ULYSSES—VIRGINIA WOOLF LIKED THE BOOK, DESPISED THE AUTHOR.
ULYSSES—VIRGINIA WOOLF LIKED THE BOOK, DESPISED THE AUTHOR. In the Times Literary Supplement (March 23), J.C has some quotations from Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER’S DIARY which show a startling snobbery in the literary world of 100 years ago. Woolf read ULYSSES on August 16, 1922, shortly after it was published. Her first reaction was that it was:”…an illiterate, underbred book”. Three weeks later she wrote : “I finished ULYSSES….Genius it has, I think.” Her negative first reaction on August 22, 1916 may have been influenced by what she thought of Joyce in her diary entry for the date: ULYSSES was “the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.”
I had heard that her reaction to the book was, “This is what happens when you try to educate the Irish.”