Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, VOL. VI: 1936-1941 Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 556 pages...
...letter writing," Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, "has now reached a stage, thanks to the penny post and telephone, where it is not dead-that is the last word to apply to it-but so much alive as to be quite unprintable. The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published...
...changes since Horace Walpole or, later, those Victorian worthies enshrined in three-decker "Lives and Letters." Vanished are the leisurely epistles addressed to a quasi-public circle of acquaintances (and, between the lines, to posterity); the 20th century goes elsewhere for its literary entertainment and journalism. In all of Woolf's 3,710 collected letters-here rounded off in the last of six stout volumes that have been coming out since 1975-she scarcely ever troubles to paint a scene or describe great events; even wars are kept to the background: "I write with the usual air raid going...
Modern letters are hasty and utilitarian, usually meant for one pair of eyes only. But by that token the best of them, like Woolf's, are also vibrant with immediacy, intimacy and often indiscretion ("Why," she asks, "is it so pleasant to damn one's friends?"). With her aristocratic sense of decorum she may have felt that their very privacy was what made them unpublishable. If so, she failed to reckon on this age's voracious, ransacking appetite for all that is private in a writer's life. As significant as her novels...
...Woolf scribbled as fluently as she talked, and almost as fast. Letter writing for her was a compulsion, a sport and an antidote to solitude, but it was also a matter of principle. It was a way of cherishing friendships, with all the sacred personal values that friendships implied in Bloomsbury. "Life would split asunder without letters," she maintained in Jacob 's Room. Her massive correspondence shows her weaving a variegated web to hold it together. She pours out affection and admiration to her sister, Vanessa Bell, whom she wonderfully characterizes as a mixture of pagan goddess and Moll...