Politics and the Woolfs
Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf and Politics, lecture by Peter Jones, 5 December 2020
Guest Blog: Lisa Hutchins
Teacher of working men and women, organiser of a wartime food co-operative, campaigner for universal adult suffrage and contributor to The Daily Worker. These are not activities that one associates with a closed, exclusive, aesthetic world, as Bloomsbury is sometimes portrayed. All were carried out by Virginia Woolf as part of a lifetime of political activism in partnership with her husband Leonard.
For the third session of Literature Cambridge’s Virginia Woolf Season Peter Jones, Fellow-Librarian at King’s College, discussed a dimension of her life and work that provides fascinating context for her literary output. His lecture centred on how her husband Leonard Woolf is usually portrayed as a political activist while Virginia is the novelist and perhaps essayist. But Peter offered evidence from his College’s archive and others on how the couple formed a close political partnership to campaign on causes including anti-imperialism, the co-operative movement, and democracy and participation.
He described how the modern archive at King’s College contains many sets of papers relating to Bloomsbury. (It is currently closed to visitors but can be explored through its catalogue.) These include material from Julian Bell, John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster. Politics and social issues were a demonstrable concern for the Woolfs and many other members of Bloomsbury.
Leonard was a former Colonial civil servant who came to despise imperialism, to argue for international co-operation through the League of Nations (perhaps using military enforcement), and to publish a diverse range of political material through the Hogarth Press founded with Virginia in 1917. He was associated for many years with the Labour Party including sitting on its Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions for more than 20 years. He wrote for left-wing periodicals including the New Statesman and published pamphlets and longer works. Two of the most significant are Co-operation and the Future of Industry (1918) and Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920).
Virginia helped her husband by essentially carrying out a literature review for Empire and Commerce in Africa. Peter told us that there are more than 800 pages in her handwriting, plus typed and handwritten index cards, containing quotes from authors she had read and annotated. She also compiled statistical data on international commerce from material in the library of the London School of Economics.
We might think of Virginia’s and Leonard’s fiction, non-fiction and political activism as separate activities. Peter discussed how they share many concerns. He pointed out that the essays are often in dialogue with the novels whose intimacy and domestic or personal subjects do not prevent them from addressing politics. A thread of anti-imperialist thought is detectable in several of Virginia’s major works, including The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway. Another example of real-world political involvement informing fiction is the portrayal of the suffrage office in Night and Day.
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At the end of Virginia's life, art and politics became inextricably intertwined. In 1940 she fell into a depression partly attributed by some commentators to the cool reception for her biography of Roger Fry. Peter described how Benedict Nicolson (son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson) wrote to her while serving in an anti-aircraft battery at Chatham. He accused the Bloomsbury circle of playing at literature and art while the world burned, focusing on aesthetics while failing to act to prevent the rise of fascism.
Peter told us that, in crafting her reply (written on 13 August 1940) Virginia probably took more trouble in drafting a letter than at any other point in her life. The result was a manifesto in defence of herself, her friends and their life’s work which stressed how members of the Bloomsbury circle had engaged with the wider world and put themselves in the firing line rather than hiding away. She questioned whether as an Oxford-educated aesthete and aspiring art historian, he was in fact any different. The letter is expressed in the politest terms, possibly so as not to offend Vita, but it essentially defends the entire value system of the Woolfs and their friends to someone who was part of their circle.
Meanwhile, Literature Cambridge director Trudi Tate has written about the hostility the Bloomsbury circle was subjected to in the days immediately after Virginia’s death and the cruelly unsympathetic reaction that it provoked in some quarters, with her suicide note wilfully misquoted to score political points and Virginia herself portrayed as weak and selfish, even as deserting the war effort.
It is deeply shocking to realise that someone who suffered such profound mental ill-health could be dismissed so harshly following a suicide. It would be good to think that we have developed more sympathetic attitudes but, with the pressures now brought to bear by social media, I am not sure that is true. Maybe the final lesson to draw from this session was that compassion, empathy and the willingness to work on behalf of the disadvantaged in our society is of first importance – especially in times of trouble.
King’s College offers online exhibitions of archive material, some related to the Bloomsbury Group. They can be found on the college website.
The archives of the University of Sussex contain two collections of relevance. The Monk’s House papers and the papers of Leonard Woolf are held at The Keep in Brighton.
• The next session in the Virginia Woolf season will be given by Alison Hennegan on Saturday 12 December 2020 at 10 am with a live repeat at 6 pm.
