VIRGINIA WOOLF: TWITTER'S PATRON

Folks of all temperaments and occupations keenly share their belief that the Information Age is uniquely foolhardy and strident. They bleat their case ever-so-dimly, “Twitter- oh!”, before collapsing into the familiar embrace of their fainting couch. Virginia Woolf begs to differ – and commonly does so in fewer than 280 characters:

“We could both wish that one’s first impression of [Katherine Mansfield] was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap.”

– Diary, 1917

“A more despicable set of creatures I never saw. They come in furred like seals & scented like civets, condescend to pull a few novels about on the counter, & then demand languidly whether there is anything amusing.”

– Diary, January 13th, 1917

“I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that [Katherine Mansfield’s] mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too.”

– Diary, August 7th, 1918

“Hope (Mirrlees) has been for the weekend—over-dressed, over elaborate, scented, extravagant, yet with thick nose, thick ankles; a little unrefined, I mean.”

– Diary, November 23rd, 1920

“Pale, marmoreal [T.S.] Eliot was there last week, like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head, until he warms a little, which he did.”

– Diary, February 16th, 1921

“I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this is on par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again.”

– Diary, August 16th, 1922

"[E.M. Forster's] mother is slowly dispatching him, I think—He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.”

– Letter, May 1926

“[F]ate has not been kind to [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place. The primers dismiss her … In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned to her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where … she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.”

– In The Common Reader, 1932

“Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed: but then there’s all the letters and the request for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the N.S.—thus procuring more rain drops.”

– Diary, October 29th, 1933

“I am reading Point Counter Point [by Aldous Huxley]. Not a good novel. All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

– Diary, January 23rd, 1935

On Sigmund Freud: “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralysed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.”

– Diary, January 29th, 1939