Wonderful essay on Virginia Woolf by Benjamin Schwarz. He has a gift that isn't often noticed. He quotes well. Woolf could be an atrocious snob. But still, she was a snob who could say this, in a lecture to the Workers' Education Association in 1940:
'Let us bear in mind a piece of advice that an eminent Victorian who was also an eminent pedestrian once gave to walkers: “Whenever you see a board up with ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted,’ trespass at once.” Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground … It is thus that English literature will survive this war … if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.'
I wish I'd written that.
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