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Virginia Woolf

Personal Information

Born January 25, 1882
Died March 28, 1941 (59 years old)
London, United Kingdom
Also known as: Adeline Virginia Woolf, Virginia, Woolf
140 books
4.1 (138)
2,619 readers

Description

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. [Comment from Ursula Le Guin on The Guardian]: > You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf. > I was 17 when I read [Orlando]. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere. > How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete. > In [Flush], Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world. > Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own. : : :

Books

Newest First

The letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolfe

4.3 (3)
226

After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West, a British novelist married to foreign diplomat Harold Nicolson, and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf’s death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched: daily dramas, bits of gossip, the strains and pleasures of writing, and always the same joy in each other’s company. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons. DeSalvo and Leaska established the chronological order of the letters and placed them in sequence, and they have also included relevant diary entries and letters Vita and Virginia wrote to other friends where they add context and illumination to the narrative. Annotations throughout the text identify peripheral characters, clarify allusions, and provide background. As the New York Times noted, "the result is a volume that reads like a book, not just a gathering of marvelous scraps." In his introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling."

Essays

Jeremy Collier, Umberto Eco, H. I. D. Ryder, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Walter Kasper, Béla Bartók, Clement Mansfield Ingleby, John Fiske, John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michael Pye, Octavio Paz, Sayyid Aḥmad K̲h̲ān̲, Joseph Addison, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Евгений Иванович Замятин, Henry F. (Henry Francis) Pelham, Arthur Christopher Benson, Grant, Percy Stickney, Charles Carroll Everett, Jean François Lyotard, Herbert Spencer, Raymond Williams, William Hazlitt, Giorgio Agamben, Alfred Kerr, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok, William Butler Yeats, William Graham Sumner, Allen Tate, James Beattie, J. H. Plumb, William Godwin, Francis Bacon, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Thomas Buckle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Friedrich Grimm, John Addington Symonds, James Hadley, James Laughlin, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, Irving Howe, E. M. W. Tillyard, Benjamin Rush, Plutarch, Morton Feldman, Simone Weil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Howard Zinn, Ellen Key, Salisbury, Robert Cecil marquess of, J. Logie Robertson, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Henry Huxley, Arnold Zweig, Hugh Miller, Mackenzie, Morell Sir, George Orwell, Bing Xin, Roland Barthes, Errico Malatesta, George John Romanes, Parsons, Theophilus, Alice Meynell, Alejo Carpentier, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Barzun, James Huneker, Thomas Paine, Thomas Merton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Montaigne, Michel de, David Hume, Paul Valéry, Félix Guattari, Wilhelm Max Wundt, Christopher Hill, Shen, Congwen, Italo Calvino, Robert Morgan, James Martineau, Abūlkalām Āzād, Friedrich Schiller, Rosemond Tuve, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Carl Gustav Jung, John Henry Newman, Thomas De Quincey, Virginia Woolf, Matthew Arnold, Frederic William Henry Myers, Ernst Troeltsch, Martin Buber, Hermann Bahr, Thomas Mann, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Jonathan Franzen, Samuel Johnson, Anscombe, G. E. M., Charles Lamb, George Brimley, John Abercrombie, Thomas Monro, Hubert Bland
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1

Two stories

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0

Two tales about little boys and their adventures. In the first, two Irish brothers get to Dunmore by hitching rides with the people they meet. In the second, a Spanish boy helps save the town's water supply with an ingenious scheme.

Selected essays

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1

"With his wit, eloquence and shrewd perception of contemporary morals, Samuel Johnson was the most versatile of Augustan writers. His dictionary, dramas and poetry established his reputation, but it was the essays published in The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler that demonstrated the range of his talent. Tackling ethical questions such as the importance of self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, the role of the novel, and, in a lighter vein, marriage, sleep and deceit, these brilliant and thought-provoking essays are a mirror of the time in which they were written and a testament to Johnson's stature as the leading man of letters of his age." "This new edition contains a broad selection of essays presenting both the forcefully argued moral pieces of Johnson's middle years and the more light-hearted essays of his later work. The introduction places the works in their historical and literary context, and there is also a chronology of Johnson's life and times."--Jacket.

Between the Acts

3.8 (4)
35

"Virginia Woolf's extraordinary last novel, Between the Acts, was published in July 1941. In the weeks before she died in March that year, Woolf wrote that she planned to continue revising the book and that it was not ready for publication. Her husband prepared the work for publication after her death, and his revisions have become part of the text now widely read by students and scholars. Unlike most previous editions, the Cambridge edition returns to the final version of the novel as Woolf left it, examining the stages of composition and publication. Using the final typescript as a guide, this edition fully collates all variants and thus accounts for all the editorial decisions made by Leonard Woolf for the first published edition. With detailed explanatory notes, a chronology and an informative critical introduction, this volume will allow scholars to develop a fuller understanding of Woolf's last work"--

Nurse Lugton's curtain

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5

As Nurse Lugton dozes, the animals on the patterned curtain she is sewing come alive.