490
PARTISAN REVIEW
go beyond counting on their fingers. Despite this widespread in–
difference of educated parents to the education of girls, some
young women did learn to write, perhaps from hearing all of
Scott read aloud nightly in the drawing room for an hour and a
half, and then being left alone to read. It was some such fortu–
itous conjunction of circumstances that prepared Woolf to benefit
in public from the education she had missed earlier.
The succession of essays, reviews, and other articles written
by the young Virginia Stephen from 1904 until 1912, and by the
older Virginia Woolf from 1912 until her death in 1941, would be
astonishing had she written nothing else. These two volumes of
essays, however, are to be followed by four more volumes of es–
says, which will take their places on bookshelves already hold–
ing six volumes of Woolfs letters, five volumes of her diary, the
eight novels, the shorter fiction, the biographies, the prose works.*
No English school or university of the late nineteenth century
can claim her as a beneficiary of their accumulated wisdom, but
many of their alumni might have been happy to produce half or
a quarter as much interesting work as Woolf did without
enjoying the tutelage and ambiance of those ancient
communities. Inevitably, she was always aware of their exis–
tence and weight, she wrote from within that awareness know–
ingly, turning a deprivation into an advantage. She was also well
placed to benefit from the encouragement of mentors from that
world. Their suggestions expanded her range, their judgements
excited her curiosity, and their enthusiasms led her to thoughts
and experiences that might not have reached into her father's
library.
She made good and thrifty use of all her reading, picked out
the outlines of the important problems, and even learned quite
early to write intelligently about things that might be only
vaguely known to her, for example, the Lakes, as seen by
Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Canon Rawnsley (founder of
the National Trust), on the other, or the history of Spain, or life in
a French chateau. She had never been to the Lakes, although
Leslie Stephen went climbing there; she had spent only a few
days in Spain and Portugal; and she had no experience of French
chateaux or the French countryside but could absorb the weight
•
Volume
JIJ,
1919-1924
($22.95) of the
Essays
was published just as this issue was going to
press. Like the earlier volumes, it is ably edited by Andrew McNeillie.
