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Author: Hermione Lee
Quotes of Author: Hermione Lee
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  1. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures - for they are rather under life size - will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.
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  2. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    We can allow ourselves this 1920s picture of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, dancing the Chicken Strut or the Memphis Shake together, with Leonard, pehaps, winding up the gramophone, after tea on a June afternoon.
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  3. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    In a political discussion about the empire, Harold the diplomat argued for the benefits of colonial rule: 'our English genius is for government.' Raymond opposed him: 'The governed don't seem to enjoy it.
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  4. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    She had an absurd meeting, arranged by Violet Trefusis and Raymond Mortimer, with Violet's mother Mrs Keppel, the ex-mistress of Edward VII. Both had anticipated having nothing to say to each other, but {Violet remembered} they did find one congenial subject: 'Personally I've always been in favour of six cylinders though I know some people think four are less trouble.' 'My dear Mrs Keppel, you wouldn't hesitate if you saw the new Lanchester with the fluid fly-wheel!' Neither {Violet Trefusis commented} knew a thing about motors, but both thought 'they were on safe ground'.20 It was just the sort of anecdote Lytton would have enjoyed.
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  5. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    In Downhill All the Way, Leonard remembers them returning from an evening spent with Vanessa in her studio in Fitzroy Street. {This was in 1930.}A drunk woman was being abused by two passers-by and was then accosted by a policeman who seemed to Leonard to be 'deliberately trying to goad her into doing something which would justify an arrest'. He lost his temper, challenged the policeman in front of a small crowd, and made him let the woman go. What Leonard omitted to mention in his reminiscence was that he and Virginia had been to a fancy-dress party for Angelica's eleventh birthday. Virginia was dressed as a {'mad'} March Hare, with a pair of hare's ears and paws. Roger Fry, at the party, had been a wonderfully characterful White Knight. And Leonard was 'wearing a green baize apron and a pair of chisels as the Carpenter'. But as he tackled the policeman {'Why dont you go for the men who began it? My name's Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman's not to blame'}, 'holding his apron and chisel in one hand',114 he forgot all about his comical fancy-dress in his anger and his determination to see justice done.
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  6. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. {Virginia Woolf, p. 11}"
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  7. Hermione Lee _ Body Parts: Essays on

    From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland {1585-1639} gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian {and} Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.
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  8. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job – unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher. But biography is bound to reflect changing and conflicting concepts about
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  9. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self.
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  10. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when 'the writer tells his own story', since only he knows the whole truth about himself. {He does not use the word 'autobiography', which only came into circulation in the early 19th century.} Those who write about another may want to over-praise him or 'aggravate his infamy'; those who write about themselves, he says – optimistically – have no 'motive to falsehood' except 'self-love', and we are all on the watch for that.
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  11. Hermione Lee _ Virginia Woolf

    A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. {Virginia Woolf, p. 11}
    book-quotelifewoolf
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