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“... and fears but ‘something else’: ‘The sum of his days’. At the opening of The Hours (1999), Virginia Woolf lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story ...”

“... at the Savoy, but somewhere in between. The Mitfords weren’t feminists, and they weren’t Virginia Woolf, but it seems possible that Woolf would have had a nicer time altogether had she known how to have a friend like Nancy or Jessica Mitford. The world might have seemed less pressing, and more adaptable to her ...”

“... and nuanced; as original and haunting as any work by Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. According to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, McCullers wrote seven drafts of The Member of the Wedding, yet there is nothing artificial or over-polished about its fluid, poetic style or its ...”

“... declared in 1930 that Scottish literature would have to wait fifty years before it could produce a Virginia Woolf or a James Joyce. When he made the prophecy, he might reasonably have expected to be around to see MacWoolf and MacJoyce. As it is, a huge ‘what if’ hangs over his prematurely ended career. He never had a chance to show how good he really ...”

“... valued friends. There were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and ...”

“... claim to find – political, religious, social, intellectual – is almost entirely conceptual. Virginia Woolf attacked Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells as realists who defined character only by stubbing the end of it into clothes, income, social status and so on. She faulted a generation for its vivid exteriors. A new generation of realists might be ...”

“... Eliot doing Social Services, Emily Brontë over at Police, Jane Austen in Bridges and Tunnels, Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe sharing Health.’ She gets a chance to realise some of her dreams, when she inadvertently creates a female golem who calls herself Xanthippe and helps her ‘mother’ to power. But as the other stories in this collection ...”

“... be imposers, female writers masochists. Is it not remarkable that there is only one female Modern, Virginia Woolf? No wonder we’re all so afraid of her. Pritchett’s fiction is suspended in place and time. On the Edge of the Cliff contains several stories set in present-day London, but the mild convulsions they describe could just as easily have taken ...”

“... of Ireland. But it is not clear that he reckons many of the others – Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and so on – to be indispensable. But then the book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with ...”

“... the Suicide Club described in his unfinished novel. She told American audiences that the deaths of Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig and her brother were a kind of statement. They had died, she claimed, ‘not because they had failed in their own private or public lives’ but because the world – ‘this particular star’ – had become ...”

“... opinion, college was all about. ‘Who’s your father?’ he asked Madeleine. ‘Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?’ ‘In my case,’ Madeleine said, ‘my father really is my father.’ ‘Then you have to kill him.’ ‘Who’s your father?’ ‘Godard,’ he said. To ‘find out what everyone else was talking ...”

“... churlish opinions of her own talent. She was a muse to perhaps the greatest novelist of the age, Virginia Woolf, who was now setting out to immortalise her in the pages of Orlando. And then this. A book about trudging through Persia, as Iran was then known, with Harold Nicolson, her diplomat and writer husband. ‘For a long time,’ the first line of ...”

“... the massive, glacially paced Camilla. By that time Burney’s prose style was ‘tarnished’, as Virginia Woolf put it (‘its leaves were fluttering and falling profusely to the ground’), and her early proto-feminism had hardened into conservatism. There are no Burney novels, in other words, from her early middle age, when other writers of the era ...”

“... everyone he met. He was painted by Duncan Grant and gushingly admired by Lytton Strachey, while Virginia Woolf thought he had ‘a head like a Greek god’. He performed in plays alongside Rupert Brooke and was the model for George Emerson in Forster’s A Room with a View. And he was a great rock climber, perhaps the best. He missed the first year of ...”

“... At Mrs H.G. Wells’s funeral on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a Companion of Honour and a trustee of the Reform Club ...”