JUST BETWEEN US

The pleasures and pitfalls of gossip.

- BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

To be discussed by others can confer status; it can just as easily strip status away.

In August, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a quiet stretch at Asheham, the country house that she and her husband, Leonard, rented in rural Sussex. “We’ve been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind,” Woolf wrote to a friend, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell. “No gossip, no malevolence, no support from one’s fellow creatures.” After six months spent in such isolation, Woolf quipped, “I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads.” Alas, any pretensions to holiness had been dispelled by the arrival of house guests the previous evening: “I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning. We gossiped for 5 hours.”