Word: virginia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...husband records in Downhill All the Way, their middle age suffered "the erosion of life by death," as many of their demon friends died after 1932, including Roger Fry, Julian Bell and Lytton Strachey. The tempo of Virginia's life was made desperate by the threat of a second war. Perhaps the entire Bell biography can be read as the history of a woman's progression towards lunacy. She lived through the Battle of Britain, but fearing the onset of another attack of madness she was convinced would be incurable, she drowned herself in March...
...know the psyche of Virginia Woolf, and this is what she is in effect asking of a biographer, one would have to be either God or Virginia, preferably...
...book's first section, treating the period before Virginia Woolf's marriage, responds better than the second part of his method. But his approach spares the biography from being overly prescient or oppressed by unsupportable conclusions...
...VIRGINIA WOOLF'S contemporary high reputation as a paradigm of feminine sensibility is often puzzling. She does not emerge from Bell's chronicle as a generous, forgiving, or warm human being, though endlessly fascinating. It is her sister Vanessa who appeals to the reader for the attractive qualities Virginia lacked. Virginia's history dramatized the miseries of a sick person, for, she was, on occasion, as mad as the March Hare. She fought a painful battle against the possibility that the next attack of insanity would paralyze her permanently. Clearly, Virginia Woolf in Bell's biography is quite often piteous...
...Perhaps Virginia Woolf's current stature and importance to present-day women derives from exactly the excruciating periods in her career. Bell makes clear her courage and fortitude, as he does her expert sense of her craft. In the end, reading Bell's account shows Virginia Woolf had more emotional resiliency than she has been credited for. As a novelist she succeeded in solving the intellectual challenge writing presented by embodying her sensibility in the only shape capable of expressing it. That she was ignorant of great preserves of human experience is undeniable, but to expect more from...