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proofs of his irreligiosity. Here, I believe, Gay plays down the fact
that Freud was a totally cultured Viennese, a bourgeois as well as
a Jew. Like Goethe's Faust, this type of Jew was riddled with am–
bivalence, by the fact that "two souls dwell [ed], alas! in [his]
breast." Like his less gifted fellow Jews, Freud too had incarnated
"the spirit that always denies." And like them he was "far more
Jewish in the face of anti-Semites than at home." Freud did not
reject his roots, and his quest for truth was relentless. That it did
not lead him to foresee the danger to the physical survival of ev–
ery Viennese Jew does not detract from his stature and indicates
only that politics, as Gay also shows, was not his
fort e.
In any event, Gay's assessment of the total Freud is lucid
enough to initiate the novice into psychoanalysis, and it provides
enough new information to satisfy the sophisticated reader.
EDITH
KURZWEIL
VIRGINA WOOLF'S EARLY ESSAYS
THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. VOLUME I, 1904-1912.
VOLUME II, 1912-1918. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich. $19.95, $22.95 .
Like many an Edwardian writer, Virginia Woolf got
her education in public, as a book reviewer. Some of the others
were fortunate to have been at Oxford or Cambridge, and at a good
school before that. But Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen,
eminent Victorian critic and first editor of the
Di ctionary of
National Biography,
so she received only the most rudimentary
and haphazard lessons at home, and no university education at
all. For many daughters of the educated class, the family's own
library and atmosphere were thought adequate, to be supple–
mented by some music and French lessons perhaps; but system–
atic or rigorous training was scanty. Among much of the
"intellectual aristocracy," this was a common fate , and for every
young woman who became Virginia Woolf, there were count–
less others who barely learned to spell or think consecutively or
