Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh

F. W. BATESON MEMORIAL LECTURE

Punctuation and its Contents:Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh

H. R. WOUDHUYSEN

F. W. BATESON, in whose memory this lecture is given, was nogreat lover of the novel: compared to poetry and the drama, hefelt it was an inferior genre that did not attract his discerningcritical attention. So it might seem strange to use this occasionto look at the work of two twentieth century novelists, VirginiaWoolf and Evelyn Waugh, about both of whose work Batesonhad significant reservations. In as much as I have an excuse todo this, it is because Bateson had a real interest in textual andeditorial questions, as well as in bringing those two old imaginaryfoes language and literature together. He was a strong advocateof modernised texts, and wrestled with questions about spellingand punctuation, opposing the idea that ‘the ability to composegreat literature necessarily carries with it the ability to spelland punctuate it correctly’. For him, punctuation, broadlycharacterised as one of the accidental as opposed to the substan-tive features of a text, ‘should always be modernized’, butnot when ‘such a process affects the meaning’ – a positionthat G. Thomas Tanselle wittily characterised as a statementthat ‘amounts to saying that accidentals should never bemodernized’.1

Essays in Criticism Vol. 62 No. 3# The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgs012

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When Bateson started the Longman Annotated English Poetsseries, his General Editor’s note stated that:

Obsolete or inconsistent systems of spelling, punctuation,capitalization and similar conventions of the originalprinting-house, including those of the author himself, haveaccordingly been modernized.

Or, to put it another way, ‘whatever impedes the reader’s sympa-thetic identification with the poet […] – whether of spelling,punctuation or the use of initial capitals – must be regarded asundesirable’.2 Thinking about punctuation and spellingmattered to Bateson as an editor and as a critic. In his 1975article in Essays in Criticism, ‘Could Chaucer Spell?’ (theanswer is ‘yes’), he wrote:

To the question ‘Could Shakespeare spell?’ the answermust clearly be ‘Yes, in a sort of a way, but very badly’.Could he punctuate? ‘No, hardly at all’.

In the end, this did not matter, for as long as ‘communication isnot impeded’, great poets and dramatists did not have to be ableto ‘spell or punctuate correctly’. Of course, the judgement ofwhen communication is impeded by spelling and punctuationis a nice one, but in the article he also thinks about anotheraspect of the question that concerns him, that ‘recent Chaucerianscholarship’ believes ‘that all the longer poems – and no doubtsome of the short ones too – were written to be read aloud’.3 Ishall return to this subject a little later.Bateson’s concern was with punctuation in plays and poetry:

novels were another matter, and he seems to have had little tosay about their editing. His opinion of Virginia Woolf waslow: the great experimentalists of twentieth century fiction, hewrote, were Gide, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, ‘and the de-cidedly less great Virginia Woolf’.4 His view of Evelyn Waugh,two years or so below him at Oxford, was less clear. ‘Whothen are the founts of Good English to-day?’, he asked inEssays in Criticism in 1961:

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I was surprised to learn in two recent issues of the NewStatesman that the best English being written just nowwas by Evelyn Waugh. (The testimonial came fromKingsley Martin and Paul Johnson.) Is Waugh’s prose asgood as all that? I must say I had never suspected it. Wewere undergraduates together at Oxford, distant andrather uncordial acquaintances, and Waugh’s prose stylehas always seemed to me sound Oxford prose – lessmannered than that of Graham Greene and PeterQuennell, who were of the same undergraduate generation,or Aldous Huxley’s, who preceded us by a few years – butnot by any means the real Good English (which for me isin the line of descent from Swift and so tends towardsShaw’s prefaces or Orwell).

By the end of the 1960s he had changed his mind andproposed that Waugh’s ‘prose style was perhaps the bestof his generation’.5

The juxtaposition of Woolf and Waugh might strike somepeople as a little odd: the worlds of Hyde Park Gate, Blooms-bury, and Rodmell probably seem rather far from those ofGolders Green, Piers Court, and Combe Florey. In the intervalbetween sending his manuscript of the short story ‘TheBalance’ to the Hogarth Press in 1925 and its rejection, Waughwas lent one of Woolf’s novels, probably Mrs Dalloway,‘which I refuse to believe is good’.6 He enjoyed Orlando agreat deal more, being ‘transported’ by it, while regretting ‘theslight Clive Bell self consciousness – the references to the fact ofthe book she is writing being a book’.7 In his journalism,Waugh has a good dig at ‘the Peter Pans of Bloomsbury, theskittish old critics who will not grow up, who must always bein the movement’ and expressed contempt for ‘some people inBloomsbury’ whose ‘whole life is occupied in trying to bemodern’.8

Although they had friends and interests in common (HenryGreene’s novels were published by the Hogarth Press), Waughhad little to say about Virginia Woolf. Her view of him and ofthe Bright Young People more generally is equally obscure,since they do not feature significantly in her published diaries,

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letters, or essays. Neither writer comments at any length on theother, and it seems that they never actually met. In July 1930, fol-lowing the crash of an aeroplane on the way from Le Touquet toCroydon, Virginia Woolf cut going to a dinner for thirty put onby Lady Cunard; Waugh did go to it, recording in his diary that‘Some of the young women did not see fit to turn up so that Ifound myself with an empty chair on one side […] The dinnerwas very good’.9 The episode (though not Woolf’s absentpresence) has rightly been connected to John Andrew’s deathin A Handful of Dust.10 If the empty chair is emblematic oftheir paths not crossing, that is not to say that they were quiteunaware of each other’s worlds. Hermione Lee has pointedout, for example, that inBrideshead RevisitedCharles Ryder fur-nishes his Oxford rooms with ‘a screen, painted by Roger Frywith a Provençal landscape, which I had bought inexpensivelywhen the Omega workshops were sold up’, and that Fry’sVision and Design, as well as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victor-ians, are among Ryder’s ‘meagre and commonplace’ books.11

One interest that Woolf and Waugh more or less shared wasprinting. There is much still to be found out about theworkings and the history of the Hogarth Press, but VirginiaWoolf’s close involvement in its activities – setting, composing,printing, and distributing the type herself – is well known. In amuch more minor way, Waugh had done some printing atLancing where he was at school, but his friendship at Oxfordwith Alastair Graham, ‘My closest chum once’, brought himinto contact with a different sort of book production from thatof his father’s firm Chapman and Hall.12 After Graham wassent down from Brasenose College, his mother apprenticed himto learn printing at the Shakespeare Head Press in Stratford.Waugh spent part of the later summer of 1925 at Graham’shome at Barford, with ‘Alastair working at his printing on apress bought second-hand from Leonard Woolf’.13 The nextyear, Graham printed Waugh’s first book, P.R.B: An Essay onthe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1847-1854 in an edition offifty copies signed by the author. During the 1920s, in additionto the typographer Oliver Simon and James Guthrie, the ownerof the Pear Tree Press, Waugh met Stanley Morison who


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inspired him to spend perhaps as long as part of a day attemptingto design new typefaces.14

Waugh was fully aware of the relative fixity of what wasprinted or typewritten compared to his own handwriting. In1935, on the way to Djibouti, he told his future wife LauraHerbert that the Daily Mail had given him a typewriter:

It is really quite easy if tou [sic] go slow and know how tospell. That is my difficulty as up till now I have used noncommital letters when in doubt and there dont seem to beany on the type writer.15

Typographic form and style mattered to Waugh and, for a time,were part of Woolf’s daily life.

In addition to this interest in printing, admittedly stronger andlonger lasting for Woolf than for Waugh, the two writers hadanother experience in common. In both their childhoods,reading out loud was a significant occasion, as it would havebeen for most children of their generations (she was nearlytwenty-two years older than him) and class. In the first half of1897 alone, when his younger daughter was 15, Leslie Stephenread or recited from Henry Esmond, Tennyson, The Antiquary,‘Peter Bell’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Caleb Williams,Sohrab and Rustum, Maud, and Macaulay’s ‘The Armada’,while in the same period Virginia Stephen read Felix Holt, TheLifted Veil, Wives and Daughters (for the second time), andNorth and South to her elder sister Vanessa.16 The Stephenfamily readings were usually happy occasions, although theColeridge ‘was rather a failure – almost ending in the middlefuriously’, but the ones in the Waugh household appear tohave been more tense and difficult. Arthur Waugh lovedamateur theatricals and embraced any opportunity to givedramatic recitations; above all he liked to read from Dickens,whose works his company published.17 His performancesappear to have embarrassed his younger son who associatedthese sorts of display with a difficult atmosphere. In BridesheadRevisited, the narrator explains ‘It was the custom, I learnedlater, always to ask Lady Marchmain to read aloud on evenings


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of family tension’ (p. 128): in the course of the novel she doesquite a lot of reading out loud.Reading out loud is occasionally described inWoolf’s writings,

as when in Night and Day Mr Hilbery reads Scott to his indig-nant daughter Katharine in an attempt to turn her ‘into a civilizedhuman being’; or when in To the LighthouseMrs Ramsay readsto her son James the story of the Fisherman and his Wife; orwhen, in an essay, Woolf describes how ‘Down in thebasement the cook is reading a newspaper aloud’.18 As is wellknown, Waugh’s treatment of the subject is fuller and muchmore disturbing:

‘You are fond of Dickens?’‘Why, yes, of course. More than fond, far more. You see,

they are the only books I have ever heard. My father used toread them and then later the black man… and now you. Ihave heard them all several times by now but I never gettired; there is always more to be learned and noticed, somany characters, so many changes of scene, so manywords… I have all Dickens’s books here except those thatthe ants devoured. It takes a long time to read them all –more than two years.’

The exchange between Tony Last and Mr Todd in AHandful ofDust looks back to the beginning of the book when Brenda readsto Tony from the newspaper over breakfast. The narratorcontinues:

He had always rather enjoyed reading aloud and in thefirst year of marriage had shared several books in this waywith Brenda, until one day, in a moment of frankness, sheremarked that it was torture to her. He had read to JohnAndrew, late in the afternoon, in winter, while the childsat before the nursery fender eating his supper. But MrTodd was a unique audience.19

What is at first an enjoyable experience for Tony soon developsan atmosphere of menace, then declines to open threats and im-prisonment, as he works his way through Bleak House,Dombey


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and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit,Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit again.The paragraph in whichMr Todd talks about his fondness for

being readDickens aloud is, perhaps, notable for its punctuation:there are two sets of three-point ellipses and a dash. These can, ofcourse, be seen on the page, but supposing one were to read AHandful of Dust aloud, howmight one reproduce these ellipticaland parenthetical marks? Not even a skilful and experiencedreader could convey the difference between a pair of dashesand a pair of brackets and would have trouble making thepresence of a three-point ellipsis felt (although actors managethis in performing Beckett’s and Pinter’s plays).20 The onlyphysical rather than vocal enactment for a mark of punctuationin regular use is the unlovely ‘scare-quotes’ or their physicalmanifestation in the ‘air quotes’ that are put around words,according to the OED ‘to indicate that what is being said isironic, mocking, or disingenuous, or is not a turn of phrasethe speaker would typically employ’. Since ‘air quotes’ are appar-ently American in origin, they are usually made with two fingersof each hand and signal double inverted commas.In the Renaissance, as Jonathan Hope has argued, ‘punctu-

ation marks are primarily notes towards an oral performance,not ends in themselves’, but in much later writing, not least inrelation to the different forms of modernism to which Woolfand Waugh might be said to belong, literary works exist asvisual experiences as much as, if not on some occasions morethan, auditory ones. Jim McLaverty has written with great in-genuity and persuasiveness about the leading role Pope’sDunciad Variorum played in this process and described how ‘lit-erature is seen as well as heard’.21 Reading aloud or being read toaloud might be all sorts of things: from a nightmare of tediumand dullness, to a highly entertaining and pleasurable experience,to – more unsettlingly perhaps, as in Bernhard Schlink’s TheReader – a deeply erotic and intimate one, or to a solitary andself-conscious one as when Waugh ‘cut out of the publishededition [of Brideshead Revisited] any turns of phrase whichwere hard to read aloud’.22 What is lost in reading aloud is theauthor’s attempt to conveymeaning and nuance through punctu-ation, in addition to the visual signals communicated by the look


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or appearance of the text itself. To take only the most obviousexample, The Waste Land has a carefully limited supply ofbrackets, dashes, and ellipses, while few pages in Joyce’swritings are free of such marks. How differently does Kipling’smost famous poem, ‘If—’, appear without its following dash,or the epigraph to A Passage to India, ‘only connect…’,without its three following points? For that matter, how mightone signal the absence of possessive apostrophes in the titles ofForster’s Howards End or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake whenspeaking of them?Although the history of punctuation in the English novel still

remains to be written, Woolf and Waugh are by no meansunique in their use of it for different effects. They are both con-cerned with the degrees of containment and freedom that itoffers and how it relates to the rest of the text. The chiefphysical marks of these effects are the three-point ellipses, thedashes, and the brackets that both authors so liked. In rhetoricalterms ellipses are the outward and visible signs of aposiopesis;brackets of parenthesis; dashes can belong to both schemes.Marks of ellipsis, indicating interruption and absence, can befound in a few sixteenth century English books, but come intotheir ownwith the drama andwith Ben Jonson’s plays in particu-lar. Anne Henry has shown how Richardson and Sterne adoptedvarious typographical devices, including asterisks and printers’flowers, to mark interruption and to create gaps in their narra-tives. In the nineteenth century, various lengths of dashes orrules were employed to distinguish between different sorts ofinterruption, and by mid-century, she argues, three-pointellipses ‘were being used to mark the crises that shake the mostorderly of nineteenth-century worlds’. Citing the critical recep-tion Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors(1901) received, she suggests that ‘It was the achievement of mod-ernism to transform “…” from a mark of the aberrant or climac-tic narrative occurrence to a symbol of everyday speech’.23

Parentheses have received more attention than ellipses, chieflythrough John Lennard’s work in relation to English verse. Whiledrawing attention to the different uses to which parentheses (orlunulae, as he prefers to call them) have been put in authorssuch as Marvell, Coleridge, Byron, and T. S. Eliot, Lennard is


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acutely aware of their visual effect on the reader and the import-ance theymay have for editors. Sterne’s ‘typographical trickery’ isdiscussed and Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘parenthesis’ in thefirst edition of the Dictionary is quoted:

A sentence so included in another sentence, as that it may betaken out, without injuring the sense of that which inclosesit: being commonly marked thus, ().

Lennard finds this definition ‘as bizarre as it has been influential’,disliking the limitation of the mark just to round brackets andJohnson’s evident contempt for them.24 What is also strikingabout Johnson’s definition is the idea that what is inside the par-enthesis could be removed without ‘injuring the sense of thatwhich incloses it’. This goes very much against Lennard’slarger argument, one that might find further support in thenovels of Woolf and Waugh, neither of whom is mentioned inhis stimulating account.There is no shortage of brackets or of dashes of both kinds in

the great Victorian novelists – Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës,George Eliot – but on the whole they do not use three-pointellipses. Hardy’s use of these markings grows, as Henry hasdocumented, from eight in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)to just under 200 in Jude the Obscure (1896).25 Who else usedthem? They appear in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879)and in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), butnot – to take two authors at random – in Henry James’s fictionor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s. One writer who makes heavyuse of ellipses in her novels is Anne Ritchie, Thackeray’sdaughter; in Old Kensington, for example, published in 1873,the year after Under the Greenwood Tree, there are aroundseventy three-, four-, and (rather thrillingly) five-point ellipses,as well as numerous dashes signalling interruption. In onespeech, Ritchie seems to seek to capture the flux of mind as‘the simple baronet’ Sir Thomas speaks of Dolly’s happiness:

The engagement seems to be neither on nor off .… She tellsme that Robert is free, but she seems to consider herselfbound .… I have thought it best to write to him plainly on


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the subject.…My wife, as you know, wishes the engage-ment entirely broken… at least I think so .… 26

This use of punctuation may well have attracted VirginiaWoolf’sattention, since Ritchie was her ‘Aunt Anny’, touches ofwhom can be found in Mrs Hilbery in Night and Day.More explicitly, in 1921, Woolf acknowledged how LyttonStrachey’s punctuation – ‘two semi-colons, dash, note of ex-clamation, full stop’ – seeped into her style.27

One certain source of influence on Waugh was RonaldFirbank, all of whose fictions are rich in ellipses, interruptingand signalling the unexpressed and the inexpressible, seekingabove all compression and brevity: ‘I am all design – once I getgoing’, he wrote; ‘I think nothing of filing fifty pages down tomake a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots’.28

Firbank may also be the source for one of Waugh’s favouritepractices, the insertion within brackets of all sorts of supplemen-tary matter – jokes, comments, ideas – as if they were part of anintermittent marginal commentary. On the other hand, three ofthe modern writers Waugh most admired, P. G. Wodehouse,Saki, and Ernest Hemingway, were generally very sparing intheir use of elliptical punctuation of this kind. The same is truefor the novels of Henry Green and of Ivy Compton Burnett,but not of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier of 1915 orNorman Douglas’s South Wind of 1917, in which ellipsesoccur quite frequently.Of course ellipses, dashes, and brackets were not the only

marks that Woolf and Waugh either used or commented on.Not all punctuation was significant; Virginia Woolf liked todescribe proof correcting in terms of taking commas and semi-colons out or of putting them back in.29 Yet she also constantlyexploits the different visual effects punctuation offers her. Shewrites on the subject in her diary as well as in her letters, refer-ring, for example, to what she once called ‘the labour ofinverted commas’. ‘Am I in love with her?’ she asked herselfabout Vita Sackville-West in May 1926, ‘But what is love? Herbeing “in love” (it must be comma’d thus) with me, excites &flatters; & interests’. The isolation of the ‘in love’ by invertedcommas is complemented by the brackets around ‘comma’d’, a


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nonce verb unrecorded in the OED. In September of the sameyear, she wrote, ‘Then I’m astonishingly happy in the country— a state of mind which, if I did not dislike hyphens, I shouldhyphen, to show that it is a state by itself’.30 Much might bemade of this self-proclaimed dislike of hyphens, but many ofthe OED’s first citations for properly hyphenated compoundadjectives are from Woolf. These include ‘book-fed’, ‘lightning-quick’, ‘man-womanly’, ‘moth-coloured’, ‘nerve-drawn’, ‘road-running’, ‘snail-green’, ‘sponge-bag’ as in the trousers, and,rather unexpectedly, ‘thigh-slapping’. Whether the hyphens arethe printer’s or her own is another matter. To take one moreexample, in Jacob’s Room:

Captain George Boase had caught a monster shark. Oneside of the triangular hoarding said so in red, blue, andyellow letters; and each line ended with three differentlycoloured notes of exclamation.31

She may be gently mocking the unloved exclamation mark, butshe was not entirely averse to it herself, and her early lettersand occasional passages in her diary are peppered with them.32

Some of her uses of these marks are truly exclamatory,although a few teeter on the brink of marking excitement oremphasising what the sentence in which they occur already says.In his letters (or at least those that have been published),

Waugh is much more restrained with exclamation marks,although some people might think that he had rather moreoccasion to use them than Woolf. Excluding reported speech,there are perhaps no more than a handful in his private corres-pondence and another handful in his diaries, all correctly used.Waugh rarely comments on punctuation and in his diaries,letters, and journalism, generally seeks to keep it to aminimum; he allows himself the occasional ellipsis or dash anda set of inverted commas for what he called ‘jargon-words’. Inthis part of his writing, punctuation is generally expected to beself-effacing, so that Malcolm Muggeridge is praised for his useof it which ‘though not always orthodox (commas beforeands), is usually consistent’.33


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Some of the most celebrated moments in Virginia Woolf’s fictionhave a powerful engagement with punctuation: when she writesabout her literary art, punctuation never seems far from hermind. It is as though the non-verbal marks on the page becameincreasingly important to Woolf as a means of expression.Perhaps the most famous or notorious piece of punctuation

in Woolf’s fiction comes in the middle section, ‘Time Passes’, ofTo the Lighthouse, where the death of Mrs Ramsay is signalledin a paragraph contained by a pair of square brackets:

[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched hisarms out one dark morning, but Mrs Ramsay having diedrather suddenly the night before, he stretched his armsout. They remained empty.]34

In ‘Time Passes’, Woolf changes her usual punctuation: there arenone of the three-point ellipses used elsewhere in the novel andalmost all the dashes in the section are used parenthetically. Itcontains seven passages marked off by square brackets and allare set as paragraphs: things happen in them, but here actionis, as it is so often in Woolf’s fiction, parenthetical to thedesign of the novel. She had used square brackets before inJacob’s Room to describe Jacob talking to Durrant, but theycome in the middle of a sentence (p. 37). Square bracketsoccur again in To the Lighthouse, in the last part of the novel,where the whole of section 6 is devoted to describing part ofthe boat trip to the lighthouse:

[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square outof its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it wasalive still) was thrown back into the sea.]

The round brackets within the square ones tell their own story:contrary to Johnson’s definition, removing their contents doesinjure the sense of the surrounding sentence.‘Time Passes’ can be taken as a parenthesis between the two

more extended parts of a sentence moving from ‘The Window’

to ‘The Lighthouse’. In a similar way, the importance of the inter-stitial or the parenthetical can be seen in the title of Woolf’s last


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novel,Between the Acts. That title might also bemeant to suggestthe bounding of time between the two world wars or the warsthemselves. This is the sense in which David Jones refers to theGreat War:

This writing is called ‘In Parenthesis’ because I havewritten it in a kind of space between—I don’t knowbetween quite what—but as you turn aside to do something;and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for thewriter, who was not only amateur, but grotesquely incom-petent a knocker-over of piles, a parade’s despair) the waritself was a parenthesis—how glad we thought we were tostep outside its brackets at the end of ’18—and alsobecause our curious type of existence here is altogether inparenthesis.35

Many of the parentheses in Between the Acts explicate andexpand on the novel’s various dramatic performances, providing,as they do elsewhere, a sort of commentary on the events of theday, moving in and out of people’s consciousness. Waugh uses asimilar technique in Vile Bodies for the Colonel’s commentsduring the showing of A Brand from the Burning: A FilmBased on the Life of John Wesley.36

There is an element in authors’ use of brackets that can becompared to the interjections of a heckler.37 When Woolfobserved in her diary of The Waves, ‘(humour is what itlacks)’, it is not entirely clear that she sees the humour of herown parenthetical observation in the same way that she did inOrlando where she wrote: ‘“Time passed” (here the exactamount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whateverhappened’.38 But on occasions, the relationship between thetext and its commentary becomes unclear. Already in Jacob’sRoom, whole paragraphs were being put within roundbrackets (e.g. pp. 116-17); in To the Lighthouse, the novelWoolf once thought of finishing ‘in a parenthesis’, the round-bracketed paragraphs become longer and fuller, swell to twoparagraphs, and even occupy a whole section (I. 14) of six para-graphs in about eight pages.39 The same use of extended paren-thetical paragraphs occurs inTheWaveswhere there are brackets


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around multiple sets of paragraphs spoken by Louis andRhoda.40

These brackets are full to overflowing, rich in material,allowing more to be said, even if it is unsayable other than tooneself, as when Richard Dalloway holds out flowers for hiswife, ‘(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; notin so many words.)’.41 Woolf’s other favourite marks of punctu-ation, the dash and the ellipsis, are representative of, amongmany other things, incompletion and indeterminacy. InJanuary 1926, immediately after a visit from Vita Sackville-Westhad come to an end, Woolf wrote in her diary ‘One wants tofinish sentences’, but in her constant restatements of the battlebetween completed words and unfinished punctuation, thelatter increasingly came to win.42 In a letter of 1911, Woolfwrote about Jacques Raverat: ‘in two months, he says,…ThatI take to mean, bed with Gwen. It is portentous; I think thedots give the feeling rather well’. A year later, she said‘However, I’m…That describes my state of mind. Very well’.43

This sort of early certainty as to what ellipses might convey tothe reader gave way to the unspeakable. The last entry, on 24March 1940, in her diary recorded that ‘L. is doing the rhodo-dendrons…’, with no clear sense of what the three points (ifthey are actually authorial) signal.44 She was well aware of theemptiness of the elliptical: on holiday in Italy, at Piacenza inMay 1933, she wrote ‘Perhaps in this disoriented life onethinks, if I can say what day it is, then…Three dots to signifyI dont know what I mean’. As with the brackets proposed forthe conclusion of To the Lighthouse, she described her plan for‘The Jessamy Brides’, the work she had in mind in March1927, prefiguring Orlando and The Waves: ‘My own lyric veinis to be satirised. Everything mocked. And it is to end withthree dots… so’. She could also imagine a more disturbing endto her own life, in October 1940, being killed by a bomb. ‘Yes.Terrifying. I suppose so — Then a swoon; a drum; two orthree gulps attempting consciousness — & then, dot dot dot’ –the absence of a full stop after the final vocalised dot ischaracteristic.45

In the fiction, speech and the babble of conversation are rich inellipses and dashes, marking pauses, silences, suspense, repetition


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(the ticking of a clock in Jacob’s Room, ‘tick, tick, tick… tick,tick, tick’ (p. 83)) and the unsaid or indecipherable (the sky-writing inMrs Dalloway, the forgotten names of social acquain-tances, the expiring gramophone in Between the Acts).46 Theycome at the end of sentences and paragraphs, and sometimestheir effect is actually described, as when in Mrs Dalloway,Septimus Warren Smith’s wife Lucrezia says: ‘“That’ll do forthe moment. Later…” her sentenced bubbled away drip, drip,drip, like a contented tap left running’ (p. 217). But they canalso be used to indicate discontented frustration, as when,having reached Q, Professor Ramsay tries to go further: ‘“ThenR…” He braced himself. He clenched himself […] He wouldnever reach R.On to R, oncemore. R—’ (p. 57). Themodulationbetween the spoken letter with the three-point ellipsis and theunspoken same letter with the dash is striking, but its exactmeaning is unclear. In The Waves, the book in which Bernardrecalls having said that ‘life had been imperfect, an unfinishedphrase’ (p. 310), the ellipsis all but disappears and even dashesare, at times (for example in the sixth section of the book),used sparingly.In her diaries,Woolf occasionally used dashes tomark omitted

or forgotten names.47 More often, as in modern practice, sheemployed them to signal obscene words that could not bespelled out in full: their first and last letters appear to functionas brackets around an empty (or all too full) parenthesis. Sheonce called this, in relation to Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘putting in thethoughts between dashes’.48 The difficulty this can cause ismade explicit in an exchange recorded from Sunday tea in July1923 with the Eliots about The Waste Land:

V. I’ve been setting up your poem. Its a good poem.Vivien a damned good poem, did you say?V. Well, you’ve improved what I said. But it is a d——dgood poem.49

Vivienne Eliot’s speech can be reported, butWoolf found spellingout a swear-word from her own lips or pen almost impossible.50

This might well be contrasted with Jacob’s contempt for:


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Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, [who] had issued an edition ofWycherley without stating that he had left out, disembow-elled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecentwords and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said;a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mindand a disgusting nature. (p. 112)

The paragraph in which this occurs begins with Jacob exclaiming(in full and in the narrator’s words, ‘rather too extravagantly’),‘“Damned swine!”’51

Perhaps her most characteristic use of the extended dash is forthe inexpressible. This was a habit acquired young. In her diaryfor May 1897 she said of her sister, ‘Nessa was at her most——— (to be filled in as desired) studio’.52 The extended dashgives scope for all sorts of possibilities. Nearly thirty years laterin the diaries, in a famous passage which is itself containedwithin brackets, she contemplated her new novel:

(But while I try to write, I am making up “To the Light-house”—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have anidea that I will invent a new name for my books tosupplant “novel”. A new —— by Virginia Woolf. Butwhat? Elegy?)53

If attention has focused on the elegiac quality of her work, the useof punctuation to express the inexpressible is characteristic, as is alater passage from 1930 about The Waves:

How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in whichevery life shall have its voice—a mosaic—a——. I do notknow.54

Elliptical punctuation allows Woolf in her writing to resistmeaning and interpretation, while at the same time expressingthem obliquely. It permits her, in other words, to escape orevade the phrase-making against which her fiction so oftenprotests.Much more has been claimed for it than what one early

reviewer (of Jacob’s Room) called her ‘dot-and-dash method’.55

The importance of the parenthetical and elliptical to Woolf’s


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writing, especially inARoom ofOne’s Own andThree Guineas,has been explored by feminist critics. In these readings, her use ofparentheses is seen by Denise Delorey as a means ‘to deflate thedramatic events on which traditional masculinist narratives (andhistory) turned’.56 Equally, for Rachel Bowlby, ‘The dotted line[…] points out the arbitrariness of a masculine line ofprogress’, and ‘the woman […] can only be represented aswhat is left out, as a dotted line […] alluding to something elsethat cannot be said’.57 There can be little doubt that punctuationis a central feature in her writing and in her thinking about artand sexual politics.

Few readers would look for or claim to be able to find feministsignificance in Evelyn Waugh’s ellipses, brackets, and dashes,but his use of them in his fiction is in some ways just as well con-sidered as Virginia Woolf’s. However, where her aim – at least inThe Waves – was to get everything in, his art relies on leavingthings out. Brigid Brophy identified this, arguing that ‘Waughhad written – and, almost as much as written, omitted – in frag-ments and ellipses, like a fiercer Firbank’.58 This is what makeshis use of brackets in his fiction so unexpected. If brackets gener-ally represent what can be cut out without loss (as Johnson’s def-inition stated), then why add material by making use of them?Waugh’s juvenilia and early stories have scarcely any round

brackets; there are just over half a dozen in Decline and Fall(1928), mostly containing additional information, but sometending towards the dry aside. Vile Bodies of 1930 is different.Following the novel’s second sentence, the Jesuit Father Roths-child’s suitcase and its contents are described in three sentencesenclosed within a set of brackets: ‘It contained some rudimentaryunderclothes, six important new books in six languages, a falsebeard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated’(p. 9). Thus begins Waugh’s new infatuation with brackets.Like the ‘small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide’, theycontain the unexpected and present a distinctive perspective onthe world of the surrounding narrative: they also provide ahome for some of his best jokes. In Vile Bodies, Waugh adds anew element to his parenthetical practice by including spokencomments within brackets. On the rough Channel crossing at


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the start of the book, when the Revivalist Mrs Melrose Apestrides into the ship’s bar and orders a double rum before har-anguing the unwell passengers, one of them, drunk and distinctlyill, is made to repeat his earlier excuse, but now it appears withinbrackets, ‘(“Not sea-sick, ventilation,” saidMrHendersonmech-anically)’. And whenMrs Ape tells the passengers, ‘“We’re goingto sing a song together, you and me”’, the novel’s protagonist ismade to respond parenthetically: ‘(“Oh, God,” said Adam.)’(pp. 19, 20) – the ‘song’ about Hope succeeds in healing themin ‘body and soul’. Besides this spoken commentary, Waughalso uses brackets to mark off whole paragraphs, with one set en-closing four of them describing the ‘grave debate in the servants’hall about the exact status of angels’ – they are, of course, nurses(p. 93).In the second part of the novel, there is a further elaboration on

the uses of brackets. At a party, Nina reminds Adam that the firsttime she sent him to try to extract money from her father, it wasat Archie Schwert’s party. Adam expostulates: ‘“Oh, Nina, whata lot of parties.”’ The next, bracketed paragraph describes someof them:

(…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties,Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circusparties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else,almost naked parties in St John’s Wood […] dull dancesin London and comic dances in Scotland and disgustingdances in Paris – all that succession and repetition ofmassed humanity. …Those vile bodies…) (p. 123)

In addition to ellipses and the dash, it is striking that the bracketscontain the book’s title – a title whose seriousness derives from itsassociation with St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians and its use inthe Book of Common Prayer’s Burial Service.59

Like all infatuations, Waugh’s love of brackets was not asimple one, and his affections cooled in Black Mischief (1932),which has just over a dozen, none of much significance or con-taining speech. The affair reached its peak in A Handful ofDust (1934). Here, there is the same use of brackets for comic


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passages, such as the description of Tony Last’s brother-in-law’seating:

He ate in a ruthless manner, champing his food (it was hishabit, often, without noticing it, to consume things thatothers usually left on their plates, the heads and tails ofwhiting, whole mouthfuls of chicken bone, peach stonesand apple cores, cheese rinds and the fibrous parts of theartichoke). (p. 169)

A set of brackets is used for comment on the Vicar of Hetton’sunusual and distinctive sermons:

(‘The Reverend Tendril ’e do speak uncommon ’igh of theQueen,’ a gardener’s wife had once remarked to Tony.)(p. 38)

But bracketed speech also takes the place of direct comment onhow things change for Tony at Hetton. With Brenda inLondon, he gives up the faddy diet he had shared with her, butthen changes arrangements again:

(‘Ambrose, when I’malone I don’t really need a long dinner.In future I’ll just have two courses.’) (p. 89)

The economyof thewriting here contrasts with the expansivenessof the longer bracketed episodes later in the book which impres-sionistically and evocatively describe Tony’s three significant tripsabroad before he joins Dr Messinger in search of a city(pp. 179-80). A comparable effect is achieved when, torturedby insects in his hammock, in a long bracketed parenthesis(p. 196) Tony thinks of London parties and remembers howmany he went to with Brenda before they became engaged andhow few after they were married. Brackets and memory occuragain when, in the jungle, Dr Messinger abandons the map ofthe area with relish:

(Roll up the map – you will not need it again for howmany years, said William Pitt…memories of Tony’sprivate school came back to him at Dr Messinger’s words,


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of inky little desks and a coloured picture of a Viking raid, ofMr Trotter who had taught him history and wore very vividties.) (p. 204)

These unspoken remembrances of things past are to an extentself-consciously Proustian and fitting in a novel which has twochapters whose titles take the form ‘Du Côté de Chez […]’.They are complemented by a story, within brackets, whichTony tells himself, while he reads to Mr Todd, of his futurehomecoming. His ‘gradual re-encounters with civilization’ willinclude good food on the liner to Europe, a shy first meetingwith his wife and uncertainty as to how to address her:

…‘Darling, you’ve been much longer than you said. I quitethought you were lost…’ (pp. 246-7)

This is the only set of brackets in the chapter and in fact the lastset in the book.Perhaps the most interesting set of them in the novel describes

the behaviour of Jock Grant-Menzies’s shameless blonde(p. 110). Her arrival coincides with John Andrew’s death.While she and Tony wait for the terrible news to be given toBrenda in London, Mrs Rattery, ‘American by origin, nowtotally denationalized’ (p. 112), is playing ‘intricate four packpatience on a card table’ (p. 126), the same lengthy game shehad played the night before (p. 113):

(Mrs Rattery sat intent over her game, moving littlegroups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards aboutthe table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingersorder grew out of chaos; she established sequence and pre-cedence; the symbols before her became coherent,interrelated.)

The game does not work out (‘“It’s a heart-breaking game,” shesaid’), she abandons it and pulls the cards ‘into a heap, haphaz-ard once more and without meaning’ (p. 127). Mrs Rattery thensuggests that she and Tony, who cannot play patience, trybezique or piquet; but he only knows how to play animalsnap. Their game and behaviour are witnessed by Albert the


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butler, who expresses his amazement in a painfully comicparenthesis:

(‘Sitting there clucking like a ’en,’ Albert reported, ‘andthe little fellow lying dead upstairs.’) (p. 130)

Her brief ability to make order triumph over chaos, to establishsequence and precedence and to make symbols coherent andrelated to each other clearly contrasts with the world of the restof the novel: the game she plays goes to its heart. Like amodern deus ex machina, Mrs Rattery descends on Hetton byaeroplane, but she does not provide a solution to an otherwiseintractable situation, other than by getting Tony through theafternoon. In some ways, her card-playing may remind thereader of other classical figures, the Fates or Parcae, foralthough conventionally they were depicted as spinning, theycould also appear weaving, and Mrs Rattery’s fingers move thecards ‘about the table like shuttles across a loom’. MrsRattery’s game of patience is also a metaphor for what writersthemselves do or are meant to do – bring order out of chaos,the reverse of what Waugh is trying to achieve here.In the course of his career, the contents of Waugh’s brackets

develop from bearing information, then jokes, especiallyspoken comments, to containing the significant and essential.The jokes continue in Scoop (1938): ‘(for the better sort of Ish-maelites have been Christian for many centuries and will notpublicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without specialand costly dispensation from their bishop)’.60 However, inBrideshead Revisited (1945), more essential and significantmaterial is made to appear parenthetically. So, for example, thedescription of the skull Charles Ryder has in his rooms inOxford with the motto ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, which supplies thetitle for Book One, and the fact that Ryder’s wife, Celia, is‘Boy’ Mulcaster’s sister both appear in round brackets (pp. 43,221). All of this use of brackets is a version of the techniqueAnn Pasternak Slater has detected in Waugh’s fiction of theright things happening in the wrong places. Brackets allowauthors to create a visible form of dislocation: what is saidwithin them establishes a visually subversive dialogue with the


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main part of the narrative, a dialogue that, far from being remov-able without loss of meaning, is essential to it, but which has tobe seen to be understood.

Literary history is bound up with authors’ personal relationships(or the lack of them). It encompasses the development of genresand movements, but it also touches on changes in style and thehistory of the language, including the history of punctuation.One of the most encouraging and exciting critical developmentsof the last twenty or thirty years has been the way that book his-torians have helped us think about the material forms texts takeand thereby contributed to our understanding of them. F. W.Bateson had intimations of this, and understood what could bedone with brackets. In 1946 he edited a volume, calledTowards a Socialist Agriculture, for the Left Book Club and towhich, besides essays on subjects such as ‘Farm Sizes andLayouts’ and ‘The Ownership of Agricultural Land’, he contrib-uted a poem, ‘Lines on the Buckinghamshire Parish MachineryPools’. Its penultimate stanza seeks to evoke:

This lovely evening, my shouting children(All Brill was playing rounders in the garden),The zooming efficient bombers in the skyConspired with meditations on the PoolsTo a daydream of a New England, like WilliamBlake’s […]61

That punctuation again.

Professor Woudhuysen’s lecture was delivered at Corpus ChristiCollege, Oxford on 25 April 2012.

NOTES

It has not been possible to reproduce the exact typography ofsome of the punctuation from the works discussed above. In par-ticular, the spacing of ellipses and dashes, as well as their length,has in most cases, been standardised. Matter omitted from quo-tations has been represented by three points enclosed in squarebrackets thus: […]. All other ellipses are those of the originalauthors.


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1 G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Greg’s Theory of Copy-Text and theEditing of American Literature’, Studies in Bibliography, 28(1975), 167-229: 227 n. 99, repr. in Selected Studies in Bibliog-raphy (Charlottesville, Va., 1979). Tanselle was discussingBateson’s chapter on ‘Textual Criticism’ in The Scholar-Critic:An Introduction to Literary Research (1972), pp. 126-46; thequotations come from pp. 139, 142.2 The first quotation comes fromBateson’s note toThe Poems ofThomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. RogerLonsdale (London and Harlow, 1969), p. xi, the second fromhis note to The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks(London and Harlow, 1969), p. xv. The note differs in thesetwo editions and it is not clear which was written first. Neitherof the two earlier Longman Annotated Poets volumes, KennethAllott’s edition of The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London andHarlow, 1965) and John Carey and Alastair Fowler’s ThePoems of John Milton (London and Harlow, 1968), in whichthe editors ‘reproduced old punctuation with diplomatic faithful-ness’ (p. x), has a General Editor’s note.3 F. W. Bateson, ‘Could Chaucer Spell?’, E in C, XXV (1975),2-24: 4: the italics are in the original.4 F. W. Bateson, Essays in Critical Dissent (1972), p. 242.5 F. W. Bateson, ‘Editorial Commentary: The First Ten Years’,E in C, XI (1961), 80-3: 82; ‘Eng. Lit. As It Could Be’ (1969),repr. in Essays in Critical Dissent, p. 191. The change of viewis pointed out by Valentine Cunningham in ‘F. W. Bateson:Scholar, Critic, and Scholar-Critic’, E in C, XXIX (1979),139-55: 143-4.6 The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (1976),pp. 222, 225; Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The EarlyYears 1903-1939 (London and Melbourne, 1986), p. 126.7 The Letters of EvelynWaugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980), p. 29.Waugh’s letter is undated and assigned to ‘[October 1928]’; herefers to ‘Reading Orlando’ in a diary entry for 15 October1928: see Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, p. 298. The first tradeedition of Orlando was published on 11 October 1928: seeB. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th edn.,by B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke (Oxford, 1997), p. 61.


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8 The Essays, Articles and Reviews of EvelynWaugh, ed. DonatGallagher (1983), pp. 46, 123; there are further references toBloomsbury on pp. 257, 274, and 301 and to Woolf on p. 424.9 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell andAndrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (1977-84), iii. 409; Diaries ofEvelyn Waugh, p. 323.10 Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘Waugh’s A Handful of Dust: RightThings inWrong Places’,E inC, XXXII (1982), 48-68: 67-8 n. 9.11 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Harmondsworth,1962), p. 29; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996), p. 470.The Omega workshops failed in 1919. Waugh seems to haveadmired Lytton Strachey as a biographer and lent a friendRoger Fry’s Flemish Art (Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, pp. 233,288). For Strachey’s view of Decline and Fall (‘not soamusing’), see Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A CriticalBiography, 2 vols. (1967-8), ii. 570.12 Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 589.13 Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994), pp. 65,110, 137. It has not been possible to identify this press fromVirginia Woolf’s letters and diaries or from J. H. Willis, Jr.,Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press,1917-41 (Charlottesville, Va., and London, 1992).14 Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, pp. 182, 190-1, 192-3, 298. Asample of Waugh’s early bibliographical knowledge can befound in his biography Edmund Campion (1935), pp. 146-7.15 Letters of Evelyn Waugh, pp. 95-6.16 Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals1897-1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (1990), pp. 15, 21, 22, 23,26, 66, 80-1, 83, 107; 48, 56, 57, 59. Cf. Lee, Virginia Woolf,pp. 112-13.17 Hastings, Evelyn Waugh, pp. 13-14, 24-5, 27.18 VirginiaWoolf,Night andDay, ed. Julia Briggs (1992), p. 406;‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), in The Essays ofVirginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6vols. (1986-2011), iv. 394.19 Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1964), p. 241, and seep. 21. Although the second paragraph is rewritten from the1933 story ‘TheManWho Liked Dickens’, the first and its punc-tuation are substantially the same. See Evelyn Waugh, The


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Complete Short Stories and Selected Drawings, ed. Ann Paster-nak Slater (1998), pp. 127, 128.20 Cf. Christopher Ricks, ‘Geoffrey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atroci-ties”’, in The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984), pp. 285-318, esp.pp. 293-5.21 Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Elo-quence and Artifice in the Renaissance (2010), pp. 100-1;James McLaverty, ‘The Mode of Existence of Literary Worksof Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum’, Studies in Bibliog-raphy, 37 (1984), 82-105: 96.22 Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 206.23 Anne C. Henry, ‘The Re-mark-able Rise of “…”: ReadingEllipsis Marks in Literary Texts’, in Joe Bray, Miriam Handley,and Anne C. Henry (eds.),Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentationof Meaning on the Literary Page (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.,2000), pp. 120-42: 137, 138.24 John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parenthesesin English Printed Verse (Oxford, 1991), pp. 87, 91-2. He alsoquotes Boswell’s comment on Johnson, that ‘He disapprovedof parentheses; and I believe in all his voluminous writings, nothalf a dozen of them will be found’.25 Henry, ‘The Re-mark-able Rise of “…”’, p. 137.26 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Old Kensington, 2nd edn. (1873),p. 398. I owe this point to Charlotte Mitchell, ‘Aunt Annie’,TLS, 15 July 2011, 3-4, where she writes that Ritchie’s ‘playfulinconsequential tone and use of ellipsis often recall’ Woolf.27 Woolf, Letters, ii. 479.28 Quoted in Ronald Firbank, Three Novels, introd. AlanHollinghurst (2000), pp. vii-viii; ‘filing’ is sometimes spelled‘fileing’, as in Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques, ed.Mervyn Horder (1977), p. xi.29 Woolf, Diaries, ii. 149, iv. 38, 181.30 Ibid., v. 258, iii. 87, 110.31 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922), p. 25.32 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and JoanneTrautmann, 6 vols. (1975-80), i. 23, 25-6, 36, 88, 91, 138, 190,236, and cf. ii. 62. See also, for example, the diary entry for 29September 1930: Woolf, Diaries, iii. 321.33 Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, pp. 231, 232.


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34 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), pp. 277-8; thesection is incorrectly numbered ‘7’ in this edition.35 David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937), p. xv; this is from the lastparagraph of the book’s preface, dated 1 March 1937.36 Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Harmondsworth, 1938),pp. 209-10.37 Cf. Ricks, ‘Geoffrey Hill’, pp. 309-10.38 Woolf, Diaries, iii. 299; Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biog-raphy (1928), p. 91, cited in Jane Goldman, ‘From MrsDalloway toTheWaves: New Elegy and Lyric Experimentalism’,in Susan Sellers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to VirginiaWoolf (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 49-69: 60.39 Woolf, Diaries, iii. 106.40 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931), pp. 152-3 (five para-graphs), 247 (three paragraphs).41 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), p. 178.42 Woolf, Diaries, iii. 57.43 Woolf, Letters, i. 461, ii. 9.44 Woolf, Diaries, v. 359.45 Ibid., iv. 158, iii. 131, v. 327: on the last passage, see JohnWhittier-Ferguson, ‘Repetition, Remembering, Repetition:Virginia Woolf’s Late Fiction and the Return of War’, ModernFiction Studies, 57 (2011), 230-53: 247-8.46 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), pp. 85, 86, 136,235. For dots in Three Guineas, see Patricia Ondek Laurence,The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition(Stanford, Calif., 1991), pp. 107-8.47 Woolf,Diaries, iv. 78, 109, v. 29: some of these may be editor-ial omissions.48 Woolf, Letters, ii. 234.49 Woolf, Diaries, ii. 256-7, the following ‘Cetera disunt’ (sic)looks back to the first printing of Christopher Marlowe’s incom-plete Hero and Leander (1598).50 For ‘d——d’, see also Woolf, Diaries, ii. 120, iv. 8, 290, 327,331, 339, 341, v. 266, 323; for ‘d——n’, iv. 253, v. 61; for‘s——y’, ii. 136; for ‘b——s’, ii. 171; for ‘p——ing’, v. 357.The early letters to Violet Dickinson are particularly rich inthese forms: see, for example, Woolf, Letters, i. 53, 62, 83, 95,etc.


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51 For another ‘edition with asterisks’ in The Years, see Laurence,Reading of Silence, p. 108.52 Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, p. 91.53 Woolf, Diaries, iii. 34.54 Ibid., iii. 298.55 Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdarand Allen McLaurin (London and Boston, Mass., 1975),p. 106; the writer was Gerald Gould.56 See, for example, Denise Delorey, ‘Parsing the FemaleSentence: The Paradox of Containment in Virginia Woolf’s Nar-ratives’, in Kathy Mezei (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: FeministNarratology & British Women Writers (Chapel Hill, NC, andLondon, 1996), pp. 93-108: 105.57 Rachel Bowlby, ‘The Dotted Line’, in her Feminist Destina-tions and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh, 1997),pp. 137-45: 140, 145.58 Brigid Brophy, Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views andReviews (1966), p. 156.59 Stannard, Early Years, pp. 202-3, where he points out that theparenthesis is not in the complete manuscript of the novel. Thephrase ‘vile bodies’ is also used by Mr Brocklehurst, the loath-some manager of Lowood School, in Jane Eyre, ch. 7.60 EvelynWaugh, Scoop: ANovel About Journalists (Harmonds-worth, 1943), p. 74.61 F.W. Bateson (ed.),Towards a Socialist Agriculture: Studies bya Group of Fabians, Left Book Club Edition (1946), p. xii. TheBateson family report that the game was not rounders, butcricket.


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Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh

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