298
PARTISAN REVIEW
the human conditions Eleanor Marx observed among the dockers, the
women strikers of the Silvertown rubber works, the East End poor,
urged her to immediate, practical reforms. But just as she was unable to
break off with Aveling, she seems never to have considered modifying
the "hard line" Engels and Aveling espoused. And gradually she lost
her closest English friends-Shaw, the novelist Clementina Black-to
Fabianism, the modified, meliorist socialism that Engels was so
contemptuous of, and that was to become the dominant English
tradition. The saddest thing about Eleanor Marx 's last years, after
Engels's death in 1895, is her isolation. " I think I live more in the past
memories of my dear ones than in present things," she wrote her
father's old friend Wilhelm Liebknecht. The work was endless-the
meetings, lectures, tours-but her life had no vital center.
Where Eleanor Marx was cursed in her choice of a mate, Virginia
Woolf seems to have been singularly fortunate. Leonard Woolf left the
Civil Service when he married Virginia,
to
become, like her, a free–
lance writer (best known for his Fabian policy papers); he comes
through both the
Diary
and
A Marriage of True Minds
(a by-product of
the vast editing industry now under way at the University of Sussex and
the New York Public Library) as a kind of saint. To Virginia he was
"doctor, nurse, parent ... and chief literary adviser" -that is, the
Compleat Husband in all senses but the usual one. (Virginia, after an
amiable try at marital relations, which she seems
to
have found quite
baffling, settled for separate beds, then separate bedrooms, and brief
romances with women friends.)
A Marriage of True Minds
offers new letters between Lytton
Strachey and Leonard Woolf, statistics on the Woolfs' annual budget
for food, servants, clothes, and travel , and an impressive collection of
photographs in which the pre-Raphaelite Virginia comes to look more
and more like the craggy Leonard. But there is nothing new or
illuminating in the account of the marriage, and the authors' prose is
really unworthy of their subject, even as gossip: " Virginia was not the
typical fidgety introvert."
In this first of a projected five volumes of the
Diary,
on the other
hand, none of the gossip, personal or socij.l, matters. This is a writer's
diary, an exercise book in which immaculate prose is fitted to the most
precise observation and analysis; on rereading, it comes to seem a
person, "with almost a face of its own," Woolf notes with pleasure. She
had the freedom that goes with great gifts, that intensity of need that
others instinctively make space for, serve, sacrifice their lives to. "What
I wonder constitutes happiness?" she writes. "I daresay the most
