Today I bring you two things: some thoughts on the influence of painting on Woolf’s approach to writing AND a conversation about her short story, ‘Kew Gardens.’
A conversation about ‘Kew Gardens’
Today, I speak with
and the two of us take a close look at Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘Kew Gardens.’ Nancy knows a lot about Virginia Woolf and her novels, and brings all of that knowledge and insight into our discussion. It was really fantastic!Woolf’s short stories are challenging! So please don’t feel discouraged if you read the story and feel… confused. I was also confused but, at this point in my life, I am no longer worried about confusion — it’s an ordinary feature of my intellectual life — sort of like a big tree that is, at times, difficult to see past but which is nonetheless beautiful and perfectly climbable if you don’t mind shinning up the trunk and putting ladders in your stockings. If you listen to the conversation, you’ll hear Nancy and me attempt to nut it out.
“I wondered whether Woolf might be doing this as an experiment. Maybe ‘Kew Gardens’ was a way for her to emancipate the genre or to liberate it from its constraints.”
Nancy Miller
Painting and writing
‘Kew Gardens’ has an obvious painterly quality – Nancy and I discuss this in our conversation – and it’s clear, from Woolf’s diaries and conversations she had with the artists around her, that she was very interested in the parallels between painting and writing.
Those parallels and points of divergence would have been given recurring emphasis by Woolf’s relationship with her sister, Vanessa Bell, an artist. Virginia and Vanessa were close and Virginia looked up to Vanessa and imitated her. When Vanessa began to paint professionally, Virginia reportedly began writing standing up at a high desk as if standing at an easel.1 It seems appropriate that this very painterly short story – ‘Kew Gardens,’ published in 1919 – should mark the first collaboration of the sisters, with Vanessa contributing two woodcuts to illustrate Woolf’s story. Vanessa would go on to provide the cover art for many of Woolf’s subsequent novels.
In her biography of Woolf, Virginia Woolf – An Inner Life, Julia Briggs notes the significant influence of Vanessa’s art on Woolf’s writing. Vanessa had abandoned realism to concentrate on form and structure. According to Briggs, Vanessa’s approach and the ideas that underpinned it, ‘…helped Virginia to make her own art ‘new’ – and it was the more powerful for the cross-fertilization involved, the necessity of adapting visual and spatial ideals to her own medium of writing.’2
In 1917, Woolf recorded in her diary a conversation with art historian Roger Fry and art critic (and Vanessa’s husband) Clive Bell in which they discussed what it meant for art to be representational. Woolf expressed the view that the thing that was essential to all art was that it was representative: ‘You say the word tree, & you see a tree. Very well. Now every word has an aura. Poetry combines the different auras in a sequence’.3 Fry asked Woolf whether she founded her writing upon structure or texture and Woolf – connecting ‘structure’ with ‘plot’ – answered ‘texture.’
The primacy of texture over structure offers a useful lens through which to view Woolf’s writing. ‘Textured’ might usefully describe Woolf’s renderings of her characters’ inner lives in books like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse – where feelings, memories, resonating objects, and sensory experiences are sketched in with all their contrasting roughnesses and smoothnesses. It might also describe the vivid interplay of light, colour and sound in a short story like ‘Kew Gardens’.
And though ‘structure’ or ‘plot’ might find itself demoted somewhat in Woolf’s approach to storytelling, ‘form’ remains a prominent and foundational feature of her writing. When deciding how to approach To the Lighthouse, Woolf drew a diagram in her notebook that looked like a capital H, imagining that the novel would take the form of ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’. This corresponds to the final three-part structure of the novel with the ‘Window’ and ‘Lighthouse’ sections connected by the ‘Time Passes’ ‘corridor.’
Form is equally important in ‘Kew Gardens’ – there is a symmetry between the first and last paragraphs which bookend four sections in which pairs of characters enter and exit the scene.
‘The similarities and differences between painting and writing fascinated [Woolf],’ writes Briggs. ‘[W]hile the plastic arts created a more immediate impact, they also generated a sense of silence, a short-circuiting of language to which her fiction often aspired. Painting could cut through the novelist’s task of recording time passing by making it stand still, making a single moment last forever. Her own art was to reach out for that effect.’4
A few other points of interest
Publication of ‘Kew Gardens’ by Hogarth
‘Kew Gardens’ was published in a stand-alone edition by Hogarth Press. Hogarth Press was the Woolfs’ own publishing house. Initially Virginia and her husband Leonard had talked about buying a printing press in 1915. A few years later they were still trying to raise capital to purchase a press, which they finally managed to do in March 1917. Leonard’s purpose was, according to Virginia’s nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, to some extent therapeutic – it would be good for Virginia to have some manual occupation, he thought, as she recovered from another serious breakdown in 1915. But Virginia and Leonard were also both writers and the idea of having a printing press at their disposal was, of course, very attractive.5
The publication of ‘Kew Gardens’ containing woodcuts by Vanessa resulted in a rare quarrel between the sisters. Vanessa was unhappy with the print quality of her woodcuts and Woolf recorded in her diary that Vanessa ‘…firmly refused to illustrate any more stories of mine under those conditions, & went so far as to doubt the value of the Hogarth Press altogether. An ordinary printer would do better in her opinion.’6
A Katherine Mansfield connection7
When Katherine Mansfield stayed with (society hostess and patron of the arts) Ottoline Morrell in 1917, she wrote to Woolf about Ottoline's beautiful garden (the letter is now lost). Later Mansfield wrote to Ottoline asking: 'who is going to write about that flower garden...there would be people walking in the garden – several pairs of people – their conversation their slow pacing – ... the pauses as the flowers 'come in' as it were – ... A kind of, musically speaking – conversation set to flowers.'8
Who is going to write about that flower garden? Well, Virginia Woolf, that’s who. And if you read ‘Kew Gardens,’ you’ll notice that Woolf’s story bears a strong resemblance to Mansfield’s idea, albeit transposed to Kew. In fact, Woolf showed Mansfield the story as it was being typeset and Mansfield later wrote to Woolf: 'Yes, your Flower Bed is very good. There's a still, quivering, changing light over it all and a sense of those couples dissolving in the bright air which fascinates me...'
Hogarth Press published Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’ in 1917 (at about the same time Woolf was writing ‘Kew Gardens’). Woolf set the type for ‘Prelude’ herself with Leonard doing the machining.9
Prufrock
Nancy made a fascinating connection between the older gentleman in the story and TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ You can read that poem here if you’re interested.
Sixpence entry to Kew
In our chat, Nancy drew attention to a moment when the final two characters in ‘Kew Gardens’ – the young couple who are courting – talk about the entry fee to the gardens. The young man remarks that it’s lucky it isn’t Friday because they make you pay sixpence on Fridays and the young woman says, ‘What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?’ ‘What’s ‘it’—’ the young man replies. ‘What do you mean by ‘it’?’
And here is something I stumbled upon in Woolf’s diary from 23 November 1917 (‘L’ is Leonard):
L. went up to London with the rollers, & I meant to go to Kew. On the way it struck me that one ought to decide things definitely. One ought to make up one’s mind. To begin then, I settled that if it was the 6d day at Kew I wouldn’t hesitate but decide not to go in. It was the 6d day; I turned without pausing & had therefore to walk back. Certainly this decision brings a feeling of peace, though I rather think I was wrong.
Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe
In our chat, Nancy and I refer (without much context) to a few characters from Woolf’s novel — To the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay, the formidable matriarch in that story, is a portrait of Woolf’s mother. And Lily Briscoe (a guest of the Ramsays staying with them at their summer house in the Hebrides) is an artist who, during the novel, is engaged with painting and with resolving a problem of balance in her artwork. We will, in February when we read To the Lighthouse, investigate Lily Briscoe further!
Thanks for tuning in folks! I hope you enjoy the conversation with Nancy as much as I did. Until next time when we will take a closer look at ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (available at the Yale Review).
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf – An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 68.
Briggs, p 68.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf — Volume 1: 1915-19, ed Anne Olivier Bell, 22 Nov 1917, p 80.
Briggs, p 69.
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography 1912-1941, Triad Granada, 1976, p 38.
Diary of Virginia Woolf, 9 June 1919, p 278.
Katherine Mansfield was a contemporary of Woolf’s hailing from New Zealand who is best known as a short story writer. She died tragically young. I briefly wrote about her rivalrous relationship with Woolf here.
Mansfield quoted in Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 63.
Bell, p 48.
Share this post