Book Review: Virginia Woolf, the Brontes and the Common Reader

Caroline Lodge reviews Hilary Newman, Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës (Lexington Books, 2024)

I am grateful to Trudi for the invitation to review this book for the Literature Cambridge blog: Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës by Hilary Newman. The history of English literature is a rich one, with many connections between writers. This study explores the connections between Virginia Woolf, the modernist from the first half of the twentieth century, and the Victorian Brontë sisters. I am reading the book from the point of view of a ‘common reader’, to borrow Woolf’s own term.

Newman opens her argument by thinking about Woolf’s roots in Victorian culture:

The thesis of this book is that while Virginia Woolf was intellectually a twentieth-century modernist writer, her emotional life had been at its most profound, and largely remained, in the intense Victorian period in which she had passed her childhood and early adulthood. Two of the most important relationships in her Victorian life had been terminated by deaths which shaped her as a person and determined many of her responses in later life. She returned to the Victorian period again and again, both in her criticism and in her novels. In many of the latter, her characters are reared in the Victorian era, and their experiences shape their lives, as they had hers. To a large extent she accepted the same literary canon that her father had, and among the novelists she continued to promote were the Brontë sisters. (p. 1)

What did Virginia Woolf make of the Brontës; and how might her work have been influenced by theirs? To her, only two of the Brontës were worthy of consideration: Charlotte and Emily. She did not rate Anne despite some poetry and her two novels: Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Personally, I find Wuthering Heights intensely annoying, and full of characters who are quite horrid and vengeful. Notwithstanding my opinions, the three sisters now occupy a salient role in the pantheon of great Victorian writers.

Emily Brontë

Hilary Newman guides us through the many connections between the Brontës and to Woolf’s reflections on the works of the older Brontë sisters. She is a scholar who has worked deeply on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and published numerous articles on them. She traces the influence of the Brontë sisters on Virginia Woolf personally, creatively, and professionally.

She has combed through everything that Virginia Woolf wrote and identified every diary comment, every reference in her novels, letters, essays, criticism and polemic texts and looked at the Hogarth Press’ relevant publications. It’s a very thorough work of scholarship which traces Virginia Woolf’s changing reactions to the Brontës as she developed from a young critic to an innovative novelist. Hilary Newman develops the claim, made by Virginia Woolf, that she would not come to a conclusive view on matters of fiction. And in considering the connections between the writings of these three great novelists, she aims to ‘reconsider the open-endedness of Woolf’s vision’ (p. 6). The author presents her deep knowledge in great detail, rarely offering an absolute conclusion, just as Virginia Woolf recommended.

We might have expected a series of oppositions: Victorian writers against modernist author; Victorians who wrote ‘too copiously and indiscriminately’, in contrast to the moderns, who aimed to exclude everything that was extraneous; emotion as opposed to character as the driver of narrative and so forth. However, Hilary Newman begins with the biographies of the writers, and particularly highlights the many deaths that they witnessed, of their mothers and their siblings. According to Hilary Newman, these early bereavements led to ‘the tight bonding of the surviving children and Charlotte and Virginia’s search for mother-figures or surrogates’. (p. 21)

Virginia did, of course, remain close to her sister Vanessa all her life. In my view, the search for a mother-figure may be evident in her early writing, but I am not convinced that she continued the search in her later fiction. After writing To the Lighthouse she wrote: ‘I used to think of him [father] and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind.’ (Woolf, Diary, November 1928)

Newman notes that Virginia Woolf’s childhood influences were steeped in Victorian literature, but, in her adult life, this intellectual grounding was combined with her instinct and intellectual development embracing innovation, challenge and avoiding unnecessary definitive judgements.

In ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’, an essay in her first volume of The Common Reader (1925), Woolf explores the contrast between the Brontë sisters.

When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer’. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no ‘I’ in Wuthering Heights.

(Woolf, The Common Reader, p. 159)

She identifies the limitations of Jane Eyre, and praises Emily who invests her characters with ‘such a gust of life that they transcend reality’. She has the ‘rarest of all powers’.

Virginia Woolf, 1920s

She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar. (The Common Reader, p. 161)

A few years later, in 1928, Virginia Woolf gave the two lectures that became A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘In this polemic’, Newman argues, ‘Woolf picks up all the ideas about female writers that had previously featured, albeit briefly, across the broad range of her literary essays’. (p. 181) The Brontë sisters are referred to in the first paragraph.

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Howarth Parsonage under snow; some witticism if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words are not so simple.

(Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 3)

Hilary Newman discusses Virginia Woolf’s decision to refer to these esteemed writers in her opening paragraph, and her discussion of possible approaches to her topic. She provides interesting insights in the discussion on anger in women’s writing.

In Jane Eyre, the reader is aware of the authoress intruding herself into her novel to complain about the bad way women are treated in comparison with men. This expression of a personal grievance interferes with the artistic unity of Jane Eyre. By contrast, Emily Brontë kept herself out of Wuthering Heights and did not distort it by any expression of anger. (p. 189)

One happy outcome of reading Hilary Newman’s study is to send me back to The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own and perhaps even to Wuthering Heights. To read these writers in a spirit of further discovery and wonder, to explore alternative and various aspects of their writing - this is what the common reader does to add to their experiences.

The book will appeal to those who love delving into minutiae, into detail. Those who want a broader brush might find the Introduction of most value where she describes her approach and the work of previous scholars in the field.

Works cited

Hilary Newman, Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës (Lexington Books, 2024)
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Volume 1 (1925; Vintage, 2003)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Oxford World’s Classics, 2015)

Caroline Lodge writes a weekly bookish blog, Bookword, on a range of book-related issues which you can find at bookword.co.uk.