This was Leonard Woolf's second novel, written just before the
First World War, at the height of the suffragette movement, when
early feminism began to find its voice. Men were suddenly required
to see women differently, and this novel explores their dilemma and
the difficulties of accepting a new awareness of gender. Art
student Harry, Jewish and suburban, meets cool middle-class Camilla
in a London studio and pursues her romantically whilst painting her
portrait. But this can be no brutish capture of the girl to satisfy
his own ends, with the woman to become merely his wife at the end
of it. Mysterious and elusive Camilla is more than a prize for male
conquest; she is her own person, and the book looks at how Harry
must change his attitude to accommodate her feelings. The novel
feels like an observation of women through the wrong end of a
telescope - to the men of the early 20th century, the educated
female was a difficult and sometimes dangerous creature with a mind
and destiny of her own to follow. In a way, Woolf was looking at
how he should handle his new relationship with Virginia (he wrote
this novel soon after their marriage), how not to trespass on her
talent, how the demands of marriage would affect her writing and
how to meet his own carnal needs. Harry loves the new and
independent thinker in Camilla but he also wants a fierce melding
of souls and bodies which Camilla cannot give him - she confesses
she does not love him. Rejected, Harry is seduced by Gwen,
Camilla's contrast, a childish woman Harry knows he will grow tired
of, a woman who evokes all the unevolved attitudes with which he
has battled. In a sense Camilla is Harry's ennobling, and Gwen is
his fall. Not just a novel reflecting its times, The Wise Virgins
also stands alone as an unappreciated roman a clef in which the
lives of the famous Bloomsbury Set are thinly disguised. Essential
reading for anyone interested in the period and the people. (Kirkus
UK)
"The Wise Virgins" (1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a
dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family
business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in
artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing 'Lawrence' girls.
For, as Lyndall Gordon writes in her Persephone Preface: 'It is a
truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of
the author's wife - Virginia Woolf.' This is one reason why the
novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy,
funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and
at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional
denouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock. It was
on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his
second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven
years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same
questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in "The Sunday Times":
'It's a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair
between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time
and place. Woolf's writing is almost unbearably honest.'
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