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The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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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.