Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Between 1912 and 1922, Virginia Woolf wrote two novels, Night and Day and Jacob's Room, which secured her reputation, and revised a third, The Voyage Out. Almost weekly she reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, composing superb little essays. She married Leonard Woolf ("Precious Mongoose" in her letters) and with him founded the Hogarth Press, for which she functioned as chief talent scout and reader of manuscripts as well as typesetter (on the dining-room table). During this decade the press published, among other titles, Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, Poems by T.S. Eliot and Story of the Siren...
...part of her professional discipline, Woolf began and sustained a writer's diary, brushed up on her Latin, and undertook to learn Russian. For recreation this intensely introspective yet active woman walked, skated and rode horseback. She managed a town and a country house and, in Nigel Nicolson's phrase, led a "scintillating social life." When she had nothing else to do, she typed manuscripts for her friend Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians) or scurried to raise a fund of ?500 a year to free T.S. Eliot from his job at the bank. Despite this hectic, variegated life...
...Woolf could write, "Life would split asunder without letters." Who can doubt that the author of 4,000 of them meant it? There is a craving to these letters - an almost palpable need to reach out and touch. Taken as a whole, they constitute a ritual against loneliness, a message in a bottle repeating with a hundred only apparently casual variations, "I'm here. Are you there...
...letter to a struggling young writer, Gerald Brenan, Virginia Woolf dropped her entertaining-letter-writer mask to confess: "I am doubtful whether people, the best disposed toward each other, are capable of more than an intermittent signal as they forge past...
Here is the essential theme of Woolf's novels, with their dream-sense of human beings as interior space floating down the corridors of a world of bewitched objects. The letters - fascinating for what they don't say, can't say - reveal between the lines the author living out her own theme...