Cecil Woolf is calling all Woolfians, both common readers and scholars!
The publisher and nephew of Leonard and Virginia has proposed a project for Blogging Woolf. And he plans to publish it as a monograph in his Bloomsbury Heritage series.
Cecil has asked us to collect “Virginia Woolf’s Likes and Dislikes” on this blog. Submit your entries in the comments section on this page, citing the source of the quote (Woolf’s Diary or Letters), volume, and page number.
Contributors should also include their name and academic affiliation, if appropriate, so you can be credited for your contribution in the Bloomsbury Heritage volume Cecil plans to edit and publish.
Cecil himself has come up with the first offering. Here’s what he sent Blogging Woolf:
- “I like printing in my basement best, almost: no, I like drinking champagne and getting wildly excited. I like driving off to Rodmell on a hot Friday evening and having cold ham, and sitting on my terrace and smoking a cigar with an owl or two” (Letter to Hugh Walpole, 16 July 1930, Letters IV, 189).
On the previous page in the same volume of Letters, I found the following dislike:
- “I don’t like [J. C.] Squire, but am doubtless jaundiced by my sense of his pervading mediocrity and thick thumbedness” (Letter to Ethel Smyth, 11 July 1930, Letters IV, 188).
Now it’s your turn, fellow Woolfians. Post away in the comments section below.
Or send your entry to bloggingwoolf@yahoo.com.
Alice Lowe
Catherine
Kaylee Baucom
Paula Maggio
Stefano Rozzoni
seanmcphail
suzannebellamy1
veronikakra
Vara Neverow
William Patrick Wend
Zoe Wolstenholme
Dear Fellow Woolfians
I need your help! Virginia liked honey. She described herself as ‘a very bear where honey is concerned’. I was so charmed by this that I used it in my book about Monk’s House garden (out September 2013 with a foreword by Cecil Woolf) but I forgot to make a note of the source! Now the publishers in the UK and in Germany are hounding me for the details and I cannot find the quote….does anyone recognise it?
It is rather urgent.
Thank you!
Caroline Zoob (tenant at Monk’s House 2000-2011)
Dear Caroline,
The quote you mention — and about which I replied to you via email — is from page 564 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. III: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977. 6 vols. Your book looks enticing, and I look forward to reading it once it is published in September.
Well—I like snakes: so far as human feelings are left me. After 2 days of worrying and doing nothing, and talking and listening in, one is scarcely a worm, let alone a bird. What happens to you in the country?
Letter to David Garnett 5 May [1926]
[…] I pushed my current project aside and took a three-minute beach break in St. Ives, Cornwall, where Virginia Woolf spent her […]
[…] most things in life, though, Woolf wavered between liking and disliking Richmond. Briggs says that even though Woolf described Hogarth House in one of her diaries as […]
I’m reading her Letters from 1934 (Volume 5) & came across some “likes,” a couple of “heavens,” and a loathing…
To Ethel Smyth, 29 July:
“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” (Many of us would agree!)
To Vita Sackville-West, 6 September:
“Did I tell you my notion of heaven? All mushrooms…”
To Ethel Smyth, 12 October:
“I like the London suburbs in autumn and their immense poetry. I like Hyde Park fading into night, only the flowers burning in a few pale facades. I love overhearing scraps of talk by the Serpentine in the dusk…”
To Ethel Sands, 24 October:
Re Walter Sickert – “I like his pictures.”
To Stephen Spender, 29 October:
“I liked talking to Yeats…”
To Ethel Smyth, 1 November:
“I’m going to suffer a lunch out–loathe it though I do.”
CAN YOU ALSO SHARE LIKES AND DISLIKES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE……….. PLZZZZZZZZZZZ…….
Laura, thank you for contributing Virginia’s likes and dislikes. Nice selection!
Oops..just noted you want page numbers – all are from paperback published in 1984 Harvest Bk /Harcourt Brace
In order the pages are:
218
215
336
336
356
356
From VW’s Diary, Volume V (1936-1941):
‘And I like the soft cream and yellow flowers on the sunny grass and the bend and stooping like a picture.’
‘But considering how many things I have that I like-what’s odd – (I’m always beginning like this) is the severance that war seems to bring:everything becomes meaningless…’
‘I liked her when I found she was Italian’ ( re Yvonne Pallavicin)
My favorite: ‘I like wine’
‘I liked the dinner with Dadie best’
‘I liked the soft grey night at Newnham’
Hope these few are helpful
I just found your website and am enjoying looking through it very much. thanks, Laura
She agonized over socializing and parties, a love/hate relationship which was tied to her insecurities about her clothes. This comes out in some related passages in Diary Volume 4:
“how I hate Bond Street & spending money on clothes;” 25 May 1932
“I don’t like dining with Clive–not altogether.
” I won’t wear my new dress I said, in case I should be laughed at.
“…there were moments of brilliant fluency which I enjoyed; when I said its far better to be here, rubbing my wits with these charming people than reading Rousseau in my drawing room; then I revoked that opinion; then I floated again; then I landed in the scrannels.
“No, I don’t think I like Clive’s partys anymore–though theyre stirring enough. I pick up too many thorns, one way & another.”
1 June 1932
And ceremony: first Rachel MacCarthy’s wedding:
“Oh but the inadequacy of the service…that clogged and diluted the real feeling…the perpetual compromise.
“No I don’t like the ceremony.”
13 October 1932
And the Women’s Co-operative Guild Jubilee:
“Its a very ugly thing, a ceremony. I detest them more & more. …they say things that aren’t true: they say we are on the brink of a new world; they talk of the trumph of co-operation. thats why I hate ceremonies–not a word that fits–all wind blown, gaseous, with elementary emotions.”
20 June 1933
“glass is the best of all decorations, holding the light & changing it”
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, 23 July 1918 (170).
[…] Woolf likes & dislikes […]
She both liked and disliked Ulysses:
I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far–not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irriated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
(A Writer’s Diary, 16 August 1922)
Some likes:
1 “But I like the London suburbs in autumn and the immense poetry and I like Hyde Park fading into night…” (Letters, 12 October 1934).
2 ” What I like best is the water meadow onot which our garden opens..” ( Diary, 29 September 1924)
3 ” I would like to have another life, & live it in action ” ( Diary ,8 September 1930)
4 “And L. and I were very extravagant, for the first time inour lives, buying desks, tables… for Rodmell. This gave me pleasure.”
(Diary ,5 June 1929 )
5 “I am more and more attracted by looseness, freedom and eating one´s dinner off a table anywher, having cooked previously.”
( Diary , September 1930)
Some dislikes:
1 “But the money psychology is odd, & that it doesn´t give me enormous pleasure to spend ” ( Diary ,0 November 1927)
2 “but I don´t like women who are vain & lacking in self-confidence at the same time” ( Diary ,23 November 1920)
3 “Why do I dislike unbalanced criticism so much -”
( Diary ,23 November 1920)
Mavis, thanks for submitting your ideas. Add more any time!
Hi, I am Mavis from Taiwan.
In response to this topic, my first impression is her passion for walking in London.
Mrs. Dalloway claims,“ I love walking in London,” (The first chapter of Mrs. Dalloway)
In one entry of her diaries, Woolf paradoxically claims that “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, v3, 298)
will try to find out more during the process of my research, this topic is interesting!:)
“I like to think of myself tapping at my father’s study door, saying very loud and clear `Can I have another volume, father? I’ve finished this one’. Then he would be very pleased and say `Gracious child, how you gobble!'”
(Letter to V. Sackville-West, 19 February 1929, Letters IV, 27)
Please do. Start the ball rolling!
My first thought–really, the very first–was “chocolate creams!”
Will find the citation for you & return…
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