relationship
with heritage. Although Woolf was captivated by Vita, the handsome aristocrat, she
was also sceptical of wealth and privilege and her tone here is somewhat competitive.
She is ironic about Vita’s inherited pearls, asserting instead her own “makeshift” inheri-
tance: the vast intellectual heritage that had made her a writer and the wealth of English
literature that she had first encountered through her father’s recitations and his library.
Yet, Woolf gave Vita a “makeshift” inheritance of her own in Orlando, a book that, as
Nigel Nicolson wrote, “identified her with Knole for ever” thereby providing her with a
“unique consolation for having been born a girl, for her exclusion from her inheritance,
for her father’s death earlier that year” (190). This strategy sits closely with Woolf ’s call
for women to “rewrite history” (AROO 45).
The papers in this book, which arise from a conference held at Leeds Trinity
University (Yorkshire, UK) in June 2016, explore some of the complex dynamics of
Virginia Woolf ’s relationship with heritage, ranging across the themes of education
and mentoring, heritage places and spaces, the literary and cultural past, the queer
past, modernism and its relationship with heritage, the writing of lives and history.
It also looks at ways in which later generations of writers from several cultures have
traced their heritage from Woolf.1
Heritage: A Debate
The collection opens with a challenging essay by Jane Goldman that invites us to
consider the politics of what is meant by “heritage.” Goldman argues that the term is
laden with implications of legal inheritance, patriarchal privilege and the exclusion
of women, and that the “heritage industry” is a term that masks the appropriation
or “plundering” of artefacts. Goldman’s critique is echoed in other papers, such as
Leslie K. Hankins’s reminder about the potential exclusivity of archives. Others see
Woolf ’s relationship with heritage as uneasy or ambivalent. However, many other pa-
pers tell a different story, working on the principle that Woolf did not allow heritage
and inheritance to remain the domain of male privilege but instead asserted women’s
moral claims to the riches of literature and culture and showed how the past could be
“queered” to reveal unexpected dimensions of our “inherited lot or portion” (OED,
definition 4) from ancestors female and male.
viii
Heritage can be transmitted through education and mentoring, often to em-

powering effect, as this section shows. It starts with David Bradshaw’s erudite and
witty plenary address on Woolf ’s relationship with her cousin the Oxford academic
H. A. L. Fisher, which reveals that while Woolf satirized him, she also found him
“captivating” and that their views on educational reform were not dissimilar. Beth
Rigel Daugherty reminds us how Virginia Stephen negotiated class boundaries in
her teaching at Morley College, while Kaylee Baucom provides a personal account
of breaking down barriers by introducing Woolf ’s work to her students (Las Ve-
gas sex-entertainment workers). Jean Mills explores what Woolf can teach us about
understanding our own intellectual heritage, particularly from our female mentors.
Marion Dell (who took part in a plenary dialogue with Mills), builds on this insight
but also reveals the creative “ambivalence” that marked some of Woolf ’s encounters
with her female forebears.
Heritage Spaces
Heritage can be localized in various spaces: in archives, where manuscripts,

sketches and favourite objects are preserved for future generations; but also in land-
scapes and houses which serve as commemorative spaces and cultural signifiers. This
section explores the meaning of some of these spaces in Woolf ’s life and work, begin-
ning with Maggie Humm, who follows the traces which the artist circles in St. Ives have
left in Woolf ’s work. Ann Martin explores the significance of Lady Lasswade’s longing
for Yorkshire in a close reading of class, gender and geography in The Years, while Mar-
lowe Miller focuses on the English country house in Between the Acts, revealing the
tyrannical implications of the architectural arch in the private home. Leslie Hankins’s
essay takes Woolf ’s standing desk, recently acquired by Duke University, as the starting
point of an exploration of Woolf ’s various writing spaces from the first beginnings to
the mature writer’s retreat to an armchair in the Hogarth press storeroom. Hana Leaper
closes this section with an examination of Vanessa Bell’s sketches for the dustjacket of
The Death of the Moth in the Angelica Garnett Gift archive at Charleston, exploring the
emotional significance of its moths and the elms at Monk’s House.
Literary and Cultural Heritages
As befitting such a prodigious reader and inquisitive mind, Woolf ’s literary and
cultural heritage was vast and varied. From ancient Greece, through the Romantic
period, and into the late nineteenth century, this chapter illustrates both the diversity
of influences upon Woolf and the different ways she could engage with literature.
Jeanette McVicker begins the chapter by looking at Woolf ’s development of an Eng-
lishness of her own making, influenced in part by the culture she found in Greece.
Elizabeth Gourd remarks on the effect that reading Greek literature had upon Woolf
in terms of framing the family tragedies of her childhood, and then for informing her
future mind-set with the same sense of dramatic tragedy. Elizabeth Anderson looks
ix
to establish an interrelation between the spiritual and the material in Woolf ’s work,
arguing that the mystical in her fiction can be located in the mundane. Davi Pinho
explores Woolf ’s concept of the androgynous mind, connecting this idea to the influ-
ence of the Romantic poets on Woolf and her writing. Danielle Gilman refutes the
idea that Woolf ’s attitude towards Walter Scott was simply due to a paternal affec-
tion, instead evidencing Woolf ’s genuine critical interest in the writer. Lois Gilmore
concludes the section with an examination of the connection between Woolf and
Lewis Carroll, revealing through this Woolf ’s ideas on the transformative effect of
literature upon the reader.
Queer Pasts
Woolf ’s novels interrogate our perspectives on the world, and the articles in this
section aim to extend this investigation to the past: how do Woolf ’s works shift the
focus to an unexplored version of history, revealing capacities for queer rewritings and
insertions? Gaura Narayan explores the closely interlinked topics of sex and literary
history in Orlando, demonstrating how Woolf substitutes a wide array of literary sourc-
es for the vexed questions of sex and sexuality; and Matthew Clarke’s essay examines
Woolf, Strachey and their queering of Queen Elizabeth. Kathryn Simpson explores
how The Voyage Out provides a queer revision of Austen’s Persuasion. The chapter fin-
ishes with Mary Wilson’s analysis of the queer perspective of domesticity on English
heritage in Between the Acts.
Modernism and Heritage
Literary and cultural heritages were, paradoxically, of great interest to modern-

ist writers’ innovative experiments, as T. S. Eliot articulates powerfully in “Tradition
and the Individual Talent.” Savannah Pignatelli uses Eliot’s essay to lead in to an ex-
ploration of how Eliot and Woolf responded to the mythical figure of the mermaid,
showing how Woolf, in turn, reacted to images from Eliot’s poems. Jeanne Dubino
reminds us of the wide cultural and literary contexts for modernism, by considering
the romance genre of the “Kenya Novel” as possible spur for Woolf ’s satirical com-
ment about attitudes towards the “very fine negress” (AROO 50). The remaining three
papers in the section draw attention to the importance of politics as a background
for modernism. Vara Neverow introduces Leonard Woolf ’s neglected satirical work
Fear and Politics (1925), with its exposé of the flaws in human nature that hamper
efforts to achieve a peaceful world. Diane Gillespie shows how cultural heritage be-
came a political battleground with the book-burnings of the 1930s, and how Virginia
Woolf herself invokes biblioclastic rhetoric to attack patriarchy and its heritage in
Three Guineas. To demonstrate Woolf ’s continuing political legacy, a group of un-
dergraduates from Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, examine her analysis of the
politicization of the maternal body and reproduction in Three Guineas, and testify to
the continuing significance of these arguments for young women today. In doing so,
their paper anticipates a theme that comes to the fore in the next two sections of the
book: our heritage from Virginia Woolf.
x
Writing Lives and Histories
How to accurately represent the truth of a life with facts and fiction, to achieve that
elusive mixture of granite and rainbow, was an enduring preoccupation for Woolf; and
her investigation of the process began long before the famous essay on “The New Biog-
raphy” in 1927: Heidi Stalla argues that extensive real life research into Blo’ Norton Hall
underpins the free invention of Joan’s journal in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.”
Beneath every work of history lies also the question of what is deemed worthy to be
preserved for posterity: Ella Ophir investigates Woolf ’s selection of politics, daily life
and celebrity in her diary, and Kristin Czarnecki discusses how the radically different
afterlives of Woolf and Jean Rhys respond to their conceptions of heritage and autobio-
graphical self-representation in fiction and memoirs. The three final papers examine
biofictional accounts of Woolf ’s life: Laura Cernat questions if factual veracity always
means truth in a range of biofictional novels, while Anne-Laure Rigeade’s examines
Woolf as icon in recent French biographies. The chapter concludes with Lucy Smith’s
argument for Woolf ’s central importance as character and inspiration for the emerging
subgenre of archive fiction.
Woolf’s Legacies
A remarkable web of influence and intertextuality has spread from Woolf ’s work,
stretching across generations of writers as well as national borders. As this selection
of papers ably demonstrates, Woolf was at her most prescient when she declared: “As
a woman, my country is the whole world” (3G 125). Adriana Varga reveals that there
was significant interest in Woolf in Romania as early as the interwar period, with critics
such as Caba and Beza interpreting her writing in a progressive and perceptive manner.
Paulina Pająk’s investigations explain the relatively recent rise in Woolf ’s popularity in
Poland, particularly amongst female intellectuals in the country who have recognised
relevant themes of gender equality and secularism in Woolf ’s texts. In her paper, Eva
Mendez discusses the importance of spaces and spatial codes in A Room of One’s Own
and “An Office,” a short story by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, explaining how
both texts explore ideas of assuming patriarchal authority through spaces and alterna-
tives to this form of authority. Catherine Hollis examines the ways in which American
writer Lidia Yuknavitch alludes to Woolf and her work, most notably Three Guineas,
through Yuknavitch’s novel, The Small Backs of Children. Both texts, Hollis writes, focus
on the impact of war and violence on the bodies of women and children, whilst reject-
ing the aestheticization of the victims. In her paper, Gill Lowe applies the “hawk and
dove” games theory from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene to understanding Woolf ’s
propensity for malicious criticism, theorising that Woolf was able to assume character-
istics of the passive dove or the aggressive hawk depending on her situation.
Finale
This volume concludes, like the conference itself, with Laura Marcus’s tour-de-
force exploration of Woolf ’s speculation in her memoir A Sketch of the Past that her
xi
sense of shame has its origins in “some ancestral dread.” In the only paper to fully
consider heritage in terms of hereditary traits (see OED definition 4), Marcus skilfully
brings together insights from psychoanalysis, cultural studies, philosophy, confessional
literature, and life writing, to help us see interconnections between many themes that
recurred throughout the conference, and echo across this volume.
Note
1. For further information on the conference and its proceedings, including the Conference Program, see
www.woolf2016.com.
Works Cited
Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Accessed 6th February 2017.

Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Nigel Nicolson, asst. ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks.
London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
–––. A Room of One’s Own. London: Triad Grafton, 1977.
–––. Three Guineas. Intro. Hermione Lee. London: Hogarth Press, 1986.
xii
Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)
AHH A Haunted House

AROO A Room of One’s Own
AWD A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf
BP Books and Portraits
BTA Between the Acts
CDB The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)
CR1 The Common Reader
CR2 The Common Reader, Second Series
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)
D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)
DM The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (ed. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,
6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)
F Flush
FR Freshwater
GR Granite and Rainbow: Essays
HPGN Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)
JR Jacob’s Room
JRHD Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)
L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)
M The Moment and Other Essays
MEL Melymbrosia
MOB Moments of Being
MT Monday or Tuesday
MD Mrs. Dalloway
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RF Roger Fry
TG Three Guineas
TTL To the Lighthouse
TW The Waves
TY The Years
VO The Voyage Out
WF Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own
(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)
xiii
Heritage: A Debate
“Her—it—age!”:
Virginia Woolf and Syllabic Intervention—
Or, “Heritage is a Kim Novak word”
by Jane Goldman
“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

“Scarborough,” Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold
line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp?
She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in
her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his
paint-brush.…
“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.
…“Over there—by the rock,” Steele muttered, with his brush between his
teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s
back.
“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all
passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against
rocks—so it sounded. (JR 8–10)
W
hat Woolf has Archer do unto Jacob in the opening pages of Jacob’s Room—
“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!”—I propose doing unto that most unWoolfian word:
“Her—it—age!” Now we have three words that truly do open up Woolfian
portals, obsessed as her writing is by gendered pronouns and the passing of time. Is
this trisyllabic utterance now a form of urgent shorthand, telegraphing the message:
“She has become an object over time”? I can certainly see that message as fundamental
to the concept of “heritage.” For “Heritage” speaks the sustained historical period of
eugenically entitled patriarchal subjectivity that we still endure. Heritage is a toxic po-
litical and social convention— reifying, commodifying, subordinating, gendering and
ranking all that it encounters.
Syllabling “Her—it—age!” also opens up the word’s fantastic capacity for mon-
degreen, which did tempt me to write a paper on “Woolf ’s Hairy Stage,” an argument
predicated on the aesthetics of coiffure in the works written in that era of Woolf ’s con-
ventional long, loose locks and her badly bundled chignon— before she got herself
that smart shingled bob in 1927! Or predicated on the gender and canine stakes at
that formative moment when the hirsute family pet mongrel Shag (male), and Gurth
the equally hairy (and male) sheepdog whom she shared with her sister Vanessa, were
superseded in her affections in 1906 by the intermediary shorthaired and misnamed
bitch Hans, the epicene boxer dog (the end of another Woolfian hairy stage).1 Another
mondegreen available in Scottish parlance would be “Woolf ’s hairy tadge.” I have re-
sisted that temptation too.
“Her—it—age!” 3
But further to the present argument on “Her—it—age,” I want to propose that a

methodology for reading becomes available in Woolf ’s syllabic breakage of “Ja—cob!”
Such fissuring may be read as endlessly supplementary rather than diminishing and re-
ductive. I propose that the fissured “Ja—cob” makes possible a cryptic, semi-mystical,
affirmation of inter-special companionship, and that this supplementary inter-special,
methodology be adopted for critical analysis of the text in which Woolf ’s only recorded
use the word “heritage” appears.
For Woolf disposed of the word “heritage,” this paper finds, very early in her writ-
ing career. Nor is it anywhere in her fiction, essays, memoirs, letters, diaries or journals.
The only instance I can find of Woolf ’s venturing into print with the word “heritage”
is in her observation about a domestic cat in one of her earliest works to be composed
for publication: “On a Faithful Friend” (1905), her obituary on the family pet, Shag:
One cannot help wondering what the silent critic on the hearthrug thinks
of our strange conventions—the mystic Persian, whose ancestors were wor-
shipped as gods whilst we, their masters and mistresses, groveled in caves and
painted our bodies blue. She has a vast heritage of experience, which seems
to brood in her eyes, too solemn and too subtle for expression; she smiles, I
often think, at our late-born civilisation, and remembers the rise and fall of
dynasties. (E1 12)
But first a word on the “Ja—cob!” methodology.
“Ja—cob!”: a methodology
To demonstrate the methodology deriving from Woolf ’s syllabling of “Ja—cob,”

before applying it to “Her—it—age,” let’s consider what dances of the intellect among
words and syllables it unleashes. Jacob’s two syllables are augmented by the long dash,
breathing life between the two—in utterance, do we expel or inhale? Does the dash
allow for a gulp of air between them? Such a break for breath is powerful reminder of
language’s somatic grounding and production.
“Ja,” a grammatical particle meaning “yes” in Germanic languages (including in-
formal English), is both an affirmative whole and a fragment torn from any number
of words beginning with those two letters, according to the Oxford English Diction-
ary. “Ja” means “I” in many Slavic languages. It is an Indic consonant—a glyph in the
Brahmic family of scripts, a Javic letter, and features in other languages too. “Ja[y]”
is a creaturely pun too on the bird Jay. “Cob,” noun and verb, has multiple meanings,
many “Containing the notion ‘big’ or ‘stout:’” a great man, big man, leading man; a
wealthy man; a miser; a huge, lumpish person. Cob opens to the animal: a male swan;
the name of a fish as in a “young herring:” “a short-legged, stout variety of horse, usu-
ally ridden by heavy persons.” Cob is a species of gull, and a spider. Or “Containing the
notion ‘rounded’, ‘roundish mass’ or ‘lump,’” cob is a nut or fruit stone; a testicle; “Cobs
are round Balls, or Pellets with which Fowls are usually crammed.” Applied to various
rounded solid bodies, a cob is a small stack of hay; a bunch or knot of hair, a heap or
lump of (anything)—coal, a loaf, a building block. Cob is Irish for a Spanish dollar or
4 Virginia Woolf and Heritage
“piece of eight,” as well as a basket, a blow, a bad mood. As verb, cob means to fight, to
crush, to strike, to thresh and to throw.
By breaking open in the first pages the name in the title, Woolf invites attentive
reading of the novel’s every word, every syllable. The elusive protagonist’s name comes
to us already broken, fragmented, the verbal room that is Jacob’s always and already
forced open, a resource for the reader to raid and ransack. The multiple permutations
of combinations of meanings produced by these fissuring monosyllables, “Ja—cob,”
resonate through Jacob’s Room. In many such permutations Woolf ’s syllabled portal
“cob” opens to the animal connecting to the novel’s numerous and proliferating and
semi-fugitive narrative threads. For example, picking up on David Bradshaw’s brilliant
reading of sexual innuendo and the historical migratory patterns of the British fish-
ing industry in Jacob’s Room, I am struck by the pertinence of taking “cob” as “young
herring” as well as “testicle.” Thus, Archer’s brotherly cry, “Ja—cob!,” manifests a lewd
authoritative, self-declaration of the spermatic, or auto-spermatic, onanistic, in a novel
already resonating patriarchal somatics and sexualities.
Woolf’s “Heritage” and “Inheritance”
There is some impertinence as well as some foolhardiness in the way in which

we buy animals for so much gold and silver and call them ours. One cannot
help wondering what the silent critic on the hearthrug thinks of our strange
conventions—the mystic Persian, whose ancestors were worshipped as gods
whilst we, their masters and mistresses, groveled in caves and painted our
bodies blue. She has a vast heritage of experience, which seems to brood in
her eyes, too solemn and too subtle for expression; she smiles, I often think, at
our late-born civilisation, and remembers the rise and fall of dynasties. There
is something, too, profane in the familiarity, half contemptuous, with which
we treat our animals. We deliberately transplant a little bit of simple wild life,
and make it grow up beside ours, which is neither simple nor wild. You may
often see in a dog’s eyes a sudden look of the primitive animal, as though he
were once more a wild dog hunting in the solitary places of his youth. How
have we the impertinence to make these wild creatures forego their nature
for ours, which at best they can but imitate? It is one of the refined sins of
civilisation, for we know not what wild spirit we are taking from its purer
atmosphere, or who it is—Pan, or Nymph, or Dryad—that we have trained to
beg for a lump of sugar at tea. (E1 12)
The opening sentence and the whole first paragraph of “On a Faithful Friend”
(1905) explore what Srinivas Aravamudan has termed the “virtual subjectivity” of
“pethood” (Aravamudan 33; Goldman 11), the way in which humans commodify do-
mesticated animals as objects but also bestow on them a limited subject status that may
be readily reversed returning them to commodity once more. This fragile, precarious
“pet” subjectivity has been historically (and is still) experienced by colonized, inden-
tured, and enslaved people, and not least women:
Pets, once acquired and privatized, can be suspended from their earlier par-
ticipation in the public sphere as objects, taking on an honorary subjectivity.
The initial status of the pet subject is honorary, or virtualized, because it de-
pends on the contingent and fetishized investment of the owner. The owner’s
disinvestment returns the pet to the identity of an objectified commodity in
the market-place…Although virtualization starts out as a reversible process,
it soon acquires an autonomy of its own. The beginnings of the social contract
discourse allowed the theorization of subjectivity on the basis of “natural”
rights that rationalized the possession of property; Africans and women,
variously extraneous to such ideas, begin challenging those who claim own-
ership of them by exerting subjective authority over themselves as objects.
The subject is simultaneously alienated (this body is property that belongs
to someone else) and empowered (as I’m property, I can own myself). The
construction of this pet-subject through interpellation, where the subject vol-
untarily responds to a “call” by the dominant law that then subjects “it,” is not
that different from the construction of the human subject. If this is a scandal,
it is one that, arguably, [Aphra] Behn used to expose, whether intentionally
or unintentionally, the process of Oroonoko’s making and unmaking. (Ara-
vamudan 44)
How are we to read the figure of the Persian in Woolf ’s essay “On a Faithful
Friend”? Human? Animal? The virtual subjectivity of pethood may be understood as
working in tandem with the eugenically, entitled subjectivity of heritage, itself equally
fragile, but self-deludingly confident in its sense of dominion over the animal. For, as
Aravamudan indicates, the virtualization of subjectivity in pethood, although revers-
ible, “soon acquires an autonomy of its own.” And the “beginnings of social contract
discourse,” he explains, “allowed the theorization of subjectivity on the basis of ‘natural’
rights that rationalized the possession of property” (44), which is the foundation too,
we should note, of the term “heritage.” Aravamudan continues: “Africans and women,
variously extraneous to such ideas, begin challenging those who claim ownership of
them by exerting subjective authority over themselves as objects” (44).
See the second two sentences of “On a Faithful Friend”: “One cannot help won-
dering what the silent critic on the hearthrug thinks of our strange conventions—the
mystic Persian, whose ancestors were worshipped as gods whilst we, their masters and
mistresses, groveled in caves and painted our bodies blue. She has a vast heritage of ex-
perience, which seems to brood in her eyes, too solemn and too subtle for expression;
she smiles, I often think, at our late born civilisation, and remembers the rise and fall
of dynasties.” These two heavily ironic sentences, dwelling on human and animal an-
cestry in archeo-anthropological terms, explore and expose the dogged reifying force
and master-slave power relations of age-old, ancestral “civilisation,” itself underpinned
by a more sophisticated and “subtle,” feline ideology of even more ancient and mystic,
aristocratic, and entitled “heritage.” The quasi-divine cat’s “vast heritage of experience,”
we gather, trumps late-come, human “civilization,” since it exposes the “impertinence
as well as foolhardiness in the way in which we buy animals for so much gold and silver
and call them ours.” There was a time when the ancient Egyptians worshipped the cat
goddess, Bast, a deity embodying protection, fertility, and motherhood. (Dogs have
owners, we conclude, whereas cats have staff!) Yet both canine “civilisation” and feline
“heritage” are countered by the democratic, materialist and inter-special, companion-
able terms of the obituary title, “On a Faithful Friend,” and its account of “the bark of a
dog who waits to be let in” (E1 14). Whereas the continuum “heritage” never again oc-
curs in Woolf ’s writings after its singular appearance in 1905, its fragmentary, barked,
syllables (“her” and “it” and “age”), may be understood to encapsulate her interest in
the gender politics of personal pronouns running through her entire oeuvre, as its very
spine, a string through cheese culminating in her plans for Between the Acts to have “‘I’
rejected; ‘we’ substituted” (D5 135).
In 1905 the word heritage, as noun, could mean, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary: “That which has been or may be inherited; any property, and esp. land,
which devolves by right of inheritance;…heritable estate…As distinguished from
conquest: land inherited, not purchased. Figuratively: the ‘portion’ allotted to…the righ-
teous or the wicked in the world to come.…The people chosen by God as his peculiar
possession;…That which comes from the circumstances of birth; an inherited lot or
portion; the condition or state transmitted from ancestors. Heirs collectively; lineage.”
It is not until 1970 that heritage comes to mean: “Characterized by or pertaining
to the preservation or exploitation of local and national features of historical, cultural,
or scenic interest, esp. as tourist attractions” (OED). So this word undoubtedly primar-
ily meant in 1905 patriarchy’s passing of property, father to son through birthright
and eugenic entitlement, dynastically, imperially and colonially, generation after gen-
eration, through the reified subordinate marital and maternal services of mothers and
daughters.
Heritage is currently a word employed to sanitize and suppress that process of
plunder and subordination. See the fifth stanza of “Faust’s Dog,” a recent poem by
Wayne Koestenbaum: “Heritage is a Kim Novak word— / her Polish past, suppressed
in Picnic” (Koestenbaum 18). Heritage elides and sanitizes history and kleptocracy.
Indeed, there’s a string of upmarket London drycleaners called Heritage Dry
Cleaners who specialize in the restoration of oriental carpets.2 But can this toxic word
ever be turned to advantage? Woolf ’s singular published usage of it suggests she had
little interest in trying to rehabilitate “heritage.”
If men are the beneficiaries and subjects of heritage, and women its mere reified
means of perpetuation and object commodities too (“Her—It—Age”), what are we to
make of Woolf ’s “silent critic on the hearthrug,” a female cat (or depiction of one), who
seems aligned with domestically trapped women? Does “the mystic Persian” represent
a feline allegory of the unspeaking subaltern class of women? If the reader is not au
fait with cat breeds, she might well assume that the “the mystic Persian” is human, or
an orientalised (human or animal) slave. Given this Persian has both “masters and
mistresses” but once was worshipped as divine, her lost sovereignty is a kind of ludic
royalty bestowed on human and animal pethood (eg. Rex, Caesar, Sheba).3 Or is there
a critique here of patriarchy’s asinine disavowal of its own animality, a disavowal forged
in tandem with the dispossession and subordination of women? Woolf ’s counter-Car-
tesian narrator claims for animals (and women) (“she smiles; I often think”) the power
of thinking and reason that patriarchy denies them. Or crediting the cat with thought,
does the narrator merely anthropomorphize it?
The emphatic revelation on the silent critic’s gender comes with the shocking
declaration: “She has a vast heritage.” But the shock of any “she,” whether human or
animal, being in possession of material, propertied, “heritage” is diminished by the two
words “of experience,” which instantly dispossess this “she” of literal wealth, turning
“heritage” metaphoric. There is a Hegelian reading, already enabled by Johann Jakob
Bachofen’s influential work Mother Right (1861), which understands that patriarchy’s
transmission of property through the father-line, by definition must have been preced-
ed by the dispossession and overturning of a prior matriarchy. Is this the “vast heritage
of experience” brooding in the silent Persian’s eyes? Is this what makes the anony-
mous narrator ”think” that “she” is smiling “at our late born civilisation” remembering
“the rise and fall of dynasties.” Dogs and men, beware Ozymandias! Women and cats
were once top dogs too. And theirs/ours is the coming autonomy. If a returning or ris-
ing propertied matriarchal lineage is mooted in this early publication’s singular use of
“heritage,” it is interesting that Woolf never again goes into print with that word; never
writes it anywhere else. But the related words, “inheritance” and “inherit” do feature in
her writings, public and private.
Indeed “On a Faithful Friend” employs this cognate term in a sentence on the
quasi-aristocratic, paternal lineage of the obituary’s subject, “Shag:” “The whole of the
Skye-terrier tribe—who, that is, inherited the paternal characteristics—had somehow
been swept from the earth; Shag, the sole scion of true Skye blood, remained in an ob-
scure Norfolk village, the property of a low-born blacksmith, who, however, cherished
the utmost loyalty for his person, and pressed the claims of his royal birth with such
success that we had the honour of buying him for a very substantial sum” (E1 13). Shag
is here a canine Royal Pretender. His disappointed, nevertheless ludic royalty speaks
both to the precarious fragility of the virtual subjectivity of pethood and to the pater-
nalist class politics at work in eugenic inheritance and heritage.
Most notably, the Persian cat who “has a vast heritage of experience” prefigures
Louis’s soliloquy, in The Waves, following the ominous post-zenith interlude in which
“The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky.” (W 179):
“I have signed my name,” said Louis, “already twenty times. I, and

again I, and again I. Clear, firm, unequivocal, there it stands,
my name. Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast
inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands
of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood
of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered
together this fine morning.” (W 181)
Has Louis read his author’s obituary of her pet dog Shag, I wonder? Has he noticed
the silent bemused feline critic who is seen to possess and embody “a vast heritage of
experience,” where he finds “packed in” himself (as passive recipient) “a vast inheritance
of experience”? Unlike the humorless Louis, she from her vantage of the virtual sub-
jectivity of pethood, from her shared continuum with Bast the goddess of maternity, is
rightly amused by the transience of his inherited “late born civilisation, remembering
the rise and fall of dynasties.” Perhaps Louis has not read “On a Faithful Friend:” for if
he had, surely he’d be a lot less “clear-cut and unequivocal” in his underwritten sense of
the eugenically entitled subjectivity of “inheritance” and “heritage.”4
Notes
1. See Maureen Adam’s chapter on Woolf ’s dogs.

2. See http://www.heritagedrycleanersuk.com/
3. See Aravamudan on Oroonoko’s “ludic kingship,” p. 43.
4. This paper was written for the panel on syllables and sentences. On the day it was delivered I began by
“reflecting on the shocking news of the assassination of Jo Cox MP, shot and stabbed to death on the
street outside her surgery, here in Leeds yesterday (16 June 2016). How utterly sick I am of hearing and
reading in our media the familiar, repeated sentence, ‘She died of her wounds after being attacked.’ Let
us reflect on the gender politics of that syntax. A common variant in reporting the murder of women in
our culture is ‘She died at the site of her wounds,’ again eliding the agent of her murder. As if by virtue
of being a woman in the public sphere, the dead one somehow brought it on herself.”
Works Cited
Adams, Maureen. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Brontë. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.
Bachofen, Johann Jakob. “Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriar-
chy in the Ancient World.” 1861. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen.
Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.
Bradshaw, David. “Winking, Buzzing, Carpet-Beating: Reading Jacob’s Room.” Southport: Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain, 2012.
Goldman, Jane. “Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading, and Writing with the Companion Species.” A Com-
panion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman. Oxford: Wiley, 2016.
Koestenbaum, Wayne (2012) Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background (New York: Turtle Point Press).
Oxford English Dictionary OED.com. Web.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London:
Hogarth, 1977–1984.
–––. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols 1–4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols 5–6).
London: Hogarth, 1986–2011.
–––. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth, 1922.
–––. The Waves. London: Hogarth, 1931.
“The Very Centre of the Very Centre”:
H. A. L. Fisher, Oxford, and
“That Great Patriarchal Machine”
by David Bradshaw
W
hile it’s just possible you’re not intimately acquainted with every contour of
the illustrious career of Woolf ’s first cousin Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
(1865–1940), you may have got wind of the key role his underwear played
in twentieth-century British history. In 1943, British Intelligence launched “Operation
Mincemeat,” which involved dropping the body of a fictitious Royal Marines officer,
“Major William Martin,” into the sea off Spain in the hope that the false documents he
was carrying would deceive the Germans about genuine Allied plans for the invasion
of Sicily by making them believe an invasion of Greece was in the offing. The corpse of
a Welsh vagrant was procured without difficulty, but as the bogus Major Martin was
meant to be an officer of some social substance, he needed to be discovered wearing
high-end woolen underclothes, but such garments, with wartime coupon rationing in
full swing, proved difficult to source. It was at this point that J. C. Masterman, then
a resourceful intelligence officer, recalled that the grandee H. A. L. Fisher had been
knocked down and killed in a traffic accident three years previously, and he immedi-
ately contacted his widow to enquire whether Herbert’s eminent smalls were still in his
wardrobe. They were, and Mrs Fisher was glad to hand over her late husband’s flannel
vests and underpants, along with his superior handkerchiefs, in aid of the national war
effort, and they would go on to play what must surely have been a crucial role in mis-
leading the Germans (Smyth 100–102).
Fisher would have been proud of his contribution to the national war effort, for he’d
been at the centre of the machinery of State between 1916 and the fall of the Lloyd George
government in October 1922, and his sense of public duty never wavered. Being so close
to the hub of public affairs, whether in Government or beyond it, Fisher both fascinated
and intimidated Woolf, and her scornful unease with his kudos, as well as something very
close to pride in his renown, seeps out time and again in her letters and diary. On balance,
however, while Fisher epitomised her family’s continuing intellectual éclat, a notability
that she both relished and pushed against from the beginning, he personified above all
that stifling patriarchal heritage which overshadowed her early career in particular and
left its mark on her life as a whole. Drawing liberally on Woolf ’s published comments on
Fisher, I shall also bring to light a number of unpublished Woolf letters in the H. A. L.
Fisher papers in the Bodleian Library, a resource which not only provides us with new
angles on him from her perspective, but also holds evidence of Fisher’s less censorious
attitude to his cousin. The twin purpose of my lecture will be to flesh out a man who is
currently only a spectral presence in Woolf studies and to suggest that there was rather
more to the relationship between Fisher and Woolf than is currently acknowledged.
Fisher, whose father had been private secretary and tutor to the Prince of Wales,
and whose second name, Albert, “was bestowed on him by his princely godfather”
“The Very Centre of the Very Centre” 11
(Ryan), entered Winchester in 1878 where, among other things, he fagged for Ed-
ward Grey, the future Foreign Secretary, whom he would go on to work alongside
in Lloyd George’s wartime Cabinet. Like so many Winchester men before and after
him he proceeded, in 1884, to New College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the
college on completing his degree in 1888, and the following year became its tutor in
modern history, in which capacity he would go on to produce a stream of diverse his-
torical writings, including The Mediaeval Empire (1898), The History of England (1906),
Bonapartism (1908), The Republican Tradition in Europe (1911) and Napoleon (1912).
In 1899 he married Lettice Ilbert and in 1912 he resigned his New College Fellowship
to take up the Vice-Chancellorship of Sheffield University, having recently served on
the Royal Commission on the Public Services in India.
In December 1916 Fisher received “a bolt from the blue” in the form of
an invitation from Lloyd George to join his newly formed coalition govern-
ment as President of the Board of Education. The political world was far from
alien territory to Fisher. He had a wide acquaintance among intellectually
minded politicians such as Morley, Asquith and Balfour. He had known Lloyd
George socially for some years and they had liked each other, so that he was
not intrinsically a surprising choice for the post. (Ryan)
He would serve as an MP from 1917–1926, when he resigned having taken up the posi-
tion of Warden (head) of New College in 1925. He was still in post in 1940, when he
perished in the London traffic.
Having outlined Fisher’s career, I’ll now turn to a more detailed account of Woolf ’s
interactions with her cousin. In early November 1901 she told Thoby that “Oxford as
you can imagine would draw me from my bestial comforts if any place would” (L1 45).
Woolf makes this remark in connection with Leslie Stephen being awarded an honor-
ary D.Litt. by the University, and it is just possible that she made her first visit to Oxford
for the postponed conferment of this degree on 26 November 1901, when Fisher gave
Stephen’s acceptance speech in his absence. Two years later, and with Leslie Stephen
now dying of cancer, Fisher delivered Stephen’s prestigious Oxford Ford Lectures on
English History on his behalf.1 And it was during the preparation of these lectures for
publication that what I believe to be Woolf ’s earliest extant correspondence with Fisher
emerges. Stephen dictated a letter to his daughter in which he expresses his gratitude
to Fisher for redacting his lectures despite his own heavy work load and at the end of
it Woolf even reproduces her father’s distinctive colophon. In her accompanying letter,
she informed Fisher:
Dear Herbert,
Father has dictated to me this letter for you.
He is decidedly more comfortable, & the doctors expect to keep him free
from any pain. But of course he is very weak, & keeps almost entirely in bed.
Yours affectionately,
Virginia Stephen2
We know for certain that Woolf stayed with the Fishers at 34 Norham Road, their
spacious north Oxford home, in June 1905, a visit during which she was “introduced to
six new undergraduates at every meal…Why is virtue so unattractive—only the utterly
dissolute really appeals to me—Herbert writes his histories, and makes his jokes; and
they combine intellect and humanity—and Lord, what a bore it all is!” (L1 193) And
she made a return visit chez Fisher in late 1907, once again reporting on her experience
in the most unfavourable terms to Violet Dickinson:
I have been staying at Oxford, and stretching my brains with trained Arabs,
with not an ounce of flesh on them. The atmosphere of Oxford is quite the
chilliest and least human known to me; you see the brains floating like so
many sea anemonies, nor have they shape or colour. They are bloodless with
great veins on them…Of course Herbert Fisher has his merits; but what can
you do with a brain so competent that nothing resists it—because, after all,
it attempts only solid things—histories, and triumphant little text books.
Now my brain I will confess…floats in a blue air; where there are circling
clouds, soft sunbeams of elastic gold, and fairy gossamers—things that cant be
cut—that must be tenderly enclosed, and expressed in a globe of exquisitely
coloured words. At the mere prick of steel they vanish. (L1 319–20)
Woolf would always associate Oxford with soigné materialism and a polished,
patriarchal worldliness, but if we are minded to be too condemnatory about the Uni-
versity and its alumni, we should note that she was also writing disparagingly about
Cambridge around this time. “Last night I dined out in Chelsea, and mauled the dead
and rotten carcasses of several works written by my friends; how I hate intellect!,” she
wrote to Dickinson in July 1907. “There were several young men, whose lights had
been kindled at Cambridge, and burnt all of them precisely in the same way” (L1 300).
In February 1909 Woolf was once again a guest at the Fishers’ Oxford residence,
describing it, fantastically inaccurately, as a “new red villa, standing in its own grounds:”
Cabbages tap at the dining room windows; great white fowls run across the
lawn…There were Regius Professors at dinner, and undergraduates who had
won prizes without number, and were consequently unable to talk, as though
they sucked their prizes, as babies suck their corals. (L1 385)
She would be scathing about Oxford and the Fishers for the rest of her life, and it is
likely that she draws on her sojourns with her cousin and his wife when she describes
the excruciatingly awkward Sunday lunch at the Plumers for which Jacob Flanders is
late. This scene is set on the Huntingdon Road in Cambridge, of course, and Lettice
Fisher was not, like Mrs Plumer, begotten “in the suburbs of Manchester” (42), but
there is something about the “cheese-paring” (42) Mrs Plumer that recalls Mrs Fisher
and her close attention to domestic economy, aspects of life at the Fishers’ that Woolf
draws attention to in her letters.3 And Woolf ’s disparaging attitude to Mrs Fisher’s wife-
ly advice and accomplishments would not have been helped, as the years drew on, by
Lettice’s BBC broadcasts (and subsequent publications) on such topics as Mothers and
Families (1932) and The Housewife and the Town Hall (1934), though we should also
note in passing that Isaiah Berlin mentioned to Elizabeth Bowen that Lettice Fisher had
once told him that she regarded the Virginia Stephen of this time as “most priggish and
horrible” (Berlin 70).
If my linking of the Plumers and the Fishers is speculative, however, it is as clear as
crystal that Woolf ’s early fiction is consistently antipathetic to the ideological outlook
Herbert Fisher and so many of his late nineteenth-century Oxford contemporaries es-
poused. In an address he gave on 22 February 1919, Fisher observed that as he brought
to mind “the Oxford atmosphere of the last two decades of the nineteenth century I feel
that while our minds were occupied with many interests, from the Hegelian philosophy
downwards, the system of Education provided or assisted at the expense of the State for
the general mass of the community was not among them” (TPUNL 4), while in his auto-
biography, Fisher noted that “Hegel, as interpreted by T. H. Green and [Edward] Caird,
was the reigning philosopher in my undergraduate days. It was the fashion among all our
instructors to pull J. S. Mill to pieces and consign Herbert Spencer to the nethermost pit”
(AUA 50).
I first suggested that Woolf ’s early fiction confronts this Weltanschauung in my
maiden paper to this society, at the sixth annual conference held at Clemson University
in 1996, an essay later published as “Vicious Circles: Hegel, Bosanquet and The Voy-
age Out,” and I have returned to this theme in passing on a number of occasions, so I
won’t go into it in depth at this point. But I’ll just take a moment to reiterate my view
that Woolf ’s treatment of Richard Dalloway and Willoughby Vinrace in The Voyage Out
amounts to “a full-hearted thrust at the neo-Hegelian abstractions of [Green’s philosophy
and Bernard Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State], whereas the women who
revolve in circuits of tedium, duty and oppression in Woolf ’s first novel embody the case
for an alternative polity predicated on liberty, justice and representation” (Bradshaw 183–
84). “[F]orce is inherent in the State,” Bosanquet argued, “We make a great mistake in
thinking of the force exercised by the State as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons
by the police and the punishment of intentional law-breakers. The State is the fly-wheel of
our life. Its system is constantly reminding us of duties…which we are either too ignorant
or too indolent to carry out apart from instruction and authoritative suggestion” (quoted
Bradshaw 184). In addition to Dalloway’s explication of the obligations inherent in the
Hegelian idea of the state in the fourth chapter of The Voyage Out, this manipulative
force is also alluded to in Chapter 27 of Night and Day, when Ralph says to Katharine,
“The question is, then, at what point is it right for the individual to assert his will against
the will of the State” (ND 399). More conspicuously, the fatally obedient sailors in Jacob’s
Room who “descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea” (JR 216), and the
“impassive” traffic policeman on Ludgate Hill, his “face…stiff from force of will, and lean
from the effort of keeping it so” (JR 216–17), are further examples of individuals in the
grip of this all-pervasive but “unseizable force” (JR 217), as are the boy soldiers of Mrs
Dalloway, young men recruited to play a key role in R. B. Haldane’s concept of a reformed
Hegelian army, “their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend
written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England” (MD
43). Beyond Woolf ’s fiction, I would also point to the “disagreeable impression of control
& senseless determination” (D1 59) she picked up when accompanying Leonard to an
assessment of his fitness for military conscription in October 1917 as yet another mani-
festation of this Hegelian force at work in British society. Of course, I’m not now trying
to suggest that the Liberal statesman H. A. L. Fisher was the sole source of Woolf ’s
concerted opposition to such neo-Hegelian thinking, but there is a striking alignment
between his ideological convictions and those of the fictional Conservative statesman
Richard Dalloway.
More patently Fisher-like is The Voyage Out’s Hughling Elliot. Fisher had spent a
formative year in Paris, where
he found himself particularly at home, enjoying the cultural riches of the city
to the full. As a historian he benefited both from his induction into the sober
and minute techniques of research pioneered by the École des Chartes and
from the inspired flights of speculation that he heard from Renan and Taine.
(Ryan)
Elliot, likewise, is a francophile “Oxford Don” (VO 123) who has “a profound knowl-
edge of Coptic which he concealed as far as possible and quoted French phrases so
exquisitely that it was hard to believe he could also speak the ordinary tongue” (VO
126–27). His wife, on the other hand, is a Lettice-like woman “whose expression was
habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing to thing as though they never found
anything sufficiently pleasant to rest upon for any length of time” (VO 123). “Who
writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?” Elliot enquires at one point in Chap-
ter XI. Hirst has no idea, but Elliot fills a later silence by telling a “fascinating anecdote
of Lord Curzon (educated at Balliol College) and the undergraduate’s bicycle” (VO
303). Similarly, in To the Lighthouse, Tansley’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Mr
Ramsay include informing him “who had won this, who had won that, who was a ‘first-
rate man’ at Latin verses, who was ‘brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound’, who
was undoubtedly the ‘ablest fellow in Balliol’” (TTL 10).
Once Fisher entered Lloyd George’s wartime Cabinet, Woolf ’s uneasy enthralment
with him intensified markedly. On 15 October 1918, for example, she told Roger Fry
that she’d spent “two hours alone with Herbert Fisher” the previous night “and found
him though sedate and even aged infinitely improved from what he used to be at Ox-
ford. Even Parliament, I suppose, is an improvement upon that. But what humbugs they
all are!” (L2 282–83). Yet Fisher, for all his faults and foibles, was anything but a fraud;
indeed, he was about to prove himself something of a visionary, and the Education Act
of 1918, still referred to as “The Fisher Act,” “made a contribution of permanent impor-
tance to the cause of educational reform” (Ogg 87) in the United Kingdom. “Because of
this,” in the words of the educational historian Lawrence Andrews, “the Education Act
of 1918 can be placed in the same category as the 1870, 1902 and 1944 Education Acts,
as a legislative measure of the first importance” (Andrews 89).
Woolf followed up her letter to Fry with another to Vanessa in which she noted
that Fisher had:
become rather like one of those wise old sheep dogs whose eyes have become
slightly pale; but he is much less supercilious than he was at Oxford. He had
just seen Lord Milner [Secretary of State for War] who said we had won the
war that day and shall have peace by Christmas…Herbert was surprisingly
sensible—perhaps because he knew our opinions—about war in general:
however, he believes in public schools, and said you’d better send Julian and
Quentin to Winchester, where they get the best education in the world (L2
283–4).
Around the same time in her diary, Woolf recorded:
I did not think I should so soon have to describe a meeting with a cabinet
minister…I was sitting down alone to tea on Sunday…when the bell rang &
I saw several figures against the glass. On opening the door I really couldn’t
at first collect my wits; there were Olive & M[ichael] Heseltine & Herbert
Fisher…Was I nervous or proud, or anything but interested & anxious to pick
[Fisher’s] brains for news? I don’t think I felt a moments agitation. For one
thing he has lost his lean intellectual look; his hollow cheeks are filled; his
eyes with that pale frosty look which blue eyes get in age; his whole bearing
very quiet, simple, & when not speaking rather saddened & subdued…I can’t
help thinking that London life has rid him of his desire to say clever things to
undergraduates all the time. Anyhow we talked without stopping & without
difficulty.
“We’ve won the war today” he said, at once. (D1 202–3)
Woolf goes on to detail what Fisher meant by this statement, his thoughts on the
consequences of the peace and his plans for the future. “So we talked on…I tried to
think it extraordinary but I found it difficult—extraordinary, I mean, to be in touch
with one who was in the very centre of the very centre, sitting in a little room at Down-
ing St. where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing through from all over the
world, a million miles a minute; where you have constantly to settle off hand questions
of enormous difficulty & importance—where the fate of armies does more or less hang
upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide” (D1 204; emphasis added). “It is
quite obvious of course,” Woolf wrote in a revealing diary entry three days later (while
reflecting on what she’d written on 15 October):
that for some reason perhaps not creditable to me I think H.[erbert] F.[isher]
worth many more words than Ka [Cox] say, or Saxon, both of whom have
dined here since. My theory is that for some reason the human mind is always
seeking what it conceives to be the centre of things; sometimes one may call it
reality, again truth, again life—I don’t know what I call it; but I distinctly visu-
alise it as a possession rather more in H.[erbert] F.[isher]’s hands than in other
peoples. For the moment he makes all the rest of the world’s activities appear as
ramifications radiating from him (D1 205; emphasis added).
As I’ve already mentioned in passing, the consensus amongst educational histo-

rians is that Fisher, within the constraints of his time, was a radical and pioneering
Minister of Education (1916–22) in that “he introduced a number of significant reforms:

in the Education Act of 1918, in improving the status and rewards of teachers, in de-
signing a system of national examinations and in funding universities” (Judge 5). And
although some “of these reforms were eroded by the financial crises of the early 1920s”
(Judge 5), they were partially achieved under the straitened circumstances of war and in
the face of keen opposition from one entrenched faction or another.4 In addition, Fisher
“formalised the University Grants Committee, which remained until the 1980s one of the
brightest jewels in the educational crown” (Judge 13) and introduced a system of “State
Scholarships enabling some students from poorer families to gain access to universities,”
as well as securing £8 million to pay for 27,000 ex-servicemen to go to university (Judge
13). Leonard Woolf, however, was not disposed to give Fisher any credit for these various
progressive measures or for the Act that would in future bear his name. Indeed, in an
influential passage in Downhill All the Way he recalls Fisher as:
a man of great charm, both physical and mental, but also the kind of man
whom in those days I thought it to be almost a public duty to oppose in public
life. For he was the kind of respectable Liberal who made respectable liberal-
ism stink in the nostrils of so many of my generation who began their political
lives as liberals…I may have been prejudiced and unfair, but I thought the
Fisher Education Act…to be the sort of cowardly compromise which seemed
to save the face of its author at the expense of his principles. When he was a
Minister, we saw him fairly often…His conversation fascinated us; he was so
nice, so distinguished, and so ridiculous that he might have walked straight
into Crotchet Castle. His face and his mind had the gentle, pale, ivory glow, the
patina which Oxford culture and innumerable meals at Oxford high-tables
give to Oxford dons…Herbert, with all his academic innocence, suddenly
found himself projected into the very centre of the world of action, the House
of Commons, Downing Street, the Cabinet. L[loyd] G[eorge] and the Cabinet
went to his head…He was obsessed by Lloyd George, who was to him a cross
between a superman and a siren, and by Downing Street, sitting in which he
felt himself to be sitting bang on the hub of the universe.
About all this poor Herbert discoursed to us lyrically…He was never
tired of telling us that we and everyone else who did not sit in Downing Street
knew nothing about anything. He gave us a vision of the Prime Minister and
the President of the Board of Education sitting in the Cabinet Room in Down-
ing Street and receiving an unending stream of secret, momentous messages
from every quarter of the earth, if not the remotest galaxies of the outer uni-
verse. When the Lloyd George government fell…he still continued to tell and
retell nostalgically the fairy story of his days in Downing Street (34–35).
How do we explain Leonard’s animus? A clue, perhaps, is offered by Kenneth Mor-

gan when he reminds us that: “To a marked extent, the English intellectual world…was
a Liberal world. Great journals, great institutions, great universities still took their tone
from Liberal intellectuals. It was ironic that…H. A. L. Fisher, perhaps the most representa-
tive, highest Liberal of them all was firmly anchored within the Cabinet and proud of it”
(Morgan 199). Even so, he was “generally regarded as a powerful academic voice on behalf
of unreconstructed Liberals, both in terms of domestic reform and an enlightened foreign
and Irish policy” (Morgan 83), so there is still much to unpick in Leonard’s contempt.
Presumably oblivious to how the Woolfs perceived him, Fisher asked if he might
come to lunch with them on 13 April 1919. Writing to Vanessa three days later Woolf
told her sister that Fisher had on this occasion displayed
the intolerable Fisher superciliousness; and makes my spine curl—no longer

with despair at my own insignificance though. I feel worth ten of him, and in
fact we made ourselves rather disagreeable, and abused George Duckworth,
and the Cunards and Lady Manners, with whom he seemed to be impressed…
It’s said that he’s a government spy…But Lord! What watery and wobbly minds
these politicians have—and always afraid to say what they mean, and such an
air of being behind the scenes… (L2 348)
while in a diary entry of 17 April 1919 she anatomized her cousin at greater length,
dissecting him as:
a strange mixture of ascetic & worldling. The lean secluded man now finds him-
self dazzled by office, & with all his learning & culture swept away by men of
vitality & affairs. Such a tribute as he paid to Winston [Churchill] might have
been paid by some dazzled moth to a lamp. He seems to see nothing clearly, or
else some notion of responsibility forbids him to say what he thinks. He hums
& haws when asked a plain question & murmurs on in a husky sort of whisper
which seems bodiless & blurred as himself. His whole aspect is that of a worn &
half obliterated scholar made spruce by tailors & doing his best to adopt the qui-
et distinguished manner of those who govern. This is his official side. In private
he is a kindly, even affectionate gentleman, simple by nature, though tarnished
either by Oxford or by his Fisher blood with a supercilious superficial manner
which leads him to dally urbanely & in a way which belittles them with art &
letters & everything but politics. This used to irritate—now it merely amuses
me. He has long passed the shadow line, & his sarcasms seem directed at phan-
toms. All clever official men—seem smoothed out of likeness to humanity; &
impelled to babble on glibly & entertainingly as if they were under a perpetual
contract to keep high table amused. I do H.A.L.F. the credit to say that he does
not give himself airs, save those of a person rendered responsible through no
particular merit of his own. (D1 263–64)
According to F. Russell Bryant, the editor of Fisher’s Coalition Diaries and Let-
ters, Woolf ’s “unflattering” words “reflected her disinterest in the great issues of the
day, her lack of sympathy with the heavy responsibilities Fisher bore and her possible
nervousness about being around someone so prominent” (TCDL ii 372), but Bryant’s
comments more palpably betray his own limitations. As we know, Woolf was far from
uninterested in the “the great issues of the day” and there is no evidence at all that she
had a “lack of sympathy” for Fisher’s onerous role in public affairs, though his national
“prominen[ce]” did indeed rivet and intimidate her in equal measure. And it is also
worth mentioning at this point that she encountered the same superciliousness that
riled her in Fisher in other Oxford men of her acquaintance. For example, of the histo-
rian Arnold Toynbee Woolf remarked, “I think I frighten him; or perhaps I’m not used
to the Oxford manner. Its suavity and politeness are strange to me” (D1 211), while of
the political scientist, G. D. H. Cole, she wrote: “Never was there such a quick, hard,
determined man as Cole; covering his Labour sympathies…with the sarcasm & sneers
of Oxford” (D2 41). Balliol’s Raymond Mortimer was condemned in similar terms:
“Mortimer is Oxford, & thus not nearly so easy to come to terms with as Sebastian
[Sprott] for instance. [Mortimer] is all angle & polish. Wears a swallow tail white waist-
coat; wants brilliancy not intimacy, is half a dandy” (D2 257). Nor was her impression
of Oxford improved when T. S. Eliot told her that all he had learned during his time at
the University was “self confidence” and “how to write plain English” (D4 179).
Intriguingly, we also have Fisher’s more prosaic account of his recent lunch with
the Woolfs. On the evening of 13 April 1919 he wrote to his wife from the Athenaeum:
I have just returned from a day at Richmond. Lovely with intermittent heavy
showers and a glorious rainbow. I spent the morning on Indian papers, got
out to Virginia by 1:30 p.m. & after lunch walked with her & Woolf along the
river to Kew, then through Kew Gardens & back to tea. The magnolias all in
flower, the chestnuts out and the willows in their first tender green. Very re-
freshing. We got caught in one fierce downpour but as I had my Burbury [sic]
it didn’t matter…Virginia was very nice and so was her Woolf, who is looking
at League of Nations with Willoughby. I gather that V. does a great deal [of]
reviewing for the Literary Supplement. She is now going through a course of
Defoe, and is very enthusiastic about Moll Flanders, which she describes as
one of the greatest novels. I’ve never read it but I knew that Uncle Leslie used
to admire it’ (TCDL ii, 405–6).
After attending a concert in April 1920 Woolf recorded the following day that she
walked a few steps beyond Herbert Fisher coming out; followed him across
the empty lamplit purlieus of Westminster, saw him step so distinguished, yet
to my eye, so empty, into Palace Yard, & so to take part in ruling the Empire.
His head bent—legs a little wavering—small feet—I tried to put myself inside
him, but could only suppose he thought in an exalted way which to me would
be all bunkum. Indeed, I feel this more & more. I’ve had my dive into their
heads & come out again, I think. (D2 32)
By the end of November 1920, on the other hand, she was describing Fisher as “a good
man, or don at least, become an old tin can for platitudes” (L2 448).
A year later, on 18 April 1921, she and Leonard again shared a meal with the “Cabi-
net Minister.” “We think he asked us in order to apologise for—everything,” Woolf
wrote in her diary:
He said he had neither the physical force nor the combativeness to carry things
through. He said he hated Parliament. A political life is dull, & wastes all one’s
time, he said; one is always listening to dull speeches, frittering time away…The
upshot of it all was that he couldn’t be blamed for his conduct about Ireland.
And then he was careful to explain that the public is ridiculously in the dark
about everything. Only the cabinet knows the true spring & source of things he
said. That is the only solace of the work. A flood tide of business flows inces-
santly from all quarters of the world through Downing Street; & there are a few
miserable men trying desperately to deal with it. They have to make tremen-
dous decisions with insufficient evidence on the spur of the moment…Never
was there a thinner lighter airier specimen I thought; his words without body, &
his head cocked at a queer angle, & his hands gesticulating, & his eyes so blue,
but almost vacant, & cheerful colourless words, slightly mannered & brushed
up in conformity with some official standard of culture…But after mouthing his
meaning behold; it flew away like thistledown, & it appeared that this Cabinet
Minister & representative of Great Britain in whose hands are armies & navies
was dry and empty again. (D2 112–13)
During the course of yet another lunch with Fisher, on 8 May 1921, he made Woolf
“despair—of everything. Poor man! Is it inevitable that politics should eat out your
inside and leave you but a shell? Perhaps its being in the Cabinet; I felt that if the win-
dow was open, poor Herbert would be blown down Victoria Street—yet so good and
well meaning” (L2 467). Fisher, on the other hand, merely recorded in his diary: “Up
to town with M.[iriam] Pease. Cabinet 4 p.m. Masterly exposition of railway bill by
E.[ric] Geddes—he proposes to save 35 millions a year. Thence home. Virginia Woolf
to lunch. Then to House [of Commons]“ (TCDL iii, 735).
Among other things, these various rendezvous with and sightings of Fisher surely
left their stamp on Woolf ’s representation of the Cabinet’s conduct of the War in Jacob’s
Room:
Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the
Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication…The voice spoke
plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man
made notes on the margin of type-written sheets…His head—bald, red-
veined, hollow looking—represented all the heads in the building. His head,
with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of knowledge across the
street…and then the sixteen gentlemen…decreed that the course of history
should shape itself this way or that. (JR 240–41)
But while those “amiable pale eyes” look very much like Herbert Fisher’s, in reality
Woolf ’s cousin “had little enthusiasm for the war. He had argued for a compromise peace
with Germany not only at the moment when Lloyd George was made prime minister to
pursue an unconditional German surrender, but to the prime minister himself ” (Ryan),
so, once again, Woolf ’s fictional incorporation of Fisher, or at least aspects of him, as
well as her and Leonard’s representation of Fisher in their personal writings, needs to
be set against a more nuanced account of his Cabinet activities and his actual position
on various issues of national policy, such as the War and the situation in Ireland, where,
in the words of one historian, Fisher was “not insensitive to Lloyd George’s illiberalism”
(Bentley 151–52). Fisher was also to be one of the few in the Lloyd George Ministry “who
spoke out for the rights of the conscientious objectors” (Sherington 74).
In January 1925 a new phase of Fisher’s career began when he succeeded the leg-
endary W. A. Spooner as Warden of New College, becoming “the most distinguished
of all who had held that office since its foundation in 1379” (Ogg 122). Alongside his
close friend Gilbert Murray, then Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Fisher was also
the General Editor of the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, and in this
capacity he asked Woolf to write a book for the series “on Post Victorian” later that
year, but she turned him down: “To think of being battened down in the hold of those
University dons fairly makes my blood run cold…I’m the only woman in England free
to write what I like” (D3 43). Asquith regarded Fisher and Murray as the “two best
brains in England” (Bentley 163), but this was clearly not enough to persuade Woolf
to write for them!
Four years later, returning to Monk’s House from a walk in September 1929, Woolf
“groan[ed]…to find Herbert Fisher on the lawn” (L4 90). Left to stand alone, this testy
aside might be read as further proof of Woolf ’s exasperation with her cousin’s haughty
grandeur, but the following month she published A Room of One’s Own and in due
course Fisher must have read it and sent his congratulations to her. Woolf responded
with an unpublished letter of great interest:
My Dear Herbert,
Your letter has been sent on to me down here [that is, to Monk’s House],
where we are recovering from influenza. It is a great pleasure to me to think
that you like my little book. I feel some anxiety when I think of you—for
whom I inherit much respect—reading anything I write—all the greater then
is my relief if you approve. I was rather doubtful about this book, considering
my complete lack of education. However, I did want to say what I said, & I’m
very glad that you think it came through.
Virginia Woolf5
Are we to simply juxtapose Woolf telling Desmond MacCarthy that she “groan[ed]”
at the sight of Fisher on her lawn and her apparently sincere pleasure in her cousin’s
praise for A Room of One’s Own as a token of her refined hypocrisy and her desire to
entertain MacCarthy, or is there something more fundamental and absorbing in play
here? I think there may well be. What we might feel inclined to pick up is not just
further evidence of Woolf ’s “inherit[ed]” respect for Fisher but, more importantly, her
“inherit[ed]” sense of his achievements and, above all, her sympathetic affinity with the
dutiful burden she also laboured under to bring merit to her illustrious family, her oc-
casionally exhilarating, sometimes disabling sense that “She was carrying the heritage
of her predecessors into the art of [the twentieth] century” (to borrow the quote from
Joseph Brodsky that the OED uses as an example of the possible usage of “heritage”).
Another unpublished letter offers further evidence of Woolf and Fisher’s propin-
quity rather than her stroppy hostility towards him. During the course of a letter to
Violet Dickinson of 27 August 1905, Virginia Stephen noted that “The Quaker has
written a pamphlet about Christian Science, to confute Mrs Butler.6 The Stephen family
seems to think no controversy complete without their printed opinion. A wonderful
race!” (L1 206) “The Quaker” in question is clearly Caroline Stephen, but Nicolson
and Trautmann gloss the “Mrs Butler” concerned as Mrs Josephine Butler, the social
reformer. This is incorrect, and the relevant Mrs Butler was the prominent British
Christian Scientist Agnata Frances Butler. But the point of leaping back to this 1905
mention of Christian Science is not to dwell on an editorial slip but to prepare the
ground for informing you that in 1929 Herbert Fisher also proved himself worthy of
his “race” by publishing his own demolition of its beliefs and practices. Entitled Our
New Religion, it is a highly engaging denunciation of what Fisher goes to great lengths
to expose as the “the virulent absurdity” (ONR 142) of Mary Baker Eddy and her
movement. Serialised in the Sunday Dispatch prior to its appearance as a book, Fisher’s
otherwise imperturbable biographer describes this gloriously anomalous publication
as “a clever little book, so clever that it might have been written by Lucian, or Voltaire
or even the Devil himself ” (Ogg 18), and it is without doubt the most extraordinary
item in the Fisher canon. To quote his biographer again:
Its effect was disconcerting. Some old friendships, including those of two
prominent members of the peerage, were jeopardised; nearly as serious,
the custom of the [publishing] firm, particularly in the United States, was
threatened with diminution…[for]…the folly of attacking a cult which has
the backing of money and social influence. Indeed, for a time Fisher found
himself out in the cold among the pariah dogs who bark at the sleek, pedigree
creatures basking in the sunshine of popular favour. (Ogg 18)
Mortified, in particular, by its scandalous reception in America, the rattled Fisher

sent a copy of Our New Religion to Woolf, who, once again in contrast to her earlier
Monk’s House “groan,” wrote to Fisher to thank him for it with straightforward grati-
fication:
My dear Herbert,
It was delightful of you to send me your most amusing book. I read it last
Christmas, together with a very large life of Mrs Eddy,7 & I am afraid you have
demolished the old woman completely (she has a certain charm). But you
don’t leave much standing, & I greatly enjoy seeing you do it.
Thank you so much. It shall go in a new bookcase in a new room.
Virginia Woolf8
Two years later, Woolf arranged to visit the Fishers in Oxford (L5 113), but then
postponed her trip (L5 120). As she wrote to Virginia Isham in January 1933, “I wonder
what you’re acting at Oxford? If I come there I shall drop in and see. The Fishers did
ask me to stay last term; I’m rather terrified of going” (L5 150). In the interim, Fisher
had complimented Woolf on her centenary tribute to Leslie Stephen (published on 28
November 1932) and she responded, yet again, with what sounds like genuine appre-
ciation:
My dear Herbert,
I am greatly pleased that you liked my article, and it was very good of you to
say so. I was reluctant to write it, but Vanessa and Adrian wanted me to—and
I did it in the fear that I should make a complete failure of it.
Yes, I too remember Hyde Park gate very well, and your coming [in
1888]—and mother saying you had won a fellowship and asking her what
that was. (L5 132)
As we’re coming to see, I hope, intimacy, admiration, disdain and disquiet are all
in evidence in Woolf ’s communications with and writings about Fisher, yet in some
ways they were quite clearly poles apart. When Sir George Duckworth died in 1934,
for example, Fisher wrote a letter to The Times which must surely have made Woolf
gag with its privileged, suave sonority and its entirely laudatory portrait of a man she
regarded as rather less than praiseworthy. “George Duckworth,” Fisher intoned:
had a genius for happiness. He was happy himself and radiated happiness
wherever he went. There was never a man of a sweeter or more affectionate
disposition. He was essentially one of Walter Bagehot’s “enjoying English-
men”: he enjoyed his family and his friends, his games and his food, his garden
and his pigs, his rough shooting, and every pleasure which the lovely county
of Sussex can afford. It delighted him to be an arbiter of wines and dishes,
to legislate on the boiling of an egg, to prescribe the one artistic method of
preparing a rabbit, and to launch a crusade for the improvement of Sussex
cookery. It was no credit to be cheerful in the sunshine of a presence so hand-
some and benignant.9
Notoriously, Virginia Stephen had found the “handsome” George Duckworth’s incestu-
ous “enjoy[ment]” of her body far from “benignant,” and although in a letter of May
1934 Woolf told Vanessa that she felt more “affection” for George in the aftermath of his
death, she still thought of him (contrary to the tenor of Fisher’s encomium) as having “a
sort of half insane quality…about family and food and so on” (L5 299).
In November 1933 she told Quentin Bell that she had “got to stay with the Fishers
the week after [next]” (L5 248). As far as I’m aware, this overnight stay of 30 November
was Woolf ’s first visit to the Warden’s lodgings, or private quarters, at New College, and
she described her experience in a letter to Ethel Smyth of 3 December:
Oh my God, what a lot I’ve talked the last few days!—150 boys with some
literary tendency (concealed) shook my hand at New College each led like
a victim to the altar, by my old bald white priestly cousin Herbert Fisher.
We stood in a long gallery, and so it went on till midnight, and I ran out of
small talk, and could only think of bargain sales in Selfridges basement to talk
about…But there was a certain monastic dignity about the cloisters in moon-
light (not that I like colleges) and the young are cool faced and pink lipped, if
only I could have lain on cushions and shied roses at them—instead of stand-
ing in a draught handing penny buns. No I dont like institutes where dressing
bells ring for dining, and praying bells ring for prayers, and all hours have
their duties, which one pretends to observe, but with a lie in ones heart—so
that even my kind old cousin, who once loved cricket, I think, is now as hol-
low as a corn husk. (L5 254)
In similar vein, she wrote in her diary the following day:
Staying with the Fishers. A queer thing, people who accept conventions. Gives
them a certain force. H[erbert] has the organisation behind him. But robs
them of character, of vagaries, of depth, warmth, the unexpected. They spin
along the grooves. H[erbert] to some extent anxious to impress his privileged
impartial position. Many stories of “when I was in the Cabinet.” Yet why not?
The odd thing is that when with them one accepts their standards. And whats
wrong? So nice, just, equable, humane. But how chill! And over his shoulder I
see the rulers; small; but not evil; striving—a complex impression. Warden[s]
have lived there since 1370—or so. How can he differ? Young men all very
smooth, but talkative. Nothing to strike on. A nice nameless boy told me he
read Greek 8 hours daily. Some like Oxford, some think it a place of restric-
tions. Yes, Herbert accepts the current values, only rather intellectualises &
refines. Dismissed Tom, Clive, Maynard (partly), in favour of the great forces
of vitality—Winston, L.[loyd] George. Lettice waspish about Labour Party…
[Herbert] [t]ells stories of Balfour & in the manner of the great man—dis-
creet, nipped, bloodless, like a butler used to the best families. Toils at history
of Europe…Nothing to whizz one off one’s perch at New College: all in good
taste & very kind. But Lord to live like that! (D4 191–2)
One of the Fishers’ other guests on 30 November was the 24-year-old Isaiah Ber-
lin,10 whom Woolf portrays as
Oxford’s leading light; a communist, I think, a fire eater—but at Herbert’s ev-

eryone minces and mouths and you wouldn’t guess to talk to them that they
had a spark or a spunk. Herbert is all that is refined and stately; he looks much
like Adrian; but office has smoothed out all corrugosities. He told me story
after story about the Cabinet of 1916. To him that was what a Christmas tree
is to a child, and the poor old moth still haunts those extinct, but once radiant,
candles. (L5 255)
Berlin reported to Elizabeth Bowen that after dinner he, the other guests and the invit-
ed undergraduates “were constantly re-formed by Mrs F[isher], who ill at ease and idle
handed jumbled everyone into a sort of game of musical chairs in which nobody talked
to anybody for more than two minutes” (Berlin 70). And while Edward Pargiter’s swot-
ting for his Greek examinations in The Years cannot be based on the undergraduate
Woolf encountered at New College (as she drafted that section of “The Pargiters” in
the late autumn of 1932), Woolf ’s fictional St. Catharine’s College oddly anticipates so
much of her 1933 visit to New College, and the “famous crooked street” (TY 71) Kitty
walks down is remarkably like New College Lane, a thoroughfare with no fewer than
five dog-legs. Like Woolf, Kitty complains that “Oxford always made her feel foolish.
She disliked Oxford” (TY 249).
Fisher was awarded the Order of Merit in 1937 and despite Woolf making a mis-
chievous comment about this august dynastic order in Three Guineas (128), he wrote
to his cousin asking her to visit him. “After my remarks on OM’s this is conciliatory. He
wants me to send a signed copy. And his time is drawing out: resignation impending”
(D5 171). On 14 September Fisher had written to Woolf on behalf of his friend Nowell
C. Smith, who, among other things, headed the Oxford Branch of the League of Na-
tions Union. Smith had asked Fisher whether he could persuade Woolf to send him a
signed copy of Three Guineas or any other work for fund-raising purposes. “I pass on
this request—you must receive many such and may, I hope, be forgiven for doing so. I
wish there were some hope of seeing you at New College. My days there are fast draw-
ing to a close” (Snaith 84). Woolf did send a copy of Three Guineas and Nowell Smith
told her on 2 October 1938 that he had read the book “with admiration and assent”
(Snaith 90). On 17 September 1938, Woolf told Fisher that she’d be “delighted” to send
a copy of Three Guineas to Smith (who was also Chairman of the English Association).
“May I come and see you one day quietly?,” she continued. “I should so much like to,
but am always afraid that you and Lettice are overdone with people. Tell Mary [the
Fishers’ only child] that if ever she wants a meal in London there is always one for her
at Tavistock Square—at least after this month” (L6 272–73).
Fisher’s time was “drawing out” more quickly than he could have imagined, and
two years later Woolf ’s “very old venerable cousin” (as she described him in a letter to
Ethel Smyth) was “killed by a Lorry” (L6 393) on the Victoria Embankment, a grand and
progressive project, like Fisher himself, constructed to serve the British Imperial State
in its pomp. But if Woolf ’s brusque announcement of his death in her letter to Smyth
of 22 April seems to suggest that she was underwhelmed by his sudden demise, this im-
pression should be set against another unpublished letter Woolf wrote on 22 April, this
time to Mary Fisher. And before I quote it, I’d like us to recall her acting as her father’s
amanuensis in 1903, when Leslie Stephen and Fisher were corresponding about prepar-
ing Stephen’s Ford Lectures for the press. I know Woolf must have written other letters
on behalf of her ailing father during that period and she may well have concluded them
with a similar flourish, but it is timely to remind you of the way she ends her 1903 let-
ter to Fisher by faithfully reproducing Stephen’s colophon. In turn, this leads me to ask
whether that intimate act is enough in itself to make us wonder whether Woolf saw the
relationship between Fisher and her parents as almost filial—a speculation that this letter
to Mary Fisher further emboldens. “My dear Mary,” Woolf wrote:
I can’t help writing you one line. Your father was so much a part of my child-
hood. My father & mother were so proud of him, & he brought them back to
me more than anyone else. And from seeing you together I think I can guess a
little what you have lost.
Dont dream of answering: some day I hope you will come & see us.
Both Leonard & I would like to send our love, to you & your mother.
Your affectionate
Virginia Woolf11
Doesn’t this revelation, that Fisher brought back her parents more than anyone
else she knew, not only provide us with an illuminating insight into Woolf ’s vexed yet
awe-struck relationship with her cousin, but also throw intriguing light on her tetchy
reaction to Fisher’s linking of Mr and Mrs Ramsay and Leslie and Julia Stephen in his
unfinished autobiography? Here Fisher recalls his pleasure in:
staying at St. Ives with the Leslie Stephens in the circle of beautiful children
and brilliant intellectuals which is commemorated in my cousin Virginia’s
sensitive fantasia “To the Lighthouse”. Virginia was a small child then, and
was only in her teens when she lost the lovely mother who was adored by us
all and to whom in this commemorative volume she pays an exquisite trib-
ute. Her father Leslie, so formidable within the home, was a different creature
when he was striding over the Cornish cliffs, botanizing as he went, repeating
poetry, and overflowing with good spirits and enjoyment. I learnt to know
him from these St. Ives visits and always held him in deep affection and re-
gard. (AUA 20)
Having read these words, Woolf told Lady Simon (surely disingenuously) that Fisher’s
volume “rather nettled [her]. I don’t like being exposed as a novelist and told my people
are my mother and father, when, being in a novel, they’re not. It was rather charming,
though, his book, in the beginning, but then Lettice and the Cabinet between them
flattened it out. That was true of him too” (L6 464).
Fisher’s anti-war instincts had long made him an ardent advocate of appeasement
(Ogg 136, 138), and even during his time in the Coalition he regarded appeasement
as “a necessary corrective to the Treaty [of Versailles]. It provided a hope that the in-
justices of the Treaty would disappear peacefully” (Gilbert 52). During the 1930s he
had longed for Germany to become “de-Hitlerised” (Ogg 138) and he deplored the
public outcry against the Munich Agreement of 1938. Between the Acts, on the other
hand, with its acerbic focus on an insular and festering culture of smugness, repres-
sion and self-deception, opposes the mentality of appeasement from beginning to end
and may well represent Woolf ’s last critical engagement with Herbert Fisher’s values
in her fiction. While characters fuss about “whiffy” (BA 29) fish and fund-raise dog-
gedly for their continuously deteriorating steeple, martial violence fills the timeless
depth of the lily pond (BA 39–40), a blood-lust takes hold of the most unlikely char-
acters, and plainly imminent but unanticipated showers drench the villagers (BA 162).
Like Fisher in his recent three-volume History of Europe, Miss La Trobe seeks to rep-
resent the looming horror of the contemporary through the prism of the past and to
“douche [her audience] with present-time reality” (BA 161), but her audience can only
gape on uncomprehendingly and her pageant is a “failure” (BA 188). It would be go-
ing too far to claim that this novel’s argument on the inwardness of appeasement was
directly prompted by Fisher’s point-of-view, but, whether intentionally or not, it hosts
a coalescence of themes that critiques Fisher’s inter-war standpoint with unflagging
trenchancy.
On 25 April 1940, just as she was finishing writing “The Leaning Tower,” Woolf
recorded in her diary:
I was thinking of my memoirs. The platform of time. How I see father from
the 2 angles. As a child condemning; as a woman of 58 understanding—I
shd say tolerating. Both views true? Herbert’s death recalls him. The groan.
That man will kill me! H.[erbert] going up to talk in the study. Hearing his
wheeze of a laugh on the stairs at night. Essence of a prig—a don, I thought.
He came into the day nursery. Advised us to read some shilling shocker. Un-
easy condescension. A more friendly memory of a walk at Brighton. I had to
choose the way. Chose against his wish. His frock coat. The King coming to
Oxford…At Oxford when a don. Walking to Bores [Boars] Hill…Then the
Cabinet—coming to Hogarth House, discussing action v. contemplation…
The Magnolias at Kew. H. looking…A long talk alone about Armistice Day…
So the last social meeting at New College. The party. His light cats tread. His
hollow benevolence. His shell. His considerateness. His enthusiasm…Warmer
& mellower—asking me to come again. Gave me Homer, gave me his books.
But the distance too great. & so—I shant give him the pleasure—never went
there. And thats over (D5 281–82).
Perhaps we get our last hazy glimpse of Fisher behind the fusty privilege of Louis
MacNeice’s Oxford in “The Leaning Tower,” yet the truth is that Woolf ’s cousin had
done more than most of his generation to improve education for the masses and to
increase funding for Britain’s civic universities. He had done his best to ensure that the
next generation would not be “a leaning-tower generation—an oblique, sidelong, self-
centered, squinting, self-conscious generation with a foot in two worlds,” and he had
contributed quite considerably to that process of change that found its apotheosis in
the establishment of the Welfare State immediately after the Second World War, where
men and women of all classes might stand “without hedges between [them], on the
common ground” (E6 274). The previous year, when Woolf had given a talk on book-
production at the Regent Street Polytechnic, she was struck by the enthusiasm and
lack of stuffiness in the students, the notable absence of patriarchal heritage on display.
“It was rather cheerful. And free & easy. Much better than Oxford & Cambridge” (D5
206). Similarly, while her vision of her utopian “experimental college, and adventurous
college” in Three Guineas is far more radical than Fisher’s real-world educational initia-
tives—in that it would be built on the cheap, without chapels and would be subject to
continual refurbishment as each generation passed through it, and with its teachers
“drawn from the good livers as well as the good thinkers. There should be no difficulty
in attracting them. For there would be none of the barriers of wealth and ceremony,
of advertisement and competition which now make the old and rich universities such
uneasy dwelling-places” (TG 143–44)—Fisher’s radical ideas were not entirely out of
kilter with Woolf ’s own. For example, he believed “that a country which closed down
formal education for the great bulk of its child population at the age of twelve was
allowing human capital to run to waste on a prodigal scale” (AUA 98), and he was
also persuaded that “The young should not be entrusted to the care of sad, melan-
choly, careworn teachers. The classroom should be a cheerful place. The state which
values harmony should begin by making its teachers happy” (AUA 105). In short, and
in their different ways, both cousins were committed to what Fisher called “the social
reconstruction of the country” (AUA 105), and while Woolf would have been horri-
fied to know that “At a time when all his carefully matured plans were under attack
in the economically difficult post-war years [Fisher] wrote a private note as Minister
supporting the ban imposed by many local authorities on the employment of women
teachers” (Judge 15), he did, in his time-bound and embattled fashion, introduce many
educational measures that were far-sighted and a lasting contribution to social justice
in this country.
“The patriarchal society of the Victorian age was in full swing in our drawing room,”
Woolf writes in “Sketch of the Past.” “It had of course many different parts…Father for
example laid immense stress upon school reports; upon scholarships; triposes and fel-
lowships. The male Fishers went through those hoops to perfection. They won all the
prizes, all the honours. What, I asked myself, when I read Herbert Fisher’s autobiography
the other day, would Herbert have been without Winchester, New College and the Cabi-
net? What would have been his shape had he not been stamped and moulded by that
great patriarchal machine? Every one of our male relations was shot into that machine at
the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the
Warden of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is
to think of a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod over the pampas” (MOB 155;
emphasis added). Later in 1940, on hearing that G. M Trevelyan had been made Master
of Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf coined the term “The complete Insider” to describe
men of his ilk. “Herbert Fisher is another. So (with a ‘perhaps’) is Maynard. They are
Romans not Greeks. I like outsiders better. Insiders write a colourless English. They are
turned out by the University machine. I respect them. Father was one variety. I dont love
them. I dont savour them…They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the
forests & the will o the wisps” (D5 333).
On one occasion Isaiah Berlin told Mary Fisher that her “father was the only
grand’homme I have ever known face to face” (Berlin 298), and whenever Woolf set
eyes on him she must have found it impossible to resist bringing to mind not just the
pale-eyed grandeur of her father but also and even more powerfully her clean-shaven
brothers, and especially Adrian, to whom, as Woolf mentioned in the letter to Quentin
Bell of 1933 quoted above, Fisher bore more than a poignant resemblance. In turn,
we might consider how such a resemblance may have led her to muse on her role as a
Stephen descendant, an inheritor, and of her own place, as well as Fisher’s, in that rich
network of Victorian family life mapped out by Noel Annan in “The Intellectual Aris-
tocracy.” So while she could never be truly intimate with her cousin she was, I believe,
far more captivated by him than has been acknowledged to date—and not least because
she saw Fisher as being so intimate, as she put it in that diary entry of October 1918,
with “the centre of things.” In that regard, Fisher was to be far from the open sesame
she imagined he might be, but there was rather more to their relationship, I have tried
to suggest, than the pique and ridicule we find in her personal writings and in Leon-
ard’s Downhill All the Way.
Notes
Unpublished letters and excerpts from the Letters and Diaries are included with permission of The Society of
Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia
Woolf, volumes 1-5, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Diary copyright © 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984 by Quentin
Bell and Angelica Garnett. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All
rights reserved. Excerpts from The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volume 1, edited by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne
Trautmann. Letters copyright © 1975, by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
1. Published as English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904).

2. Unpublished letter from Virginia Stephen to H. A. L. Fisher, H. A. L. Fisher Papers, Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford, MS. Fisher 224, fol. 257. It is marked “1903,” but the dictated letter that accom-
panies it is dated 6 November 1903.
3. See, for example, L1 30; L1 193; L1 385.
4. For succinct accounts of the challenges Fisher faced, see Middleton and Weitzman, pp.72–98 and 135–
39; and Sherington 99–125.
5. Unpublished letter from Virginia Woolf to H. A. L. Fisher, 6 March [1930], H. A. L. Fisher Papers,
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Fisher 223, fol. 258b.
6. This was published as Caroline Emelia Stephen and Mrs Butler, The Basis of “Christian Science,” a pam-
phlet composed of letters exchanged between the two of them in the “Friends” Quarterly Examiner, July
1905.
7. Probably, Lyman P. Powell, Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait (London: Nisbet, 1930).
8. Unpublished letter from Virginia Woolf to H. A. L. Fisher, H. A. L. Fisher Papers, Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford, MS. Fisher 223, fol. 259.
9. “Sir George Duckworth,” letter from H. A. L. Fisher, The Times, 30 April 1934, 16.
10. See Barkway for more on Woolf ’s relationship with Berlin and this dinner in particular.
11. Unpublished letter from Virginia Woolf to Mary Bennett, H. A. L. Fisher Papers, Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford, MS. Fisher 218, fol. 150. Emphasis added.
Works Cited
Andrews, Lawrence. The Education Act 1918. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976.
Barkway, Stephen. “A Letter from Virginia to Isaiah Berlin.” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 39:4 (January 2012), 4–9.
Bentley, Michael. The Liberal Mind 1914–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
Berlin, Isaiah. Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946. Ed. Henry Hardy. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Bradshaw, David. “Vicious Circles: Hegel, Bosanquet and The Voyage Out.” Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Se-
lected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K.
Hankins. New York: Pace UP, 1997. 183–91.
Fisher, H. A. L. The Coalition Diaries and Letters of H. A. L. Fisher, 1916–1922: The Historian in Lloyd George’s
Cabinet. 4 vols. Ed. Bryant, F. Russell. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.
(TCDL)
–––. Our New Religion. 1929. London: Watts, 1933. (ONR)
–––. The Place of the University in National Life. London: Oxford UP, 1919. (TPUNL)
–––. An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Oxford UP, 1940. (AUA)
Gilbert, Martin. The Roots of Appeasement. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966.
Judge, Harry. “H. A. L. Fisher: Scholar and Minister.” Oxford Review of Education 32.1 (Feb 2006): 5–21.
Middleton, Nigel and Sophia Weitzman. A Place for Everyone: A History of State Education from the End of
the 18th Century to the 1970s. London: Victor Gollancz, 1976.
Morgan, Kenneth O. Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918–1922. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979.
Ogg, D. Herbert Fisher: A Short Biography. London: Edward Arnold, 1947.
Ryan, A. “Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens (1865–1940).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ODNB.com.
Web. Accessed 4 Aug 2016.
Sherington, Geoffrey. English Education, Social Change and War 1911–1920. Manchester: Manchester UP,
1981.
Smyth, Denis. Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Snaith, Anna. “‘Wide Circles’: The Three Guineas Letters.” Woolf Studies Annual 6 (2000): 1–168.
Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939. London: Hogarth Press,
1968.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Ed. Frank Kermode. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
–––. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1977–1984.
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Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage:
Lessons, Readers, and Class
by Beth Rigel Daugherty
L
et me start with a story. Traveling back roads to get to my small hometown
in southeastern Appalachian Ohio, I stop at the gas station near Dillon Lake,
outside Zanesville, for a bathroom break. At the cooler, in line, all around the
small store, working men dressed in beat-up jeans, dirty t-shirts, and heavy shoes pick
up chips, soft drinks, beer, candy bars. They drive the pick-up trucks and vans in the
parking lot. There I am, in leggings, tunic, and walking shoes, driving a Mini-Cooper,
getting water. My tentative smiles and attempts to make eye contact prior to making
small conversation, even with the female clerk, are evaded.
They do not know I am from the same hills. They do not know my husband is a
carpenter and heads for a shower and a beer when he gets home. I do not know if any
of them are readers or writers. I do not know who they might vote for (“blue” voters
do exist in “red” counties and states). What they see, I suspect, is an educated parents’
daughter. What they see is that their lives are hard and mine is easy. And they are right.
Just five minutes. No sneering or condescension on my part. No hostility or anger
on theirs. An ordinary business transaction in rural United States. But class marks
it, through and through. Class marks us through and through. My attitudes, values,
and behaviors were shaped by educated parents who lived and worked as ill-paid high
school teachers in a scorned, stereotyped, and ridiculed part of the country. My educa-
tional heritage and education mean I do not belong in that country store. Yet my rural
Appalachian heritage makes me feel like an interloper in academia.
So I feel empathy for Virginia Woolf ’s class dilemma: “Did they know how much
she admired them? [Kitty] wanted to say. Would they accept her in spite of her hat
and her gloves? She wanted to ask. But they were all going off to their work. And I am
going home to dress for dinner” (TY 73). My roots, both Appalachian and educated,
are why I understand the ambivalent activist, to borrow Clara Jones’s phrase, and the
contradiction between Woolf ’s insider assumptions and outsider actions, between her
private behaviors and her public critiques. Why I both cringe and cheer. Why I feel so
apprehensive as I talk about the class attitudes and values permeating Woolf ’s work.
Why I want to look more closely at Virginia Stephen’s class heritage and its effect on
her experiences with Morley College working-class students. Why I want to consider
readers and writers. As a class, within a class, negotiating with other classes.
We know about Leslie Stephen’s money tantrums and Woolf ’s “frustrated fury” at
“being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast” (“Sketch” 108, 116). She explained
his checkbook explosions as a patriarch’s belief that genius excused bad behavior
(“Sketch” 109–110). But something more seems to have been going on. Where did
Leslie Stephen’s money anxiety come from? Presumably having inherited from his
brother and wives, he was worth over £15,700 at his death (Bell), which, according to
MeasuringWorth.com, would be £1,526,000 in 2015! Perhaps it stemmed partly from
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Ebook Virginia Woolf and Heritage 1St Edition Jane Degay Editor Online PDF All Chapter

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Virginia Woolf and Heritage 1st Edition

Jane Degay (Editor)

A Haunted House Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse 1st Edition Virginia Woolf.

The Voyage Out 1st Edition Virginia Woolf

The Common Reader 4th Edition Woolf Virginia

Miss Stephen's Apprenticeship: How Virginia Stephen

The Annotated Mrs Dalloway Merve Emre Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books 1st Edition

Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin,

Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin, and Anne Reus

ISBN: 978-1-942954-42-2 (print)

For information about Clemson University Press,

Typeset in Minion Pro by series editor Wayne Chapman,

Cover art provided by John Haddock.

Notes on Contributors.............................................................................................. 282

by Jane de Gay, Anne Reus, and Tom Breckin

Heritage can be transmitted through education and mentoring, often to em-

Heritage can be localized in various spaces: in archives, where manuscripts,

Literary and Cultural Heritages

Modernism and Heritage

Literary and cultural heritages were, paradoxically, of great interest to modern-

Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com. Accessed 6th February 2017.

AHH A Haunted House

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

But further to the present argument on “Her—it—age,” I want to propose that a

But first a word on the “Ja—cob!” methodology.

To demonstrate the methodology deriving from Woolf ’s syllabling of “Ja—cob,”

Woolf’s “Heritage” and “Inheritance”

There is some impertinence as well as some foolhardiness in the way in which

“I have signed my name,” said Louis, “already twenty times. I, and

1. See Maureen Adam’s chapter on Woolf ’s dogs.

Around the same time in her diary, Woolf recorded:

As I’ve already mentioned in passing, the consensus amongst educational histo-

Minister of Education (1916–22) in that “he introduced a number of significant reforms:

How do we explain Leonard’s animus? A clue, perhaps, is offered by Kenneth Mor-

the intolerable Fisher superciliousness; and makes my spine curl—no longer

Mortified, in particular, by its scandalous reception in America, the rattled Fisher

In similar vein, she wrote in her diary the following day:

Oxford’s leading light; a communist, I think, a fire eater—but at Herbert’s ev-

1. Published as English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904).

by Beth Rigel Daugherty

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