A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf's "Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher"

Abstract

In now formidable canon of Virginia Woolf scholarship, Janet Case, one of most important and sustained influences in her life, still exists largely by way of footnotes. The more famous dramatis personae of Woolfs literary circle still eclipse quieter and steadier association which, for novelist, was to represent her lifelong relationship, of love and defiance, with classics and the classical temper. When Janet died in July 1937, Virginia Woolf, in writing her obituary for London Times (reprinted at end of this essay), had to summon together a wide variety of feelings, ambivalences, which had shifted, often very subtly, over a period of more than three decades. Reflecting on complexity of feeling which followed eulogy's completion, Woolf wrote in her diary, And how I loved her, at Hyde Park Gate: and how I went hot and cold going to Windmill Hill: and how great a visionary part she has played in my life, till visionary became a part of fictitious, not of real life.1 Born in 1864 and educated in classics at Girton College, Cambridge, Janet became Woolfs tutor toward beginning of 1902. By that time her pupil had covered a considerable amount of Greek under supervision of Clara Pater. Two notations in margins of her edition of Sophocles show that, under Pater, Antigone was begun on May 7, 1900, and completed on July 11,2 and in summer of following year, Woolf wrote her brother Thoby that she had read Oedipus at Colonus and half of Trachiniae as well.3 However, this sheer quantity of material clearly did not impress firm Miss Case