James Wood

That then follows a hilariously minimizing description of what Hugh Whitbread has actually done in those 55 years.

And this is summarized as the improvement of shelters and the protection of owls in Norfolk.

Clarissa has a formidable old aunt, Aunt Helena, who is mentioned several times through the book but really makes a major appearance at the end of the book at the party.

Aunt Helena is a throwback.

Her main moment in life was when she died.

when she was living in Burma.

So she's an absolutely imperial creature, Burma of the 1870s, and she has a glass eye.

It seemed fitting, writes Wolfe, that she should be turning to glass.

And then when we encounter her at Clarissa's party at the end of the novel, we're told that people who had known Burma in the 1870s, people who had known Burma in the 1870s,

We're always led up to her.

She's sitting in a chair.

She's old and not very able-bodied.

So we have to, again, if we're thinking in this old realist dispensation, so we're thinking not so much Wolfe and more like Dickens.

So how would Dickens do this party?

Or how would Austen do this party?

Well, Woolf has plenty of that spirit in her too.

Here is Aunt Helena in her sort of bath chair, as it were, at the party.

And people are being led up to her.

People who had known Burma in the 1870s being led up to her.

And what she likes to talk about once you encounter Aunt Helena is the book that she wrote about orchids in Burma and how it was praised by Charles Darwin.