Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, And The Detective Novel By

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VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE HOGARTH PRESS, AND THE DETECTIVE NOVEL by Diane F. Gillespie

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hy do people who teach experimental novels often go home and read, or even write, detective fiction?1 Already in 1929, in "The Professor and the Detective," American academic Marjorie Nicolson attempts to answer this question and to defend the seemingly anomalous reading habits of her peers.2 She disagrees with the "pseudopsychologist" who thinks that professors need escapes into "vicarious violence" from their ethereal, desiccated, and unreal lives of the mind. On the contrary, she writes, the lives of academics are much like those of other people. Nicolson insists that professors of her day, unlike their predecessors, do "keep up with recent literature" (113). What they need, therefore, are escapes from modernist psychological novels, with their "excessive subjectivity," lengthy "dissections of emotion," adolescent egocentricity, and lack of both form and purpose (112-14). Detective novels, she thinks, require the hardfought battles of wits between skilled authors and experienced readers that provide welcome returns to the life of the mature mind (118-19)3 Marjorie Nicolson published her 1929 essay in the Atlantic Monthly. That journal wooed Virginia Woolf as an author in 1925 and, when she wrote an essay for it in the November 1927 issue,4 described her in the "Contributors' Column" as "perhaps the most accomplished woman novelist of to-day." Since Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) both preceded Nicolson's essay, Woolf probably is one of the "children of a larger growth," one of the "'bad boys' and 'smart girls' of [contemporary] literature," who cause Nicolson to reach desperately for, and to defend the reading of, detective novels (115). One wonders what she would have thought of the apparently inconsistent decision of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press to publish two such novels. C. H. B. Kitchin's Death of My Aunt appeared in the same year as Nicolson's essay (1929), and Crime at Christmas was published five years later (1934).5 On the surface, Kitchin's titles sound appropriate, not for an avant-garde press like Hogarth, whose intention was to publish work by nontraditional writers and thinkers, but for a commercial house pitching more conventional fare to a broader reading audience. On the level of basic plot, Kitchin's two novels certainly fit W. H. Auden's definition: "a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies" (qtd. Charney xx). As J. H. Willis says, Kitchin also uses a number of "familiar English crime conventions" (159). The Hogarth Press dust jacket designs corroborate the centrality of murder. Richard Kennedy's white jacket for Death of My Aunt shows a corked bottle with a red label, a visual allusion to poison. More graphic, the unsigned cover design for Crime at Christmas shows, through an irregular hole in a red background, a loosely sketched profile of a woman's head, two hands gripping her throat. In actuality, however, the Woolfs, like Marjorie Nicolson, challenged traditional literary categories and, although they did not embrace the detective novel genre to the extent that she did, neither did they ignore it, as we would expect stereotypical mod-

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ernists, at least as she describes them, to do. Nicolson rejects the distinction between academic and "real" life and defends the reading of detective novels as a mature intellectual activity more appropriate to professorial interests than the immature introspection presumably required of readers of psychological novels. The Woolfs did not accept that distinction. They marketed Kitchin's novels in ways that emphasized their hybrid intellectual and psychological nature. Moreover, during roughly the same period that Hogarth was publishing Kitchin's detective stories, Virginia Woolf ’s fiction increasingly incorporates her awareness of criminality in British society. Although she does not write detective novels per se, she is preoccupied, throughout her career, with mysteries. By the 1930s, she has developed her own revisionary slant on the treatment of crime in fiction. No evidence exists that Virginia Woolf read Marjorie Nicolson's article when it appeared.6 In any case, Woolf took a defensive posture of her own in the early 1930s when she entered a continuing, heated debate about "highbrows" and "lowbrows" ongoing in pamphlets and journal pages and in BBC broadcasts.7 Virginia Woolf ’s essay, "Middlebrow," reacts, not to the Nicolson-type dismissal of work like hers as sophomoric egomania, but to the labeling of her writing as elitist, as "highbrow" and "Bloomsbury." Woolf embraces these intentionally derogatory labels just as Nicolson embraces the charge of escapism and redefines it as a return to the life of the mature mind. Woolf redefines highbrows, who are devoted to ideas but frequently inept in practical matters, and lowbrows, who energetically pursue their lives but often are incapable of seeing themselves from broader perspectives, not as enemies but as mutual dependents (178). They ought to join forces, in fact, against the opportunism of the charmless, vacillating "middlebrow." The "middlebrow," by Woolf ’s definition, pursues "neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige" (180). If middlebrows write, Woolf declares, they do it neither "well" nor "badly," and they treat what is neither "proper, nor [. . .] improper" (181). Any financial success only tempts them to affectation: "Georgian style" houses in South Kensington filled with "sham antiques," along with art and books by dead painters and writers (185-6). Living artists are beyond their comprehension and appreciation. Although, like middlebrows, highbrows often must write for money, once they earn enough, more like lowbrows, they pursue life. To the evaluation of writing, Woolf thus adds an analysis of writers' motives and their responses to financial success. Just as Marjorie Nicolson largely ignores distinctions among psychological novels as well as among detective novels,8 so Virginia Woolf ’s general definitions of brow heights can be difficult to apply in specific instances. The Hogarth Press's motives for publishing Kitchin's detective fiction are a case in point. Perhaps the addition of Death of My Aunt and then Crime at Christmas to the Hogarth list simply was one result of the Woolfs' irritation with facile, hostile labeling by reviewers who are, by Virginia Woolf ’s implication, middlebrows. The motive also may have been, in part, an opportunistic one. In that case, depending on how they used any profits, the Woolfs risked the middlebrow label themselves. Kitchin already was a Hogarth author whose previous two novels –"sponsored," he said, by Virginia Woolf–had lost money for the press (Willis 159). As Edward Bishop has noted, Virginia liked Hogarth Press novels to be financially viable (51). As late as August 1927, she was rejecting "bloodsucker" novels that would

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cost a lot to print and would not make a profit (Diar y 3: 150). She and Leonard, therefore, may well have considered the potential commercial value of Kitchin's turn to detective fiction. In May 1930, when the Woolfs traveled Press books in Devon and Cornwall (Diar y 3: 303), Death of My Aunt almost certainly was among them. Later that same year, however, the Woolfs talked of regaining their freedom by cutting back Press operations because, as Virginia asks her diary, "What's the point of publishing these innocuous novels & pamphlets that are neither good nor bad?" (Diar y 3: 327). On this occasion, she provides neither titles nor an evaluation of Kitchin's Death of My Aunt. That it, and its successor, Crime at Christmas, were not among the Press's bloodsuckers, however, is indicated by positive reviews and sales. Equally likely, the decision to publish Kitchin's detective novels was a manifestation of Leonard's own seemingly contradictory literary tastes–his admiration for Virginia's experimental fiction, and the experiments of others, combined with his reading and reviewing of crime writing and detective stories (Willis 158).10 Accounting in 1927 for the latter interest, he cites the involvement of the reader in discovering "what happened. We are one of the detectives," he says, and that is "part of the pleasure" ("Detective" 727). Like Nicolson's, his attraction to detective fiction is that of an intelligent puzzle-solver. If only through her relationship with Leonard, Virginia would have been aware of detective novels, but her reading habits were inconsistent, too. Her association with Bloomsbury notwithstanding, she also identified with a group of intelligent readers (Letters 4: 467) much larger than any small cohort of university-educated people, including Leonard and a number of her male friends. In "On Being III" (1926), for instance, Woolf defends the abrupt transition in her reading from "the best in literature," not just to mediocrity, but to "the worst," from Shakespeare's plays to Augustus Hare's three-volume, nineteenth-century biography of two noblewomen. Hare may be no Boswell, she writes, but his account fascinates her because, as she reads, she gradually becomes "almost one of the family" (Essays 4: 325-6). Writing her Common Reader and other essays from a nonacademic perspective for readers of fairly diverse backgrounds and tastes, she encourages them to make up their own minds about books. Indeed, like middlebrow reviewers, middlebrow college and university professors often annoyed her with their facile generalizations and categories, their presumed intimacy with writers,11 and their false masks of objectivity.12 How, she imagines asking lowbrows, "dare the middlebrows teach you how to read–Shakespeare for instance. All you have to do is to read him" ("Middlebrow" 183). As early as 1924, in her well-known essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Woolf also reveals–unexpectedly, if Nicolson's categories hold–that she has read at least some detective fiction. She combines a standard criticism of the genre for its deficiencies in characterization13 with a criticism of Arnold Bennett, who has charged her with a similar inability to create viable characters. Her example of their different perspectives is from the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. Bennett may say, she writes, "that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him; to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun" (Essays 3: 426). If Woolf ever associated detective fiction with middlebrow writers and readers, it would be because her view of "character" and the relationship between character and plot differs from that of many more conventional novelists

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of her day. Yet Woolf does not object to plot per se, just to plot divorced from characters that, by her definition, live. Unlike several writers on detective fiction, among them Dorothy Sayers, who note that "both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin" (72), Woolf does not associate Sophocles' Antigone with detective fiction when she discusses the play in 1925. She does insist, however, that Sophocles' plot is memorable "because what happens is so closely bound up with the emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one and the same time" (Essays 4: 64). Comments like these help to explain Virginia Woolf ’s part in the publication decisions about Kitchin's two detective novels. We know, from either the title or the jacket, that the crimes in both books are against women, a fact that may have activated Virginia Woolf ’s critical interest. More importantly, when we look at the jacket blurbs and the novels themselves, we discover more substantial reasons for the Hogarth Press's interest in them. The jacket blurbs deconstruct distinctions between character and plot, between modernist psychological fiction and at least Kitchin's kind of detective stories.14 Both blurbs emphasize the balance between "detective-work" and "the behaviour of the murdered women's relatives and dependents" or, as the Crime at Christmas jacket puts it, "the behaviour of normal people in abnormal circumstances." The latter blurb quotes Malcolm Warren, Kitchin's first-person narrator, a stock broker turned amateur sleuth. Warren proceeds to define "normal people" as those "whose lives come fairly close to our own, people whose psychology we can follow and sympathize with." Warren then offers a "two-fold" justification for a detective story, part of which sounds like Leonard Woolf ’s–and, indeed, Marjorie Nicolson's: "First, it presents a problem to be solved and shares, in a humble way, the charm of the acrostic and the crossword puzzle." But, Warren adds, in a way more evocative of Virginia Woolf ’s work, the "real justification" is that "it provides one with a narrow but intensive view of ordinary life, the steady flow of which is felt more keenly through the very violence of its interruption" (Kitchin, Crime 272). What we have, to adapt Virginia Woolfs much-quoted comment in "Modem Fiction," is "ordinary mind[s]" on an extraordinary day (149). Having already written in Mrs Dalloway about the violent eruption of the news of Septimus Smith's suicide into the flow of Clarissa Dalloway's party consciousness, and about the multiple deaths that reverberate through the psychic lives of the Ramsays and their guests in To the Lighthouse, Woolf must have understood, if indeed she did not help to select, this quotation. Advertised in ways consistent with the jacket blurbs, Kitchin's detective novels elicited reviews that suggest their suitability for the Hogarth list. Although faulted by some reviewers for lack of action and excitement, others compliment Kitchin on subtle character drawing that is unusual in a detective novel (Times Literar y Supplement 849) and credit the book with setting "a new standard in detective fiction" (L. P. Hartley 552). Building on the success of Kitchin's previous detective novel when they published Crime at Christmas in 1934, the Hogarth Press advertised it as a successor to Death of My Aunt, "a novel which won for Mr. Kitchin high praise and a large public as an experiment in the art of combining the emotions of every day with violent catastrophe." Crime at Christmas again features Malcolm Warren "whose sensitive individuality did so much to ensure the success of Death of My Aunt (Autumn list 1934). When

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Kitchin's second detective novel also was a success, the Press reissued the first in a cheap edition (Spring list 1935). The reviews of Crime at Christmas again emphasize the characteristics of Kitchin's book that make it a viable Hogarth Press offering. They mention its slow pace (Anderson 13) but compliment its "silken style," "cleverness" (Cuppy 16), and refinement (Saturday Re view of Literatur e 448). The Times Literar y Supplement reviewer notices Kitchin's ability to "express his sensitive perceptions in a peculiarly attractive and sympathetic style" (712). Through his narrator Malcolm Warren, Kitchin makes clear that he is writing a different kind of detective novel, even helping, J. H. Willis says, to "establish a subgenre of the species," one that includes Agatha Christie's first-person tour de for ce, The Murder of Roger Ackr oyd (1926) (159). Although Warren does not turn out to be the murderer himself in Death of My Aunt, he summarizes his actions and, primarily, his thought processes as he, in his amateurish way sets out to discover a murderer. "Unobservant with my eyes," he admits, "I prided myself on seizing psychological nuances" (Death 23). He is, therefore, antagonistic towards an Inspector who "made no allowances for the innumerable irrational acts habitually performed by rational people, had no conception of the mass of habits and inhibitions which continually regulate, unawares, the behaviour of the most normal" (Death 72). Thus "normal," even to Warren, covers a host of human complexities, as Woolf ’s own novels demonstrate. Both Kitchin and Woolf, in their probing treatment of the "normal" and the "ordinary," anticipate P. D. James's recent observation that distinctions like "normal" and "abnormal" have become much less certain in contemporary detective fiction (34). Kitchin also has written a metafictional novel within the detective-novel genre, one that self-consciously comments upon its own proceedings and upon its minor and major revisions. For example, although Malcolm Warren's familiarity with detective fiction gives him "a few hints as to the handling of servants in a house of crime" (Death 192), he finds that "no detective story [. . .] lays sufficient stress on the horror of meals after a murder" (Death 127). Warren also casts himself as an untraditional hero, "timid, physically clumsy, and incapable of climbing up the side of a house, leaping on to trains in motion, or wrestling with Alsatians" (Death 91). Equally unlike those in some detective fiction, the policemen he encounters are "plain men" who can track "the movements of people's bodies," but remain oblivious to their minds. In contrast, Warren's brain is his "microscope" (Death 92). Finding himself in a situation he has only encountered before in books, he struggles "to judge things by the standards of everyday life and not by Edgar Wallace" (Death 121). Still, with nothing to go by but his reading, Warren tests a method he remembers from a detective story. He constructs a table. On one side he lists suspects. At the top he puts headings. Then, on a scale of 1-10, he rates each suspect according to motives, weakness of alibi, opportunity, and murderous disposition (Death 98). With considerable concern as well as mockery of both himself and his list-making, he notes that he and his Uncle Hannibal come out with the highest scores and thus look guiltiest. Were he actually reading a detective novel, though, he says he would look instead for a person with a lower score, someone who was "not too obvious but obvious enough" (99). That inclination also leads him astray. The person guilty of the murder of Warren's cantankerous aunt is a woman he admires, another aunt motivated by love for Warren's Uncle

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Hannibal whom the murder victim has been treated so badly. Warren describes the murderer as a cultured woman who, had she not married, "might have painted, written novels, or designed ballets" (Death 114). For him, therefore, discovering the truth about his aunt provides no real satisfaction. The thwarted creativity of Kitchin's unlikely villain, however, must have intrigued Virginia Woolf. Her variously creative female characters culminate in Isa Oliver, who hides her poems from her unsympathetic, stock-broker husband in a "book bound like an account book”(Betw een the Acts 15). Kitchin's second detective novel, Crime at Christmas, suggests, by means of intertextual evidence, that he had read at least one of Virginia Woolf ’s novels. When Mrs. Harley is thrown to her death, she breaks her neck, but also is partly impaled on the spikes of the railings below (53) like Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Whereas Woolf ’s Dr. Bradshaw contributes, through his insensitivity, to Smith's suicide, Kitchin's actual murderer is a doctor. Dr. Green denounces Freud's theories as "pure common sense," their only value being "to knock another nail in the coffin of prudery" (30), and he makes, with equal confidence, pronouncements about people he meets. Malcolm Warren may marvel at the obscurities of his own thoughts and motivations and those of human beings in general (136), but Dr. Green–like Woolf ’s Dr. Bradshaw with "divine proportion" as his key to all diagnoses and treatments (Mrs Dalloway 99)–proclaims that "most people [are] very easy to understand" (109). Kitchin carries Woolf ’s indictment of Dr. Bradshaw further, however, when he casts Dr. Green not only as the murderer, but also as a subsequent victim. Warren, who finds the doctor's body, worries, in a way worthy of Woolf herself, that "the whole truth may be told in many ways [. . .] even in the baldest narrative facts must be given some sort of a setting [. . .] that was liable to infinite misconception" (153-4). As Bernard says in Woolf ’s The Wa ves (1931), "Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say" (Wa ves 187). Along with the quotation about "the behaviour of normal people in abnormal circumstances" used for the dust jacket blurb (Crime 272), Warren's metafictional comments continue in Crime at Christmas. When he questions the doctor for having "disturbed the position" of Mrs. Harley's body, for instance, he is accused of "living in a detective story" (Crime 42). His awareness of such fiction in an unfamiliar situation again is evident when he says, "I gather from the detective stories I have read that bodies don't bleed after death." The inspector, a more congenial character than the one in Death of My Aunt, acknowledges not only that people tend to depend on detective fiction for "practical hints," but also that "crimes themselves tend to imitate the detective story" (Crime 168-9). Warren is tempted to imitate, not the criminal, but a detective novel investigator. He imagines how he might interrogate "waiters, valets, porters, chambermaids and liftboys." (Crime 229). As in Death of My Aunt, however, he rejects such activities in favor of "psychological deductions" (Crime 200) and analyses of his own cerebral functions. He observes how his mind "continued to work unconsciously on the problem," the result being a solution reached with "a dazzling suddenness" (Crime 76). Observing further the involuntary functioning of his brain, Warren also wonders, Proust-like, "what it is that provokes those sudden memories which arise for no apparent reason in the least imaginative of us" (Crime 209-10).

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Whatever his deviations from the standard detective novel, and whatever his affinities with some of the psychological fiction published by the Hogarth Press, Kitchin's second detective novel evidences discomfort with a Bloomsbury milieu he considers, pejoratively, "highbrow." In Crime at Christmas, another character, Clarence James, has "become greatly entangled with a coterie in Bloomsbury" (15), a "very highbrow circle" (174). Warren himself, much like his creator, moves only on the fringes of such a group since, as he says, "being a stockbroker is not a passport to the world of art and letters–unless," he says, "you are a potential buyer of pictures" (174-5). Clarence James, like Leonard Woolf, is a Labour party supporter. Like the Woolfs' friends Roger Fry and Clive Bell, James writes "articles on art" (26). He has other characteristics of the Bloomsbury stereotype: he is "intolerant [. . .] of the things most people tolerate," is probably a proponent of free love, and is "extremely sensitive and highly strung" (1745). His Labour sympathies are compromised, however, when he ends up as an "editor, at quite a good salary, of a rich magazine dealing with the applied arts and modern 'luxury articles'" (278). Is Kitchin, through his creation of Clarence James (of "highbrow" Bloomsbury) and Malcolm Warren (fringe Bloomsbury), damning the Woolfs and their friends as essentially opportunistic, rather like the middlebrows of Woolf ’s definition? Woolf ’s letters and diaries reveal comparable hesitations about Kitchin. They met socially on a number of occasions (Diar y 3: 30; Letters 3: 189), but the record is hardly one of intimacy. Virginia sent Crime at Christmas to the painter Ethel Sands, along with books by Vita Sackville-West, Constance Butler (lllyria Lady), and herself (Walter Sicker t: A Conversation). "I'm afraid the books I'm sending aren't a very bright lot," she writes dismissively. She singles out Kitchin more for himself than for his book: "Crime at Christmas is by a very rich young man who used to work with Philip Ritchie [at the bar], until [like his character Malcolm Warren] he took to the Stock Exchange, and discovered a gift for detective stories" (Letters 5: 339-40). On two occasions in the same year, Kitchin emerges, along with T. S. Eliot, as the Woolfs' guest. Again, Woolf writes about Kitchin, not his books, and, confiding this time in her diary, she dismisses him as "fat & white & cunning & not up to the mark" (Diar y 4: 263). The defensive attitude towards "highbrow" Bloomsbury apparent in Kitchin's second detective novel, combined with Bloomsbury's, or at least Virginia Woolf ’s, ambivalent attitude towards Kitchin the man, may help to explain his eventual falling out with the Hogarth Press. As J. H. Willis notes, Kitchin concluded that the press, after all, was not an appropriate venue for detective fiction and moved to Constable. Leonard grudgingly gave his permission, with the condition that Kitchin make available the sales figures for his next book. Ironically, as it turned out, Kitchin had done better with Hogarth and its promotional efforts (Willis 173). In her own writing, Virginia Woolf treats the detective novel genre in a revisionary way, as she did so much else in the culture in which she grew up. Throughout her career, the characters she creates are more likely to use the interrogative style of so much detective fiction to question cosmic and psychological mysteries than they are to interest themselves in violations of the laws of England. "How could any Lord have made this world?" Mrs. Ramsay asks, thinking of its lack of "reason, order, justice," its "suffering, death, the poor" (To the Lightshouse 98). "Why did she mind what he said?" Lily Briscoe asks herself about Charles Tansley's verbal bludgeoning of her self-confidence,

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"Women can't write, women can't paint, not so much that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it?" (197). Added to interrogations of people's motives are recurrent conclusions about their essential mystery and metafictional observations about the difficulties of capturing it in writing. "Who and what are these unknown people?" asks Bernard in The Wa ves. "I could make a dozen stories [. . . .] But what are stories?" (144). Malcolm Warren's attempt, in Kitchin's Death of My Aunt, to put together "a jigsaw puzzle presented in disorder," possibly with a number of pieces missing (Death 77), invokes the intellectual activity of detection. Less obviously, in a way that escaped Marjorie Nicolson, it parallels the efforts of Woolf ’s characters to understand themselves and others, as well as the thoughtful collaboration required of us as readers when we respond to those characters, presented in fragments from multiple perspectives. We might even argue that Virginia Woolf ’s efforts to put into words the seemingly chaotic, associational workings of the human consciousness anticipate what Stefano Tani calls "the metafictional anti-detective novel." As Tani describes it, "the detective is no longer a character but a function assigned to the reader as the criminal is no longer a murderer but the writer himself who 'kills' (distorts and cuts) the text and thus compels the reader to become a 'detective'" (113). In "Character in Fiction," Woolf understands the intellectual and aesthetic violence of Joyce, Eliot, and Strachey to the extent that, when they wax indecent, obscure, or impolite, they do so because, desperate for fresh air, they metaphorically take axes and do violence to the windows of exhausted literary traditions (Essays 3: 434-5). With her greater respect for the intelligent common reader, Woolf is not so intentionally "perverse" a "killer of texts" as are some of her contemporaries. Yet Tani identifies the intellectual prowess of the kind demanded of Woolf ’s readers, something that Marjorie Nicolson, in her dismissal of the experimental fiction of her day, seems entirely to have missed. We also might ask whether the detective's, or the reader's, piecing together of clues is all that different from doing literary, or most other kinds of research. Marjorie Nicolson does recognize that link when she says that "scholars are, in the end, only the detectives of thoughts" (126). Woolf was no academic, yet in her well-known fictionalized essay A Room of One's Own (1929), she demonstrates–using, like Kitchin, a firstperson narrator–how much detection is involved in research. The mystery revolves around the ambiguous phrase, "women and fiction," and leads Woolf ’s narrator to discover absence of evidence, not presence–the scarcity of accounts of women's lives. Linking presence to the possession of money, she ponders women's poverty through the ages. She looks for clues among catalogues and books in the British Library; visits the colleges, quadrangles, libraries, and dining tables of well-endowed men's colleges at "Oxbridge" and a new, bare-bones women's college ("Fernham"); and examines more books–biographies, historical studies, and literature–especially those by women.15 Envisioning the wanton destruction of Shakespeare's gifted sister, she recognizes the necessity of imagination where research fails. Simultaneously a demonstration and an ironic parody of traditional scholarly methods, therefore, A Room of One's Own claims to avoid scholarly pontification. Its narrator aims at no "nugget of pure truth," but only "an opinion upon one minor point," which is, in fact, anything but minor: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (3-4). Carolyn Heilbrun links Woolf ’s A Room of One's Own (1929) with Dorothy

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Sayers's Gaudy Night (1935) in that, as women, both writers "knew 'by instinct' what the trouble was at Cambridge and Oxford alike" ("The Detective" 287-88). As P. D. James points out, also using Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night as an example, "the detective story does not require murder," but it "does require . . . a mystery" (Time 243). In an effort to read Jane Austen's Emma as a detective novel, P. D. James defines what she means. A mystery turns on "facts which are hidden from the reader but which he or she should be able to discover by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness" (Time 243-4). Without insisting that we read a book like Mrs. Dalloway as a detective novel, in this context we still might ask whether we can assign responsibility, however complex a mix of collective and individual behavior, not only for Septimus Smith's death but for the alienation and misery of Lucretia Warren Smith and Doris Kilman. Although she read some of Arthur Conan Doyle, there is no evidence that Virginia Woolf read either Dorothy Sayers, or for that matter Agatha Christie's detective writing of the late twenties and thirties. Yet, roughly during this same time period, when the Hogarth Press was publishing Kitchin's detective novels, a concrete underworld of actual, not just metaphorical, crime does emerge in her fiction. In the triad of criminal, victim, and detective, though, Woolf ’s focus is neither the criminal, however surprising his or her identity and motivation, nor the amateur detective, however reluctant or inept. Instead her focus is the victim, or else someone who witnesses or identifies with victimization. In The Wa ves (1931), Flush (1933), The Years (1937) and in her posthumously published novel Betw een the Acts (1941), the vulnerable parties are children, animals, and women. Their actual and psychological lives may be indelibly scarred, but the crimes go unpunished. We are not left with the satisfaction, common to conventional detective fiction, that truth and justice prevail. The criminal, most often, is the very hierarchical and inequitable society that should ensure justice rather than foster criminality. Threatening, in other words, civilized society and individual sanity in the novels of Woolf ’s last decade are not just the atrocities of war and empire (ably described in her work by others), but also a related underworld of criminal behavior. In The Wa ves, for example, Neville, as a little boy, reconstructs his reaction: "when I heard about the dead man through the swing-door last night when cook was shoving in and out the dampers. He was found with his throat cut [. . . .] He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this [. . .] 'death among the apple trees' for ever" (24). Neville, in school, surrounds this disturbing image of murder or suicide with "the exactitude of the Latin language" (31), his love for Percival, his solitude, and his satire, but the memory returns, and perhaps portentously, during the farewell dinner for Percival: "The man lay livid with his throat cut in the gutter [. . .] And going upstairs I could not raise my foot against the [. . .] apple-tree with its silver leaves held stiff!" (124). According to the laws of England, Neville's homosexuality is a crime that makes him less a criminal than a vulnerable outsider. Like Clarissa Dalloway before him," he concludes that "each day is dangerous” (213). In Flush Woolf ’s awareness of a criminal underworld is most overt. The vulnerable parties here are primarily helpless animals, but also the owners who are attached to them. If the animals are not ransomed, they are killed. In the Whitechapel chapter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog Flush, stolen from Wimpole Street, is taken "not a

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stone's-throw" away into "one of the worst slums in London" (87-8). No detective is required to discover who is responsible; Mr. Taylor and his gang of thieves simply threaten to send "a brown paper parcel [. . .] containing the head and paws of the dog" if a ransom is not paid (89). Woolf ’s account, however, interrogates the very notion of criminality. Is the crime to be laid at the door of the well-to-do who ignore the poverty, filth, and disease so dangerous to their own comforts? Are the criminals Barrett's father, brother, Robert Browning, and indeed "all Wimpole Street" who insist that paying the ransom would only be "giving way to tyranny"(98)? From Miss Barrett's and Flush's perspectives, the answer to both questions is yes. Would Mr. Browning have felt the same way if she had been kidnapped, Elizabeth Barrett wonders: "Flush was helpless. Her duty was to him" (101). We also have access to the perspective of the hungry and thirsty spaniel who, for five miserable days, waits to be rescued from the cursing thieves and murderers who have confined him to a dark, dirty, and cold room with other hostages like himself. Susan Squier, who notes parallels, intentional or unintentional, between the threats against Flush and Jack the Ripper's murder and mutilation of women in 1888 (130), observes that Flush and Miss Barrett are both imprisoned in a hierarchical system that fosters violence and ignores feelings. Neither is freed until Flush is ransomed, and they both leave the patriarchal home (127-8). In The Years, as in The Wa ves, a child is vulnerable. In the 1880 section, little Rose Pargiter steals the Nurse's latchkey, concealed every night "in a new place for fear of burglars." The Pargiter's house, like the Barrett's, is threatened with theft by the poverty that too often breeds vice. Appropriately, in an environment of predator and prey, Rose imagines herself a hero. She has "her pistol and her shot" and, as "Pargiter of Pargiter's Horse," rides off "to the rescue" of "a besieged garrison" (26-7). What disrupts her confident, tomboyish adventure on her way to Lamley's shop is "the figure of a man" who "suddenly emerged under the gas lamp," "leered at her," and tried to catch her (28). On her way home again, it is the actual Rose (not the imaginary garrison) who needs rescuing: "As she passed he sucked his lips in and out. He made a mewing noise. But he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes." In a panic, she runs home. Unable to erase the man's face from her mind, unable to tell her sister Eleanor about it, unable to sleep, and sure the man is pursuing her into her very room, she experiences the "profound feeling of guilt" (41-2) that frequently silences the vulnerable and the victimized. Rose never forgets the experience. "What awful lives children live!" Martin remarks. "'Yes,"' the adult Rose replies, "'And they can't tell anybody'" (159). The violent disruption of her self-confidence that turns Rose from a tomboy into an ashamed and frightened little girl may well account, in part, for her suffrage activities later in the novel. In the 1911 section, Rose ends up "in a police-court" and then "in prison" for throwing a brick (204, 231).16 In the last section of the novel, the elderly Kitty drinks to the elderly Rose, whom she calls "a fine fellow" with "the courage of her convictions" (420). Whatever her methods and their consequences, Rose has managed to regain her self-esteem and to assert her autonomy in a hierarchical society torn apart by world war. In Betw een the Acts the crime is rape, and it is Isa Oliver who dwells on it. She reads a newspaper account of a girl taken by troopers to look at an extraordinary horse

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with a green tail. Instead "they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face" (20). Isa avoids a common reaction and does not blame the girl for her gullibility. Instead, her imagination recreates the scene, and it is imprinted indelibly upon her mind (22) as an image of her own entrapment. This rape, as Stuart Clarke has discovered, is based on an actual incident much in the papers of the previous year.17 In the novel, it joins the allusion to the disturbing Procne and Philomela story (109) as well as the violent images of old Bart Oliver abusing his cringing dog, scaring his grandson, and calling him a crybaby (12-13); of the public school violence reported by William Dodge (73); of Giles Oliver releasing his frustrations by stomping on the choking snake (99, 107, 111); of Miss LaTrobe gnashing her teeth behind a tree (122); and of the twelve war planes flying over the village pageant (193) in a novel set on the eve of World War II. Although, throughout her career, Virginia Woolf ’s own characters often interrogate cosmic and psychological mysteries, in these later novels, an underworld of actual crime helps to underscore her critiques of patriarchal British society and her sympathy with the vulnerable and powerless. Marjorie Nicolson neither detected Woolf ’s social criticism nor did Nicolson understand the intellectual demands on the reader of experimental psychological novels like Woolf ’s. Piecing together the fragments of human consciousness impinged upon by the disturbing events of ordinary days, not to mention the disruptive events of days more extraordinary, obviously was not Nicolson's idea of the intellectual life of the mind. Instead, in a way that Woolf would have dubbed "middlebrow," Nicolson told people what to read and how to react to detective novels for mature intellectual stimulation and to contemporary psychological novels for immature emotional indulgence. Not only Woolf ’s own work, but also the Hogarth Press's publication of Kitchin's detective novels blur this facile binary. True, Kitchin's detective novels evidence ambivalence towards "highbrow" Bloomsbury and summarize rather than simulate experimentally the workings of the mind. Nevertheless he employs a narrator who, conscious of his own thoughts and thought processes, reflects preoccupations like Virginia Woolf ’s with the complex workings of the mind and with the elusiveness of truth. Through his narrator Malcolm Warren, Kitchin shifts the emphasis of the detective novel genre from solving crimes to examining ordinary people's often irrational, inconsistent, and inadequate responses to violent events. Woolf must have welcomed Kitchin's efforts to introduce metafictional self-consciousness and psychological complexity into the detective novel genre and thus to make plot inseparable from character. Aware of the detecting element in research, sufficiently conversant with the detective novel of her day, and disturbed by the criminal underworld of her patriarchal society, Virginia Woolf finds ways to blur some overly simple writing and publishing binaries and to help people whose reading habits seem equally omnivorous to do likewise.

NOTES

1. See Leonardi. 2. In a note accompanying her manuscript (quoted in "The Contributors' Column" of the April 1929 Atlantic Monthly issue which originally published the piece), Nicolson says she has waited in vain for

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someone else to write this defense. She names other English and philosophy professors (Kittredge, Lowes, Lovejoy, Singer) who are avid detective fiction readers and collectors and bets "that when the Modern Language Association begins its convention at Toronto this week more time will be devoted to the subject of detective stories than to any other one form of art." In fact, she thinks many people attend the convention because they fear missing "the latest detective find of the year" (572). 3. Nicolson adds to the comments quoted in "The Contributors' Column" (see n. 2, above) her belief that a man would have been the more appropriate author of her article because "the detective story is, of course, a man's story preeminently." Regardless, she thinks she is "recognized–for a woman–as being close to an authority on the subject!" (572). When Haycraft reprinted Nicolson's essay in 1947, she admits that her dismissal of women writers of detective fiction is dated, but indicates that in 1929 Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackr oyd had just appeared, that Dorothy Sayers was little known in America, and that other women detective writers (like Ngaio Marsh) were just beginning their work in the genre. Since 1929, she adds, "many of the best detective stories . . . have been written by women" (Haycraft 110). 4. The essay was "The Novels of E. M. Forster" (November 1927). 5. My thanks to Beth Daugherty for mentioning this fact to me several years ago. C. H. B. Kitchin was Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin (1895-1967). He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, served in World War I, and came into contact with the Bloomsbury circle of friends through his affiliation, in the legal profession, with Philip Ritchie, a close friend of Lytton Strachey, and with C. P. Sanger, who also knew Strachey as well as Leonard Woolf. Kitchin, as Virginia Woolf says, left the bar and "took to the Stock Exchange" (Letters 5: 339). 6. The issue of the Atlantic Monthly with Nicolson's article also contains "Disarmament–American Plan"by Salvador De Madariaga, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford and formerly Chief of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations (April 1929, 525-38). Although it is a piece that would have interested the Woolfs, especially Leonard, there is also no evidence that he read it. 7. Leonard Woolf ’s challenge to the highbrow/lowbrow distinction preceded Virginia's. In Hunting the Highbr ow (1927), he insists that those who deride "highbrows" lump together a wide variety of species, subspecies, and hybrids, none of which should be confused with pseudohighbrows (Hunting 10-11, 5051). To the "pseudo" category, as Melba Cuddy-Keane notes, Leonard relegates the clichéd associations of highbrows with elitist "sneers at popularity," with snobberv and "affectation." and with their own brand of ephemeral trendiness (60). See Cuddy-Keane for a thorough discussion of the context for, and manifestations of this debate. 8. Nicolson does indicate, however, that detective novels of the emotional "Poe school" are not the kind she is discussing (118). 9. The Hogarth Press published Kitchin's Str eamers Wa ving (1925) and Mr. Balcony (1927) prior to Death of My Aunt (1929). When "his big novel The Sensiti ve One (1931)" was not successful, Kitchin returned to the detective genre with Crime at Christmas (1934). 10. The Woolf Library at Washington State University contains some evidence of Leonard's interest:three Agatha Christie detective novels and one by Ngaio Marsh, all published after Virginia's death. 11. "Then I distrust people who call both Shakespeare and Wordsworth equally `Bill'," she says in "Middlebrow" (181). 12. The most notorious of these is Professor von X, in A Room of One's Own, whose pronouncements on the "The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inf eriority of the Female Sex" grows, Woolf ’s narrator opines, out of his own "disguised and complex" anger at, and fear of, the female sex (31-2). A real-life counterpart is Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge whose conclusion that "the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man” Woolf ’s narrator contrasts to Browning's own behavior. "And happily in this age of biography . . . we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do" (55). 13. See, for instance, Chapter Three of Roth. 14. Both of these novels, dust jackets intact, are in Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections at Washington State University Library, Pullman, WA. 15. Ellen Hawkes and Peter Manso recognize Woolf ’s interest in clue-gathering among words when they cast her as a code-cracking sleuth in The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of Espionage with Vir ginia Woolf (1983).

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16. So could Nicholas end up in prison for being homosexual (The Years 297). 17. Briggs notes Gillian Beer's use of Clarke's article in the Vir ginia Woolf Miscellany (Spring 1990) to place Woolf ’s allusion in the context of women's issues of the time, including not only rape, but also a subsequent abortion. (“Editing Woolf ” 72).

WORKS CITED Anderson, Isaac. Review of Crime at Christmas. New York Times. Januarey 27, 1935. 13. Bishop, Edward L. "From Typography to Time: Producing Virginia Woolf." Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts: Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace UP, 1996 50-63. Briggs, Julia. "Editing Woolf for the Nineties." South Carolina Review 29.1 (1996), 67-77. Charney, Hanna. The Detecti ve Novel of Manners: Hedonism, Morality, and the Life of Reason. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1981. Cuppy, Will. Review of Crime at Christmas. Books. Feruary 10, 1935. 16. Hartley, L. P. Review of Death of My Aunt. Saturday Review. November 9, 1929. 552. Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1947. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. "The Detective Novel of Manners." Hamlet's Mother and Other Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990. 275-89. James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Kitchin, C. H. B. [Clifford Henry Benn]. Crime at Christmas. London: Hogarth, 1934. ____. Death of My Aunt. London: Hogarth, 1929. Leonardi, Susan J. "Murders Academic: Women Professors and the Crimes of Gender." Feminism in Wo m e n ' s D e t e c t i v e F i c t i o n . Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. 112-26. Nicholson, Marjorie. "The Professor and the Detective" (1929). The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1947. 110-27. Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Saturday Re view of Literatur e. Review of Crime at Christmas. January 26, 1935. 448. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime (1928-29).” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1947. 71-109. Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Times Literary Supplement. Review of Crime at Christmas. January 26, 1935. 712. ____. Review of Death of My Aunt. October 24, 1929. 849. Willis, J. H., Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1992. Woolf, Leonard. "The World of Books: Detective Stories." Nation and Athenaeum 40 (26 February 1927): 727. ____. "The World of Books: The Fascination of Crime." Nation and Athenaeum 34 (29 December 1923): 490. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich,1969. ____. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984. ____. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Vols. 1-2. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1887, 1988. Vol. 4. London: Hogarth, 1994. ____. Flush: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1933. "Middlebrow." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942. 176-86. ____. "Modern Fiction." The Common Reader : First Series. 1925. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.SanDiego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1984. 146-154. ____. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 25 New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980. ____. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957. ____. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1959. ____. The Years. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965.