Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired 'A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery

by Virginia Woolf

George Moore.

The Novels of E. M. Forster.

I

II

III

IV

Middlebrow.

The Art of Biography.

I

Froude’s Carlyle

Edmund Gosse,

Lytton Strachey.

II

III

IV

Craftsmanship.

Now, this power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations—naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them to-day—that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.

The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example—who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”?

From Macbeth. His bloodstained hand will redden the ocean.

And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.

A Letter to a Young Poet.

Rhyme is not only childish, but dishonest,

This you must do; this you must not. I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban path than write poetry,

The poet is trying honestly and exactly to describe a world that has perhaps no existence except for one particular person at one particular moment. And the more sincere he is in keeping to the precise outline of the roses and cabbages of his private universe, the more he puzzles us who have agreed in a lazy spirit of compromise to see roses and cabbages as they are seen, more or less, by the twenty-six passengers on the outside of an omnibus.

Can you doubt that the reason why Shakespeare knew every sound and syllable in the language and could do precisely what he liked with grammar and syntax, was that Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra rushed him into this knowledge; that the lords, officers, dependants, murderers and common soldiers of the plays insisted that he should say exactly what they felt in the words expressing their feelings? It was they who taught him to write, not the begetter of the Sonnets.

And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.

Why?

Professions for Women.

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

All this was pleasant and as it should be,

For her, not the slaves.

undergone for his country,

undergone for his insurrection

the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.

If men and women must write, let them leave the great mysteries of art and literature unassailed; if they told us frankly not of the books that we can all read and the pictures which hang for us all to see, but of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze—if they would write of themselves—such writing would have its own permanent value.

Fathings

Farthings

nor

not

The Land of the Blessed Virgin,

I wonder why so many people wish for high position and great wealth’ when it merely emancipates them ‘from all the practical difficulties, which might teach them the facts of things, and sympathy with their fellow-creatures’.

k

basket

Tom Brown’s School Days

He was born with qualities that are neither rare nor splendid: good brains, for instance, and a passion for books; but it is inspiring to see how these two gifts in their naked austerity—for neither ever attracted anything foreign to it—are able to supply all that a man wants; at any rate, all that he needs to be a respectable, independent, and harmless human being.

Mary Crosbie

the author of Mademoiselle Ixe,

Mary Elizabeth Hawker, writing under the pseudonym Lanoe Falconer.

all

an

[Recollections and Impressions by E.M. Sellar (William Blackwood and Sons, 1907).]

Incorrect! This subtitle has been duplicated from the previous review. It does not describe the book that is the subject of this review.

Letters of a Betrothed, during the German War of Liberation, 1804–1813, edited by Edith Freiin von Cramm, and translated by Leonard Huxley,

Philip Sidney.

‘Love the Judge.’

Love, the Judge

[Lone the Judge

[Love, the Judge

Low? the Judge,

Love, the Judge