Word: woolfe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This book, a companion to Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth" and "The Moment," and to her earlier "Common Readers," is probably the last volume of her essays which will be published. Many of the essays in the book have appeared separately before. Written at various times in the last 20 years of her life, they represent a wide variety of subjects, from a dissertation on the novels of Turgenev to a plea for the abolition of book reviewers...
...body of the essays in this volume could be loosely called literary biography. These are brief and charming sketches, some of famous men, Conrad, Hardy, Oliver Goldsmith, and some of obscure figures, known only through a terse diary or a packet of family letters. In all of them, Virginia Woolf exercises her talent of character-drawing. She uses with extraordinary deftness little details about her subjects' lives and periods; her essays sparkle even when the man is very dull...
...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...
Members of the History Department last night named Robert L. Woolf, visiting lecturer on History, from the University of Wisconsin, as a possible successor to Blake. Woolf was not available for comment...