Enjoyable book with the battle of going with society or doing your own thing. It is pretty progressive for the time it was written and paints and picture of suburbia in much the same way as it exists now. Looking back a hundred years life, and life's problems and choices remain prety much the same. ( )

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf

I'm not normally a reader of introductions, as I believe that the test of a work is its ability to stand on its own without explanation, but for some reason I did read this one, which has some quite interesting background information. It seems likely that at least some of the novel's original readers would have recognized Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the characters of Harry Davis and Camilla Lawrence. Certainly their friends and family did. The Wise Virgins was first published in October 1914, and Leonard said 'the war killed it dead'. It was not republished until 1979. Lyndall Gordon's introduction to this Persephone edition comments that on its first publication the reviewers had little idea what Woolf was on about, but on its second it was read too closely as a roman a clef.

The story opens "Man is not naturally a gregarious animal, though he has become so under the compulsion of circumstances and civilization." It develops the argument that although people would naturally have lived in solitary caves circumstances have forced them to live in ever tighter groups, with builders building rows of houses for whole classes of people rather than individual houses for individual families, but behind each door "each is still a monogamous and solitary animal, mysteriously himself in his thoughts and his feelings, jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergyman and the gold ring, as she came to him in the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed". London intellectuals go out to the suburbs and exclaim 'Oh. these red-brick villas! All exactly the same, just like the people who live in them!" But, argues the book, they are "the same only in the thin crust which civilization has formed over the fires of their primeval feelings. They wear the same straw hats and muslin dresses in the summer, and in winter bowler hats and dark dresses; they think the same things and in the same way, because the ways of this strange world in which they find themselves wandering are so difficult to understand, and they humbly and gratefully take what is given to them. That is why they go into the builder's stuccoed villas; for them the stucco and the red brick and the wooden gables and the delicate pink of the almond blossom that brings spring for a brief week to every third house, stand for comfort and cosiness. They have been told these things and therefore they believe them; in that, it is true, they are all the same. But in themselves, in the feelings that no-one has taught them, under the painted plaster crust of straw hats and opinions, they burn each of them with a fiery individuality."

On first reading, I whizzed through this section, which goes on for about three pages, thinking 'yes, yes, get on with it', but on going back over the book in preparation for this review, I realize that this is where Woolf set out his stall.

In one of these rows of comfortable stuccoed red-brick houses, in the fictional London suburb of Richstead (a conflation of Hampstead and Richmond), lives the Garland family. The story begins in their garden one hot sunny June afternoon. Mrs Garland is a widow with four virgin daughters. Although "not strictly a virgin" she is "a widow of so many years' standing that she might almost have been said to have reached a second virginity". The Garland's garden shows no trace of masculine presence, there are two laburnum trees 'like maidens' and white arum lilies 'standing like virgins' bloom in island beds together with perfectly tended roses. Three of the daughters are sitting in the garden. Ethel, at thirty-seven, is the oldest, and is doing needlework. Gwen, the youngest, is reading a novel, as is her older sister, May. Gwen is experiencing vague discontent, which has come on her increasingly of late, but which she knows is wrong, and would not dream of mentioning. Gwen asks Ethel if she is ever annoyed by novels, their cleverness, the people in them who have everything, and whether she often thinks of herself as just like the heroine. After a pause Ethel says she used to, but doesn't think she does anymore. Gwen says she does, and supposes that everybody does, although it's absurd to do so because they're not like the people in books, who are so superior. She demonstrates the absurdity by asking Ethel to imagine one of their friends as the heroine of the novel, going off to Cornwall for a week with an artist, having conversations like the people in the book. Ethel replies 'But, Gwen, dear, it's a book. I don't think I want things to happen to me like that." Gwen asks "But, Ethel, don't you ever wish something had - would happen, I mean?"

Ethel moves the conversation on to the new family who have moved in down the street. Mrs Garland has called on them and returns to her daughters with the news that the family is called Davis, the father is a solicitor, they used to live in Bayswater and keep a carriage, and they have a daughter Hetty about the same age as Gwen, and a son who is an artist. There is some disappointment that the Davis family is probably Jewish, but that does not entirely quell the girls' excitement at the thought of meeting the son, and dresses are selected for the following evening.

Harry Davis, who is accepted to be a portrait of Leonard Woolf, though described by his sister as having Leonard's worst characteristics multiplied to the -th degree, is a curious creature. He enormously resents the move to Richstead and feels nothing but contempt for its inhabitants.

One of the most curious aspects of this novel one hundred years on is the emotional state of the characters given their ages. Gwen is twenty-four and Harry seems to be the same, yet they both seem like teenagers in that uncomfortable limbo between child and adult. Harry is given to making absurd or outrageous statements, guaranteed conversation killers. His parents apologize for him, or say he has an odd sense of humour. In fact he is uncomfortable in company and frequently plows relentlessly on with a clearly unsatisfactory subject rather than risk the trauma of finding another. Alone in his room after first meeting the Garlands he twists with anger in his chair; they haven't liked him, he hadn't got on with them, he never could get on with people; the Garlands were dull and stupid, but Gwen had been interested in him, none of them could understand him. Amongst all this angst is the other teenage classic - sex. Quite daringly for the period Woolf writes of Harry as he agonizes about the Garlands "To understand Harry Davis and his place in the universe - it would be necessary to have some account of the thoughts which now came to him. Convention and the keepers of the public conscience make this account impossible in the English language. The reader must fill up according to his or her ability eight to ten minutes introspection."

That same evening Gwen goes to bed dejected and discontented, unable to decide if Harry was nice. Had he liked her? Had he despised them all? He thought her stupid and dull; was she stupid and dull? There was something unpleasant and cynical about him, but he thought in a way unlike anyone she knew.

Harry has his eye on a girl in his art class, Camilla Lawrence. She seems romantic and mysterious to him, and he needs something romantic in his life. He thinks of her purity of face and her virgin remoteness.

Here are two different approaches to virginity. While the Garlands are virgin not only by their lack of sexual experience but also by their innocence and their life without any masculine influence, a simple, domestic, virginity, Camilla is virgin in an almost holy way, by her distance and unattainability.

Camilla's set are well heeled intellectuals who sit about in large leather armchairs talking about the arts. Camilla seems to have divided reviewers; for me she never really came off the page. She has an older sister, Katharine, who is much more interesting. She is used to some extent as a foil for Camilla; Katherine is more engaged with the world, more perceptive and wise than Camilla. She is also physically attractive, soft and alluring. Harry despairingly asks himself why, if he is to be in love with anyone, couldn't he be in love with her.

While dreaming of Camilla Harry entertains himself by widening Gwen's literary horizons. He starts her off with Dostoevky's Idiot and moves her to "The Master Builder". While he thinks of her enough to provide the books, he sees her too seldom for her to discuss the books with him, nor does it occur to him that she might wish to do so. The unpleasant prudish vicar engaged to Gwen's sister May attempts to keep Gwen away from Harry, and finally tells him that the books he has been lending her are 'not quite the thing' for a young girl to read, as without the experience of life to enable them to see clearly their minds will be unsettled.

Ultimately, in a return to the theme of her opening discussion with Ethel, Gwen does take the books as a model for life, specifically identifying herself with Hilda in The Master Builder. Harry's contempt for suburban life has fueled the discontent which she already felt, and the books have shown her other ways to live.

Harry indulgently applauds Gwen when she tells him that she is going to model herself on Hilda, however when she prepares to throw aside her present life he is appalled. While she quotes back at him his own words he finds himself absurdly thinking of a line from Hedda Gabler "People don't do those sorts of things", but after all he's said it's impossible for him to tell her so. Speaking to Camilla later he says "It was all an absurd mistake. I talked to Gwen as you - we all talk... she believed, as we don't"

Harry's relationship with truth is complicated, as it is for most people. He is a great advocate of truth telling, as, it seems, are the members of Camilla's circle. Katharine tells him that Camilla's boundaries between truth and fantasy are soft, and that she cannot be told the truth about herself, which of course what needs to be done to save Harry.

Sometimes Harry seems to say things he doesn't believe just for shock value or to fill gaps in conversation. Sometimes he seems to say them just to be conventional. Sometimes he says them to avoid saying what he means. Sometimes it is almost as though he is two people, the thinking one and the one that is spouting whatever he is saying. In one particularly good passage he lies because he's expected to:-

"He looked straight into her eyes. It seemed to him that he was watching coldly what was going on within. He could have laughed bitterly at himself, at her, at the whole world. It seemed to him that he saw her soul, her miserable, weak, frightened soul, forcing itself to believe his lying words. It knew they were lies, it knew they were lies. It was turning in there, squirming down there. It believed, it had shut its eyes. She flushed. It believed - she believed. He could have taken her by the throat and shaken her.'

One of the subjects Harry brings up most frequently is his Jewishness. Given his general anger and lack of social ease I found it hard to decide what he was doing in his outbursts on the subject. His comments are harsh, yet he says he is proud of being a Jew. Sometimes it seems he is using his Jewishness simultaneously as a device to distance himself and an excuse for that distance. He will never be like the others, he is the Wandering Jew, he admires but despises Gentile women for their paleness and bloodlessness. He says that Jews want money, knowledge, intelligence, and taste, in order to get power to do things and influence people, which is in itself a form of creativity. On some occasions his outbursts seem intended to offend by their very unpleasantness the person to whom he is speaking. But he also ascribes to his Jewishness his energy, his desire to do rather than just be.

Woolf was writing at a time when anti-Semitism was fairly standard in many, if not most, circles, and indeed many of the other characters in the novel express suspicion or dislike of Jews. At times even the narrative sections of the book read harshly. Mrs Davis is described as having been a handsome woman, but someone who would look better under a palm tree swathed in scarves singing the Song of Miriam. Reviewers at the time of original publication were also confused, some wondering at the author's harsh view of his own people, with others wondering why he would boast of being a Jew.

Despite Harry's contempt for them, the novel has a certain sympathy for suburban women, for it is hinted that to some degree they have all at some stage gone through a period of unrest but with no outlet have subdued their ambitions and desires in committees and cookery lessons. One of the Garland sisters, an eighteen year old boy in a woman's body, escapes by spending her life on the golf course. Harry declares himself pro-suffrage and Woolf maintained that all sensible men should adopt feminism as a policy or belief.

I could read this novel several times and get more from it each time. It would be an interesting pair to Night And Day.

An interesting but flawed novel, largely autobiographical, centered in a yound disillusioned Jewish man at the beginning of the 20th century and his differing life and romantic choices: the bohemian, intelligent, independent Camilla and the suburban, unsatisfied but conventional Gwen. Its main problem is a certain unevenness of tone and purpose: however, the book is excellent in the satirical examination of suburban life and the examination of the power relationships and self-delusions of courtship and romance. ( )

Goodness! Persephone certainly publish some fascinating and hugely readable books! The Wise Virgins - Pesephone no 43 - is beautifully written to start with. Added to that is the tantalising idea that it is said to be, in part at least, autobiographical. The novel concerns young adults, their feelings of restlessness and disappointment in the narrow, restricted world they inhabit. The novel explores, with great honesty, what few choices there were for young people at this time. their lives regulated by convention, they had little option but to marry and settle down to family life. For those intellectuals and artists, who might want more than mere middle class domesticity out of life, the world seemed a dull and pointless place. ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/jul08.html#woolftwv ( )