To manage the Washington Review of Books, it was at least necessary to read and think.
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In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, David Trotter reviews two books about Mrs. Dalloway (The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway, by Edward Mendelson, September; and Mrs. Dalloway: Biography of a Novel, by Mark Hussey, May) and two reissues of it (edited by Edward Mendelson, September; and edited by Trudi Tate, May):
Austen said that she had chosen “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Woolf, too, takes the considerable risk of adopting the point of view of a protagonist whose sense of entitlement makes her hard to warm to. In both cases, the entitlement stems from the privileges bestowed by wealth and status (Emma is the only one of Austen’s heroines to be guaranteed financial security from the outset). Austen allows us to imagine that unconditional looking, in itself the expression of an admirable lust for life, may at the same time induce or strengthen complacency. Emma, of course, has by her side that most tactful of scourges, Mr. Knightley, whose gentle admonishing will pave the way for her redemption from entitlement. Woolf seems to have felt that Clarissa would merit sterner measures. She duly appointed a pair of harpies to do the job. For in Mrs. Dalloway she meant not only to give voice to the spirit of criticism, but to dwell in detail on its embodiment: its atmospheres, its methods and mannerisms.
[The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway was the Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 27, 2025. “The atmospheres of criticism” is a great phrase. —Steve]
In the TLS, Andrew Hadfield reviews two books about seventeenth-century English literature (The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 4. 1603–1660: Literary Cultures of the Early Seventeenth Century, by Katharine Eisaman Maus, June; and The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature, by Robert Hudson Vincent, February):
Vincent argues with considerable logic that we have been taken in by nativist terms such as “metaphysical” and should realize that English literature was less insular than is often assumed, and that links to Europe were vital to its development. It is perhaps not surprising that many writers associated with the baroque were either Catholics or well versed in European devotional culture.
In a chapter on how nature is conceived in all its manifold forms via the baroque, Vincent turns to Enobarbus’ elaborate description of Cleopatra sitting in state in a regal barge in Antony and Cleopatra, suggesting that the play encourages the audience to ask: “does the imitation of nature’s excesses lead to wonder or confusion? Pleasure or ruin? Glory or catastrophe?” It’s undoubtedly a good question, but I couldn’t help feeling that it could be asked of many such passages that contain studied and elaborate metaphors connecting the artificial beauty of human objects to natural forms. If we take this thinking seriously, we will surely have to think of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and Thomas Nashe as baroque authors, as well as Shakespeare.
[If we go back to what Dr. Johnson said about the “race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets” we find, among other things:
Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.
But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
Set aside the low opinion of these poets and this is clearly a description of the baroque. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Clare Bucknell reviews a book about female writers in early modern England (Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England, by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, September):
Several female writers, Scott-Baumann shows, responded by claiming that classical learning was a burden or a danger rather than a gift. “You say; you affect proze, as your auncestors did; Error is not to bee affected for antiquitye,” Southwell warned Ridgeway in her defense of poetry. In the dedication to her Lucretius translation, Hutchinson contended that the study of “Pagan Poets & Philosophers”—tutors pressing pre-Christian texts on their young students—was “one greate means of debauching the learned world”: “They puddle all the streames of Truth, that flow downe to them from devine Grace, with this Pagan mud.” Mount Helicon, in Greek mythology home to the Muses and the spring of divine inspiration, was to her a sort of licentious, drunken pleasure garden: “Those walkes of witt which poore vainglorious schollars call the Muses groves, are enchanted thicketts, and while they tipple att their celebrated Helicon, they loose their lives.”
Cavendish went further, claiming (disingenuously) not to have read anything and to be a better writer for it. Flamboyant claims of ignorance of the classical sources that her rivals prized crop up repeatedly in her critical writings. “Scholars are never good Poets,” she announces in her essay collection The Worlds Olio (1655). “Great scholars are Metamorphos’d or transmigrated into as many several shapes, as they read Authors, which makes them monstrous, and their head is nothing but a lumber stuft with old commodities.” (The notion of the scholarly mind as a lumber room, a dusty attic full of household junk, was a direct hit at Jonson and his cherished notion of reading and writing as mental “furniture.”)
[Claiming never to have read anything is fantastic. More people should do it. I personally can’t, since I owe too much to the modernist-Callimachean-huge nerd strain, but other people should.
I don’t know whether Hutchinson knew the Tertullian phrase everyone quotes (maybe everyone hadn’t started quoting it yet? She does cite other works of his in her On the Principles of the Christian Religion, though):
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?
But she certainly knew the source of its language:
For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols?
And when Hutchinson makes this argument the image she uses is that of polluted water; when Milton, writing at around the same time, wants to put the same argument about impurity in the mouth of the Son in Paradise Regained he uses a different image:
Remove their swelling Epithetes thick laid
As varnish on a Harlots cheek, the rest,
Thin sown with aught of profit or delight,
Will far be found unworthy to compare
With Sion’s songs . . .
—Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Catullus, Thomas Wyatt, and So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) (three things of equal importance to Western civilization.)
The source of the crisis of authority in criticism (maybe this is what it felt like to be one of those Victorian explorers hunting for the source of the Nile)
K. T. on a Poem by Jorgenrique Adoum and the work of translating idiosyncratic uses of language
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
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