Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bate's of John Keats (1963), Henri Troyat's of Tolstoy (1967) and Leon Edel's of Henry James of which the final volume appeared early in 1972. All are definitive studies and brilliant. Quentin Bell's new biography of the British feminist critic and novelist. Virginia Woolf, while lacking the voluminous scope of some recent works because it intentionally avoids a critical evaluation of her literary output, ranks among the best of the last decade's watershed biographies...
Though a couple of skillful articles treat Virginia Woolf's literary achievements, in general, the literature addressing her as both an artist and a personality is a critical wasteland. Aileen Pippett's mawkishly reverential biography, The Moth and the Star, (1955), was symptomatic of the uncritical enthusiasm Virginia Woolf inspired, and contributed to the adulation with which many students and emancipated women still regard the "high priestess of Bloomsbury...
...VIRGINIA WOOLF by Quentin Bell. The novelist's nephew sees his famous aunt painfully forging a unique art despite an eccentric family, madness, and the burden of being a woman...
...write vaguely about vagueness is no less criminal, in fiction as elsewhere, than to write blandly about blandness, as if it were scripture. Fortunately, the other stories in the collection are somewhat more authoritative--with a little help from our friends D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. One story, "Not a Very Nice Story," about a symbiotic pair of marriages, seems to be a direct imitation of Lawrence, or at least of his less attractive side. With a similar conspiratorial and chatty tone, Lessing one-ups over her characters by pretending a sympathy she and the reader know she doesn...
...better stories, "A Year in Regent's Par," and "Lions, Leaves, Roses..." recall Virginia Woolf, both in style and in the love, shared with Henry James as well, of the garden metaphor and the English park. The writing in these two stories is quite skillful, at times almost beautiful. "Lions, Leaves, Roses..." ends especially well with a dizzying sense of infinite space and possibility: "Leaves, words, people, shadows, whirled together towards autumn and the solstice...