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“... books, like her journalism, are larded with quotations, from recherché antique cookery books to Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Walter Scott. Her approach is not in the least like the gastronomic dandyism of the ‘food-for-food’s sake’ crowd: she is holistic about it. She is obviously a truly civilised person and, for her, knowing how to eat and to ...”

“... making itself felt, a reminder to keep himself up to the mark. The last essay in that volume, on Virginia Woolf, written more than forty years later, observes almost as an aside: ‘She worked harder than ever when she became famous, as gifted writers do – what else is there to do but write?’ That rhetorical question may on first reading seem to ...”

“... a materialistic society – but strive to shed the trappings of conventional narrative logic, as Woolf and Joyce were beginning to do. Burke was very much a man of the Twenties in the way he thought of narrative as suspect and slightly low, a pabulum for lesser minds. But unlike Joyce and Woolf, who were extraordinarily ...”

“... and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever known’. His wife, on the other hand, who knew several Stracheys well, thought them ‘a prosaic race, lacking magnanimity, shorn of atmosphere’. The direct line has died out now. The family’s ...”

“... effects of this ‘harmonisation’ at close hand. On 1 January 1992, the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both of whom died in 1941, came out of copyright. I was working at Penguin at the time, and my colleagues had commissioned Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics editions of both writers, with a feminist twist to the ...”

“... and betrayed’ by her parents and her stepmother.) Soon after she met Oliver, Ray told Virginia Woolf that she could ‘quite imagine falling in love with him’. After a month, she proposed to him on a walk ‘between the sewage station and the lunatic asylum at Littlemore’ in Oxford.Alys Russell, whose husband had recently left her, warned ...”

“... the first appearance of the Oxford edition of Jane Austen in 1923. It was in her review of it that Virginia Woolf referred to her distinguished predecessor as, of all writers, ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’: one even culpably reserved and reticent. Woolf is hardly a Humberstall. Yet ...”

“... try out what was to make her unusual among women novelists of her time: writing about men at war. Virginia Woolf had more or less said that this was impossible, as well as undesirable. A Room of One’s Own assumes that war is a male subject, and that its fictional dominance contributed to the crushing of female literary talent, the proper concerns of ...”

“... other nine).’ Jane and Paul Bowles are always on the move – so are she and John. Zelda and Virginia Woolf had debilitating periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although Simone Weil pushed bravely past her sinus headaches, working in the fields ...”

“... enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch ...”

“... and call. Matheson’s name for Sackville-West was Orlando, for the fictional version of her that Virginia Woolf, another lover, had created. Matheson was the Stoker. ‘So gloriously odd, to love a stoker,’ she wrote to Sackville-West. ‘Stokers grub away in their trousers … they are rude and uncultivated, of limited imagination and few ...”

“... connection was hereditary. Warner was in touch with that world yet independent of it; she knew Virginia Woolf but condescended to what she regarded as the over-self-conscious Mrs Dalloway, and indeed one suspects that she thought herself, though without vanity, which was not one of her vices, as simply a better writer than ...”

“... pin’. As for descriptions of women’s clothes, Watt is surely right about the decline of what Virginia Woolf called ‘frock consciousness’ in literature. Ted Hughes’s ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, from Birthday Letters, which Watt includes, is an account of his and Sylvia Plath’s wedding. She wore what the title suggests, but beyond ...”

“... such as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, have admired these books; and Wystan Auden and Leonard Woolf are said to have spoken well of them. Certainly he saw himself as the heir to Virginia Woolf and his novels were written for those who enjoy the long conundrums of Joyce. But after four volumes no publisher would go ...”

“... of Louis XVI; she saw many of her Girondist friends imprisoned and guillotined. ‘Every day,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of Wollstonecraft, ‘she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people’s prejudices.’ An intense platonic relationship with Henry Fuseli and an affair with a dubious ...”