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Virginia Woolf had an unfortunate life, beginning with her family relationships, notably having the ill-tempered and depressive Leslie Stephen for a father. Early on, she exhibited the symptoms of mental illness (most likely bi-polar disorder for which there was no effective treament in her lifetime) and had several psychotic episodes and hospitalizations. Leonard, her husband, was apparently an understanding and supportive man, though her sex life with him was unsatisfactory, even less than her affair with Vita Sackville-West, who by all accounts was a bitch supreme, who managed to have a happy marriage with Harold Nicholson mostly because he and she were more homosexual than heter.
With all this misfortune, you almost have to hope that Virginia's career as a writer had been more successful. Primarily, she hoped to be a major novelist, but the majority of her fiction, written in part to demonstrate the irrelevance of "realism", is mediocre, excepting perhaps TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, which survives largely because of the animus towards her father, the inspiration for one of the characters. (Her first novels--THE VOYAGE OUT and NIGHT AND DAY--are realistic, but they're minor works, if not exactly juvenilia.)
As someone has said, her books are like paintings with lots of color and texture but no draughtsmanship. The "luminous halo" she sought to portray eludes her and stultifies her reader.
Her real gift was for the essay form and literary criticism. The book under review and her two volumes of THE COMMON READER are her greatest achievements. Why she wasn't satisfied with being a good essayist and critic mystifies me. How many good essayists and critics have written worthwhile fiction?Read more ›
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I was lying on the floor, nominally exercising but really just taking time off from gravity, when I noticed a small piece of fuzz on the carpet. Pinching it between forefinger and thumb, I realized it was a small moth crushed now in my fingers, as soft as lint. Oh yuck, I thought, and good riddance too, darned thing and its cousins probably feasting on my winter wool wardrobe.
Virginia Woolf, however, has more moth compassion in her four page essay than I've mustered in a lifetime. "The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life...appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic." She stuck with Moth-Guy to his end, musing over life force and death. And that is why I loll on floors and she authors books.
Best essay of all in this book was "Street Haunting" wherein an early evening walk in winter through London streets "gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves." She proceeds on a 14 page meditative journey through the streets and shops of central London.
The bulk of the book's entries are literary criticism for which I have no background to appreciate. But the first five essays are definite jewels.
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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.Read more ›
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