Word: septimus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...suicide. She had always been morbidly self-critical, agonized over almost every book, sometimes suffered a complete nervous collapse. Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him-the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself...
Langguth wastes little time trying to decide whether Saki was a literary butterfly who finally tried to stamp or some kind of shrike with a sense of humor. The book notes the Waugh-like gift for comic names (Loona Bimberton, Septimus Brope), the Wildean wit, the Wodehousean way with the featherheaded fauna of the West End and the country house party, the surprise endings self-consciously borrowed from O'Henry...