Word: woolfe
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Analogies of the sea haunt Virginia Woolf: "As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass." Virginia Woolf's novels are all attempts to answer the same inexhaustible question: What is the nature of life? "The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account...
...Writer. Unlike most novelists, Virginia Woolf has written as much criticism as fiction. Even those who do not care for her novels admit that as a critic she is first-rate. In her two Common Readers (collections of critical articles) she has practiced the detachment which Matthew Arnold preached. Her tolerance rarely deserts her except when she writes about literary climbers or timeservers, or about the Edwardian novelists who were her immediate predecessors. Her pet targets are Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, whom she considers hopeless materialists, blind guides of their misled generation. Heaven...
...best steeplechasers are bred in Ireland. From England come literary thoroughbreds. Virginia Woolf's stepgrandfather was William Makepeace Thackeray. Half the most scholarly families in Eng-land-the Darwins, Maitlands, Symondses, Stracheys-are related to her. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography, kept open house for the great literary men of his day (Meredith, Stevenson, Ruskin, Hardy, John Morley, Oliver Wendell Holmes). The classic dead crowded the shelves of his library. Though Virginia Woolf's experience was as restricted as Jane Austen's, her reading knew...
...Woman. Of the Englishwomen of letters before Virginia Woolf (Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes) none had her advantages. She was brought up as a young lady of the Edwardian era, with all a young lady's privileges but no prunes and prisms. She was too delicate to go to school, and no Edwardian restrictions were put on her reading. She never lost her faith for she was never taught any. And her huge connection (her eight brothers and sisters had two different fathers) gave her entree into the useful worlds of English literature and English society...
...years before the War, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Sidney Woolf, a liberal journalist and literary critic. Their tall house in Bloomsbury soon became the nucleus of a literary set, the "Bloomsbury Group." The Woolfs housed their Hogarth Press under the same roof. There, in "an immense half-subterranean room, piled with books, parcels, packets of unbound volumes, manuscripts from the press," Virginia Woolf wrote. Many of her friends have been politically active feminists, and from her study Virginia Woolf has done her bit for woman's cause. Her essay on the position of women stated the now-classic requisite...