Word: woolfe
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...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...
...outside, "It's the all too familiar spectre, so to speak," she said, attempting to swagger like Mae West, "of the question just what can and cannot be dose with a play after it leaves the playwright's hands. Why someone went so far as to put on Virginia Woolf with an all gay cast. Albee went to court to stop it. I forget whether he won or lost but it could be seen that way you know...
This excellent biography was written by Virginia Woolf s nephew. The first sentence?"Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen"?sets the stance: just a slight bow to a heavy heritage. More important than Bell's style is his detachment, a quality that he certainly did not inherit. The Stephen family was part of the intellectual wing of Britain's upper middle class; Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a famous essayist and man of letters. Altogether, they were an excitable clan, idealistic, moralistic, painfully interdependent, swept along by unrecognized currents of passionate attraction that stopped just short...