Practice

In ‘The Leaning Tower’, Virginia Woolf calls a writer's education ‘so much less definite’ than the education of others, then defines it as a mix of ‘[r]eading, listening, talking, travel, leisure’ (E6 266), a combination many women, ethnic minorities and working-class people could not easily gain. Beyond that ‘less definite’ schooling, many practising writers, then and now, recommend what Robert Louis Stevenson suggests in ‘A College Magazine’ (57–76). As did others, Virginia Stephen learned to be a writer by following that advice, whether she had read it or not: read widely, set oneself exercises, imitate models and practise consistently. If she was going to break into the world of letters through reviewing and essay writing, Stephen knew she had to learn the ‘knack of writing for newspapers’ (L1 155), and we can see her practising that skill in her observations, journal entries, reading notes, and reviews of popular fiction.

Observing

From the start, Virginia Stephen's writing revealed acute powers of observation, but as she grew older, she worked to improve both her writing and the observations it rested on. Her first request for criticism from a friend, a letter to Emma Vaughan dated 11 September 1899, coincidentally came when she was in Warboys, where she had begun, says Leaska, ‘practising the art of essay writing for the first time’ in her summer holiday journal (L1 28; PA 135). From that date forward, although dated entries still appear, Stephen fills her journal with literary exercises, some titled, in which she describes nature and people, place and time, society and culture, home and away. What she explains in ‘Retrospect’ (30 July 1903) about her Hyde Park diary book applies to all her 1899–1909 pieces: they ‘serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps & fragments …. It is an exercise – training for eye & hand – ‘ (PA 186–7).

Learning to write for papers, Virginia Stephen apprenticed as a book reviewer who practised reading books, but also as an essayist who practised reading the world. She trains eye and hand, recording what she sees with ‘an honest desire to put down the truth with whatever materials one has to hand’, knowing ‘rough