Creative Writing Bolton Manchester’Her heart was made of liquid sunsets’: Virginia Woolf’s How should one read a book?

Woolf’s reading of Jane Austen’s characterization of Mr Woodhouse, seamlessly explores Austen’s  deployment  of narrative ‘point of view’.

For Woolf  is a brilliant reader. She recognizes here that Austen makes her characterization seem natural, as if  we are merely overhearing Mr Woodhouse’s conversations and making up our own minds about him as we go about our business. He seems to ‘evolve’ as in life! 

Thus once  the original ‘seed’ about Mr Woodhouse’s character  is planted  by Austen’s declarative  third person narrator, the rest of his ‘character’ seems to evolve naturally, proving the orginal idea, ever growing before us as we encounter and re-encounter him amidst Highbury’s community.

Reading Woolf years ago as an undergraduate changed my life: she was a revelation both in her fiction and her critical essays/reviews. 

I still find her writing wonderful and she makes me cry. 

To the Lighthouse is perhaps the most perfect elegy  in English prose.

This brief exploration of Austen’s Emma is delivered with the understated  ease of a most beautiful mind!

“Matrimony as the origin of
change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she 
says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that 
her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. 
We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were
here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought
of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to 
reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let
us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah
that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you men-
tioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and 
humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s
character seen from three different points of view at once;
as he seems himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen

by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen
herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her
characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.

 

Bonus Austen: ‘I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.’
Jane Austen, Letter to Cassandra, 31st May 1811