“... in a moment of attention and expectation which isn’t a response – as it might be, say, in Virginia Woolf – to some tremor of life usually unperceived, but which arises only from a situation the author has devised by withholding information. Who is Mrs E. Boyd Golson, why is she compulsively drawn to Eudoxia? The answer hasn’t to do with ...”

“... up and dies just as the heroine decides she might have him after all). Meanwhile, female writers (Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Mew, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Nancy Cunard, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Townsend Warner) allowed the old Victorian spinster a few escape-routes: killing off the controlling father who kept her at home (Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of ...”

“... meditation on ‘women and fiction’ to which Backscheider’s study might be read as a prequel, Virginia Woolf acknowledges a crucial debt – the birth of the possibility of £500 a year and the freedom to write for oneself – to Aphra Behn, the first professional female writer, on whose tomb ‘all women together ought to let flowers fall.’ ‘The ...”

“... and in a manner more like Violet Hunt’s than Rebecca West’s, or Dorothy Richardson’s, or Virginia Woolf’s. 1924 was the year of Woolf’s ground-breaking essay on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, which urges the development of new narrative techniques and criticises Arnold Bennett and other Edwardian ...”

“... Gertrude​ Trevelyan lived the Virginia Woolf dream: £500 a year and a room of one’s own in which to write experimental novels. Born in 1903 into a well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill ...”

“... of consciousness. Despite all her work, she was sniggered at by Pound and dismissed as prim by Virginia Woolf. As the 1920s progressed, she became more be-bunned and anachronistic, and was avoided by Dorothy Richardson (the author of Pilgrimage, one of the longest streams of consciousness of the period), who found her too wary and easy to offend. The ...”

“... Rosamond Lehmann, whom Mackenzie was proud to acknowledge as a disciple, Dorothy Richardson, even Virginia Woolf and Lawrence himself, there was the play of consciousness caught in words, consciousness as itself a form of diffused and in a sense infantile eroticism. One remembers Virginia Woolf’s feeling for the ...”

“... of the few. Yet literature gives back what history has erased. In fact literature – Galsworthy, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ‘ruling class’, so familiar that we forget how brief its existence was. A cross between a gentrified bourgeoisie and a professionalised aristocracy, it ranked as ...”

“... subject – whether the normal sexual relationship is hetero- or homo- or bi-.’ In the same year Virginia Woolf, interested in her active engagement with the times, wrote to commission an autobiography from Holtby for the Hogarth Press. ‘I don’t see how I can write an autobiography,’ she is reported to have told Brittain. ‘I never feel I’ve ...”

“... classics: Men in the Off Hours (2000), for example, contains an essay entitled ‘Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War’. Men in the Off Hours remains the most diverse, and the best, introduction to her prose and verse. Here is ‘Epitaph: Zion’: Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives Were fragile, the wind ...”

“... remembered him as ‘a completely sympathetic person’, others recalled a ruthless heart-breaker. Virginia Woolf, for whom he worked at the Hogarth Press, sketched him in her diary as a faintly preposterous dandy: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise’. ‘You make a ...”

“... have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to despatch my unconditional acceptance (this after ...”

“... ought to except Miss Thackeray’s short stories, which I cannot resist when they come near me.’ Virginia Woolf drew on her memories of Anny, who was known as Aunt Anny to the Stephen children, in the figure of Mrs Hilbery in Night and Day: Ideas came to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with a duster in her ...”

“... died, back in London, in 1928. Her final appearance in Cambridge was a posthumous cameo part in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), originally given as lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges a few months after Harrison’s death. There Woolf imagines that she caught a glimpse of the ghost of ‘J — H ...”

“... Hesse’s typewriter, Robert Graves’s straw hat, Margot Fonteyn’s ballet slippers). Virginia Woolf and Frida Kahlo are on her itinerary, but you get the feeling she’d have no problem with a canon largely comprised of dead (cool) white guys; strangely, or possibly not, in both Just Kids and M Train other women are largely absent. It’s ...”