Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...VIRGINIA WOOLF-David Daiches-New Directions...
...late, probably great Virginia Woolf, Chicago University's David Daiches has written a helpful set of program notes for lay readers...
...Virginia Woolf was all but born between the covers of a book, grew up and lived there until one day in 1941 when she stepped out to drown herself in the River Ouse. Her father's first wife was Thackeray's daughter. Her father was Essayist Leslie Stephen. Her husband was Essayist Leonard Woolf. Her brother-in-law was Art Critic Clive Bell. She educated herself in her father's vanguard-Victorian library, honed her fine wits against the most delicately abrasive minds in Edwardian and Georgian London. Her first novels, The Voyage Out and Night...
Death pervades each of Virginia Woolf's best books. In Jacob's Room a dead young man's life fades in other people's memories like a match streak on a tepid stove lid. In Mrs. Dalloway an image of all London shines and synchronizes beneath the reverberations of London's belling clocks. In To The Lighthouse, which Critic Daiches calls "the perfection of Virginia Woolf's art," the rhythms of time and death and change suffuse and subtilize a half-mystic seascape, a long-delayed excursion, an equally delayed resolving of family discord...
Orlando, an elaborate literary joke, uses time and death by making a myth of their powerlessness: its immortal, androgynous hero (Mrs. Woolf's friend, Victoria Sackville-West) is watched from the age of Queen Elizabeth into a night in 1928. In The Years Virginia Woolf used death and time chiefly by implication, and discarded all experiments. She was able at last, using traditional forms, "to convey her unique sensibility by sheer luminosity of language." And Between The Acts managed (not quite successfully, Mr. Daiches feels) to create an image of the whole past and present of England and resolve...