By Ali Smith
Genius and ink: the phrase that gives this book its title has been notched out of ‘On Re-reading Novels’, one of the essays by Virginia Woolf written over two decades as a reviewer and critic for the Times Literary Supplement. Ostensibly a consideration of Percy Lubbock’s 1921 publication The Craft of Fiction, the real focus of ‘On Re-reading Novels’ is the beginnings of the critical attempt towards a fuller understanding of the novel as form. Woolf wrote it at a time when ideas about the shape of the novel were about to defy all former imaginings. James Joyce’s Ulysses had been serialized and passed around in bits and pieces for the preceding four years and was finally published in its entirety in early 1922; and Woolf’s own transformatory work had begun with her first truly great experimental novel Jacob’s Room, which she published three months after this essay appeared. You might say the whole notion of what a novel could be was being re-read.
So what makes a novel a novel, then? ‘Obviously there must be a process, and it is at work always and in every novel’, she writes in July 1922. ‘We must have been aware that a novelist, before he can persuade us that his world is real and his people alive, must solve certain questions and acquire certain skill. But until Mr. Lubbock pierced through the flesh and made us look at the skeleton we were almost ready to believe that nothing was needed but genius and ink.’ Thank you, Mr. L, she says, for the helpful attention paid to the concept of process, meanwhile she quietly infers that his splaying-open of the form is also a kind of killing.
When it comes to literary form and its relation to concepts of reality, or concepts of literary/literal aliveness in the form of the novel, Woolf would ask something a lot more vital from critical response. This collection lets its readers trace the formation of her own critical voice, through her responses to a range of classic (and not so classic) writers and literary forms. It charts a timeline of pieces via which her open, wry and intuitive reading of a work or a writer shifts in potency from an early brilliance that’s conscious of (and still a bit beholden to) deference to tradition, to the finding of a formidable vital intelligence of voice and critical form, one which would revolutionize the possibilities of critical writing.
She complains repeatedly in her diaries about how little she gets paid for it, but she clearly loved writing for the TLS. She also habitually, playfully, always fruitfully, tended to baulk against or question notions of establishment and authority, especially literary establishment, so it’s no surprise to find her in her diaries yo-yo-ing between feeling ‘important