“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
Female writers were practically non-existent until the 18th century in England. That is to say, financially successful writers. Most who did publish did so at their own expense and, as a result, female writers as a whole were viewed with disdain as amateurs or, worse, time-wasting dilettantes. Aphra Behn revolutionized the landscape for all women in the country by being the first to prove a woman could actually make a living from the income produced by writing.
Lord Byron
Woolf pours on the irony and strikes the match in a conflagration that announces she came to bury Byron, not praise him. Admitting that the poet is the ultimate icon of the beautifully brooding soul of the poet, she then proceeds to deconstruct as myth that all women are in love with him. They are merely following what they have been told, she insists, after pointing out as evidence a remarkably list of unattractive qualities which truth must admits belong to Byron. Then, the final slice with the knife:
“To fall in love with Byron…obviously one must be a man; or, if of the other sex, disguise it.”
Understatement
A subtle little bit of irony in the face of a truism far from subtle becomes the punctuation mark to Woolf’s sociological investigation into dearth of women writers in the 1400’s. After pointing out the very real and manifest threat of physical violence to which a young woman would be subject under the hypothetical condition of refusing a marriage proposal in favor of pursuing a literary career, she writes that
“the spiritual atmosphere was not favorable to the production of works of art.”
Women and Men
The battle of the sexes is the war in which Woolf takes up arms and accounts herself quite the strategic general. And one of her fiercest weapons is that sharp sense of ironic appraisal of certain truths often stated with a deceptively quiet but immensely powerful droll sense of humor:
“It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald, but save in these respects, and in others where they are said to be identical with men, we know little of them and have little sound evidence upon which to base our conclusions.”
The Duchess
The opening of this essay is a quote from its titular subject, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. From the proceeds a heartfelt appraisal of her work itself that is ultimately an exercise in irony precisely because Woolf must supply so much background information and history for one of the least familiar figures in the entire text:
“All I desire is fame” the Duchess once wrote before getting her wish come true during her lifetime.
