Word: woolfe
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MANY GOOD NOVELS take place from within a character's mind. Most of Crime and Punishment, for example, is seen through Raskolnikov's eyes. And while Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is told in the third person, there is no real narrator, causing the reader to slip from mind to mind with no perceptible voice to bridge the gaps. All that floating free sometimes can give readers mental seasickness. To avoid this, most authors use plot for ballast. The plot structures the thoughts, the thoughts give added resonance to the "real events." In A.N. Wilson's Wise Virgin, however...
...narration treats Tibba's fantasies and eventual blossoming love-life ironically, it at least gives us something substantive to grab hold of. The picture of Tibba that we get from her father's musings is quite pathetic: it is not until we catch her pretending to be Virginia Woolf that we start chuckling at her. Her scenes with Piers Peverill, head boy at her uncles's boarding school, are delightful ("you were very good at kissing. Fox, but I really want to have it off with you as soon as possible"): Peverill, a charmer who gets away with every kind...
...examination of creativity's demands and its essential place in the artist's life, she holds up the example of Virginia Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own, and rewrites it from the Black woman's perspective. What, she asks, were women to do who not only could have no room and no financial independence, but who could barely claim their bodies as their own' And what of women like her mother, who raised a large family with hardly a moment to themselves' They found a way, she responds...
...wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland." That kind of screwball is still pitched effectively by Monty Python, but it is not a sign of seniority. Virginia Woolf believed that Ring Lardner had "talents of a remarkable order." And so he had. But the episode from You Know Me Al leans hard on misspelling and false naiveté, favorite devices of the novice: "Florrie thinks she has got to have a new dress though...
Rose's earlier book, A Woman of Letters, a study of Virginia Woolf, led her to examine Woolf s passionately propounded notions of sexual equality. Seeking a unifying principle that would link the couples in Parallel Lives, she looked for the dynamics of power within Victorian marriages. Not surprisingly, she concluded that "traditional marriage shores up the power of men in subtle ways." Eliot and Lewes, Rose hypothesizes, may have achieved equality because "sanctioned marriage bears some ineradicable taint which converts the personal relationship between a man and a woman into a political one." An interesting thesis...