fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it
7. English statesman (1773-1846). Lady Bessbor-note], Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), English ough is Henrietta, countess of Bessborough nurse, who originated and directed a group of field (1761-1821). nurses during the Crimean War and is considered 8. See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey [Woolf's 9. 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
.
2 212 2 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.
Chapter Four
That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry then. What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing 'the arrant feminism' of Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Bronte at that time would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea,1 for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:
How are we fallen! fallen by mistaken rules, And Education's more than Nature's fools; Debarred from all improvements of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed; And if some one would soar above the rest, With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed, So strong the opposing faction still appears, The hopes to thrive can ne 'er outweigh the fears.
Clearly her mind has by no means 'consumed all impediments and become incandescent.' On the contrary, it is harrassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the 'opposing faction'; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do?which is to write.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play, Are the accomplishments we shoidd desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire, Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime, Whilst the dull manage of a servile house Is held by some our utmost art and use.
1. Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea (1661?1720); the quotations are from her poem 'The Introduction.'
.
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2123
Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert never meant; Be dark enough thy shades, and he thou there content.
Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:
Nor will in fading silks compose, Faintly the inimitable rose.
?they are rightly praised by Mr Murry,2 and Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated those others:
Now the jonquille o'ercomes the feeble brain;
We faint beneath the aromatic pain.
It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was turned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies,3 the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She 'must have,' I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:
My lines decried, and my employment thought,
An useless folly or presumptuous fault:
The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way,
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay4 is said to have satirised her 'as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling.' Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that 'he was more proper to walk
