Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out

4. Chapter IV (continued)

"No," said Rachel.

She slid Cowper's Letters and Wuthering Heights out of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

"What a dear little room!" she said, looking round. "Oh, Cowper's Letters!" I've never read them. Are they nice?"

"Rather dull," said Rachel.

"He wrote awfully well, didn't he?" said Clarissa; "--if one likes that kind of thing--finished his sentences and all that. Wuthering Heights! Ah--that's more in my line. I really couldn't exist without the Brontes! Don't you love them? Still, on the whole, I'd rather live without them than without Jane Austen."

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

"Jane Austen? I don't like Jane Austen," said Rachel.

"You monster!" Clarissa exclaimed. "I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?"

"She's so--so--well, so like a tight plait," Rachel floundered. "Ah--I see what you mean. But I don't agree. And you won't when you're older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain-- you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world's slow stain.

How divine!--and yet what nonsense!" She looked lightly round the room. "I always think it's living, not dying, that counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight-- I assure you I know heaps like that--well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they're geniuses and die young. But I don't expect you to agree with me!"