“I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely.” VW, diary, 19 Jun 1923, p. 249.

Since the first time I noted this quotation, I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway. No sooner finished than I knew I’d have to read it again. I found an entire scholarly essay about an episode in the novel of which I had no memory, an that got me going. I’ve also watched the film adaptation, and when you remember that “the design is certainly original” you have to wonder how anyone could produce such a banal treatment of it. But then you have to wonder, too, how one could produce an excellent treatment. Is it mandatory to meet the unconventional with the unconventional? Art with art? And who was the intended audience?

“How far has our set justified its promise? Lytton maintains that in ourselves we are as remarkable as the Johnson set, though our works may perish — still we’re at the beginning of our works.” VW diary, p. 64

It would be interesting to know if Boswell compared his own set to anything preceding it, or if he distinguished between set and Club. And if by set, Strachey meant The Club, then we have to compare Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell to Reynolds, etc, and immortality certainly falls short. A discussion on immortality was the context for the quotation above in September 1920 (recorded in Virginia Woolf’s diary). Lytton was the believer, and Leonard Woolf the skeptic. “It was an amusing talk,” wrote Virginia, and it apparently included comparisons involving Madame de Sevigné and Macaulay.

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw85227/The-Memoir-Club