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“... close friends in Cambridge with a number of those who were later to be dubbed ‘Neo-Pagans’ by Virginia Woolf – notably Rupert Brooke and Jacques Raverat (a wealthy French boy who went to school at Bedales). This group of rich and self-regarding undergraduates, with their literary pretensions and amateur dramatics, are a rather less palatable aspect ...”

“... wedding rings, to help his Abyssinian venture, Iris patriotically threw hers into the cauldron. (Virginia Woolf records her saying so, in her Diary.) So much from this period has been tidied up that we could be mistaken in thinking we are getting a ‘real sense’ of Iris. Back in 1922 she became friendly with MacKenzie, a young Cambridge-educated war ...”

“... if irrelevant or untrue. Few writers have undertaken with more professional determination what Virginia Woolf called the ‘preliminary drudgery’ of writing, or rewriting, a serious novel. Whether we believe that she gives us the best insight into human nature or not, there is little doubt that Janeism flourishes, and may continue to do so with the ...”

“... echoes of Baudelaire and Wilde here, parallels with figures to be found in the work of Eliot and Virginia Woolf. And throughout the book, early, middle and late, there are grand posturings about the horrible necessity of having to do something, or anything. ‘Living seems to me a metaphysical mistake on the part of matter, an oversight on the part of ...”

“... Doctor John Langborn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her spaniel Flush, immortalised by pet-lover Virginia Woolf; and so on. The significant point is that, more often than not, pets help humans to acquire ‘sympathetic tendencies’, as Locke insisted, and here the contributors to Animals and Human Society miss an opportunity to enlarge their ...”

“... capable of both thoughts. Mike Nichols, who directed Taylor and Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, once asked her whether it was ‘a pain in the ass’ being so beautiful and she replied: ‘I can’t wait for it to go.’ Her part as Martha (for which she won an Oscar) required her to gain weight and to be made up unflatteringly to look ...”

“... forces of its age. Neither critic can find much value in Modernism: Mimesis ends by rapping Virginia Woolf sternly over the knuckles, while Lukács can see little but decadence in Musil and Joyce. The upbeat humanism of both men is affronted by the downbeat outlook of the Modernists. Both are doctrinal life-affirmers, high European humanists ...”

“... partnership, and an artistic one, too. It was like that image of masculine-feminine collaboration Virginia Woolf uses – a man and woman getting into a cab together, to go somewhere – in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf claims the best writerly mind would be like that: collaborative within itself, androgynous by virtue ...”

“... most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a party she was tapped on the shoulder by Virginia Woolf, who said, somewhat dampeningly, ‘Remember: we won this for you.’ Nearly twenty years younger than Woolf, on the threshold of adolescence in 1914, Lehmann was more ambivalent about the past. The world ...”

“... Velvet, starring a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. It sometimes seems that the enthronement of Virginia Woolf in the canon has entailed the demotion of a whole generation and a bit of women, not just Bagnold (born 1889) but Rose Macaulay (born 1881) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (born 1893). This seems especially unjust when one of them successfully ...”

“... in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from Modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not a question of what might be brought into the novel – sex, the natural functions – but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was understandable that the discursive ...”

“... marriage was not as black as the lugubrious relishers liked to paint it (both Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf were impure witnesses for the prosecution), and he shows too that there was often a sportive collusion, easily misconstrued, between Eliot and his first wife. The happiness of Eliot’s second marriage necessarily looms less large. Partly this ...”

“... of tobacco, on which Kiernan touches, is rather iffy from the radical point of view. Colonial Virginia and Southern Rhodesia rested on forms of peonage if not slavery, and Cuba is probably more disfigured than otherwise by its reliance on a tobacco economy. (Indeed, it would be interesting to study the degeneration of the Cuban revolution as a function of ...”

“... by pleasure. A hundred years later Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one ...”

“... Christopher Robin do in one sense bear a resemblance to the enlightened groups of 1909 (when, as Virginia Woolf sardonically put it, human nature changed), so Milne’s theatre world made strenuous efforts in the direction of uplift, sexual equality and the pacifist community, under cover of soft wit and a softer frivolity. Shaw’s St Joan and ...”