Customer Reviews

Moment And Other Essays (Harvest Book, Hb 295)

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What would her best book be, one wonders . . . perhaps MRS. DALLOWAY or A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN or BETWEEN THE ACTS or maybe, in a funny mood, THE WAVES. THE MOMENT must be pretty low down on anybody;s, wouldn;t you think? She didn't even mean for it to be a book, instead after she died Leonard Woolf just kept finding things and editing them up so that the Hogarth Press could keep churning out new volume after new volume of Virginia Woolf's. Well, i can understand that. And it's not necessarily the case that the very furst posthumous collection of essays, THE DEATH OF THE MOTH, had a higher percentage of hits than THE MOMENT, it's only that nearly everything in THE MOMENT feels a little soapy and watery, as though the suds had gone out of the dishwasher a long time ago. I was never crazy about Virginia Woolf's fascination with her own family. Maybe that appeals to some old school Bloomsbury fans, but a piece like "The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray," is hard to read now with a straight face, and not only because of the double entendre, which I'm sure slyboots Virginia Woolf intended, of "The Enchanted Organ," but really because she's trying so hard to make us think that Anne Thackeray was indeed an important writer.

How about two different essays called, "Royalty." It isn;'t very helpful that the only way Leonard chose to distinguish them it to have a footnote appended to each, not when both footnotes say the exact same thing, "Written in 1939." Huh? Maybe I'll write an essay called, "Royalty," and add a footnote that says, "Written in 1939." That would serve me right, royalty too. It isn't that she, Woolf, was worshipful of royalty, although one recalls the godlike presence of the limo at the beginning of MRS. DALLOWAY, traversing the square slowly very much like the progress of a god's chariot, everyone standing around wondering and whispering who coukld be inside, which member of the royal family.

"On Being Ill" has attained classic status, and well deserved too, for it contains one of her most interesting discoveries, that illness has not its own literature and it should because it takes up so much space in our lives, particularly in the upper middle class. And yet the essay sort of peters out, as though she'd had rhis apercu and yet couldn't deide how to develop it. You get the feeling she wants to describe and than analyze her own symptoms, but then she wants to universalize them as a metaphor for being alive, enlarge the context of Russell Square, and yet the essay itself winds up eulogizing the bygone members of the British aristocracy, who lived such big lives. It has zero to do with being ill and heaps to do with having status. She's great, but let us turn to another book by her, one she wanted to have printed.