Carlyle's House and Other Sketches (Hesperus Classics) [Paperback]

Virginia Woolf (Author), David Bradshaw (Editor), Doris Lessing (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003 | Series: Hesperus Classics

Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches marks the first publication of one of Virginia Woolf’s very earliest notebooks. Recently unearthed from a collection of private papers, it contains a series of six striking and semi-autobiographical sketches, each transcribed and edited by Dr. David Bradshaw. From the cold formality of London townhouses with their rows of austere portraits, to the dull chaos of the academic’s abode, and the eccentric spinster’s Hampstead home, Virginia Woolf paints a series of portraits of everyday life, capturing character and setting in exquisite detail. Experimental in style, and heralding the later masterpieces Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, this early notebook is quintessential Woolf.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Our fascination with Virginia Woolf flows unabated. Michael Cunningham's homage, The Hours (1998), was turned into a major motion picture. A trenchant yet forgotten work of Woolf's, On Being Ill [BKL O 15 02], was rediscovered and handsomely republished, and now a lost notebook has miraculously resurfaced. It was written in 1909 when the 27-year-old budding writer, still named Virginia Stephen, was thoroughly frustrated by her unmarried state. In a series of angry sketches, each ably analyzed by Oxford fellow Bradshaw, Woolf is edgy and judgmental as she recounts her visits to the homes of the Carlyles and Darwins, limns a cutting little portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and pens a harshly anti-Semitic account of one Mrs. Loeb. As Doris Lessing writes in her brilliant foreword, Woolf was as "malicious" as she was creative, and the astonishing power of her work is rooted in her complexity as well as in her mission "to make her novels nets to catch what she saw as the subtler truth about life." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“By the time you close this modest volume, its proportions seem exactly right.” -- The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Hesperus Press; 2003 Edition edition (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843910551
• ISBN-13: 978-1843910558
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,903,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This sandwich is missing its meat, July 31, 2005

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M. Nesbit "One reader" (Daly City, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carlyle's House and Other Sketches (Hesperus Classics) (Paperback)

Not much here worth even Amazon's discount price.

I have always very much admired Woolf's literary criticism and enjoyed many of her novels. I have read the Diaries and Letters complete. So I can't be called an Anti-Woolfian. However, I have to say that this "book" is like Gertrude Stein's Oakland; "There isn't any there there".

I can take comfort in the fact that I bought "Carlyle's House" as a remainder and did get my four bucks worth of pleasure out of Doris Lessing's foreword.