"Night and Day Is Dead": Virginia Woolf in London "Literary and Historic"

Abstract

[We] don't want the [Hogarth] Press to be a fashionable hobby patronised and inspired by Chelsea. Virginia Woolf, Diary 190 What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the of all these years--since 1919--and N. & D. is dead--I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities far beyond counting: though I feel now and then the to vision, but resist it. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary 184 provoked Virginia Woolf. In the early twentieth century, the London borough was reputed to be the artistic center of London both because it had been home to eminent Victorian writers and painters and because it was the haunt of Woolf's so-called bohemian contemporaries. To Woolf, and Chelseans also signified smugness, capricious and cutting appraisals of art, and worst of all, thorough respectability. However, while Chelsea became shorthand for everything Woolf despised about London's world, its provocation also lay in its resemblance to her own world. An admixture of innovation and tradition, fashion and stability, bohemianism and social establishment, emblematized Woolf's own compound of traditionalism and iconoclasm, snobbery and fellow feeling--a compound too complexly muddled to be explained away as a divided allegiance between her father's Hyde Park Gate and her own Bloomsbury. That Woolf placed her 1919 Night and Day in therefore corroborates the widely held view that this worked a transition for her from traditional to experimental fictional forms: in Night and Day, she uses the setting to represent a conflict between innovation and imitation, between creative modern writers and the preservative establishment--a conflict arguably won out by the heroine's moving out of Chelsea. [1] Woolf's characterization of Night and Day as dead suggests that this 1919 novel of fact also gave life: Night and Day arguably gives life to a distracting tug to vision that characterizes her impressionistic novels, and it gives life to characters who, because now dead, could become the subject of biography. Indeed, Night and Day was viewed by many of Woolf's contemporaries as a portrait of Anny Ritchie, a portrait that hurt the feelings of the still-living subject. [2] This essay, however, argues that what Night and Day gives life to is London literary and historic. By 1919, private societies, municipal government, and tour book writers had identified for the public and preserved as memorials the homes of writers, artists, statesmen, and scientists; their publications mapped London through and historic associations--including associations with events in fiction. This London was created only to promote London's status as a city but also to educate its citizens and attract touri sts. Literary and historic London was therefore both a physical place and an ideal, marked out by publications (tour books, maps, and histories), by visitors (tourists, school groups, and ramblers), and by plaqued houses and museums. This essay examines how Night and Day takes as its setting the haunts and homes of London, a setting of fiction that Woolf sees as fact. In Night and Day Woolf engages with the project of and historic London, a project that attempted to make the imaginary spaces of London real--a project that created visitable and material shrines out of authors' lives and works in London. Woolf would have this dead only because it represented her painful recovery from a nervous breakdown (as Woolf herself suggested [3]) but also because it represents and historic London as a that makes everything not possible (Night and Day 194) for a modernist woman writer in London: Night and Day is structured by a space that orders the central characters and events of the through an ideology of tradition and great men. …

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