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Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... dictionary and its supplements, satirically underscored by the lament of Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas that ‘it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids . . . are to be found’. In the 63 volumes published by 1901, only about 4 per cent of subjects are female, and even the most recent supplementary volume (on the ...

Bright Blue Dark Blue

Rosemary Hill: ‘Weatherland’, 5 November 2015

Weatherland 
by Alexandra Harris.
Thames and Hudson, 432 pp., £24.95, September 2015, 978 0 500 51811 3
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... whimsical that never quite coheres. As Harris explains, she has taken much of her inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a hard act to follow and not always a helpful influence. Harris describes her own approach in the introduction as having ‘tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it’. It’s an ...

At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Rosemary Hill: Death of the Department Store, 26 September 2024

... female ethos. It’s in the Oxford Street Debenhams, which had been Marshall & Snelgrove, that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando finds herself in her last manifestation on 11 October 1928. Having travelled through time, she enters from the crowded street and the essence of department store joy comes over her. ‘Shade and scent enveloped her. The present ...

Eliot at smokefall

Barbara Everett, 24 January 1985

... from a striking snapshot of the Twenties or Thirties, showing Eliot blocked off by a towering Virginia Woolf from a cowering Vivien. The trouble with this insistence on actuality is that in practice the source-materials continually resisted the interpretation imposed on them. The play’s numb hero could never have written a line, and the action ...
... This suits Amis fine – but it does give rise to certain questions about knowledge: like Virginia Woolf, Amis elides authorial free-ranging intelligence with the restricted reactions of the protagonist, and it is often hard to see where one becomes the other. Would an amnesiac think of cars as ‘daredevil roadsters’ or invent the elaborately ...

One for Uncle

John Bayley, 5 April 1990

Robert Graves: The Years with Laura 1926-1940 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 380 pp., £25, March 1990, 0 297 79672 0
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... A bolt-eyed, blue-shirted, shock headed hatless man ... ‘Mrs Woolf? ... I’m Graves.’ He appeared to have been rushing through the air at sixty miles an hour and to have alighted temporarily ... The poor boy is all emphasis, protestation and pose. He has a crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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... the reconstruction by a literary scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... prompted to recall wrathfully how long it had taken to reach this small ledge of independence: ‘Virginia’s Room of One’s Own irritates me; and I have wanted to tell her that I have never had £500 a year of private (unearned) income or anything like it, and that I have never had a room of my own except a bedroom at a Lausanne pension for a month where I ...

I want to ride a dragon

Elisa Gabbert: Paul-as-Polly, 1 August 2019

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl 
by Andrea Lawlor.
Picador, 341 pp., £14.99, April 2019, 978 1 5290 0766 4
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... people’ experience. The sex is gross, but the box is ticked; Paul wants to try everything. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl initially seems relatively conventional: its protagonist is a non-realist semi-superhero, yes, but he moves through an otherwise realist world. About thirty pages in, however, the novel seems ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... intervals of affection and going through the motions, the marriage resembles Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? turned into a high-shriek miniseries. They separated in 1963, after ‘that fucker’s’ windfall from Portnoy’s Complaint. Then, one night in 1968, Maggie was killed in an accident when the friend driving her, speeding through Central ...

Jane Austen’s Word Process

Marilyn Butler, 25 June 1987

Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method 
by J.F Burrows.
Oxford, 245 pp., £25, February 1987, 0 19 812856 8
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... of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects of the leading ...

What’s wrong with Desmond?

Ian Hamilton, 30 August 1990

Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy 
by Hugh Cecil and Mirabel Cecil.
Gollancz, 320 pp., £18.95, July 1990, 0 575 03622 2
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... type, well-liked at school and able to move easily between Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Although Virginia maybe condescended somewhat, he knew that she was very fond of him. But then, everybody was. And it was not as if he really wanted to write book reviews. In 1905, after Eton and Cambridge (where he served as an Apostle under G.E. Moore and thus first ...

Here’s to the high-minded

Stefan Collini, 7 April 1994

After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain 
edited by Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler.
Routledge, 265 pp., £40, February 1994, 0 415 07056 2
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... century saw a decisive break with the values of the Victorian era, the assumption expressed in Virginia Woolf’s celebrated hyperbole that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed’. Those intellectuals whom we still find it convenient to refer to as ‘Bloomsbury’ may have paraded their revolt against Victorian parents and ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... to be in the least charming, but some of her crisis sayings have the bite of the best of, say, Virginia Woolf or the early Germaine Greer. French’s thesis is that the modern cultures, at least since the invention of agriculture, are and have been engaged in a systematic war against women. Women have been repressed, abused and enslaved, and continue ...

Savage Rush

David Trotter: The Tube, 21 October 2010

Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf 
by David Welsh.
Liverpool, 306 pp., £70, May 2010, 978 1 84631 223 6
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... representative of the state of society. Rather surprisingly, given its reputation for waftiness, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is the exception that proves the rule. Woolf followed Gissing and James in exploring the specific duration (or durations) of travel by underground railway. Indeed, she went further, in ...

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