Rebellion in the suburbs

First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf himself was Jewish) and its tart comments on suburban life.

From the first page, Woolf reveals himself as an astute observer of social undercurrents:

The thin brick walls and the manners of civilisation divide the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the merchants, the rich and the poor into families, as effectually as the jungle and ferocity divided their savage forefathers. It was their naked and feeble bodies and their cunning brains that herded them into the blocks of great houses, into the avenues of snug villas, into the rows of mean streets; but behind the long lines of brick and window and gable and front door… each is still a monogamous and solitary animal… jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergyman and the gold ring, as she came to the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed.

When you recall that this was written by a man who had just married a woman with a complicated response to sex it is unsettling, disturbing. It was also unlikely to appeal to those proud suburban-dwellers, desperately trying to cover up the naked truth of their monotonous lives. You have the sense that despite its elegant jacket and endpapers (from Persephone, publishers dedicated to reissuing forgotten classics by ‘unjustly neglected’ authors), this novel is set to deliver an explosive bombshell that will force you to confront all those uncomfortable thoughts you rather wish you didn’t have.

What follows never quite lives up to this beginning, and its value lies in the way that it allows us a glimpse into a very particular slice of English life, where no mention is made of the events leading to the outbreak of the first world war, and no one seems to do anything.