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Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Voices from Beyond the Grave, 20 November 2008

... of writers can often seem so unbearably silly in the light of our expectations. We think Virginia Woolf should sound like her style, but she doesn’t: in her British Library recording (the only one in existence), she sounds like a person imprisoned by her sensibility and her class as opposed to someone who floats somewhere above it. ...

Leave off saying I want you to be savages

Sandra Gilbert: D.H. Lawrence, 19 March 1998

D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-30 
by David Ellis.
Cambridge, 814 pp., £25, January 1998, 0 521 25421 3
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... Lovers, the book strikes many young readers as a chestnut, maybe even an obstacle on the road to Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker, while the later novels just look ‘weird’. On the one hand, the author of Women in Love is too damn serious, too damn end-of-the-world to be any fun in a world of MTV; on the other hand, the creator of The ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... of feminist criticism, which receives one rather surly reference. American feminist critics of Virginia Woolf, while praiseworthy in developing new vantage points on her work (that’s Taylor being charitable again), have ended up waging an ‘ideological crusade’. He is not himself, need one say, an ideological critic: he is a card-carrying ...

Short Cuts

Paul Myerscough: Iris Murdoch, 7 February 2002

... priggish about the cinema. ‘A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness,’ Virginia Woolf complained in 1926, and the feeling persists. Even the best images won’t do. The scene in Iris that everyone seems to like most has her in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, tearing blank pages from her notebook and pinning them to the beach ...

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5
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... In​ 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing ...

Short Cuts

Rosemary Hill: What Writers Wear, 27 July 2017

... hours alone. They can wear anything – or nothing – and nobody is any the wiser. Yet as Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando, clothes have ‘more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’ In the novel clothes propel the narrative of Orlando’s passage through time and ...

Diary

Ardis Butterfield: Who was Chaucer?, 27 August 2015

... I learned about the first from a New York Times review of Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. In the midst of Daphne Merkin’s somewhat dutiful praise there erupts a moment of real excitement: Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as Ms ...

On Typing

Jo-Ann Wallace, 24 February 2022

... it. The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace editions appeared at the same time, both produced under Woolf’s direction, although from different proofs. There are some minor, though not insignificant, differences between the two. As E.F. Shields puts it in her exhaustive essay on ‘The American Edition of Mrs Dalloway’ (1974), ‘both … can legitimately ...

Pool of Consciousness

Jane Miller, 21 February 1980

Pilgrimage 
by Dorothy Richardson.
Virago, £3.50, November 1980, 0 86068 100 9
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... pages long, who have complained that it is boringly avant-garde, inchoate, and vitiated by what Virginia Woolf called ‘the damned egotistical self’. It was not just perversity which provoked her to court such charges. She set out to write a novel about ‘the startling things that are not important’, and to do so through the experiences of a ...

Rochet and Chimère

V.S. Pritchett, 6 March 1980

... of the moralist. The sybarite – for there was a distinct touch of that in his nature, and Virginia Woolf twitted him for dining with duchesses – might think our lives peculiar, but he could not resist the variety of human nature. Raymond was undoubtedly at his best when writing for the New Statesman, because he liked swimming against the ...

On the Verge of Collapse

John Sturrock, 19 August 1982

The Siren’s Song 
by Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel Josipovici and Sacha Rabinovich.
Harvester, 255 pp., £20, June 1982, 0 85527 738 6
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... of royalties and rights. The Siren’s Song contains a slight but relatively accessible essay on Virginia Woolf, a welcome recruit so far as Blanchot is concerned because of the ordeals of premeditation which are recorded in her diaries. She was a sufferer, one of the neurasthenic élite, whose suicide, he chillingly maintains, ‘vindicated her ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one’s own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within. Though most of those men aren’t listening to ...

A Tulip and Two Bulbs

Jenny Turner: Jeanette Winterson, 7 September 2000

The PowerBook 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 243 pp., £14.99, September 2000, 0 224 06103 8
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... of her books. She only engages with the most irreproachable writers: Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. The only constitutive human relationship is to the partner, a shadowy figure, a troubadour’s muse. For a writer who so wonderfully emerged in such a flurry of strife and conflict, it has all gone quiet and comfy, surely, a bit like those ...

Make mine a Worcester Sauce

John Bayley, 23 June 1994

Richard Hughes 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Deutsch, 491 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 233 98843 2
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... actors are not, so to speak, up to the technology, a point noted with characteristic sharpness by Virginia Woolf in a letter to Hughes. ‘It’s full of remarkable things. What I’m not sure is whether they coalesce ... on the one hand there’s the storm: on the other the people. And between them there’s a gap, in which there’s some want of ...

Problem Parent

Michael Wood, 17 August 1989

Memories of Amnesia 
by Laurence Shainberg.
Collins Harvill, 190 pp., £10.95, April 1989, 0 00 272024 8
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We find ourselves in Moontown 
by Jay Gummerman.
Cape, 174 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 0 224 02662 3
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The Russia House 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 344 pp., £12.95, June 1989, 0 340 50573 7
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My Secret History 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 468 pp., £13.95, June 1989, 0 241 12369 0
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... Look within,’ Virginia Woolf said, but she wasn’t thinking of brain surgery. Memories of Amnesia is a black joke about inner landscapes, or more precisely, about a mind turned inside out. Subjectivity, that spreading territory of so much modern writing, becomes a sort of intellectual circus, an arena where hectic and unanswerable arguments cross like missiles in the night ...

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