'In 1926 [Catherine McMullen] was herself a workhouse laundress, struggling to improve her mind by reading T.P. and Cassell's Weekly. The magazine was full of literary gossip that made her aspire to be a writer, but she had no idea which books to read until she came across Elinor Glyn's The Career of Catherine Bush. In this story of a romance between a duke and a secretary, the secretary is advised to read the Letters of Lord Chesterfield to his Son. Catherine McMullen visited a public library for the first time in her life and borrowed the book: "And here began my education. With Lord Chesterfield I read my first mythology. I learned my first history and geography. With Lord Chesterfield I went travelling the world. I would fall asleep reading the letters and awake around three o'clock in the morning my mind deep in the fascination of this new world, where people conversed, not just talked..." ... He launched her into a lifetime course of reading, beginning with Chaucer in Middle English, moving on to Erasmus, Donne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even Finnegan's Wake.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Catherine McMullen Print: Book
[the 'intellectual' clique within the Clarion Scouts, including Edwin Muir] "followed the literary and intellectual development of the time, discovering such writers as Bergson, Sorel, Havelock Ellis, Galsworthy, Conrad, E.M. Forster, Joyce and Lawrence, the last two being contributed by me, for I had seen them mentioned in the New Age by Ezra Pound".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'[Charlie] Lahr lent [Bonar] Thompson Andre Gide and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". "It was wonderful for me to feel that I belonged to the elect who had read these giants of the future", wrote Thompson, who credited Lahr with introducing him to "writers of whom I should not otherwised have heard until years later". The difficulty was that "As soon as authors did become well known, Charlie had done with them. He felt, I suppose, that they had been bought over, or had taken to writing for the mob, else why were they popular with the wrong kind of readers?".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bonar Thompson Print: Book
'[Ethel] Mannin was firmly rooted in the autodidact tradition. In her father's library she enjoyed Gissing and Wells, "Adam Bede" and "The Cloister and the Hearth". A Clapham letter-sorter, he collected Nelson's Sevenpenny Classics, which she applauded as "a great boon to poor people"... By age fifteen she was quoting Wilde, Dr Johnson, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Browning, Omar Khayyam, Anatole France, Emily Bronte, Shaw, Hazlitt, Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Schopenhauer in her commonplace book...Except "Orlando", she read nothing of Virginia Woolf, whom she found "too intellectual, too subtle and complicated and remote from reality"...Mannin made sure to read "Ulysses" (or at least the final chapter) and she admired Gertrude Stein'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Mannin Print: Book
'With autodidact diligence [Leslie Paul] closed in on the avant-garde. He read "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land", though not until the 1930s. He smuggled "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" past customs. In "John O'London's" and "The Nation", in William MacDougall's Home University Library volume on "Psychology" and F.A. Servante's "Psychology of the Boy", he read up on Freud. In a few years he knew enough to ghost-write BBC lectures on modern psychology'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Paul Print: Book
'Dubliners, James Joyce. First time I read it I was not much impressed, but on reading them again I found much that I had missed. They are immensely real and intimate sketches. Whenever I feel fed up I read one of these sketches and find myself in another world - Dublin, 20 years ago. Dublin saloon bars, street children, catholic priests, and inconspicuous clerks - all ordinary people but real. The stories are slightly tinged with melancholy. That soothes me.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell,14 April 1922:
'Now Mr Joyce ... yes, I have fallen; to the extent of four pounds too. I have him on the table.
His pages are cut. Leonard is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Ottoline Morrell, 18 August 1922:
'Poor Rebecca West's novel bursts like an over stuffed sausage. She pours it all in; and one is
covered with flying particles; indeed I had hastily to tie the judge tight and send it back to
Mudies [Library] half finished. But this irreticence does not make me think any the worse of
her human qualities [...] I do admire poor old Henry [James], and actually read through the
Wings of a Dove [1902] last summer, and thought it such an amazing acrobatic feat, partly of
his, partly of mine, that I now look upon myself and Henry James as partners in merit. I made
it all out. But I felt very ill for some time afterwards. I am now reading Joyce, and my
impression, after 200 out of 700 pages, is that the poor young man has got the dregs of a
mind compared even with George Meredith. I mean if you could weigh the meaning on Joyces
[sic] page it would be about 10 times as light as on Henry James'.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Quentin Bell, 26 July 1933:
'I'm sending you a book of short stories; one -- by [James] Joyce -- seems to me very good. The
others Ive not read.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
1 May 1918: 'On Sunday [28 April] Desmond came to dinner [...] Late at night he took to
reading Joyce's ms. aloud, & in particular to imitating his modern imitation of a cat's miau.
L[eonard]. went to bed, & though capable of spending a night in this manner, I had
compunction, & decoyed Desmond upstairs, collecting books as we went.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Desmond MacCarthy Manuscript: Codex
Wednesday 16 August 1922: 'I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far -- not a third; & have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters -- to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples [...] An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating [...] I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Wednesday 6 September 1922: 'I finished Ulysses, & think it a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense [...] I'm reminded all the time of some callow board school boy [...] full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he'll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; & only once; & it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Wednesday 15 January 1941:
'Joyce is dead -- Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type script to our tea table at Hogarth House [...] Would we devote our lives to printing it [at Hogarth Press]? [...] the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But theres something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield Manuscript: Typescript
'Sydney shaped Larkin's taste skilfully, leading him away from J.C. Powys and towards Llewelyn and T.F., towards James Joyce with no expectation that he would enjoy him, and towards poets who would remain favourites all his life: Hardy, Christina Rossetti and A.E. Housman. In late 1939, when Larkin discovered T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood, Sydney also encouraged him - continuing, as he had always done, to make reading seem an independent activity, only tenuously linked to schoolwork.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
'Shaw's St Joan and Joyce's Ulysses into which I looked today (8-11-30) made me ashamed of my own writing. They have something to say, but I am only paring away insincerities.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
I have just borrowed a copy of 'Ulysses'. It appears to me to be jolly good, and it is certainly the most obscene genuine literature ever published, not excepting Juvenal and Co.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
I ought to have written to you before about 'Amants, heureux amants', which you were so kind as to send me. It is, in my opinion, a very fine book, highly distinguished, and certainly your best work. I enjoyed it immensely. Especially the last story, which throws light on many things—including yourself.
We have no new young novelists in England. D.H. Lawrence is the best, & he is very uneven; also he is growing older. Of course there is Joyce. Your study of him was very useful to me when I wrote a review of 'Ulysses' some time ago. I think that he also is too uneven ever to be quite first-rate. But his best chapters amount to genius.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
