Review
CARLYLE’S HOUSE AND OTHER SKETCHES
by Virginia Woolf
Hesperus Press, 100 pp.
London’s Hesperus Press shows what small publishers can do when they pick a well-defined area that large publishers have neglected. Launched in 2002, Hesperus prints forgotten or overlooked short works – nothing over 100 pages – by major literary figures. Big-name living writers are signed up to write the forewords.
Hersperus’s major coup in 2003 was the release of a previously unpublished notebook by Virginia Woolf. Given the impressive number of shelf-feet occupied by Woolf’s already-published novels, letters and journals, it really is amazing that even 100 pages by the pioneering Bloomsbury author remained unprinted.
Woolf wrote these sketches when she was still an unpublished 27-year-old. In her foreword, Doris Lessing describes them as "five-finger exercises for future excellence." Lessing’s choice of the word "future" is judicious, because without Woolf’s subsequent fame and accomplishment, these sketches on their own would simply be interesting documents of a sharp-eyed Edwardian’s social observations. And not just sharp-eyed: the edges of Woolf’s class- and race-consciousness, bequeathed to her by Victorian predecessors, were still cutting in 1909. The sketch entitled "Jews" will make you squirm, for example. As Lessing says, it’s "a pity she was such a WASP, and such a snob – and all the rest of it." Yet she believes it’s worthwhile to see "what early crudities a writer has refined" once she reaches maturity.
Like Sylvia Plath, Woolf seems to be one of those literary figures who is never quite out of popular view, although her public presence ebbs and swells from one year to the next. Last winter’s film version of The Hours sent a new wave of readers into bookstores to find their copy of Mrs. Dalloway. Those new Woolf readers have plenty of better writing to look forward to before they turn to these early sketches. True enthusiasts, students and "completists" will have to have a look, though, and they’re the ones who will be thanking Hesperus for adding even a slim 100 pages to Woolf’s published oeuvre.
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