‘A Word to Start an Argument with’: Virginia Woolf’s Craftsmanship

Abstract

This paper explores Virginia Woolf’s 1937 radio broadcast (and later essay) ‘Craftsmanship’ in the context of craft culture. As Woolf considers the word judiciously and playfully throughout ‘Craftsmanship’, it becomes a nexus point for an entanglement of ideas around making, creating, and producing. This paper places Woolf’s understanding of craft practices in the context of contemporary debates regarding the legacy of the arts and crafts movement, Roger Fry’s work in the Omega Workshops, and her own experience in the Hogarth Press. While it is tempting to see the Hogarth Press as a model of craft culture, Woolf was sceptical about any nostalgia for craft practices, often rather sloppy with the craft of book making, and deeply ambivalent about any valorization of craft. Without dismissing the significant place of the Hogarth Press in discussions about craft culture, this paper is most interested in Woolf’s repeated use of ‘craft’ to talk about the work of the writer. It explores Woolf’s own ambivalent engagement with writing as ‘craft’ and questions what it might mean to see Woolf as a craftswoman. It pays attention to her suspicion of privileging ‘well made’ writing over imagination and emotion, her attitudes towards the professionalism of craft (particularly in the context of gender), as well as the often permeable boundaries between her ‘craft’ and her ‘art’. For Woolf, the troublesome word ‘craft’ leads to, associates with, and intersects with concepts central to her life and work, including art, imagination, inspiration, production, process, amateurism, professionalism, education, skill, and vocation.

Keywords:

• Virginia Woolf
• craftmanship
• storytelling
• modern craft
• Omega Workshop
• Hogarth Press

On the craft-selling website Etsy, you can find a plethora of Virginia Woolf products, including handmade prints and stitched samplers featuring Woolf quotations, t-shirts with Woolf’s face on them, and lockets, bookmarks, or badges evoking Vanessa Bell’s cover illustrations for Woolf’s novels. These items speak in part to Woolf’s status as an icon (‘she is a phenomenon—icon, celebrity, star’, Brenda Silver reminds us [1999: xi]) but they also point to Woolf’s cultural value in a resurgent craft movement and a growing handmade economy. We are currently living in what Susan Luckman has called a ‘making renaissance’ in which craft is validated, dismissed, and commodified in multiple ways (2015: 1). While the array of Woolfian knick-knacks available on Etsy reveals Woolf’s rich potential as an object to be crafted, these also remind us that she was a craftswoman herself, both because of her work in the Hogarth Press and as a writer who made things out of words. The contemporary maker movement highlights both the persistent allure and the commercial reach of craft. It also invites us to re-consider Woolf’s evolving understanding of craft in a similarly fraught historical moment when craft was taking on new shapes and resonances. In the wake of contemporary debates regarding the legacy of the arts and crafts movement and the fate of artistic production in an era of industrialization and professionalization, Woolf was consistently pre-occupied by the nature and value of craft.

This essay traces Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent engagement with the concept of craftsmanship, something that she most directly addressed in her 1937 essay of the same name but that is also a persistent albeit intermittent refrain in her writing. For Woolf, ‘craftsmanship’ was a troublesome word that led to, associated and intersected with concepts central to her life and work, including art, imagination, production, process, amateurism, professionalism, education, skill, and vocation. Craft metaphors afforded Woolf a vocabulary with which to explore her fascination with the materiality of language and her sense of writing as embodied manual labour. Woolf’s evolving and sometimes contradictory understanding of craft was, moreover, intrinsically connected to her concerns about what it meant to make a living out of words as a woman writer, as well as broader modernist questions about the nature and value of intellectual and literary labour and the conditions of modern artistic production. Craft in both noun and verb forms becomes a nexus point for an entanglement of ideas around making things with and finding new forms for words, ideas that became increasingly central to Woolf’s work.

In his 1968 book, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, the furniture designer and craft theorist David Pye asserts that craft is ‘a word to start an argument with’ (2010: 341).¹ Woolf certainly took issue with the word in her 1937 radio broadcast, and later essay, ‘Craftsmanship’. Commissioned by the BBC producer George Barnes as part of a series called ‘Worlds Fail Me’, ‘Craftsmanship’ has become famous as the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice and a significant contribution to Woolf’s ideas about the associative, suggestive, and communal function of language. Woolf begins the talk with a curious sleight of hand, seeming to reject the title which was allotted to her by the BBC even as she draws attention to it. ‘This particular talk is called “Craftsmanship’”, she says, ‘We must suppose, therefore that the writer is meant to discuss the craft of words—the craftsmanship of the writer’. Woolf clearly distances herself from the title and pushes back against what she is ‘meant’ to discuss, noting that, ‘There is something incongruous, unfitting, about the term “craftsmanship” when applied to words’ (Woolf 1993b: 137).² Woolf earlier signalled her dislike of the BBC’s title in her diary, writing ‘am going to disregard the title & talk about words. why they won’t let themselves be made a craft of’ (3 April 1937). She proposes changing the title to ‘A Ramble round Words, perhaps’ (137) but in this she equivocates, so ultimately the talk is both rendered title-less—or, in her words ‘decapitated’ like a chicken—and haunted by multiple possible titles. Woolf thus begins the essay by strategically engaging with and distancing herself from ‘craftsmanship’ in ways that both set the stage for and shape a playful argument about the materiality and usefulness of language.

Critical discussions of ‘Craftsmanship’ have tended to take Woolf at her word in her dismissal of the title, even though, as Natania Rosenfeld notes, ‘from a woman who continually revised her own works, an argument against craftsmanship seems disingenuous’ (2001: 127). Judith Allen argues that ‘clearly, for Woolf, the title “Craftsmanship” … places too many limitations on her essay’, and refers to it as ‘an essay without its title’ (2010: 29). Emily Kopley claims that ‘the word “craftsmanship”—now commonly used in writing workshops—annoyed Woolf for its implication that language, infinitely suggestive and protean, yields to deliberate hard work as do wood and wool and copper, material objects used in other “crafts”’ (2017). While the above points hold true, even as Woolf apparently rejects the word, she also pays significant attention to it. Such slippery doubleness is in-line with what we know about Woolf’s use, particularly in the essay form, of what Melba Cuddy-Keane has called ‘the trope of the twist’, where Woolf settles and then unsettles the reader, often by reconsidering the meaning and value of words or ‘shifting ideological ground’ (1996: 97). Indeed, throughout this essay Woolf’s definitions of and attitude towards the word ‘craftsmanship’ shift and twist as she traces the various connotations of the word judiciously and playfully (or we might even say ‘craftily’).

In this essay all about language, ‘craftsmanship’ is the first word of which Woolf considers the etymology and significance, and it offers an apt example for her exploration of the simultaneous materiality and immateriality of language. With reference to the English Dictionary, she tells us that ‘craft’ has two meanings: ‘in the first place making useful objects out of solid matter—for example, a pot, a chair, a table’. And ‘in the second place, … cajolery, cunning, deceit’ (CDML 1993b: 137). While Woolf notes with ambiguous irony that ‘words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth’ (137), she immediately uses them to conjure up a strikingly visceral and then a conspicuously fantastical image: words become a headless hen running ‘round in a circle til it drops dead’ and words ‘mate’ to become a ‘monster fit for a glass cage’ (137). It is thus fitting to Woolf’s argument about language that craft evokes both the material (‘a pot, a chair, a table’ and ‘a hen’) and the immaterial (‘cajolery, cunning, deceit’ and a ‘monster’). While she critiques the way in which craft implies the hammering down of a certain meaning—solid, repetitive, enduring—craft words, for her, are also contradictory, ephemeral, and playful. Craft, then, ironically becomes the perfect example for Woolf’s discussion of language’s limitations and protean possibilities.

‘Craftsmanship’ allowed Woolf to explore craft’s usefulness as a metaphor for writing and, particularly, as a way of considering writing as a mode of material production. The practice of working something out in words was at the forefront of Woolf’s mind, and the form of the radio broadcast made her particularly attuned to the shape, substance, and tactile value of language. Woolf wrote in her diary that it was ‘a mercy to use this page to uncramp in! after squeezing drop by drop into my 17 min BBC’. She recognized ‘there’s a certain thrill about writing to read aloud’ but also speculated, ‘it could have been a good article. It's the talk element that upsets it’ (21 April 1937). Her scepticism about the formal limitations of the radio talk seems to be connected to her sense that words do not like ‘being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately’ (CDML 1993b: 142). However, as Mark S. Morrison observes, the new technologies of the twentieth century could ‘free’ words from pen and page and ‘from print itself’ (2016: 3). Woolf’s movement between technologies provoked a rich understanding of the various possibilities of media in relation to words’ ‘need of change’ (CDML 1993b: 143) as well as a sense that one writes, thinks, and uses words differently depending on the medium.

Woolf’s writing, always characterized by formal and generic experimentation, was becoming increasingly concerned with the profession of the writer and the nature of artistic labour. At the time that she was preparing ‘Craftsmanship’ for the BBC, Woolf was worrying about the critical reception of The Years (1937) and finishing up Three Guineas (1938), both of which emerged from The Pargiters, her imagined feminist essay-novel about professions. Even after writing ‘Craftsmanship’ and seemingly dismissing the word, Woolf continued to use and think about craft metaphors, particularly as she worked on her biography of Roger Fry which was published in 1940. The questions that Woolf explores in ‘Craftsmanship’ about how to create truth in words and how to capture life in writing become central to her approach to biography, where she imagines ‘on the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality’ (Woolf 1967: 229). Woolf self-consciously employed craft metaphors as she was working on Roger Fry, describing her biography, for example, in a letter to Ethyl Smyth as ‘not a book, only a piece of cabinet making’ (Woolf 1980: 381). While the word ‘only’ might imply a derisive attitude, Amber Regis draws attention to the nuanced ways in which Woolf characterized biography as a craft. She notes that in ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) Woolf describes the biographer as ‘a craftsman, not an artist’. Woolf insists, ‘the biographer is a craftsman so his work must be a craft; the craftsman is distinct from the artist, so his work must be distinct from … what? Here we must stop and pause … ’ (Woolf 1967: 227). This pause points to a crack in her metaphorical models. It suggests Woolf’s struggle to differentiate between the biographer and the author of fiction and to articulate exactly what she means to evoke by the terms ‘artist’ and ‘craftsman’. As Regis argues, for Woolf, ‘craft is not the antithesis of art, and the line demarcating one from the other is indistinct and left unclear’ (2012: 83). Woolf’s understanding of the craftsman’s work as something ‘betwixt and between’ resembles David Pye’s definition of the crafts as inhabiting ‘border-ground’ (1968: 133). Woolf’s increased interest in concepts of craft in this period can be traced back, moreover, to not only the form of biography, which, as Claire Battershill notes ‘pervades her critical writing and her thinking about fiction’ (2), but also the particular subject of her biography. Woolf became ‘immers[ed] in [Roger Fry’s] own ideas about the nature of craftsmanship’ (Battershill 2018: 109), ideas which are themselves situated in a larger modernist debate about craft.

The Modern Problem of Craft

Craft was certainly a provocative term at the time that Woolf wrote ‘Craftsmanship’, as it remains today, in no small part because we have inherited many of the contradictions that emerged during this period. Craft could be the authentically human handmade alternative to industrial modernity or something automated and mechanical; it could be a skilled profession or work done by an amateur with a sense of vocation; it could be the opposite to art or elevated to an art form; it could designate the solidly material or it could carry a spiritual resonance.³ It was, as curator and historian Glenn Adamson demonstrates in his writings on the topic, a particular problem of modernity, ‘an issue that was widely considered to be worth worrying about’ (Craft Reader 2010: 5). Adamson’s work refutes the received narrative that craft was in decline after the industrial revolution and then rescued by the Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth century, suggesting instead that craft is a ‘modern invention’, an idea that took shape in response to the pressures of industrialization and professionalization, before which there was an ‘undifferentiated world of making’ (Invention of Craft 2013: xiii). The handmade object also gained a particular resonance in an era of mass production. Adamson characterizes the Arts and Crafts movement as primarily a ‘reclamation project’ (xv), and by the mid-1930s, he suggests, the fundamentally nostalgic concepts of craft predominant in the Arts and Crafts movement were themselves coming under pressure. On the one hand, craft was co-opted by fascist, anti-women, or imperial ideology as the term was increasingly used either to elevate or depreciate particular kinds of artistic production. On the other hand, more positive ideas about the possibilities of combining craft and modern technology emerged that complicated the dichotomy that the Arts and Crafts movement had established between craft and mechanization.⁴

Woolf would have been aware of these debates around craft through her connection with the Omega workshops, her friendship with Roger Fry, and her work with the Hogarth Press. Woolf read William Morris throughout her life and, according to Peter Stansky, ‘mentions an inclination to write about’ him in February 1940 (1997: 7).⁵ She was, nonetheless, ambivalent about his creed, describing him in an early diary entry as ‘great’ but also ‘curiously inhuman’ (Woolf 1990: 221). Youngjoo Son argues that Woolf resisted what she saw as the restrictive nature of Morris’s ideology, desiring instead ‘openness and flexibility’ (2013: 179). Woolf was more overtly influenced by the ideas of Roger Fry who, himself uneasily influenced by Morris and Arts and Crafts, displayed an inconsistent attitude towards craft in his writings on art and his discussions of the Omega workshops. As Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan notes, Fry at times used ‘craft’ to dismiss ‘unimaginative, mechanical art’ (2014: 81), but he also saw something redemptive in artistic craft, advocating in his essay ‘Art and Socialism’ that if art could be ‘purified … by a prolonged contact with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment’ (Fry 1996: 193). Fry aimed to re-invigorate art with the freshness and spontaneity of craft and emphasized the way in which the handmade mark lets in human sensibility. Although Fry claimed that the Omega workshops were ‘less ambitious than William Morris, they do not hope to solve the social problems of production at the same time as the artistic’ (1996: 199), he did recognize the importance of the social and ethical conditions of artistic production. Fry saw Omega as a place where the artist could earn a living ‘by some craft in which his artistic powers would be constantly occupied, though at a lower tension and in a humbler way’ (Fry 1999: 183), and he wanted young artists to ‘make chairs and tables, carpet and pots that people liked to look at; that they liked to make’ (Woolf 1940: 189). While Omega did not necessarily aim to elevate the decorative crafts to the level of high art—Fry remained acutely aware of the need for the products to be practical, understanding that ‘Chairs had to stand upon their legs; dyes must not fade, stuffs must not shrink’ (196)—it did work to disrupt artistic hierarchies. Moreover, despite Fry’s resistance to the nostalgic morality of the Arts and Crafts movement, he too was committed to creating pleasurable material conditions for making. For Fry, craft was thus uneasily connected to larger questions of artistic production in modernity, and the term instigated a broader examination of both the nature of art and the material conditions and commercial value of artistic production.

Woolf’s Craft Practice

The Omega workshops were an influential predecessor to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, which was founded in 1917. There was, as Hana Leaper notes, overlap between the artists who worked at Omega and at the Hogarth Press, and the Woolfs were learning how to print as Fry was issuing small handmade books with woodcut illustrations (2017). The Hogarth Press is also the obvious place to which we might turn when thinking about Woolf’s direct engagement with craft ideology and practice: it has been described by Laura Marcus as ‘artisanal’ labour (2010: 278), by John Mepham as a ‘small craft production organized on a workshop basis’ (1991: 21), and by Tony Bradshaw as a sign of Woolf’s ‘enthusiasm for the craft’ (2010: 280). While I am most interested in Woolf’s use of craft as a metaphor for writing, it is worth exploring how her own work at the press influenced her evolving ideas about craft. Her identification with craft even in what might seem the craftiest of arenas was complicated and ambivalent.

The Hogarth Press was at first, as Leonard Woolf describes it in Beginning Again, a ‘manual occupation’ (1964: 233): according to a publicity flyer for the Hogarth Press the Woolfs aimed to do ‘the whole process of printing and production … by ourselves’, and between 1917 and 1932, they hand-printed 34 texts (Leonard and Virginia Woolf c. 1919). Setting type and using a press was painstaking workmanship and physically demanding labour.⁶ This hands-on approach was intrinsically connected to a valorization of craft, and Laura Marcus notes the significance of hand-printing as ‘an activity in which the embodied work of the compositor becomes part of the printing process, thus mitigating against the idea that printing is pure mechanism’ (265). Yet, it is also true, as Helen Southworth and others have noted, that the Woolfs resisted establishing the Press purely as a craft printing workshop in the mould of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press or C. R. Ashbee’s ‘book beautiful’ movement (Southworth 2010: 4). They did use commercial printers and they were not nostalgic for a lost tradition of book making. Leonard Woolf said that while they ‘wanted [their] books to “look nice,”’ they were more interested in ‘the immaterial inside of a book, what the author had to say and how he said it’ (Downhill 1967: 80). Furthermore, as Claire Battershill notes, the early Hogarth Press books were not particularly well-crafted items. Battershill describes their aesthetic as ‘scruffy’, saying of Monday or Tuesday that ‘it was so unevenly printed. You could hardly read Woolf’s stories through the thick black ink of woodcut illustrations’ (Battershill et al. 2017: 31). Indeed, Vanessa Bell was apparently so angry about the poor quality of the woodcuts for Kew Gardens that she expressed doubts as to the value of the press (Mepham 1991: 54).

All of this suggests an ambivalent and uneven engagement with and distancing from craft practices and ideologies which celebrate craft as a sacred art. In some ways, craft became at the Hogarth Press, as it was at Omega, a tactic employed to untether artistic production from the ego of the artist (Jenni Råback notes that Bell did not receive credit for the Hogarth Press dust jackets much as Omega artists remained anonymous [2017]). Yet the Woolfs were also canny about the commercial value of handcrafted work. Elizabeth Willson Gordon aptly sums up the press’s ambiguous adoption of the positions of ‘commercial/artistic, professional/amateur, traditional/avant garde, elitist/democratic’ as a ‘sophisticated and productive’ negotiation as well as a useful marketing strategy (2010: 108).

Such a strategic engagement with craft practices suggests Woolf’s nuanced awareness of what it means to make a book, in the intellectual, hands-on, and commercial senses of the word. Woolf’s craft work at the Hogarth Press is talked about in at least three distinct, sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory ways. In one vein, the hands-on ‘making’ is a therapeutic, physical hobby which also allows her a break from the cognitive and emotional labour of writing (Lee 1997: 362, Selborne 1998: 96). Secondly, the craft of printing creates a liberating space within which she could write and publish what she wanted, free from the pressures of the marketplace (Chan 2014: 84). Finally, the physical act of making books can be seen as intimately related to the imaginative act of making books. For example, Jennifer Sorensen (2017) and Laura Marcus (2010) argue that Woolf’s experience working as a printer and publisher influenced her experimental fiction, by shaping her awareness of ‘the structure of writing’, including such things as ‘the shapes words form on the page’, the use of white space, and ‘the ways in which the reader’s experience is shaped by the structure of printed words’ (Marcus 2010: 270). All these different constructions intersect with Woolf’s own ideas about the art, practice, and profession of writing. They also lead us back to the questions that drive her essay ‘Craftsmanship’: is writing a craft? If so, what does a writer make? And, what is the nature of this making?

In response to a letter from Fry praising ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Woolf wrote that ‘Im not sure that a perverted plastic sense doesn’t somehow work itself out in words for me’ (1918, sic). Woolf was from an early age aware of and enthusiastic about the materiality of words: books were intimate material objects which she kept close to her. She was also invested in the physical qualities of the accoutrements of writing, from the marbled paper in which she covered her books to her favourite kind of pen. Woolf’s accounts of writing in the 1930s are strikingly physiological, imagining it as a physical activity and a form of labour. She complained: ‘my eyes ache with Roger & I’m a little appalled at the prospect of the grind’ (3 May). She wrote that she was working on Three Guineas ‘hard & laboriously’, comparing the labour of writing to ‘straining to draw that cart across the rough ground’ (12 March 1937).

Making things with words is a craft that can take different forms and require different skills from both mind and hands. Woolf is highly aware of the hand that crafts the words. Alice Stavely et al. note that Woolf complained about her ‘handwriting go[ing] downhill! Another sacrifice to the press!’ (22 September 1925) and wonder if, among other possible reasons, ‘years of typesetting’ might have ‘trained her hands in different formations of work’ (2020). Abbie Garrington considers The Years in the context of what she terms Haptic Modernism, noting that it is a ‘peculiarly gestural novel; one which chooses repeatedly to alight upon the use of the hands’ (2013: 119). Handwriting enacts embodied cognition; it is, for Ted Bishop, ‘bound to the physical body and creates a different kind of concentration, activates different neural pathways’ (2014: 296). The physicality and plasticity of writing is also a mode of understanding, or what Bishop calls ‘tactile perception’. As the body curls in around the hand holding the pen, writing is also a particularly intimate kind of craft. For David Pye, writing is one example (along with sewing) of the ‘very few things’ that ‘can properly be said to have been made by hand’ (Pye 1968: 29). Instead of the terms craft or handwork, Pye instead prefers to think about the workmanship of certainty, which is found in mass and automated production, and the workmanship of risk, where the worker might ‘spoil the job … at any minute’ (Pye 1968: 22). His theory recollects Woolf’s understanding of the ‘nervous tremor which distinguishes the hand-made pot from the machine-made’ (Roger Fry 1940: 242). Writing, however, invokes an element of risk not only because of the quality of the penmanship (here we might think of Woolf’s ‘chicken scratch on sky blue paper in a signature purple ink’ [Stavely et al. 2020]), but also due to the inevitable imprecision of attempting to capture ideas with words which, Woolf warns, ‘hate being useful’ and try to ‘fool us’ (CDML 1993b: 138).

‘The Craft that Defies Craftsmanship’

In ‘Craftsmanship’ Woolf asserts that ‘if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty’ (CDML 1993b: 141). Words are, though, she continues, ‘the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things’ (141). In her 2007 essay, ‘Fail Better’, Zadie Smith similarly considers how writers learn or can be taught to craft with words. She imagines a writer called Clive who desires, and thus trains hard, to write the perfect novel. ‘If writing is a craft’, we read ‘he has all the skills, every tool’. However, training and tools alone do not a great writer make, and so, for Smith, ‘writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship’. She says:

A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere—for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the ‘soul’ would have done just as well.

This ineffable ‘rogue element’, which Smith tentatively defines as the self or the soul but we might also understand as the notion of inspiration, elevates writing from mere mechanical or technical skill to an art form. Moreover, both Woolf and Smith connect the writer’s self with the skill of the reader. ‘We know them as well as their books’, Woolf writes of the relationship between writer and reader, suggesting that reading is a mode of conversation (CDML 1993b: 140). Smith compares the relationship between writer and reader to that of the ‘amateur musician’ and the composer whose music he or she plays, and says that ‘the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal’. Reading, then, is also a kind of craft, albeit one which, like writing, cannot easily be taught.

Smith, like Woolf, explores how words capture life and express personality. Wordsmithing is thus, for Smith, a ‘question of character’, for, as Woolf says, words ‘live in the mind’ (CDML 1993b: 142). Smith’s insistence that ‘writing is always the attempted revelation of the elusive, multifaceted self’ sits interestingly with Woolf’s own nuanced poetics of authorial impersonality. For Smith, such a revelation of the self is ‘much more than biographical detail, it’s our way of processing the world, our way of being active’. Woolf similarly asks in ‘Craftsmanship’ if ‘any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal?’ (140). Here, as in her analysis of biography, we see Woolf balancing ‘truth’ and ‘personality’. Katerina Koutantoni describes Woolf’s work as demonstrating a strategy of ‘dialogic impersonality, which consists of the personal element in combination with communal intentions’ (2016: 147). The interaction between individual creativity and communal tradition is central to understandings of craft. The sociologist Bernard Zarca (1986), for example, suggests the importance of individual skill but does not focus on originality when he writes, ‘a craft was a body of producers tied together by a set of techniques and knowledges which could be acquired only through the practice of the occupation itself over time’ (qtd. in Taylor 2017: 25). In his work on Shakespeare, Gary Taylor uses the term ‘artiginality’ to describe, ‘the originality proper to artisans’ (25), and notes that such an artisanal model was not, historically, at odds with understandings of authorial labour.

While craft can be used to imply a retreat from ego towards communal practice, it can also, somewhat paradoxically, suggest a characterless aesthetics of surface. Woolf was particularly alert to the danger of craftsmanship becoming a mechanical skill divorced from creativity in a modern age of mass production and excessive specialization. When Woolf argues at the beginning of ‘Craftsmanship’ that ‘to talk of craft in connection with words’ risks ‘giv[ing] birth to some monster fit for a glass case in a museum’, part of what she denounces is an attention to stuffy aesthetics that does not allow for life (CDML 1993b: 137). In a review of Gilbert Cannan’s Mummery, Woolf expressed a distaste for what she called ‘well-made’ novels (qtd. in McLaurin 1973: 64–5), and in ‘Modern Fiction’, she excorticates Arnold Bennett for being a good ‘workman’. She writes damningly,

he can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draft between the frame of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? (CDML 1993a: 8)

Woolf’s ‘life’ resembles Smith’s ‘self’ or ‘soul’. Here the well-crafted book is connected to a lack of imagination and character, a solid mechanical know-how, and a dull and expert professionalism. Woolf pushes against sedimented definitions of craft that make it re-productive and dull. Craft is also tied to crass commercialism, for words, Woolf asserts in ‘Craftsmanship’, ‘hate making money’ (CDML 1993b: 143).

Woolf’s difficulty in reconciling making art with making money suggests how, for her, solid craftsmanship becomes connected to concepts of professionalism.⁷ As Evelyn Chan demonstrates throughout her monograph on Virginia Woolf and the Professions, the status of writing as a profession was a consistently vexed question for Woolf, who was keenly aware of both the potential loss of imaginative freedom that came from tying writing to earning a living, and the connection between financial security and imaginative autonomy. She was particularly alert to how professionalism could simultaneously benefit and risk women writers. Chan notes that while Woolf at times articulated a desire to be a ‘dreamy amateur’, hewing to a ‘vision of an art driven primarily by the variety and vibrancy which amateurism could provide’ (74), she also understood professionalism as ‘the meaningful pursuit of a line of work for its own sake and personal fulfilment’ (94). In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf acknowledges that ‘money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for’ (2012: 59), and in an April 1929 diary entry she expresses ‘pride that 7 people depend, largely, upon my hand writing on a sheet of paper … Its not scribbling; its keeping 7 people fed & housed’ (Woolf 1981: 221). Significantly, she here emphasizes not only the dignity of earning a living but also the physical labour of writing—a hand moving across a sheet of paper—as an act of making.

In the introduction to their collection Crafting the Female Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (2016) include the literary market place as one of the ‘art industries’ that became increasingly open to women who wanted or needed to earn a living. They consider how these female professions both ‘emerged out of’ and ‘distinguished themselves from the rich tradition of domestic handicrafts’ (2) as they explore ‘the ways in which the aesthetics, practices and economics of creative labour shaped women’s employment and self-expression, and, in so doing, their subjectivities’ (1). There are significant gender associations with the word, ‘craft’, not only in terms of how labour and art are gendered (and the value judgments implied therein) but also because it tends to be women, and perhaps foxes, who are described as ‘crafty’. Throughout her novels, Woolf depicts female characters engaged in craft work: Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse is depicted ‘knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone’ (Woolf 2006: 2), while Katherine and Lady Otway in Night and Day knit together while talking; in Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa sews her green silk dress while talking to Peter Walsh, and in the final moments of Between the Acts, Isa ‘let[s] her sewing drop’ (2008: 288). While Woolf was certainly ambivalent about the value of domestic handcrafts (particularly if these were the only forms of artistic expression open to women), her fiction repeatedly connects domestic craft work with community, conversation, and creativity. Woolf simultaneously depicts the domestic arts as opportunities for female creativity within the domestic sphere and weaves those depictions into the structural fabric of her novels. Writing is, Woolf states in ‘Professions for Women’, open to ‘a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She only had to move that pen from left to right’ (1984: 59). Woolf once again here connects both the tools of writing—pens and inkpots—and the physical labour of writing with the creative act. Moreover, in her discussion of professionalism, she returns to a craft metaphor not only to argue for the importance of a ‘room of one’s own', but also to maintain that the room ‘has to be furnished; it has to be decorated’ (63).

While Woolf argues in ‘Craftsmanship’ that it is impossible to teach the art of writing, she did not consistently disavow the need for writers, particularly women writers, to have education and training. She wrote in her diary about how she had ‘learnt’ ‘her craft’ writing essays and book reviews for editors, discovering ‘how to compress; how to enliven’ (Woolf 1985: 145), and in A Room of One’s Own, she laments that Judith Shakespeare, ‘could get no training in her craft’ (40). Elsewhere, she writes that the ‘story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his story craftily … or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together’ (Craft Reader 2003: 12). And when, in ‘On Re-Reading Novels’ she singles out the way that Henry James's Ambassadors ‘surmounts … problems which baffled Richardson’, she gives as reason that James is ‘endowed not with greater genius but with greater … craftsmanship’ (Woolf 1988b: 343, emphasis added). It seems clear that here the word is being used as a compliment to denote a skill and an attention to aesthetics that is built on knowledge and practice which, combined with creativity, can push art to greater achievements. When Woolf describes Pater as ‘the writer who from words made blue and gold and green’ (Woolf 1988a: 172–3), she seems close to what Richard Sennett suggests in The Craftsman, that ‘there is no art without craft’ (65). That ‘rogue element’ that Zadie Smith identifies is not after all incompatible with discussions of the ‘spirit of craftsmanship’ (Sennett 2008: 286). Rather art and craft are overlapping and interconnected categories. As Sennett explains, ‘the idea for a painting is not a painting’ (65). Or, conversely, as Woolf describes art in her diary ‘the sentence in itself beautiful’ (Woolf 1983: 126).

Material and Immaterial Craft

Those incompatible meanings of the word ‘craft’ that Woolf sets alongside one another at the beginning of ‘Craftsmanship’ remain irreconcilable. Is craft something material or immaterial, useful or deceptive, mechanical or creative? Or, to put it another way, paraphrasing another famous phrase of Woolf’s, something ‘very solid or very shifting’ (Woolf 1981: 218)? Ultimately, though, the incompatible meanings of the word are less a problem than a reflection of the nature of language itself, for, Woolf states, ‘when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die’ (CDML 1993b: 143). In the end, that ‘rogue element’ that Zadie Smith spoke of might well be the guile and cunning that makes a book ‘well-crafted’ in both senses of the word. There is also a third sense of the word ‘craft’ that Woolf alludes to but does not spell out—the association of craft with witchcraft, magic, and transformation.

Despite Woolf’s criticism of workmen-like writers, she remains aware that words do make things. They make headless hens and monsters. They make us catch ‘the train’ and ‘pass the examination’ (CDML 1993b: 143). They can ‘make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room’ (140). They make not ‘one simple statement but a thousand possibilities’ (138), and they make mutable worlds which we inhabit longer than any building, because ‘words, if properly used, seem able to live forever’ (139). These various acts of making are both imaginative and intellectual endeavours, and the product of practice, technique, and skill.

Woolf’s sense of language as associative and submerged in a rich and noisy history has been valuably connected with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (Allen 2010: 29–30) who, like Woolf, asserts that words do not exist in dictionaries, but rather ‘in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts’ (Bakhtin 1981: 291). However, I would like to end by making a connection with another modernist text—Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’ which was published in 1936, one year before Woolf’s ‘Craftsmanship’, and which similarly explores the affinities between storytelling and craft skills. When we situate Benjamin’s work alongside Woolf’s, we see parallel debates around inherited and emerging understandings of craft, which can be connected to broader modernist concerns.

‘The Storyteller’ and ‘Craftsmanship’ engage over and over again with common ideas and respond to similar currents of modernity. In his discussion of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin compares oral storytelling tradition with the rise of the modern novel, connecting the former to traditional craft. Benjamin describes ‘the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life’ as ‘a craftsman’s relationship’ (2011: 108). Like Woolf, Benjamin emphasizes the individuality, character, or style of the storyteller when he asserts that ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (91). He also notes the shared tools of the storyteller and craft worker. Both writers explore the idea of a ‘linguistic communal consciousness’ (Cuddy-Keane 2003: 131): Benjamin posits that ‘a great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, particularly in a milieu of craftsmen’ (2011: 101) and Woolf writes that words are ‘full of echoes, of memories, of associations’ (CDML 1993b: 140). Benjamin observes that the craftsman and the storyteller often travelled together and shared the same spaces and experiences. His description of a community of listeners ‘weaving and spinning … while [stories] are being listened to’ (91) recalls Woolf’s fictional sewing and knitting female characters who occupy the same creative spheres as the woman writer. Both authors consider the value of storytelling, but, while Woolf, perhaps ironically, suggests that words are not ‘useful’ (CDML 1993b: 137), Benjamin claims that ‘every real story’ contains ‘something useful’ (86).

There is something of William Morris’s nostalgia in Benjamin’s sense that ‘the art of storytelling is coming to an end’ (83). He opposes craft to ‘industrial technology’ (92) and laments that the ‘rhythm of work’ is ‘becoming unravelled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship’ (90). For him, the invention of printing creates the novelist who is isolated from communal experience in a way that the storyteller is not. While Woolf also resists the technology of words that are ‘tapped out by a typewriter’ rather than coming ‘fresh from a human brain’ (CDML 1993b: 140), she insists that try as we might to ‘catch them and sort them’, words continue to ‘live in the mind’ (142). Rather than only valorizing the past, Woolf understands that words have a ‘need of change’ (142). Indeed, it seems significant that her exploration of the mutability and transformative power of language finds form in a radio broadcast; the ‘talk element’ that both ‘thrills’ and ‘upsets’ Woolf suggests the ways in which the old oral traditions might find new forms for the modern age (21 April 1937).

Ultimately, metaphors of craft, for both Benjamin and Woolf, offer a way to consider the material and tactile qualities of language. In ‘Craftsmanship’, Woolf’s words become living things: they ‘shuffle and change’, they ‘range hither and thither’, and they fall in love and mate together. This shared sense of the materiality of both words and stories also entails an understanding of how they evoke and contain memories and histories. Esther Leslie describes Benjamin as a materialist. She notes how in ‘The Task of the Translator’ he alludes to pottery, comparing translating to gluing together ‘fragments from a vessel’ where ‘the world is to be put back together, but it is a montage praxis, using debris and rubbish, the broken pots and torn scraps’ (Leslie 2010: 294). Leslie’s understanding of Benjamin’s material approach to language recalls David Pye’s description of craft in The Nature and Aesthetics of Design as ‘an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional’. ‘We live like castaways,’ Pye writes, ‘But, even at that, we can be debonair and make the best of it’ (1978: 14).

Woolf’s ‘Craftsmanship’ is part of a larger modernist conversation about the materiality of language, as well as modes, methods, techniques, and technologies of artistic production. The concept of craft lives, somewhat uncomfortably, at the intersection of all of these ideas. Woolf wrote ‘Craftsmanship’ at a time when craft was a word under pressure from different legacies, multiple conflicting associations, and divergent demands. It was a word that lay at the nexus point of a complex and, for Woolf, irresolvable argument about the nature of writing as a pleasure, privilege, profit, art, or escape, and about the nature of artistic work in an age of increasing mechanization, marketization, and professionalization.

From the Hogarth Press to her essays written for profit to her fiction, Woolf was consistently ambivalent about what it means to labour and to craft with words. In ‘Craftsmanship’, she reminds us of the multiple, often conflicting meanings of craft. If we, like Woolf, look the word ‘craft’ up in the Oxford English Dictionary, it tells us that the ‘ulterior etymology is uncertain’ and suggests connections to ‘crave’, ‘strength’, ‘force’, and ‘virtue’; it offers multiple definitions for this word that has been ‘out and about, in the streets and on people’s lips for centuries’ (CDML 1993b: 140). We must also of course remember Woolf’s counsel that words live not in dictionaries but ‘in the mind’ (CDML 1993b: 142). In our current mania for all things craft, the word predominantly remains reserved for the material and the tactile, but Woolf’s ‘Craftsmanship’ is a vital reminder to keep the material and immaterial sitting alongside one another when we think about craft. Woolf, moreover, prompts us to consider what we might gain if we were to position writing in this conversation, either imagining writing as craft or constructing it in opposition to craft, or better yet in ambivalent tension with it. After all, as Woolf declares in ‘Craftsmanship’, it is ‘our business to see what we can do with the English language as it is’, and to ask ‘how [we can] combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?’ (CDML 1993b: 141)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Clemson University Press for permission to publish portions of a previous essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pye was loosely connected to Woolf’s social and artistic circle. His mother was the bookbinder Sybil Pye and his aunt was the painter, sculptor, and draughtsman Ethel Pye. His work on craft was also influenced by Roger Fry.

2 Henceforth CDML (Crowded Dance of Modern Life).

3 For further discussion see: Pye (1968) who explores various definitions of craft in The Nature and Craft of Workmanship and considers the value of skilled workmanship in an age of factory-made objects; Adamson, whose introduction to The Craft Reader delineates the intellectual history of craft; and Sennett (2008) who, in The Craftsman, traces the ‘enduring’ ‘human impulse’ that is craftsmanship (9) as well as the various forms it can take.

4 Jeffrey Petts (2008) in fact argues that there was ‘a formal split in the Arts and Crafts Movement in the early twentieth century’ between ‘handicraft purists’ and those who were more open to mass production’ (37).

5 Judy Little reveals that there were copies of Morris’s The Defence of Guinevere and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in Woolf’s library. Woolf requested a copy of ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’. She also, according to Elisa Kay Sparks, read J. W. Mackail’s biography of Morris in 1905 and, 35 years later in 1940, she read Morris’s ‘Chants for Socialists’ (Sparks 139). In Mrs Dalloway, Sally Seton gives Clarissa a book by Morris, wrapped in brown paper.

6 See Donna Rhein (1985) for more detail on the practicalities and physical demands of operating the press. She notes that the Woolfs first bought a small hand press in 1917 which they replaced with a larger Minerva machine with a treadle in 1921.

7 There is much debate about craft as a pride in amateurism or professional knowledge. See, for example, Richard Sennett (2008), Stephen Knott (2015), and Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (2016).