Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like most legends, Burns's is fact-resistant, but responsible scholars try to retouch it occasionally. Cornell University's David Daiches (rhymes with gracious) is the latest to try, and does one of the best jobs. Critic Daiches (Virginia Woolf, Robert Louis Stevenson) scans the poet's lines more closely than his life. Even so, he manages to clear away enough romantic rubble to expose a Burns who could say: "Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." Burns came by his melancholy...
...Gentle Art. Occasionally, Fred Bason worried about his writing style, once went for advice to Virginia Woolf ("a tall, thin . . . miserably sad-looking woman . . . not in any way distinguished to look at"). She replied (or so Fred thought): "You would perhaps do well to read Stern." So Fred promptly bought a work by G. B. Stern-"but for the life of me I could see nothing [in it] to teach me the gentle art." On complaining to Mrs. Woolf, ha got back a cross note: "Sterne -Sterne with an E on the end! L. Sterne! V.W." And so, continues Fred...
...Talk of the Town" section. At 36, he is starting later than a lot of this year's first novelists, but evidently not because he has wasted time. In The Trouble of One House, his storytelling method, an indirect, impressionistic one with something of the quality of Virginia Woolf's, takes him precisely where he wants...
...cinema. The best, and best known is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, a spirited and delightful defense of the new literature of Joyce, Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence against the outmoded conventions of the Edwardian "realists," particularly Arnold Bennett. "Mrs. Brown" in the name Virginia Woolf gives a little lady who sat opposite her on a train; the author uses her, an ordinary unknown person, as a symbol of human character...
There is no doubt that Mrs. Brown is Virginia Woolf's heroine, too. Her essays discuss books, literary currents, social questions, but fundamentally their concern is with people. They are full of subtle portraits, penetrating yet sympathetic, always economically drawn. The characters, one sometimes feels, are created with too much sympathy, but they are never unreal. In their creation, Mrs. Woolf has followed her dictum about Mrs. Brown; "She is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety . . . the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence...