Handwriting, Mrs. Dalloway, & Flying Letters

It’s seen an increase of over 80 per cent in stationery sales in April. The range of plain stationery is up by more than 200 per cent. Record books – for journals – are up by over 70 per cent; notebook orders have doubled and telephone and address books sales have increased by 355 per cent.

Engaging with the online world is by some distance less beneficial than actually writing stuff down. There’s something about the process of inscribing physical ink on a physical page that involves our brain and hand in a more sensual and immediate way than the fingers-keyboard-screen nexus.

Putting pen to paper is a physical activity: you see and feel the medium you write with – whether it’s pencil, pen or ballpoint. Cardinal Newman wrote with a quill up to his death at the end of the nineteenth century, and he was a prodigious letter writers (his correspondence fills 30 volumes). What that meant was that he, like every other writer up to modern times, constantly heard the scratch of the nib on paper, constantly modified his writing to take account of the flow of ink and the avoidance of blots. Handwriting means you engage with a writing instrument. And with the physicality of the paper…woven, smooth or textured, thin or thick.

This sensuous aspect of writing may explain why handwriting – sequential hand movement – seems to engage parts of the brain that keyboard use doesn’t, as shown by magnetic resonance imaging. And cursive script – longhand – means that the flow between brain and hand is more fluent than if you don’t use joined up script.

An obvious aspect of writing by hand is that you have to think before you write; your sentences are formed in the brain before you put them down. If you make a mistake on screen it’s easily remedied. When you’re writing on paper, there’s an incentive to avoid error and get the sense formed before you begin. 

Ninety-five years ago this week, Mrs. Dalloway—arguably the most famous work by iconic modernist writer and pioneer of the stream of consciousness narrative technique, Virginia Woolf—was first published. Capturing the complex and disquieting interiority of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–WWI England, over the course of a single day, it is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Though troubled by debilitating bouts of mental illness throughout her life, culminating in her tragic suicide in 1941 at the age of 59, Woolf was an astonishingly prolific writer—of novels, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and drama—and by the 1930s had established herself as one of the most revered public intellectuals of the era. 

To mark this auspicious literary anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the first New York Times reviews of each of Woolf’s ten novels, from The Voyage Out (1915), to the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941).

When I hear that someone endowed with a good mind and trained in the liberal studies – although the salvation of the soul does no depend on that – has a view different from what truth requires on a very easy question, I both wonder and ardently desire to know the man and talk with him, or, if I cannot do that, I long at least to meet his mind and be met by his through letters which fly afar. I hear that you are such a man, and I grieve that you are severed and separated from the Catholic Church, which is spread through the whole world, as it was foretold by the Holy Spirit. ~Letter 87