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The History of Literature
756 Newly Discovered Stories by Virginia Woolf (with Urmila Seshagiri) | My Last Book with Jake Poller
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Hello. You might think that we already know everything about the life and works of an author as admired and scrutinized as Virginia Woolf. Well, think again. Our guest today, Professor Irmala Sashigiri, discovered something delightfully new and newly delightful. We talked to her about that discovery and what it means today on the history of literature.
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Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm getting in a holiday mood, people. So generous. Everyone is so generous and kind out there this time of year. I'm Jack Wilson, by the way, your host, and I'm glad you're generously here today. How kind of you to spend some time with us. We truly appreciate it. We have a great show today. This is a great story. These professors and scholars and academics have to put up with so much. Administrators who cut and cut and cut and students who make demands on their time and a culture that does not always support them. Their lives are dedicated to the humanities, which is hopefully back on an upswing now after decades of being in decline and under attack. But every now and then, even for these people, these tireless souls, something happens which feels like a miracle. A Scholar follows a rainbow. That's their specialty, by the way, these brainiacs, they're good at following rainbows. Not all of us have the patience or ability to do it. They follow the rainbow and they find their pot of gold. In this case, some stories that have flown under the radar of Virginia Wolfians. These are early stories.
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And they were discovered in their fullest form for the first time. And they reveal a whole new side of Virginia Woolf. We're also going to hear from Jake Pauler today. Jake was our Christopher Isherwood expert back in episode 724. He'll be here to talk about his choice for the last book he will ever read. But first, Irmala Seshegiri, telling us about a side of Virginia Woolf and some stories that we did not really know. That we knew.
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Okay. Joining me now is Irmala Shashagiri, who is Distinguished professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She's also the author of the book Race and the Modernist Imagination and the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. She's here today to discuss the Life of Violet, three early stories by Virginia Woolf, which she edited. Irmala Seshegiri. Welcome to the History of Literature.
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Thank you. It's a delight to be here.
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So this is exciting. Virginia Woolf is always one of the most popular authors here at the History of Literature podcast. And now we have some brand new discoveries to talk about. Where was Virginia Woolf in her life and writing career when she wrote these stories?
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C
Well, she was well before the moment that we think of Woolf the novelist. These stories, the three stories that are in the book that's called the Life of Violet, were written in 1907. She was 25 years old. She was still Virginia Stevens. She was not yet Virginia Woolf. She would not meet Leonard Woolf for four more years. And Virginia Woolf published her first novel, the voyage out, in 1915. She and Leonard married in 1912 and founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 when she published the Mark on the Wall, which is generally regarded as her first experimental short story. So the Life of Violet is a work that she composes ten years before that. And she has just moved out of her childhood home in South Kensington into Bloomsbury. And she is beginning to be a professional writer. Not a writer of literature yet, but a reviewer and an essayist.
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A
Yeah, right. I mean, as you say, it is quite a while before she publishes the novels that we think of as her first novels and so on. But she is 25 years old, so it's not like these are stories from when she was, you know, 11 or 12 years old or something. She is a fully formed adult. Why was she writing them? What were they for?
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C
They were written as.
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Perhaps an inside joke, perhaps as a love letter or a tribute to her very dear friend, Violet Dickinson.
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A
Mm. Mm.
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And they are a mock biography of Violet. And she spoofs, if you will, the lives of several of their mutual friends who were all aristocratic women, they were all wealthy and they were unconventional in their own ways, but they also led lives of a certain character that Virginia found very amusing and that she didn't want really, really any part of. So these are stories that are both fantastic and in the realm of the unreal or the magical, but they are sharply satirical and written at a moment where she is emerging from the pressure of her family, from her older half brothers, to get married, which she didn't want to do and she didn't want to lead that conventional life of a married young woman.
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A
Yeah. And I learned from, I believe it was from your introduction that she met Mary Violet Dickinson when she was just 20, but Violet was 37. And as you say, it is kind of in the nature of a spoof. The stories chronicle the adventures of a giantess named Violet. And in fact, in real life, Violet was more than 6ft tall, which is, I'm sure, was quite striking to most people she knew in those days.
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C
Yes, I mean, it's a problem if you are growing up in an aristocratic property titled family in Somerset in England in Queen Victoria's 19th century. If you're a girl and you grow up to be 6:2 and 6:3 in heels, it's really, really a problem. And Violet was not deemed conventionally attractive. She wasn't a stunning, glamorous 6 foot 3. She was deemed by those who knew her to be odd and odd looking. And so that made her automatically ineligible for the different lives that were available to so many women in her social class at that time. So she didn't get married, she didn't have children, and she was not born into a world that would have seen her become, say, a governess. And so she cultivated a very beautiful social life and friendship became her career. And the first version of these stories have been known as Friendship's Gallery. And that's really what Woolf celebrates Violet for, is her capacity for friendship. And this woman who was exiled from so many forms of femininity because of this extreme height is somebody who finds different ways of connecting with all different kinds of people at this moment.
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A
Right. And Virginia, I guess, Virginia, Steven, I should say. I mean, she had lost her mother and her older sister. Right. So is Violet kind of fitting into a role that Virginia had a particular need for?
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C
That is one way of telling the story, and that's certainly the dominant narrative about their friendship. Virginia is 13 years old in 1895 when her mother dies. Her older half sister, Stella Duckworth, dies in 1897. And then she leads with her sister Vanessa, seven fairly miserable years, living at home and caring for their aging and increasingly demanding and difficult father and having to conform to the rules and expectations of their older half brothers. And when she meets Violet in 1902, I mean, she's known Violet her whole life. But when they begin to be friends in 1902, they begin this really prolific correspondence. And Virginia's writing everything to her about every feeling, every piece of writing she's doing, every detail. Difficult experience she has at home. And so we can see on one side here is an older woman who is playing the role of a surrogate, maybe a mother, maybe an older sister, maybe an aunt. And, in fact, her nickname for Violet Dickinson was Aunt Maria. But at the same time, Violet Dickinson was an original, and she was a very astute reader of Virginia Stevens early writings. And there are letters that record her laughter when Virginia sends her comic biographies that have since been lost. We don't have those anymore. But she praises Virginia's genius. She sees that this is a very talented young person. And it's Violet who facilitates Virginia's first appearances in print, because she introduces her to the newspaper editor, Margaret Littleton, who first gets Virginia published. So there is absolutely a maternal or a filial relationship here, but I think it's also a profoundly intellectual one, and it's one that gives Virginia the space to be a writer in these masses of letters that she sends to her friend. And the Letters of Virginia Woolf are published in six volumes, and they're all very long, and the first volume is hundreds of pages, and more than half the letters in that volume are from Virginia to Violet. She really kept such a complete record of her life in the letters that she writes to her friend. And there is a lot of emotional vulnerability in those letters. Absolutely. And there's also a young writer trying out her wings, trying out different kinds of writing, being very open about not wanting to be taken, dressed up to balls and coming out in society and being presented to wealthy men who might want to marry her. So she served a number of different roles for Virginia.
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Right. It does seem like she gave her the space to be a writer. And also, I mean, in more ways than one. Kind of. To be a person. To be a person who has. And an artist who is willing to defy convention or to find one's own path.
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Yes.
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It seems like she saw that this older woman had already been doing that, and it gave her kind of an inspiration to maybe go a little further herself in those directions.
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That's right. That's very, very well said. And we are very used to associating Woolf with the rebellion of the Bloomsbury group and all the different iconoclastic things that Bloomsbury did. And that was a little bit later. But it's important to appreciate how daring it was to be, you know, to be in your late teens in 1890, to be, you know, 18 years old, to be very beautiful, to be the daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, and to simply say, I don't care about these things that you think are important. I don't care about these orders of honor that the Royal Family confers on people. I don't care if this party is happening in the Savoy Hotel or if this person is a dowager with tons of money and an incredibly eligible son. It takes a lot of courage to say no to that life. And Violet was certainly a support system for her as she was resisting her older brothers who kept wanting to, you know, drag her and her equally beautiful, equally talented, unconventional sister to these social occasions.
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A
Right. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the stories and what the new discovery exactly is. So these stories, my understanding is that they actually were previously known, but maybe not quite in the form that we have them in the book that you have just edited and published. So what did we know about them before, and how are they different now?
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C
What we knew about them before was that in 1907, Wolf wrote three stories, and they were called, and scholars have called them, Friendships Gallery. And Woolf typed them very charmingly in Violet ink for Violet. And there's correspondence where she writes to Violet and says, I've sent you my life of you, this great work. And there are three individual stories that make up this work. The first one is called Friendships Gallery, and it's about Violet's childhood and how she grew to be very, very tall by the time she was 8 or 9 years old. The second one is called the Magic Garden, and it takes up the chapter of Violet's life where she builds a cottage, which Violet actually did, called Burnham Wood, and all the people who come to that house and the different kinds of freedom they experience when they're visiting Violet. And the third story is called A Story to make youe Sleep, and Woolf presents it to us as a Japanese bedtime story. And it's about two goddesses who visit Tokyo, and they do all these magical things, and they slay a silver sea monster, and they make sugared almonds fall from the trees, and all the babies are happy, and there's this utopian society, and then they fly away at the end. So they're very unusual in Wolfian terms, in what we think of as Wolfian terms. And the version in which we knew them is a rough version. And scholars, including myself, have always assumed that Woolf just tried her hand at this kind of story writing when she was 25. They have been grouped with her early fiction, but they've never been published as part of any collection of her fiction. In 1979, a scholar named Ellen Hawkes transcribed the New York Public Library item, which is bound in leather and, as I said, typed in violet typewriter ribbon. And it was published in a journal in 20th century literature. And that's a very awkward transcription because it's hard to read that version because of all the edits and the incompleteness and the uncertainty about what Woolf meant at certain points. And then that same transcription is reprinted in an appendix of unfinished essays in volume six of the Essays of Virginia Woolf, also in 1979. And that's it. And unlike all of Woolf's other work, her essays, her more mature short fiction, her novels that have all been reprinted, issued by multiple publishers, issued with annotations, this one just sort of languished and fell by the wayside. It's not even included in the Complete Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf, even though that volume includes much earlier work and much less complete work. So it's really been marginal, and it's always associated with her friendship with Violet and maybe a little bit in relationship to Orlando, which Woolf would write in 1928 about another woman friend, Vita Sackville West. But certainly they are not front and center in the scholarship.
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And then along comes Irmala. Yes, to change everything.
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What was your role? How did this. What did you notice, and what did it lead to?
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C
Well, this discovery was a marvelous accident. It was serendipitous. It was just something that happened. When I was in the archives, I wasn't looking for it. I was looking for something else entirely. I was in the University of Sussex researching the Woolf papers that are held there, and I was looking for something that Woolf mentions that Violet wrote. And I asked the Archivists do you have this thing by Violet Dickinson? And they said, no, but you might want to contact Longleat House because they hold Violet Dickinson's papers. So I reached out to Longleat House and I said, do you have this memoir of the Steven family that Violet apparently wrote? And they wrote back and they said, yes, we do. And we assume you're also interested in Virginia Woolf's Friendships Gallery. And I said that I'm assuming you have a copy of the one that's in the New York Public Library. And they said, we don't know anything about the New York Public Library's Friendships Gallery. This is an original work.
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And so I wrote to the New York Public Library because I had a moment where I thought, maybe that's a mimeograph. And you're probably too young to know what a mimeograph is or was, but they were purple inked, these copies that you used to make of mimeograph machines. So I thought maybe, maybe that wasn't an original that I worked with, maybe.
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It was just a copy.
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And the archivist, Carolyn Vega, got back to me immediately and she said, no, no, this is an original. It's got pencil and ink marks on, on it, and it's very clearly been typed on a machine. So now we have two works by Virginia Woolf called Friendships Gallery. One is in Longleat House in Wiltshire, England. One is in the New York Public Library. Neither archivist knows about the existence of the other item. And then I began contacting Woolf scholars all around the world in different libraries. And nobody's heard of this Longleat item? Nobody knows it's there. There?
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Yeah.
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International copyright law makes it impossible for Longleat to share the images of this item with me. I can't see it. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's the same thing. I don't know if she changed it. I don't know if she's written entirely new chapters. And I'm going to fast forward four years because that's how long it took until 2022 when I flew to England and I was very generously invited to Longleat House. And I walked up just like a movie set. A wide, beautiful staircase hung with ancestral portraits. And I walked into this room and an archivist handed me a box and I lifted the lid off and I lifted out this bound, slim volume that had the name Friendships Gallery stamped on its cover. And I sat down and I read all of these stories. And I saw that Woolf had made a lot of changes. And they read so beautifully. And that room fell away and that mansion fell away, and I just went into the world of the stories, and it was marvelous. So it is a dream to be able to publish them now in this finished form for readers.
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A
It really. I have goosebumps. It really does. I mean, the story is so vivid in the way that this happened for you, but also, I mean, the world is lucky you were the right person at the right time to sort of put that together and to follow it up and everything, but it really. Just thinking about the stories.
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It not only shows that she revised them and that she edited them, which in and of itself is very significant because the early ones, as we've been talking about, the early versions, were always viewed as kind of a curiosity or, you know, a bit of fun for her to put together, but not something she necessarily cared about. And that's the thing that the, you know, not only do we have a revised version, and so it's much more polished, but it shows that this was something Woolf cared about enough to redo her draft to work on it. And so it suggests that this wasn't just the pastime of an afternoon or something, but something that, like, she thought could be a good thing and she could make it better and that she was willing to invest some time in it.
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C
Yeah. And she paid a professional to have it typed. And if you look at the New York Public Library draft item, you'll see that it's Woolf's amateurish typing. And in very strong contrast with the professionally typed longleat version, which is, you know, neatly typed, which incorporates all the hand edits that Woolf made to her first draft, plus other ones. And Woolf is so intent on making everything she writes better that even the typed version has handwritten edits on it as she's envisioning reading it through. Oh, this word should be different here, and I should punctuate the sentence differently, and I should start a new paragraph here. And her investment in these stories is very serious. Even though she never tried to publish them, her investment in the craft of putting these stories together over. Over the course of, you know, say, eight months to a year. We don't. We don't have specific dates about, you know, exactly when she. She made her revisions, but we know that she took the time to do them and that she didn't just mail her friend something that was a joke and then never return to it.
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A
Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Irmala Sashigiri.
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A
Okay, we're back. So, Irmala, let's talk about what's in the stories themselves, what they're about and what we can learn from that. So I don't immediately associate the name Virginia Woolf with fantastical and farcical anti fairy tales, with teasing tributes, with flights of fancy sea monsters and giantesses and so on, but here we go. That's what we have. Is it? Do I just not know enough about Virginia Woolf, or is this really a departure from the usual thing that we can expect from her?
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C
It is really quite unusual, and most of us who read Woolf know that Woolf works with magic and with a lot of inventive, charming possibilities in Orlando, where we have a protagonist who starts off as a man in the Renaissance and then turns into a woman and lives for many centuries. And then we have Flush, which is her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spaniel. And it is narrated not by the spaniel, but it's focalized through the perspective of that dog. And it is, again, very charming. But Orlando and Flush are both very bound to history. They're both bound to real things that happen to real people in real places. And even though the three stories in the Life of Violet.
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Have a lot of connections to real people in their satirical elements and the real friends of Violet's and of Virginia's who are the inspiration for the characters, there is a defiance of gravity in some cases, there is a refusal to adhere to Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After. And there is also, There is also, unusually for Wolf, Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After. And so both of those things are true. So we don't expect Woolf to deal in slapstick comedy, which, in the first story, Friendships Gallery, we've got some really ridiculous things that happen. The protagonist, Violet, who is a kind of giantess, saves the cook when she falls through the kitchen floor. And she saves her with a mixture of, I think, vinegar and soap suds. And then she patches up the floor with burning feather beds, and she saves her aristocratic older lady friend from a pin prick by feeding her steamed breadcrumbs. I mean, there's just a lot of very broad humor in these stories. And we think of Woolf as an arch, nuanced. Not that she doesn't have humor or an element of the comic in what she does, because she does, but not like this. So, yes, it's very unusual in our associations with Virginia Woolf to think of, you know, these elements of, oh, it's funny when someone falls down.
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A
Right, right. Okay, so your preface begins, reader, can Virginia Woolf make us burst out laughing? And does anything remain to be said about her? Career. Now, the answer to both of these questions, thanks to your discovery, is yes, but which would you say came as a bigger surprise to you?
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C
Oh, that's a great question. I think that.
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I took a deep dive into.
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Her life at this time and this is a little bit of a blank space in her writing career. And I loved learning that she was pursuing these possibilities for reinventing fiction at this moment, because the conventional story about Woolf's fiction is that she writes these two pretty traditional novels, the Voyage After Midday, and she publishes them with Duckworth & Co. And then she founds the Hogarth Press and then she has her big breakthrough with Jacob's room in 1922, and that's her first experimental full length novel and that's published in that miraculous year of 1922 for modernism, appearing at the same time as the Wasteland and Ulysses. And then she writes Mrs. Dalloway, and then she writes to the Lighthouse and so on. So 1907 is just not a moment where readers are expecting something paradigm shifting from Woolf or something that's going to burst through the boundaries of established fiction. So it was really wonderful to go back and revisit her letters and her journals and her reading notebooks from this time to see what this brilliant, brilliant woman was trying to do and what she wanted to do with literature and what she was reading and what she was experiencing and how she wanted to pull, put a story.
- [32:41]
A
Together. And what we often hear in the sort of narrative that you've just described is that she was inspired by a trip to visit a gallery of some post impressionist painters. And that that kind of gave her some ideas about the way that characters could be constructed and so on without following the. The rules of novel writing that she had employed herself in the first two novels that she wrote. But there's also a thing here that we talked about at the beginning, which is her relationship with Violet. And the example of Violet almost seems like it serves a similar function. It just seems like her height and appearance are just it. Almost as if it's suggesting to Virginia Woolf, well, if someone is an obvious exception, then it kind of calls into question all the rules and norms and conventions. And here's a woman. This isn't what an English lady is supposed to look like, but here she is. And then who's to say what an English lady is supposed to think like or act like, or be? And what other boxes are we constructing to try to put people into that don't fit for them? And it seems like that would. It flows naturally into an idea that for fiction you'd have fantasy and these anti fairy tales, and you'd be kind of saying, well, what other conventional stories are we trying to construct in our fiction? And let's see if we can explode some of those.
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C
Boundaries. That's right. And that is. That's a lot of connecting the dots that you. That you did there. And what you say about the post Impressionist exhibition, which becomes very famous in her essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, where she says, on or about December 1910, human nature changed. And that is after the life of vile, that post Impressionist exhibition, it comes later. It's a watershed moment in art, in English artistic awareness. These movements in art that had already passed through Paris and through other places in Europe and had already succeeded in shocking the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie, now finally arrive in England, thanks to the efforts of Roger Fry, who is also trying to reinvent traditions and trying to remake the way English artists see and are seen by the world. And Woolf, very close to home, has this friend who is not pathetic, who is not an outcast, who is not judged as immoral or bad company, and is living in the extremes of her body, a life that she doesn't see anywhere else. Violet goes to a woman's prison. She goes to this place called the Farm Field Reformatory. And she goes weekly, and she spends time with women who are there because they are alcoholics or they are drug addicts or they've committed crimes, and she spends time with them. She plays piano for them. She helps them put on a plate, play at Christmas, where they do a kind of mock trial about, you know, a woman who's been sentenced for murdering her husband. She makes friends with a family of dwarfs in London who are very short and she's very tall. And she writes about these two different kinds of social exile. She travels around the world with other aristocratic friends, with Lord Cecil and Nelly Cecil, and she goes to multiple countries. She starts. They start in Canada and then they go to China and to Japan and to Sri Lanka and to Egypt and, you know, all these different places. And she keeps this fabulous travel album. And that's this wonderful object that's in the New York Public Library, Violet's documentation of her trip. And she's a single woman on board this ship going, or multiple ships really going all around the world. And there is a kind of freedom here that is really appealing to Woolf. Now, I don't want to suggest that Violet was a radical or a revolutionary. She was not. She was conventional in her thinking, in Many ways, she was very comfortable being an aristocrat. She disapproved of Leslie Stevens daughters leaving South Kensington and moving to Bloomsbury. But she supported Virginia in everything she did. And, you know, she was not out protesting for women's suffrage. She was not that kind of a political or intellectual or philosophical progressive, if you will. But the nature of her life offered a kind of feminist model for Woolf that was absent everywhere else she looked. And it is what allows her to break apart the fairy tale stories or the stories of young girls coming of age that are so established by this point in the early 20th century, the sort of Victorian girlhood stories. And you see the elements of that in the first story, Friendships Gallery, where Violet is born. And she's this massive baby, this baby who's so long that she's so big that it's not enough to just get her weight. The nurse says you've got to get the foot rule and measure her. And she doesn't want to learn the things that her governess wants to teach her. She doesn't want to go to the ball and wear all this jewelry and think about virtue and honor. She doesn't want to do the things that a young girl like her is supposed to do. And she's perfectly happy not doing those things. She doesn't have any punishment or temptation or consequences for breaking those rules. And so Woolf really celebrates the freedoms that are available to women who don't fit the.
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A
Mold. Right. And there is a phrase that will jump out to any fan of Virginia Woolf. Violet finds joy in building a cottage of one's own. Can we draw a line from these stories to the famous essay A Room of One's Own? Is.
- [39:15]
C
That. Absolutely, absolutely. This is a point of origin. And that was something that really, really struck me, because I hadn't paid very close attention to that when I read the draft stories originally in the New York Public Library. And then that phrase just leaped out at me when I found the revised version. And Violet did, in real life, build her own cottage called Burnham Wood. And then the second story of the three, which is called the Magic Garden, is about the character Violet, who goes to visit her aristocratic friends at this very fancy, you know, sort of country manor house. And she is bored by all of them, and she's very, very happy when she meets this gardener. And the gardener is gnarled and he's smelly, and he's got, you know, sort of crude manners. But he is the most inspiring and inspired character that Woolf creates in the story. And he teaches Violet all of these different things. And she goes into dinner at this. You know, this very fancy dinner in this manor house, and. And she asks, who manages your drains? And it's so shocking to ask about the drains when you're. When you're eating lunch. And then everybody starts laughing, and everybody at the table starts laughing, and nobody can remember when there was so much laughter heard in that house. And that night, in the middle of the night, the woman who owns the house comes to Violet in the middle of the night and says, wouldn't it be lovely to have a cottage of one. One's own? And then the Violet character plans and builds a cottage and welcomes everybody into that cottage. So it is not about a woman writing fiction, which is, of course, the focus of A Room of One's Own, which Woolf will write or publish in 1929. But the Violet in that story is chafing against the rules and restrictions of polite society. And she's happiest when she's outside walking through her own grounds. She's enthusiastic about setting aside unnatural conventions to create space for free expression. There's this really funny, you know, kind of utopian description of scholars and nursemaids digging around the roots of vegetables in Violet's gardens and finding treasures and everyone being perfectly happy all together, where there's freedom for exchange of thoughts and above all, freedom to laugh, because you're not supposed to laugh if you're a woman. You're not supposed to laugh loudly or with your mouth open or with people who are supposedly beneath you or let men see you laugh in an uncontrolled or spontaneous way. And that, to me, is one of the most enjoyable parts of these stories are those moments when the characters laugh together. They're so subversive and so pleasurable to.
- [42:22]
D
See.
- [42:22]
C
Aha. Here's what happens when communities form around shared.
- [42:27]
A
Laughter. Yeah. You can almost see the men of the era turning red in the face and feeling angry at the idea that women could be friends with one another and that they could laugh about things together. And that, you know, I think you point out, Thomas Carlyle has said the history of the world is but the biography of great men. And here we have an alternative tale where it is okay to be a woman and to find joy in the company of other.
- [43:03]
C
Women. Exactly. And that line from Carlisle about history and biography and the lives of great men is one that Woolfish wrestled with her whole life. And implicitly or explicitly, it becomes a point against which she brings a lot of her own writing into being. And the genre of biography. We could certainly say that the Life of Violet is Woolf's first meaningful experiment with biography. She goes on to do a number of them. Not just Orlando and Flush, but she writes, writes a serious biography of the art critic Roger Fry. She writes her own autobiography, A Sketch of the Past. She writes very powerful essays about life, writing as a genre. She writes one called the New Biography. She writes one called the Art of Biography. She reviews biographies and volumes of letters and diaries. And she is restlessly, always trying to break apart heart. The idea that a record of public accomplishments and the sum of how those accomplishments influence the lives of many is the best or the only or the most truthful way to tell a life. And she says in her essay Modern Fiction, let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. So that just because you've been serving as Prime Minister and you've signed war treaties or you've ended war or you've passed laws, does not mean that that is where the essence of life or of what matters most is to be found or is exclusively to be found. We can find meaning in as many other places as we can in that. And there's that great scene in the first story in the Life of Violet where Violet's various governesses are trying to teach her history and literature and the comedy and the tragedy and classics, and Violet just bugs them to tell her stories about their lives until the stories of classical tragedy are all mixed up with the love affairs or the family stories or the career ambitions of, of the women who come to teach her. And for Woolf, those things were always inseparable, right? Always mutually.
- [45:29]
A
Constitutive. Right. And that's one of the things that really commends these stories to fans of Virginia Woolf is they might think, well, I like Virginia Woolf, but I don't necessarily need to read her stories about a giantess and that kind of thing. But these are themes that continued throughout her career. This focus on women, this focus on the role of women and the choices that they're asked to make and marriage and just the role of friendship and virtue and ambition. And it shows that these ideas were things that she was working out even before she started writing the novels that we have all come to know and.
- [46:18]
C
Love. Yes. And she was doing them with a light heartedness and a lack of. These are not stories about her. Some of her earlier writings are quite transparently autobiographical and she's working out the angst of her own life at this moment. In her fiction. And these stories are very much about Violet and they're very genuinely light hearted. There isn't suffering in these stories. There's a kind of very happy claim to all the freedoms that Violet enjoys. And that, I think is very, very daring of her at this.
- [46:58]
A
Moment.
- [47:00]
Do you think she would be surprised that these stories are seeing the light of day now? Or maybe that they haven't seen the light of day before until.
- [47:09]
C
Now? Yeah, when she wrote the first draft, she wrote to her friend Lady Nelly Cecil, who's one of the characters. She wrote, I don't want immaturities, things torn out of time preserved. And she wanted her stories sent back to her. She was very insistent on keeping them private, but then she had them typed and she showed them to her brother in law, Clive Bell. And if we leap ahead to the 1930s, we find Woolf writing letters and keeping diary entries where she's very glad about, you know, that she has the record of her younger voice. And then again, we have her two suicide notes. One requesting that Leonard destroy all her papers and the other one making no such request. So in characteristically Wolfian styles, she leaves her feelings about her early writings unresolved. I don't know how she would feel knowing that these stories are being.
- [48:04]
A
Published. Right. Well, and also in characteristically Virginia Wolfian style, it leaves room for us to do a little bit of.
- [48:12]
C
Interpreting. Yes.
- [48:15]
A
Yes. Okay. Well, the book is called the Life of Violet. Three Early Stories by Virginia Woolf. Irmala Sestergiri. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of.
- [48:25]
C
Literature. It's been a pleasure. Thank.
- [48:27]
A
You.
- [48:38]
My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our search, three of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters. Let's go do the impossible.
- [49:01]
Percy Jackson and the olympians new season two episode premiere December 10th on Disney and Hulu. Learn more at disneyplus.com whatson.
- [49:10]
Kraft Mac and Cheese is the best thing ever. It's even better than pop music. You look just as natural enjoying us at age 13 as you do 1555. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever.
- [49:34]
And finally today, I almost hate to interrupt Gabriel's holiday music. It's so good, isn't it? I could listen to it all day. I think I should ask him if he's thought about making a. A holiday album. Okay. Finally today, I talked to Jake Pauler about Christopher Isherwood, the author of Goodbye to Berlin, AKA the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. What a fascinating life he lived. And after Jake and I finished, I asked him a special question.
- [50:06]
Okay. Joining me now is Jake Pauler, who has written critical biographies of Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. Jake, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been.
- [50:23]
D
Written.
- [50:26]
That's a great question. I think there's a received idea that as men get older, they become more conservative. In their reading case of the age of about 65, it's generally considered that men will only read military history, but I think the opposite is true with me. So I was most conservative as a reader. As a young man in my 20s, for example, I would never have dreamed of reading science fiction. I snobbishly assumed all science fiction was automatically middlebrow. Whereas now in my early 50s, I'm a huge sci fi fan and I consider novelists like Ursula Le Guin and M. John Harrison to be just as literary and highbrow as John Up Dyke and Philip.
- [51:13]
A
Roth.
- [51:14]
D
Yeah. To answer the question, I think I'd like my last book that I read to be a new edgy work of science fiction by a young writer that I really admire, rather than sort of thinking like an old fogy that young writers have, you know, nothing and have nothing to teach an old dog like.
- [51:34]
A
Myself. Right. That is a, that is a shift to make, isn't it? Because I find myself doing that with music and with actors. It's sort of like if they were 10 years older than me, I still will seek them out. But if they're even my age or younger, I sort of feel like, oh, those aren't grown ups. What do they have to tell me? Even though of course the people that I'm seeking out were in their early 20s, sometimes when they were producing that kind of work, sometimes it can be hard to credit the people who come after us on the timeline. I'm wondering, since you are becoming more adventurous, if you think you would have a different genre you would want to explore in addition to science fiction, do you think you'll sample something else or do you think science fiction is kind of going to occupy you from now.
- [52:29]
D
On?
- [52:31]
Yeah. Well, getting back to what you were saying about reading older writers, certainly when I was younger, I always looked forward to the new, I don't know, Martin Amos novel or the new Philip Roth novel. But then, yes, they get older and then their writing falls off and, and then they die. So, you know, you've got right all the time be looking for, you know, new authors to read. So, you know, I tried to keep an open mind about younger writers. Also I've been trying to get into graphic novels more recently.
- [53:06]
So yeah, I really liked Providence by Alan Moore. Quite interested in supernatural fiction and the occult.
- [53:17]
So. So yeah, no, I'm definitely trying to sort of all the time expand by reading Horizons rather than, you know, the idea of reading military history. It's just so unpalatable for me. And you know, and I don't want to be that old duffer reading this huge book about the Crimean War. I, I don't think of anything more.
- [53:39]
A
Boring. Well, it's interesting because you mentioned Martin Amos. He always used to say that Kingsley Amos had gotten to a point in his life where he wouldn't read a novel unless it started out with a sentence like a shot rang out in the dark.
- [53:56]
But that I think was viewed by Martin or the way he portrayed it was that Kingsley had kind of given up challenging himself and he had, he had stopped exploring in literary fiction and was instead, you know, just looking for genre reads that would be predictable and maybe not too challenging. But I like the way you describe your forays into science fiction as being opening up new worlds and new writers and kind of new concepts and themes. It seems like you are willing to embrace the challenge in that in some of the higher quality genre.
- [54:32]
D
Fiction. Yeah, absolutely. I'm all intent on reading books that start with a shot. Rang out.
- [54:41]
Again in my twenties I would never have read thrillers and. Yeah, but now, you know, certainly when I go on holiday, I like to read a thriller. I've been really getting into Don Winslow recently. He wrote a great trilogy of books on the Mexican drug cartels and then he's recently published a trilogy of crime books that. A reworking of the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid, which are very.
- [55:10]
A
Entertaining.
- [55:11]
D
Right. But you know, it's the kind of book that you don't need a lot of attention for and that if you're lying on a beach and you've had a few beers, it's just the perfect subject to read. And you know, you don't want anything too.
- [55:25]
A
Demanding. Yeah, right. I also heard that Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, before Carl Liner passed away, they had this friendship into their 80s and 90s and they would watch movies together and they only wanted to watch movies where someone at some point would say, defend the.
- [55:44]
D
Perimeter.
- [55:48]
Yeah, Absolutely. I mean, I guess that reader question, some people would sort of think, yes, I want to finish reading Finnegan's Wake on my deathbed. But, you know, no, no, no. You know, I haven't read Finnegan's Wake in my early 50s and I think I'm never going to read. You know, I'm at peace with that now. You know, I'm certainly not going to be challenging myself in my 80s.
- [56:13]
A
With.
- [56:15]
The later joys, but there's something about genre books and films and so on that it kind of lets us experience life. And you know, those romantic comedies and things like that that are trying to make us laugh and trying to make us cry and, you know, trying to make us excited and afraid and that kind of thing. It is a kind of way of celebrating being alive to know that you can. And being human to know that you can, you can cry at a tear jerker or, or laugh at a slapstick.
- [56:53]
D
Comedy. Yeah, absolutely. You know, another thing I got into recently is audiobooks. So I would have sort of regarded that as terribly brow, like, you know, books on tape as they used to.
- [57:09]
A
Be.
- [57:10]
D
Right. But then, you know, nowadays I find, yeah, you know, I obviously, you know, I wouldn't read very literary fiction. I wouldn't have listened to that as an audio book because I'd want to read it, but with sort of less demanding, fair, like. So I, I recently did listen to June as a book on tape or audiobook and you know, that's a huge whopping 800 pages and, you know, and he's a little bit boring in places. But as an audiobook, it's kind of fine. You can just let it kind of wash over you and. Whereas I probably wouldn't have had the patience to read it as a book in.
- [57:54]
A
Print. Right, okay. Those are all great choices. Jake Pauler, thank you so much for joining me on the History of.
- [58:01]
D
Literature. Thank you for having.
- [58:03]
A
Me.
- [58:09]
Okay, that's going to do it. For this episode of the History of Literature. We're hoping to have George Orwell's 1984 soon, a whole episode devoted to that classic work. And can you tell the story of an author's life through the selection of objects? Indeed you can. We'll find out the portrait of Jane Austen that emerges from just such a selection. We'll be talking with an expert on the Godfather movies soon. That's a fun one. And we'll have an episode on Consent in the Regency period. Those early writers knew a lot. They predicted a lot of things that we're still discussing. We walk through the Romantic archives with a black woman. How does it feel for her to be there with all those poets she loves, but who would have dismissed her ancestors?
- [58:57]
We'll hear the writing advice that Chekhov gave to his friends, including some sharp self criticism and 2000 years of Roman history compressed into a single book. What do we learn from turning the telescope around or the microscope around? Maybe I should say. And here's another thing, maybe I should say goodbye. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next.
- [59:22]
D
Time.
- [59:33]
E
Foreign.
- [59:40]
You might be curious what it takes from equipment to general know how to make a podcast like this come to life. Maybe you're interested in making your own series as your New Year's resolution. Which is why you should check out my show Podcast Perspectives, the award winning series hosted by me, Jeff Umbro and produced by the Poglomerate. Recently named to the best Podcast Production and Marketing Agency by PR Daily, Podcast Perspectives explores the audio industry through conversations with the experts behind the podcast you love. From The Washington Post, iHeart, Pushkin, La Manada and beyond. We discuss everything from how to produce the best series to how to monetize and grow your shows to reach more audiences. If you're looking for a place to start, check out our recent Podcast Predictions episode where we bring on podcast leaders like Lemonada's Jessica Cordova, Kramer, Pushkin's Greta Cohn, Bumper's Dan Misner, NHPR's Rebecca Lavoy, and NASA's Katie Konance to share inspiring takeaways for 2026. Podcast Perspectives is designed to be approachable and actionable for anyone regardless of podcasting experience. So follow Podcast Perspectives with Jeff Umbro on your favorite podcast app.
- [60:46]
B
Today.
- [60:48]
Why have three Gilmore Girls in a small town resonated with generations of fans? And what does a TV series that ended nearly two decades ago reveal about who we want to be? Generation Gilmore Girls is a brand new three part podcast series that looks for answers where it all began in Connecticut. Hosted by me, Chloe Nguyen and produced by Connecticut Public, the same award winning NPR and PBS member station behind the chart topping podcast Generation Barney. This series is about the TV we love and how it shapes us. We'll take you inside the creation of Gilmore Girls, why we keep revisiting it, and the impact the show has had on its home state. Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the show, this podcast offers fresh insights and heartfelt nostalgia. Follow Generation Gilmore Girls on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. Trust me it's worth the trip back to Stars Hollow.