E S S A Y

VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE HOGARTH PRESS, AND THE DETECTIVE

NOVEL

by Diane F. Gillespie

W
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 dis-
agrees 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 psycho-
logical novels, with their "excessive subjectivity," lengthy "dissections of emotion," ado-
lescent 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 jour-
nal 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 "chil-
dren of a larger growth," one of the "'bad boys' and 'smart girls' of [contemporary] lit-
erature," 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 audi-
ence. On the level of basic plot, Kitchin's two novels certainly fit W. H. Auden's defini-
tion: "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 lit-
erary 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-
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 37

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 intel-
lectual activity more appropriate to professorial interests than the immature introspec-
tion 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" on-
going 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 sopho-
moric 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 prac-
tical matters, and lowbrows, who energetically pursue their lives but often are incapable
of seeing themselves from broader perspectives, not as enemies but as mutual depend-
ents (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 pres-
tige" (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 middle-
brows, highbrows often must write for money, once they earn enough, more like low-
brows, 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 oppor-
tunistic 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 financial-
ly viable (51). As late as August 1927, she was rejecting "bloodsucker" novels that would
38 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

cost a lot to print and would not make a profit (Diar y 3: 150). She and Leonard, there-
fore, 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 manifesta-
tion of Leonard's own seemingly contradictory literary tastes–his admiration for
Virginia's experimental fiction, and the experiments of others, combined with his read-
ing 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 intel-
ligent 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 back-
grounds 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 simi-
lar 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 middle-
brow writers and readers, it would be because her view of "character" and the relation-
ship between character and plot differs from that of many more conventional novelists
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 39

of her day. Yet Woolf does not object to plot per se, just to plot divorced from charac-
ters 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 hor-
ror 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 deci-
sions 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 inter-
est 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 quo-
tation.
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
40 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

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 men-
tion 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 dif-
ferent 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 murder-
er 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 behav-
iour 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, phys-
ically 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 consider-
able 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 cantan-
kerous aunt is a woman he admires, another aunt motivated by love for Warren's Uncle
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 41

Hannibal whom the murder victim has been treated so badly. Warren describes the mur-
derer as a cultured woman who, had she not married, "might have painted, written nov-
els, 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 indict-
ment of Dr. Bradshaw further, however, when he casts Dr. Green not only as the mur-
derer, 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 cir-
cumstances" used for the dust jacket blurb (Crime 272), Warren's metafictional com-
ments continue in Crime at Christmas. When he questions the doctor for having "dis-
turbed 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 bod-
ies 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 fic-
tion 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, cham-
bermaids 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 appar-
ent reason in the least imaginative of us" (Crime 209-10).
42 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

Whatever his deviations from the standard detective novel, and whatever his affini-
ties 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" (174-
5). 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 'lux-
ury 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 hard-
ly 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 sec-
ond detective novel, combined with Bloomsbury's, or at least Virginia Woolf ’s, ambiva-
lent 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 grudg-
ingly gave his permission, with the condition that Kitchin make available the sales fig-
ures 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 detec-
tive 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,
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 43

"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 recur-
rent 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 jig-
saw 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 them-
selves 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 murder-
er 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, some-
thing 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 fictional-
ized essay A Room of One's Own (1929), she demonstrates–using, like Kitchin, a first-
person narrator–how much detection is involved in research. The mystery revolves
around the ambiguous phrase, "women and fiction," and leads Woolf ’s narrator to dis-
cover 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
44 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

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 detec-
tive 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 behav-
ior, 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 actu-
al, not just metaphorical, crime does emerge in her fiction. In the triad of criminal, vic-
tim, 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 victim-
ization. In The Wa ves (1931), Flush (1933), The Years (1937) and in her posthumous-
ly 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 vulnera-
ble 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
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 45

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 pover-
ty, 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 pay-
ing 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 help-
less. 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 dis-
rupts 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 chil-
dren 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
46 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

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 interro-
gate 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 exper-
imental 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 "mid-
dlebrow," 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 publi-
cation of Kitchin's detective novels blur this facile binary. True, Kitchin's detective nov-
els 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 detec-
tive 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 com-
plexity into the detective novel genre and thus to make plot inseparable from character.
Aware of the detecting element in research, sufficiently conversant with the detec-
tive novel of her day, and disturbed by the criminal underworld of her patriarchal soci-
ety, Virginia Woolf finds ways to blur some overly simple writing and publishing bina-
ries 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
 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 47

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 sub-
ject 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 pro-
fession, 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, 50-
51). 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 mani-
festations 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 intellectu-
ally 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).
48 THE SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW

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).

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