“... itself sincere, and made a strong, half-uncomfortable appeal to readers as different as Hardy and Virginia Woolf. One of these early admirers was the novelist May Sinclair. Charlotte had written to her in 1913 congratulating her on The Combined Maze, a novel in which the image for the human condition is a men and women’s evening gym class at the ...”

“... study of Byron’s daughter Allegra, both issued in 1935. The latter was published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which led to her meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose diaries describe her as ‘tremulous’, ‘honest-eyed’ and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of paradise flight through the gay world. A ...”

“... traveller, always on the move. There’s nothing about Mansfield that’s institutional. She knew Woolf and Lawrence and the rest, published in the same avant-garde magazines, went to the same parties and talked about the same things, but the fact that her biography doesn’t sit comfortably alongside theirs, seems more insubstantial than theirs, is due as ...”

“... Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The gripping narratives, ‘telling ...”

“... Abbey, where a plaque was unveiled in 1993. Among the leaders of the Trollope revival was Virginia Woolf. She admired him for providing ‘the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below’, and she envied his ability to convey both the ‘moments of non-being’ that are life as ...”

“... an essay ‘Against a New Formalism’, partly a meditation on a passage near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves where Rhoda says: ‘The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying “Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”.’ Bayley distinguished between those writers – he had ...”

“... as fact. Orlando is The Biographer’s Tale’s most dashing predecessor, and the comparison with Virginia Woolf brings out something important about Byatt as a writer. Orlando was conceived as a ‘writer’s holiday’ and pitched with beautiful buoyancy against the dead-weight of historical, literary and biographical tradition. The interest for ...”

“... it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and greenery of Winchester, Virginia, to a feckless gentleman farmer and his beautiful Southern belle wife, she was removed from the landscape she loved at the age of nine, when the family moved to the harsh, flat, frozen prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. This, the first rude trauma of ...”

“... Of Human Bondage and Katherine Mansfield and Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie and quite a lot of Virginia Woolf, but she could never get anybody to talk with her about books any more, because Lakey said her taste was sentimental.’ Or: ‘But the red-letter day in Mr Andrews’s life was the day he became a Trotskyite. Not just a sympathiser, but an ...”

“... then on to the name of a c.1914 painting by Walter Sickert, with interpretations of the word by Virginia Woolf and A.L. Hendriks. Scholar notes that Sickert chose his title as ‘an émigré word we cannot assume either of the painting’s subjects would necessarily know’. The two people not only look bored but appear as if they wouldn’t need ...”

“... and way of talking prompted E.M. Forster to say that her ‘every word … should be recorded.’ Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘her genius of personality’ and borrowed some of her characteristics (her rapidity of gesture and quick changes of mood) for Lucrezia, Septimus’s wife in Mrs Dalloway. After Keynes’s death in 1946, Lydia gradually withdrew ...”

“... been ‘hallucinating’), there is a general air of cold fish about all Macaulay’s work, as Virginia Woolf noted of the successful 1920 novel, Potterism: ‘Rose, judging from her works, is a Eunuch – that’s what I dislike most about Potterism. She has no parts. And surely she must be the daughter of a don?’ The ‘lack of parts’ is ...”

“... a help. And other modern voices which deal with the language of consciousness, such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Beckett, must have been useful too. Brodkey’s grand project stands apart because his narrator is not concerned with the social but with the self. He does not observe the world, or measure himself in relation to others, or talk about last ...”

“... form. Still Life is in no sense a contemporary equivalent of To the Lighthouse, even though Virginia Woolf is one of the novelists whose cadences Byatt (I would judge unconsciously) sometimes echoes. This is, rather, a novel in which certain aspects of painting (notably the theory and practice of colour) are subjected to discursive analysis. The ...”

“... age of 42, when he married the beautiful and ambitious Ann de Vere Cole, sister of that friend of Virginia Woolf who reviewed the Channel Fleet in disguise as the Emperor of Abyssinia (Neville was relieved to find that Ann wholly deplored such exploits). Aloof, reserved, devoted to hobbies and private life, somewhat contemptuous of his fellow ...”