Word: belled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...primary examples come to mind: Richard Elimann's biography of James Joyce (1959). W.J. Bate's of John Keats (1963), Henri Troyat's of Tolstoy (1967) and Leon Edel's of Henry James of which the final volume appeared early in 1972. All are definitive studies and brilliant. Quentin Bell's new biography of the British feminist critic and novelist. Virginia Woolf, while lacking the voluminous scope of some recent works because it intentionally avoids a critical evaluation of her literary output, ranks among the best of the last decade's watershed biographies...
However, to Quentin Bell, now in his 60's Virginia Woolf was no cult object. Somehow he managed to subsume whatever personal biases he possessed as her nephew, and to conduct a candid, sober inquisition into her personal history, even though in the process he examined members of his immediate family. In the hands of a less positive narrator and a less compassionate judge of exceptional human conduct, the biography-might have suffered from myopic and a tendency towards authoritarianism. Bell, with his memory of his aunt, is privileged to add the leaven of personal recollection...
...biographical material relating to Virginia Woolf's childhood has created a sensation. Although some expert critics were alert to the curiously numb, dead patches in her outlook and in her novels, an aspect of her work expressed by an absence of eroticism, few could credibly account for it. Bell's revelation that Virginia endured ritual sexual molestations by her half-brother for years during her childhood is simply the missing link in our understanding of her tenuous sense of her own physical sexuality." The episode seared her mind: forty-five years later she could record. "I still shiver with shame...
...daughter of the famous, austere Victorian scholar Leslie Stephen, author of The Dictionary of National Biography, and Julia Pattle, a Pre-Raphelite beauty, Virginia watched her father wear out first his wife, then her step-daughter, with his incessant, self-pitying demands that they attend to his comfort. From Bell's account of the Stephen household, it becomes clear how exact an imaginative rendition of her own childhood is the Ramsey menage of To the lighthouse. Her mother's death in 1895, when Virginia was 13, was the first in a series of premature crises. Her half-sister died...
...break with a past burdened by precious personal loss was fortified by her willingness to defy Victorian convention. Bloomsburysociety was by now in high swing, Virginia was one of its hostesses, entertaining geniuses destined to fame. Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, and geniuses contracted to obscurity. Saxon Syndey-Turner. Bell reveals the Virginia of the Bloomsbury period to have irresistible, gay, irreverent, charming, flirtatious and independent. Admidst the libertarian affairs of Bloomsbury Virginia was also earnestly training for her craft. She read omnivorously, took up journalism, practiced writing daily, and attempted to compensate for the lack of formal university education...