Word: edel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BLOOMSBURY: A HOUSE OF LIONS by Leon Edel...
Only two kinds of books seem to be published nowadays: those that are about Bloomsbury and those that are not. Every survivor of that glittering artistic and intellectual cabal, every survivor's survivor, has given testimony. Leon Edel is one of our leading literary biographers, the author of the magisterial five-volume Henry James. But what can even he add to the existing mountain of data? Only two characteristic Bloomsbury virtues: form and sensibility...
...Edel uses a novelist's skill to keep all this straight - if straight is the word. Strachey's Eminent Victorians, he notes, was written "in a new kind of ink - the ink of Vienna, of Sigmund Freud." Edel's portrait of Virginia Woolf includes a pow erful analysis of the roots of her art and madness. She was haunted by deaths in her family (symbolized by a horrible animal face that once appeared when she looked in a mirror) and sexually traumatized by her halfbrothers' childhood groping. At the same time, her identification with her dead...
...given us Elizabeth Jenkins on Elizabeth I, Cecil Woodham-Smith on Queen Victoria, Philip Magnus on Gladstone and Edward VII, and Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels, including Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Francis Steegmuller on Cocteau and Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf. Moreover, the past year has brought a host of distinguished and bestselling additions to the collection: William Manchester island-hopping with...
...undergraduates who thronged to his celebrated lectures on Johnson at Harvard would not have been disheartened by such a modest dis claimer. Even so, Bate's biography surpasses every expectation. It is an achievement that rivals Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and Leon Edel's five-volume Henry James in force of insight if not in literary...