IN 1925 one brilliant contemporary wrote of another: " It
is far more difficult to catch her than it is for -her to catch what she calls life= life ; London ; this moment in June." This new tribute to Virginia Woolf, with a few additions, is the text of the Rede Lecture given in Cambridge by E. M. Forster last year. He attempts again, not judgement, but justification. During her lifetime legends grew round the name of Virginia Woolf : Forster has torn away the stupid and pernicious ones. He presents, not the Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury, but a poet-novelist, a critic, a biographer, a short story-writer,. an experimentalist, an essayist, a scholar, a feminist, a gourmet, a practical-joker, a woman, a lady, a snob: a civilised being, respecting knowledge and believing in wisdom. It is not a panegyric he offers, for he sees both her limitations and her virtues. His impressions will be recognised ; as valid by those who knew her, by her admirers as a sensitive and honest memorial, by
posterity as one artist's interpretation of another. " It
is wiser, it is safer, to regard her career as a triumph one. She triumphed over what are primarily called difficulties, she triumphed in the positive sense: she brought in the spo And sometimes it is as a row of little silver cups that I see work gleaming. ' These trophies,' the inscription runs, ' were w by the mind from matter, its enemy and its friend.'" Su homage is more than a crown of laurel.
Previous page
