Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

40 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
miners at the Labour Exchange—boys, young men in their prime and old men, idle owing
to the pits being shut down” (72). Woolf, contemplating the “beef with its attendant
greens and potatoes” at Girton, a meal which for her evoked “women with string bags on
Monday morning,” was perfectly correct in her observation that “coal-miners doubtless
were sitting down to less” (AROO 19).
Th ese conditions, Woolf argued, prevented the members of the Women’s Co-operative
Guild from becoming suffi ciently “detached and easy and cosmopolitan” (“Introductory
Letter” xxiv) to write prose that would satisfy the discerning “literary critic.” Indeed,
in “Th e Leaning Tower,” she argued that they prevented the development of any signifi cant
working-class writing to the extent that if one were to take away “all that the working class
has given to English literature…that literature would scarcely suff er; take away all that the
educated class has given, and English literature would scarcely exist” (CE2 168). Th e comments
brought a response from, among others, the miner and writer B. L. Coombes, who
argued “if one accepts the statement by Virginia Woolf as it is written it means that no
one who works at manual labour can ever hope to be a writer. She may not have thought
of it that way but the result must be so (Jones and Williams 65). As Bill Jones and Chris
Williams observe, Coombes acknowledges Woolf’s arguments and himself emphasises the
ways in which material conditions constrain working-class writers. Nonetheless, although
he “adopts the broad parameters of Woolf’s analysis” he insists that the “value of working-class
writing” lies in its origin in varieties of experience not available to the writers
with “an expensive education” (Jones and Williams 64). Indeed, he argues it is a distinct
form of literature, albeit an evolving one inevitably constructed using inherited structures
and techniques. Th e tension is founded, in part at least, however, upon Woolf’s concept
of art as “detached” and “cosmopolitan.” In A Room of One’s Own, for example, she observes
that although Charlotte Brontë “had more genius in her than Jane Austen,” this
was undermined by her “indignation,” with the result that Jane Eyre became “deformed
and twisted,” as she “will write in a rage where she should write calmly.” Without material
security, Brontë could not attain the “detachment” that would have prevented or at least
limited such “rage,” and Woolf speculates about what might have happened had she “possessed
say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels
outright for fi fteen hundred pounds” (AROO 70). For working-class women such as Mrs.
F. H. Smith, living on one pound twelve shillings a week, it was obviously impossible
to attain “intellectual breadth” on such terms. Th e “good gifts” of “wit and detachment,
learning and poetry,” are consequently things “we” give to “them,” the preserve of those
“who have never answered bells or minded machines” (Woolf, “Introductory Letter” xxx).
Th e culture of the “writing classes” existed and had an established form. It could be extended
to “Mrs. Th omas, or Mrs. Langrish, or Miss Bolt” through education and material
prosperity, but was not modifi ed by an “adventurer in literature” (Jones and Williams 65)
such as Coombes, whose work, far from being “detached,” explicitly dealt with economic
and political conditions in the South Wales coalfi elds.
In her description of the Women’s Co-operative Guild congress she attended in 1913,
Woolf noted:
All these questions—perhaps this was at the bottom of it—which matter so intensely
to the people here, questions of sanitation and education and wages, this