E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf and Vice Versa

E.M. Forster was a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group and a friend of Virginia Woolf although not a particularly close one. But they had a lot in common being not just novelists but critics of other writing.  So it is interesting to read what they had to say about each other. Each greatly admired the other, but not without qualifications. 

For instance, in a lecture on Woolf delivered on May 29, 1941, at Cambridge, two months after her death, Forster said that in her writings, Woolf “has no great cause at heart.”  Her works, he argued, are not “about something.”  Rather, as largely a form of poetry, they “are something” and when the poetry is absent, such as is the case with her second novel Night and Day and her penultimate novel The Years, her efforts fail, Forster said. 

Woolf wrote an essay entitled “The Novels of E.M. Forster” that was first published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1942. Virginia may have been reluctant to release it herself,  observing in the first couple of sentences that there are many reasons for hesitating to criticize one’s contemporaries including “the fear of hurting feelings” and “the difficulty of being just.” 

Whereas Forster felt Woolf had “no great cause at heart,” Virginia felt the opposite about him. She depicted Forster as “highly conscious of a message” and said “he believes that a novel must take sides in the human conflict.” 

 “Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined we shall see,” she said. But she wasn’t convinced he was successful in getting it across, describing his message as “elusive in nature.”  Forester fails, she argues, to successfully connect his very satisfying depiction of actual things with the larger message he evidently wants them to convey. “We feel something has failed us at the critical moment,” Woolf said. 

Why, Woolf wondered, when Howards End was such a “highly skillful book” and she wanted to declare it a success did she feel it was instead a failure? While elaboration, skill, wisdom, penetration and beauty are all present in the book, “they lack fusion, they lack cohesion, they lack force,” Woolf declared. 

That’s a fairly damning critique for a work often described as Forster’s masterpiece and especially if one is supposed to come away from it with a message. 

But one can view Forster as equally disparaging of Woolf. 

Early in the afore mentioned lecture, Forster depicted Woolf “is not a great creator of character.” And later, he elaborated on that. As a modernist novelist, Woolf strays from the fictional norm in various ways.  Among them, “she does not tell a story or weave a plot, and can she create character?  That is her problem’s center.” 

While her characters worked on the page and seldom seemed unreal, “life eternal she could seldom give; she could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account,” Forster said, pointing to Jane Austin’s “Emma” and George Eliot’s “Dorothea Casaubon” as successes on that score. 

Were there any exceptions? “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay do remain with the reader afterwards, and so perhaps do Rachel from The Voyage Out, and Clarissa Dalloway. For the rest [and there are many], it is impossible to maintain that here is an immortal portrait gallery,” Forster said. 

When one largely dispenses with story and plot, isn’t character what supposedly remains?

Same-Sex Attraction in "Mrs. Dalloway"

Attraction between women was of great interest to Woolf for more than one reason.

“Chloe liked Olivia.”  [What a concept!] 

“Do not start, do not blush, let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women,” Woof says in the fifth section of her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own.

Where did “Chloe liked Olivia” come from?  Woolf tells readers she encountered that astonishing phrase in a book called “Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael.” It was a book she at first hadn’t thought much of, based in part on Ms Carmichael’s terse and short-winded writing style, but that she was obliged to reconsider. Why? “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it, she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,” Woolf said.

That chamber was in 1928 the life of a woman “unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex.”  In other words, a woman defined in her own terms and not in relationship to a man as Woolf believed had been almost exclusively the case in English literature.

Well, Mary Carmichael was a figment of Virginia’s always fertile imagination and as for Chloe and Olivia, about all we are told of them is that they shared a laboratory where they minced liver, apparently for use as a cure for anemia, and that one of them was married with two small children. Woolf may have seen them as no more than friends, but that didn’t matter. This little invention – a woman being viewed independently of a man -- gave her the springboard she needed to examine at considerable length the impoverishment of women in literature.

The situation was so bad, she maintained, that in order to accurately depict what happens when a woman goes into a room, “whole flights of words” would have to be added to the English language.

[What would the English language look like now if James Joyce had been a woman, one wonders?]

But “Chloe liked Olivia” could certainly have implications other than just friendship and that brings me to Mrs. Dalloway.

Early in the book, after Clarissa is back from her morning walk, she climbs up to the little attic bedroom where her husband, Richard, has insisted she sleep undisturbed after her recent illness. This gets her thinking of Richard and how she has disappointed him sexually –initially “on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden” and later at Constantinople, “and again and again.”

In contrast, she has had a tendency to fall in love with women -- first and foremost with Sally Seton when Clarissa was 18 years old and “knew nothing about sex.” Encountering Sally at a party, Clarissa couldn’t take her eyes off her and then, when Sally unexpectedly arrived penniless at the Parry’s door and was somewhat reluctantly taken in, the two very different young women became almost inseparable, talking for hours about how they were going to reform the world – all Sally’s ideas, one is told.

Finally, out on the terrace one evening at Clarissa’s childhood home, Burton, “came the most exquisite moment in her whole life.” Alone with Sally – the others had gone on ahead – Sally picked a flower and kissed Clarissa on the lips. “The whole world might have turned upside down!” But then who should appear to ruin things but Peter Walsh, and her moment of happiness was embittered.

Readers aren’t told whether Sally and Clarissa took matters any further on a subsequent occasion, but from everything one learns about what Clarissa was like at 18, it seems unlikely. And in later years, when Sally married a rich Manchester industrialist, Clarissa wanted nothing to do with her, turning down invitations to visit.

Woolf contrasts this idyllically romantic, same-sex moment (the “laughing girls in their transparent muslins” Clarissa saw on her morning walk may have helped bring to her mind the “white frock” she was wearing when Sally kissed her) with a far darker example of possible same-sex attraction later in the book.

Whereas Clarissa was pursued by the vivacious, free-spirted Sally Seton who, among other things, ran down the hall naked on one occasion at Burton, Clarissa herself and possibly the Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughter Elizabeth, stimulates barely controllable desires within the rather distressing Doris Kilman, who, like a flasher lurking among trees in a public park, dresses in a green mackintosh no matter what the weather.

Miss Kilman, originally engaged by Richard Dalloway to teach his daughter history, in due course brings Elizabeth under her relatively recently acquired religious sway, much to the distress of Clarissa who wonders at one point if her daughter is falling in love with Doris.

Matters come to a head, when Miss Kilman, laughed at by the far more attractive Clarissa, is consumed by jealously and perhaps also lust.

“It is the flesh” she keeps muttering as she takes Elizabeth to a local department store, loses control of herself, buys of all things a petticoat (what was she thinking, Elizabeth wonders as the sales girl thinks Kilman “mad”) and gorges herself on sweets over tea as a possible substitute for another form of physical pleasure. Increasingly uncomfortable, Elizabeth finds her white gloves (as powerful a symbol as Clarissa’s flowers) and flees. Doris implores her in a quivering voice not to forget her, but she knows that Elizabeth, “so beautiful,” is gone.

Woolf, in an especially powerful passage, depicts Elizabeth, obliged out of politeness to have tea with Miss Kilman, as being “like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away.”  And so she finally did.  “Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.”

The down side of possible same-sex attraction doesn’t get any darker than that. But the self-possessed Elizabeth, perhaps lucky to be relatively clueless over exactly what was happening, pulls herself together and appears at Clarissa’s party in a pink dress. Yet another powerful symbol, I think.