Contents

The Essays of Virginia Woolf

Volume I: 1904–1912

Volume II: 1912–1918

Volume III: 1919–1924

Volume IV: 1925–1928

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Text by Virginia Woolf copyright © Anne Olivier Bell and Angelica Garnett 1927, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1938, 2009
Introduction and editorial notes copyright © Stuart N. Clarke 2009

Stuart N. Clarke has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press in 2009

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Introduction

Looking at this substantial volume, casual readers might think that it represents much of Virginia Woolf’s writing during the four-year period, 1929–32. They would be wrong, however. Certainly Woolf took her essays and reviews seriously: ‘these articles, all architecture, a kind of cabinet work, fitting parts together, making one paragraph balance another; are such hard labour in the doing that one cant read them without remembering the drudgery. One starts full tilt; one sees a scene in a flash; but the working out is almost (with me) unbelievably laborious.’^fn1 Then one has only to look at Woolf’s reading notes and drafts to realise the amount of work that lies behind these very readable essays. Finally, ‘Phases of Fiction’, originally devised as a book in the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series, took an unbelievable amount of time over a number of years; a transcription of its drafts would fill a book.^fn2

For Woolf, of course, the core of her working life was writing fiction, and during this period she wrote The Waves from July 1929 until she finished correcting the proofs on 18 August 1931. By 21 July 1931 at the latest she had begun writing Flush: A Biography as a relief from ‘the last screw of The Waves’.^fn3 Writing Flush – ‘that abominable dog’^fn4 – continued into 1933. The essays fertilised the fiction, and vice versa, and occasional echoes and parallels have been footnoted in the essays. In 1931 William Empson wrote that in ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse (1927) ‘it seems as if Mrs Woolf herself was not so much remembering [Mrs Ramsay’s shawl from ‘The Window’] as finding her way about the book as if by habit; it is this sort of small correspondence, used so often, that makes up a full and as it were poetical attitude to language such as would gain by an annotated edition’.^fn5 Although Empson was writing shortly before The Waves was published, his comments about Woolf’s ‘poetical attitude to language’ apply even more to that novel written in the most poetic prose. On 10 January 1931 Woolf was stirred by rereading her essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’,^fn6 and on 16 August she concluded: ‘It is a good idea I think to write biographies; to make them use my powers of representation reality accuracy; & to use my novels simply to express the general, the poetic. Flush is serving this purpose.’^fn7 During these years Woolf was often thinking about poetry and prose and the relationship between them. In the Arcadia Sidney ‘bethinks himself, one must not use the common words of daily speech’; and ‘it is not to be denied that two of the novelists who are most frequently poetical – Meredith and Hardy – are as novelists imperfect’. It is not by chance that the last section of ‘Phases of Fiction’ deals with ‘The Poets’. If ‘time to come lies far beyond our province’, nevertheless the ‘poet is always our contemporary’.^fn8 No wonder, when Woolf read Aurora Leigh ‘with great interest for the first time the other day’,^fn9 she wanted to write about it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attempt to put daily life into poetry was not so different from Woolf’s attempt to poeticise the novel. In her essay on Aurora Leigh she throws down the gauntlet for her own experiment. The Waves takes it up and confutes her own conclusion at the end of that essay: ‘We have no novel-poem of the age of George the Fifth.’

In this volume we also see evidence of Woolf’s feminist preoccupations. ‘Women and Fiction’ leading to A Room of One’s Own and ‘Women and Leisure’ all appeared in 1929. Even if the women were not from her own class, writing ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (and its revisions) reminded her in 1930 of the discrimination against and the subjection of women. Then on 29 January 1931: ‘I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a sequel to a Room of Ones Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa’s society … I’m very much excited.’^fn10 This would occupy her for a number of years and develop into The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938).

Virginia Woolf wrote essays primarily as a relief from fiction and as a means of making money:

Above all, Woolf had to keep writing: ‘The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer I must take more work than I can possibly get done. <I am> – no, I dont know what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.’ Referring to taking on too much work, she added in the margin of her diary two months later: ‘This vow I kept’.^fn13

This volume and its predecessor contain the two pillars of Virginia Woolf’s essays: her two Common Reader volumes of 1925 and 1932. Because of the duplication and revision of essays previously published, Volumes IV and V are misleading if looked at superficially. ‘Phases of Fiction’ and the postcard on George Eliot in this volume, for example, can hardly be equated. Suffice it to say that Volumes IV and V, each covering a four-year period in Woolf’s working life, comprise a significant amount of work. And neither can the amount of work involved in the revisions be underestimated: ‘Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of Common Reader? It will take me week after week, month after month. However a year spent … in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in.’^fn14 Yet only four of the essays in The Common Reader: Second Series were written especially for that volume, while the remaining twenty-two were revised to a greater or lesser extent. Woolf was trying to bring imagination and cohesion to a disparate collection, unified only by her approach and personality. We can see from her revisions increasing cross-references between the essays, and this is most significant in the much-revised final essay, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’: ‘the CR I confess is not yet quite done. But then – well I had to rewrite the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles’.^fn15 Georgia Johnston remarks about The Common Reader that when ‘we read the volume as a whole, circularly, the last essay, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” informs the first, “The Common Reader,” as if Woolf had conceived of the volume as a loop’.^fn16 Beth Rigel Daugherty develops this insight: ‘When Woolf adds The Second Common Reader to her first, she enlarges the loop, seeing the two volumes as a whole.’^fn17 Nevertheless, Woolf remained dissatisfied:

The Common Reader: Second Series was published by the Hogarth Press on 13 October 1932 and as The Second Common Reader by Harcourt, Brace on 27 October 1932. Reviews were almost universally favourable.^fn19

The Times Literary Supplement, as with a number of the reviews, considered Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf together with The Common Reader: Second Series, and this offered an opportunity to look back at Woolf’s achievements in fiction as well as at her essays. Naturally, those ‘who enjoyed Mrs Woolf’s first series, or the other essays which have appeared in these columns and are reprinted here, will renew their enjoyment’. Or, as the editor, Bruce Richmond put it: ‘I was constantly purring and saying “Ha ha! This first appeared in the Supplement”.’ The TLS chose ‘Dr Burney’s Evening Party’ as the ‘gem’ of the collection.^fn20

The Times itself saw Woolf as ‘a novelist deliberately using her creative imagination’ and praised her for ‘conduct[ing] us not into the classroom but out of it’,^fn21 with particular reference to ‘The Strange Elizabethans’. E. J. Scovell in the New Statesman and Nation stated that ‘most readers … will be enchanted by [the essays], whether or not they have read what she is writing about’ and perceptively noted that Woolf regretted ‘the limiting nature of fact, the impossibility of knowing the truth about it’.^fn22 Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times found ‘in these essays an extraordinary insight into the creative mind; and … a series of brilliant pictures of the characters’.^fn23 Gerald Bullett in the Week-end Review considered Woolf’s potted biographies to be ‘her best and most characteristic’ essays. He noted that she did not confuse biography with criticism: ‘She does not ask us to read the novels of Geraldine Jewsbury: Geraldine is worth attention for her own sake.’^fn24

Vita Sackville-West in the Listener strongly recommended the book, comforting her readers (and those who listened in to her talk on the BBC) that, ‘although you may have found difficulty in following some of Mrs. Woolf’s novels, I assure you that you will find no difficulty at all in following her critical essays. They are wholly delightful. They are sensitive, acute, picturesque, humorous, and yet severe.’^fn25 Basil de Selincourt in the Observer took a similar view but expressed it more wittily, while taking a swipe at ‘a disposition at the back of our minds to believe that criticism must be scientific’.^fn26

Stephen Spender in the Criterion thought that ‘what interests her chiefly is the artist’s development, rather than the actual word’ and that she ‘feels her dead historic characters protest that they are alive’. He concluded: ‘it is not often in this book that we are aware of an effect that is too deliberate, and even when we are so aware, it is an effect of which we do not tire’.^fn27

John Sparrow in the Spectator wondered what was Woolf’s secret of success, and answered himself: ‘she writes vividly because she reads vividly’. He was one of the few reviewers to single out for praise ‘How Should One Read a Book?’,^fn28 although Theodora Bosanquet in Time and Tide, noting that it was ‘a paper read at a school’, commented ‘fortunate school’.^fn29 Roger Pippett in the Daily Herald chose ‘George Gissing’: ‘A miraculous achievement! And an everyday occurrence with Mrs. Woolf! You ignore such an exciting writer at your peril.’^fn30 And Rebecca West in the Daily Telegraph alighted on ‘Robinson Crusoe’: ‘Is there anybody writing anywhere in the world at this moment who could surpass the essay … so beautifully moulded into a form appropriate to its content that what is an authentic critical masterpiece seems as light on the mind as a song?’^fn31

Yvonne ffrench gushed in the London Mercury: ‘the apotheosis of Mrs. Woolf as an essayist has begun’ with these ‘flawless’ essays. She considered that, unlike the first series, this time Woolf had ‘followed a definite plan’.^fn32 By contrast, Denys Thompson in Scrutiny thought that ‘The Common Reader: First Series was a contribution to criticism and the Second Series is not’, because ‘an interest in amiable eccentrics has become almost exclusive’.^fn33 Perversely, Geoffrey Grigson in the London Bookman linked Woolf to Felicia Hemans. Surprisingly, he also connected her with Sir Henry Newbolt: ‘you find unending curiosity, continual liveliness, but the same absence of thought (to be inquisitive is not to be thoughtful), the same urbanity, the same good taste’.^fn34

On the other side of the Atlantic, there was the same enthusiasm. In the New York Times of 13 November 1932 the review, entitled ‘Mrs. Woolf Uncommon Reader’, by Percy Hutchinson was extremely laudatory. It began by describing VW as ‘[a]mong the foremost stylists of the present day’, commented that Woolf’s ‘deserved reputation is enhanced by the second of these collections’ – as for ‘“I am Christina Rossetti”’, ‘what felicity of phrasing! What absolute exactness in discovering and characterizing the distinguishing note!’ – and concluded: ‘In all ways … does Virginia Woolf become as nearly perfect as Heaven grants it to the critic to be, for while the wisest of guides and the most felicitous of writers, she makes no effort to usurp our judgments …’^fn35 Horace Gregory placed the book and Virginia Woolf (‘one of the great writers of our time’) in a world ‘after a great war’: her ‘immediate purpose is not critical; the purpose is to make the [literary] tradition come alive, to select all that remains vital in our inheritance’.^fn36 V. S. Pritchett in the Christian Science Monitor thought ‘Geraldine and Jane’ was ‘a masterpiece’, ‘The Niece of an Earl’ was ‘a most amusing piece’, while as a writer himself, although he considered it ‘a counsel of perfection [in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’] to say that reading must be an act of equipped coöperation between reader and author’, he endorsed Woolf’s view as ‘an axiom of criticism’.^fn37 William J. Gorman in the New Republic compared Woolf with Edmund Gosse, to the latter’s disadvantage: the book ‘is refined, but not sallow, eclectic but not mediocre’.^fn38 Typically, Gerald Sykes in the New York Nation was one of the few to equivocate. He concluded: ‘Her polished, amiable book offers fireside pleasures which in this rude day the most apostolic opponent of archaism cannot altogether resist.’^fn39

Some of the reviewers noted that in the second Common Reader there was no equivalent of ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ which concluded the first Common Reader. Indeed, if we look through the whole of this volume we find few contemporary writers. Her mind, Woolf wrote, ‘over which I have little control, is leading me away from contemporary life in the direction of the Elizabethans’.^fn40 Even in 1932 Augustine Birrell, Edmund Gosse and Thomas Hardy were figures from the past. The review of André Maurois’ Climats (1928) in ‘On Not Knowing French’ was perhaps an anomaly. Only ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’ deals with contemporary English writing, but it would lead on to ‘The Leaning Tower’ in 1940 (see VI VW Essays). Similarly, there are fewer ‘lives of the obscure’ than in previous volumes. The two obvious exceptions are ‘Jack Mytton’ and the two parsons, James Woodforde and John Skinner. The Rev. William Cole (the subject of two essays) was also obscure, but he was the friend of Horace Walpole, and both would be revisited at the end of the 1930s with ‘Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole’ and ‘The Humane Art’ (see VI VW Essays). Genuinely obscure were the women of the Women’s Co-operative Guild and, if Woolf admitted that perhaps her approach to her introduction to Life as We Have Known It had been too literary,^fn41 the terrible sufferings and privations that they had undergone would remain with her and inform her political views in the years to come: ‘Some horror become visible: but in human form … What a system.’^fn42 Woolf’s criticism of the social system in this volume will principally be found in ‘The “Censorship” of Books’ and in the six ‘London Scene’ essays in a subtly muted form suitable for the readers of Good Housekeeping.

According to Woolf, there was a special reason for collecting and revising essays for inclusion in a book: ‘I must go on with the C. Reader – for one thing, by way of proving my credentials.’^fn43 There were, however, at least two issues with her ‘credentials’. On the one hand there was the problem of the imaginative handling of facts, the ‘granite and rainbow’^fn44 of biographical criticism. Her view may be symbolised by her comment to Margaret Llewelyn Davies about her revisions to the draft of the introductory letter to Life as We Have Known It: ‘I brought in a few cigarettes in Lilians ash tray – do they matter? A little blue cloud of smoke seemed to me aesthetically desirable at that point.’^fn45 In a letter of 24 January 1924 to Edmund Blunden about George Dyer (the friend of Charles Lamb), she wrote: ‘What I said in my article is, I think, substantially true; but I may have arranged it a little, to suit my purpose.’^fn46 Similarly, Woolf’s attitude to errors of fact was often cavalier. In A Room of One’s Own, Lady Stephen’s Life of Miss Emily Davies was corrected to Emily Davies and Girton College from the fourth Hogarth Press impression onwards.^fn47 It was never corrected in America. Again, when Donald Brace informed her that a ‘woman writes us from Los Angeles, California, to complain that … the correct title of Mrs. Greville’s poem is “A Prayer for Indifference.” She says it is not an “Ode” at all. If you would like a correction made here, will you let me know?’,^fn48 there seems to have been no response. When Woolf broadcast on the BBC that after 16 May 1816 Beau Brummell ‘never set foot in England again’, Berry the wine merchants wrote in to contradict her. Instead of altering her essay when she revised it for The Common Reader: Second Series, she appended a note at the end. Following the publication of ‘Geraldine and Jane’ in the Times Literary Supplement, several correspondents wrote in, praising the essay but supplying additional information about Geraldine Jewsbury.^fn49 When the essay was revised for The Common Reader: Second Series, this sentence remained unchanged: ‘Until she was twenty-nine we know nothing of her except that she was born in the year 1812, was the daughter of a merchant, and lived in Manchester, or near it.’ Most egregious of all were the minor errors in ‘George Gissing’, the subject of a kind of one-sided running battle with Gissing’s son.^fn50 This was one of Woolf’s most revised essays, yet the errors were never corrected.

Here we may consider in passing the distinct impression that Woolf gives of a comparative indifference to her American readers: ‘I always write things twice over, and let the Americans, who are in a hurry, have the first version.’^fn51 What she says is literally true – there was no direct airmail service between Britain and the United States until 1939 – but in actual fact Woolf never stopped revising. For example, she published ‘Dr Burney’s Evening Party’ in the New York Herald Tribune in July 1929, revised it for Desmond MacCarthy’s Life and Letters in September, and would revise it yet again for The Common Reader: Second Series. Meanwhile, her American publishers wanted to include it in an anthology that they published in 1931, and for this they used the Life and Letters revision which seems to indicate that Woolf was conscious of her transatlantic audience and her own reputation there. Incidentally, the essay was introduced thus:

As indicated above, Virginia Woolf’s most revised essay in this volume is ‘George Gissing’: its first version appeared in the New Republic on 2 March 1927 and with variations in the Nation & Athenæum on 26 February. It was revised as the introduction to Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing, published on 11 September 1929 by Jonathan Cape, and then was revised again for The Common Reader: Second Series. Finally, it appeared as the introduction to Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea, which was published by Cape on 6 March 1933. She wrote to Cape on 18 October 1932 about her introduction to By the Ionian Sea: ‘I would suggest that you should print from the version just issued in the second series of my Common Reader. I have altered it to a certain extent. I do not think that I could alter it any further.’^fn53 Nonetheless, when she returned the proofs to Cape’s office on 25 November 1932 she had made a few more revisions.

Another issue was Woolf’s fear of professionalism. She insisted to Donald Brace, her American publisher, that ‘one might describe’ The Common Reader: Second Series ‘as an unprofessional book of criticism’,^fn54 and the phrase, ‘unprofessional criticism’, appeared as part of the blurb on the Hogarth Press dust-jacket. She must have agreed with Tolstoy:

This reluctance to be professional is not just modesty, but a belief in the importance of the partnership between the reader and the writer.^fn56 At this time the modern university-trained professional literary critics as we know them today were beginning to emerge. Woolf resisted this development. As she concluded in ‘All about Books’: ‘The time has come to open Scrutinies and begin to read – no, the time has come to rake out the cinders and go to bed.’ Her own criticism was different. Hermione Lee points out that, as ‘a pioneer of reader-response theory, Virginia Woolf was extremely interested in the two-way dialogue between readers and writers’.^fn57 Woolf’s criticism was democratic, as we see in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ in particular, and the reviewers’ reactions to this essay are often revealing. While we shall observe in Volume VI an increasing emphasis on democracy not only in literature but in life, it is enough to end here with her comments on Hazlitt that apply so appropriately to her own essays: ‘if such criticism is the reverse of final, if it is initiatory and inspiring rather than conclusive and complete, there is something to be said for the critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a phrase to shoot off on adventures of his own’.^fn58

Editorial Note

The present volume is compiled upon the principles already established for the edition. Of the fifty-nine pieces it includes (excluding the appendices), twenty-six make up The Common Reader: Second Series, published by the Hogarth Press on 13 October 1932; and seven are earlier versions of essays appearing therein; of the remaining twenty-six (‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ and ‘Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’ are counted as two essays), three are reprinted for the first time. Variants are provided here from articles (signalled by headnotes in Volume IV) which were included in The Common Reader: Second Series with relatively little revision – this view proved to be over-optimistic in the case of ‘George Gissing’ (see Appendix I). Headnotes are similarly given in this volume for two 1929 essays revised for inclusion in The Common Reader: Second Series.

The question of variants also arises in the case of those essays that found publication on both sides of the Atlantic (see Appendix VIII). This issue is discussed in the Introduction, but an article (such as ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’) that appeared more or less simultaneously in the UK and the USA and then in The Common Reader: Second Series usually has three versions, and it is clear that the US predates the UK version. Accordingly, it has often been found practicable and necessary to print the US version in its chronological place, while the UK periodical version, which formed the basis of The Common Reader: Second Series revision, appears as footnotes in The Common Reader: Second Series. Endnotes are only provided on the first appearance of an essay, unless new material occurs in the later version. It is intended to include a separate index in Volume VI to all the essays in the edition, and this will help in tracking down these different versions.

As in the previous volumes the contents follow the listing in Section C of the late B. J. Kirkpatrick’s bibliography (4th ed., 1997), with the insertion of the following: ‘Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’ (here); ‘On Being Ill’ (here); ‘Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’ (here); the postcard, ‘George Eliot, 1819–1880’ (here); and ‘The Love of Reading’ (here).

Every effort has been made, using Woolf’s manuscript reading notes, to trace references to sources in the editions Woolf used, or at the very least in the editions the Woolfs owned. A great deal is known on this subject thanks to the labours of Brenda Silver, Elizabeth Steele and Andrew McNeillie, but a number of mysteries remain. In a very few cases it has been impossible to discover the work from which a quotation derives, let alone the relevant edition, and these failures are acknowledged in the notes.

Manuscript drafts of a number of articles survive and, where these have been identified, they have been listed under the essays to which they refer.

The following general changes to the text have usually been made throughout: double quotation marks have been changed to single, and vice versa; the full stops after Dr, Messrs, Mr, Mrs, and St have been omitted, except in quotations; M-dashes changed to spaced N-dashes; American spellings have been changed to British; book-titles have been italicised; and words ending in -ize changed to -ise. However, the question of regularising quotations inside or outside punctuation has not been addressed. It is debatable whether articles in journals have been treated with too much or too little respect, as errors (e.g. ‘Middlesborough’) have usually been allowed to stand. In dealing with quotations made by Woolf, significant discrepancies are drawn attention to in the notes, but errors of punctuation have usually been ignored. Particular care has been taken with the text of ‘On Being Ill’ and the ‘Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’, as both were published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. The former was one of the last of their hand-printed books, but as will be seen that was no guarantee of complete perfection. A more stringent practice has been employed with The Common Reader: Second Series. No specific changes have been made to the text, except those listed in Appendix VII. Here again, significant discrepancies in the quotations are drawn attention to in the notes.

Acknowledgements

First of all, I wish to thank Andrew McNeillie for agreeing to pass the last third of his task over to me in the middle of 2006, when it became clear that he would not have time to complete Volumes V and VI of The Essays of Virginia Woolf in the following few years. He also handed over his photocopies of Virginia Woolf’s articles; having added them to my collection, I have hardly had to photocopy any source material in preparing this volume. He very generously offered to let me use the annotations in his The Common Reader: Second Series (Hogarth Press, 1986), and I have greatly (and very gratefully) depended on these as the basis for my notes. Other debts of this nature will be found listed in the Abbreviations and the Bibliography.

Secondly, I thank Anne Olivier Bell, the Society of Authors (Jeremy Crow) as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, and the Hogarth Press (Random House UK: Alison Samuel, Poppy Hampson) for entrusting me with this task. Copy-editor Lindeth Vasey undoubtedly improved my draft. I also thank the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Vanessa Bell for permission to print an extract from an unpublished letter and the University of Sussex and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf for permission to reprint the article in Appendix IV.

No one has spent more time helping me than my partner, Brian Evans. I recorded The Common Reader: Second Series onto cassette tapes, so that I could check the various texts of the book (see Appendix VII), but Brian read article after article aloud to me as I checked the many different versions that were published by Woolf.

Stephen Barkway read the computer print-out of the whole book, and made a number of helpful suggestions and criticisms – including suggestions for improving the Introduction – for which I am extremely grateful.

Karen V. Kukil of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, has generously provided me with photocopies of articles and manuscripts and has been generally supportive.

The late Julia Briggs lent me microfilms, and I also benefited from discussions with her.

Roger Phillips told me about the London Borough of Camden’s Virtual Library, and this saved me a lot of work by enabling me to access from home the DNB, ODNB, OED, The Times Digital Archive and the TLS Centenary Archive.

I also owe thanks to Aileen Christianson, Vanessa Curtis, Mary Ellen Foley, Diane F. Gillespie, Sarah M. Hall, Brenda Helt (and, through her, to Andrew Elfenbein), Julia Paolitto, David Philps, Jane Roberts, Sheila M. Wilkinson and Henry Woudhuysen.

I am also grateful to the following institutions: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Houghton Library (Denison J. Beach), Harvard University; Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries; and Rare Books Department (Nicholas Smith), Cambridge University Library.

I wish to acknowledge the resources of the British Library (especially at St Pancras but also at Colindale), the periodicals department at London University Library, Special Collections at Sussex University Library and the Library Archives (Archives of The Hogarth Press, MS 2750) of the University of Reading.

It is clear from the photocopies I have inherited that I must also thank Elizabeth Inglis for her help prior to her retirement from Sussex University Library. There are bound to be others who assisted Andrew McNeillie, and to them I apologise for the lacunae.

Abbreviations

On Not Knowing French^fn1

^fn2fn3