The Death of the Moth and Other Essays [Paperback]

Virginia Woolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 23, 1974

A highly acclaimed collection of twenty-eight essays, sketches, and short stories presenting nearly every facet of the author's work. "Up to the author's highest standard in a literary form that was most congenial to her" (Times Literary Supplement (London)). "Exquisitely written" (New Yorker); "The riches of this book are overwhelming" (Christian Science Monitor). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A posthumous collection of her essays, written over a twenty year period, but issued ten years after her Second Common Reader. For the most part, the essays fall into two classes slight, charming, almost idyllic bits of atmosphere writing; and critical essays, chiefly on figures of a period past (Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Henry James, George Moore and others). There are a few - a very few - more personal bits - one on the subject of her horror of being thought middlebrow - high??, yes, but never the other. Only one even touches on the war. Interesting to read immediately after the Forster Virginia Woolf, and to trace and check with him through a fresh approach to unread material. (Kirkus Reviews )

About the Author

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (October 23, 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156252341
• ISBN-13: 978-0156252348
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #384,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A supreme artist at work, April 28, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Paperback)

Woolf is an outstanding essayist. This work edited and put together by her husband Leonard Woolf is her last volume of essays. It contains essays on a wide variety of subjects beginning with her careful depiction of the 'Death of a Moth' and containing essays on Henry James, Madame de Sevigne, the historian Gibbon, Sara Coleridge, George Moore, E.M.Forster, . She also has essays on 'The Art of the Biography''A Letter to a Young Poet' 'Middlebrow' 'Craftsmanship' ' Professions for Women' 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'.
One of her most revealing set of insights is given in the essay on 'The Art of Biography' There she defends the aesthetic supremacy of her own mode of writing, the novel.

"It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was tied by friends, letters and documents he was laying his finger upon a necessary element in biography; and that it is also a necessary limitation. For the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person only- the artist himself. Their authenticity lies in the truth of his own inner vision. The world created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more wholly of a piece than the world that is largely made of authentic information supplied by other people."

Woolf makes an especially beautiful description of the distinguishing character of a writer whose greatness she defends, Henry James.
"For ourselves Henry James seems most entirely in his element , doing that to say what everything favours his doing , when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time, the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be discerned, which the glare of day flattens out, the depth, the richness, the calm, the humour of the whole pageant- all this seems to have been his natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood."
Her stylistic brilliance and acute aesthetic perception pervades these outstanding essays.