The Hidden Machinery by Margot Livesey

Author:Margot Livesey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words . . . Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (Which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.

Given this amazing ambition, to make a wave in the mind—“the sea is to be heard all through it”— Woolf’s style is surprisingly simple.

I find the argument that Woolf presents in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” very persuasive, but it is interesting to note that a large part of the essay is a beautiful and very conventional character sketch of Mrs. Brown and her interactions with Mr. Smith. We see Mrs. Brown with her tidy threadbare clothes and clean little boots; we hear her speak; we speculate about her thoughts, her feelings, and her history:

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