Virginia Woolf channeling Jane Austen

Recently an essay by me appeared in The Yale Review on the career of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, in particular Warner's lesser status in comparison with her almost exact contemporary, Virginia Woolf. At the conclusion of my essay, I contrasted their differing treatments, in their own essays, of Jane Austen. It seemed to me that in writing of Austen's greatness, Woolf was speaking of herself. For instance, of Austen's unfinished early novel, The Watsons, Woolf writes (in Common Reader I): "Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature."

Virginia was a scribbler from an early age, and her "juvenilia" have been published, as have her girlhood diaries and letters. One can't help thinking that she was concerned from early on with creating a literary legacy and of situating herself in the "canon" of English literature. Note the opening of her essay on the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, which appeared in 1932 in Common Reader II:

"When we think how many millions of words have been written and printed in England in the past three hundred years, and how the vast majority have died out without leaving any trace, it is tempting to wonder what quality the words of Donne possess that we should still hear them distinctly today."

The only thing holding her back, if you believe what you read in A Room of One's Own, was a lack of a university education. Anyone who has read her essays, however, can see that Virginia Woolf was quite learned, if not in an academic sense. Indeed, she enjoyed the best kind of education for a writer: she grew up in a literary household, had access to her father's library, and read all the time.

To return to Woolf's channeling of Jane Austen. In a scholarly study of Austen, I came across the following excerpt from a letter Jane wrote to James Stanier Clarke, who had written to her suggesting a clergyman for the hero of her next novel. Austen declined, saying that she knew nothing about the subjects of men's conversations, for instance, science and philosophy. And here is the pay quote (with my emphasis):

"A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."

Do I make my case? Did Woolf go on to spin this into A Room of One's Own?

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