Portrait of the artist as a young writer. A youthful Virginia Woolf.
Is there any point in reading juvenilia? Loosely defined as work created during a writer's youth, the term encompasses everything from early jottings about pets to works of the status of Frankenstein. While the genre has always fascinated academics, however, a recent batch of publications has attempted to bring the writing of youthful authors to a wider readership. But are such works really a chance to watch a great artist finding his or her voice, or simply the literary equivalent of seeing a photo of your friend on a potty?
The publication of one of the most famous youthful works, the Hyde Park Gate News by Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, has reopened the debate on the value of such early endeavours. Begun in 1891, when Woolf was nine, the newspaper is a blend of fiction, sketches and gossip from the sisters' family home. It's impressive stuff, by turns funny and serious, as when Woolf ventriloquizes for her father in a series entitled Experiences of a Pater-Familias: "My wife a month ago got a child and I regret to say that I wish he had never been born for I am made to give in to him in everything."
The book's editor, Hermione Lee, is very much in the seeds of greatness camp, commenting in her introduction that "Hyde Park Gate News doesn't only provide raw material for Virginia Woolf's novels; it also shows, in its vivid, ebullient, attentive flow of comment, early symptoms of one of the world's great diary writers." Reviewing the book in the Independent, Laurence Phelan was a little more circumspect, but eventually he too was won over: "It's of variable quality... But I think we can make allowances, and actually, for the most part, the mimicry and satire is impressively sophisticated, funny and adult."
This curious blend of the childish and the mature runs throughout the history of juvenilia. The genre has always been associated with lighthearted and occasional writing, often produced to amuse the writer's friends or parents, perhaps the greatest example being the sharp and witty stories Jane Austen wrote between 1787 and 1793, which include an extremely funny History of England. The status of juvenilia began to change in the Romantic era, however, not least because several writers wrote what are considered major works while still in their youth. John Keats had written a great deal of major poetry before he was 20, while Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 19. In many cases, an early death meant that youthful work was all a writer was able to produce, as in the case of the great forger-poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide aged seventeen.
More recent juvenilia has proved to be a fertile source for publishing controversy. Philip Larkin was notorious for the slimness of his poetic output, but since his death in 1985 his published work has swelled hugely, most conspicuously by large tracts of juvenilia. First came Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, two rollicking novels of lesbian intrigue set at a girls boarding school. These were followed in 2005 by the Early Poems and Juvenilia, which was longer than Larkin's Collected Poems.
The author's own comments express the disdain in which many writers hold their own early work, with handwritten notes such as "pseudo-Keats babble" and "unforgettably bad". Blake Morrison was forced to agree, commenting in a review of the book that "you have to love Larkin to get through it, and knowing how firmly he renounced these poems you feel vaguely disloyal reading them at all. Unsuspecting readers in search of the real thing should be warned off."
It is unlikely that they will, however, and editions of juvenilia look set to continue to do a brisk trade. There are clearly several reasons for this, ranging from genuine scholarly interest to a slightly less noble desire to eavesdrop on writers before they were famous. The best juvenilia combines these various impulses, adding the freshness of childhood perceptions to an awareness, often unconscious, of adult realities on the fringes of the childhood world. What's more, despite all the precocity it is often the small, childish moments that make the sharpest impression. Vanessa Bell recalled how Woolf once hid to watch the response of her mother to a new edition of her paper, which amounted to the comment "Rather clever, I think." This response was more than enough for Woolf, however: "She had approval and had been called clever, and our eavesdropping had been rewarded."
