Pleasure in Woolf’s Letters

There is something so wonderfully joyful in reading about others’ failures at teaching. Here are two good ones:

“Yesterday I did a very melancholy thing—which was to take my working women over the Abbey. Only one came!—and we solemnly went round the Chapel and the waxworks together, and saw the mummy of a 40 year old parrot—which makes history so interesting miss!” (L 1.192; 18 June 1905; to Violet)

“Do you know I lecture on English Composition at Morley? ‘Is this an Arithemetic Class Miss?’ a new Dutchman asked me last time when I had done” (L 1.212; 10 Nov. 1905; to Lady Robert Cecil)