So sorry, I thought for some reason that we were starting this today - but even if I hadn't thought that, I'd not have got to it till today, as I was desperately finishing South Riding, which - hurrah! - I have done, and written the review. I loved this book.
So now on to Virginia. I took my little Bloomsbury Classics copy out with me this morning, and sat on a log in the woods to read it. Blue skies, birdsong, lovely.
What she is on about, in my opinion, is the imbalance between the sexes - which was of course much more pronounced in her time, but still very much exists today. I don't think she is denigrating the minister's wife who has 13 children, she is just saying that that rate of procreation doesn't leave you much time for anything else - and Seton's mother was not poor, she would have had help, even if not as much as would have been on offer to Woolf, had she ever had a child.
The reason she describes those meals in such detail is to point up the difference between the extremely well endowed men's colleges and the extremely poor women's ones. This is still the case today, even though almost all of the formerly all-female colleges at Oxbridge are now mixed. Places like Girton (the slightly less prestigious women's college - now mixed - at Cambridge) will never have the kind of resources that, eg, Trinity or St John's enjoy, because they are much newer, and the women who started them did, indeed, have a hell of a time getting past the conservatism that said women should not be educated in the first place.
They were also often located outwith the town, partly because the men's colleges had already used mosyt of the land up, partly because the land out the way was cheaper, and partly, I am sure, to protect the female students' morals. Newnham College in Cambridge is an exception, in that it is within walking distance of the centre, It was always seen as the most academic of the all women colleges, and has certainly produced a lot of famous alumnae. Nevertheless, inside it still felt like a girls' boarding school.
Oxbridge is very much a term still in use here. At school we were asked if we intended to apply to Oxbridge - the choice of which of the two universities, and which college at that university, could be then be made.
And the not walking on the grass thing is still a thing too! Woolf is actually told not to walk on it becasue she is not a Fellow, not primarily because she is female, though of course the beadle (often called a porter) would have instantly known that she could not have been a fellow, because she was the wrong sex (at that time). In my own college, the only people allowed to walk on the front lawn are fellows and graduates. Hence I can now do so - but was still chased by a porter last time I did (as soon as I showed him my membership card he was very apologetic, and of course it wasn't his fault, the place is overrun with tourists). However, in King's Chapel it would now be unlikley that anyone would be denied access to a service, unless it was a private thing - maybe a funeral or something - or one of the Christmas services, which are so busy that they have to be ticketed. Re the college library, that would definitely be a members' only place - partly because it is meant to be for study, not sightseeing, and partly because some of the old libraries have some extremely valuable tomes on the shelves. These days they probably have barriers and alarms, but when i was there they certainly didn't, so it was up to the librarian to check who was going in and out.
I found the description of the parsimonious tea back at Mary Seton's college very convincing. It smacked to me of Barbara Pym (who was an undergraduate at St Hilda's College, Oxford in the early 1930s). The catering at the old men's colleges would still be extremely lavish for special dinners, and most have some sort of High Table every night (though not with particularly smart food) as well as an earlier cafeteria style option.
(And speaking of Pym, Radio 4 is currently serialising a new biography by Paula Byrne 'The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym'. I was a bit cynical about this at first - I felt that Hazel Holt [Pym's friend and literary executor] had done such a good job with the one she published in 1990 that I didn't think there could be much to add. I also hadn't really liked Byrne's book about Evelyn Waugh. However, from the second instalment onwards this seems to have a lot of new material - I wonder if this is partly because Holt, as a longtime friend and contemporary of Pym's, would never have revealed things that Barbara might not have wanted revealed, whereas Byrne is neither so has a freer hand? So we learn that Pym had an active sex life from the time she arrived in Oxford - which I imagine was quite unusual for a middle class girl from the provinces at that time. She also had quite an interest in Nazi Germany for a while, until she realised what Nazism entailed.)
And going back to VW, one of my beefs with her is that she understands all of these important things, but she still can't resist those snobby little comments:
'These houses...raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces...'
I have only read the first chapter so far. When will we move on to the next one? Next Thursday?
Thanks for suggesting this Dana, it's very interesting.
