Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- List of Abbreviations
- HERITAGE: A DEBATE
- HERITAGE, EDUCATION, AND MENTORING
- HERITAGE SPACES
- LITERARY AND CULTURAL HERITAGES
- Virginia Woolf in Greece: “Curious contrasts!”: Hellenism and Englishness
- Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition
- Silence, Darkness, and Dirt: Mysticism and Materiality in The Years and Between the Acts
- Virginia Woolf Reads the Romantics
- A Critical Heritage: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, and Walter Scott
- “Where Childhood's dreams are twined”: Virginia Woolf and the Literary Heritage of Lewis Carroll
- QUEER PASTS
- MODERNISM AND HERITAGE
- WRITING LIVES AND HISTORIES
- WOOLF'S LEGACIES
- FINALE
- Notes on Contributors
A Critical Heritage: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, and Walter Scott
from LITERARY AND CULTURAL HERITAGES
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- List of Abbreviations
- HERITAGE: A DEBATE
- HERITAGE, EDUCATION, AND MENTORING
- HERITAGE SPACES
- LITERARY AND CULTURAL HERITAGES
- Virginia Woolf in Greece: “Curious contrasts!”: Hellenism and Englishness
- Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition
- Silence, Darkness, and Dirt: Mysticism and Materiality in The Years and Between the Acts
- Virginia Woolf Reads the Romantics
- A Critical Heritage: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, and Walter Scott
- “Where Childhood's dreams are twined”: Virginia Woolf and the Literary Heritage of Lewis Carroll
- QUEER PASTS
- MODERNISM AND HERITAGE
- WRITING LIVES AND HISTORIES
- WOOLF'S LEGACIES
- FINALE
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
On the occasion of her fifteenth birthday, Virginia Woolf received J. G. Lockhart's ten-volume Life of Scott from her father, Leslie Stephen. Lockhart's biography of Walter Scott is still considered a definitive account of the Scottish novelist, and the work contains a prodigious amount of Scott's personal writings; among the diaries and letters is even a lighthouse diary that tracks a six-week journey Scott took in 1814 to tour lighthouses off the Scottish coast. Leslie Stephen gifted the leather-bound volumes to his daughter out of his own collection and with a mind toward continuing his engagement with his daughter's reading habits. Young Virginia often commented in her letters about her father's strict instruction, and Stephen's interest in his daughter's literary education was an important facet of their relationship. Lockhart's extensive biography, it would seem, was simply another tome of instruction. However, Woolf was particularly thrilled by this weighty gift, writing to her brother:
Gradually all my presents have arrived—Father's Lockhart came the evening I wrote to you—ten most exquisite little volumes, half bound in purple leather, with gilt scrolls and twirls and thistles everywhere, and a most artistic blue and brown mottling on their other parts. So my blinded eyesight is poring more than ever over miserable books—only not even you, my dear brother, could give such an epithet to these lovely creatures. (L1 4)
Calling the volumes “lovely creatures,” Woolf 's excitement over the gift is palpable. Such enthusiasm for Lockhart's work and subject did not diminish as the texts remained in Woolf's possession, and an appreciation for Walter Scott soon transferred from father to daughter.
Critics often mark Woolf's interest in Walter Scott to be a function of grief or nostalgia, and suggest that the relationship between Woolf and Scott is largely sustained by the specter of Leslie Stephen (Parrott 32, DeSalvo 226–27). However, Woolf's view of the link between Scott and Stephen moves beyond mere nostalgic inclination. Leslie Stephen's role in establishing a critical tradition on Scott's work was hugely influential to his daughter's eventual writings on Scott. Stephen's position in the relationship between Scott and Woolf is a pivotal one, and is more fluid than the mere posthumous influence that critics point to.
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- Virginia Woolf and Heritage , pp. 115 - 120Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017