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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf
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Susan
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Dec 27, 2017 08:25AM
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99p todayVirginia Woolf is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.
Part of the Bloomsbury set, she lived surrounded by other artists and writers, and her novels and essays have inspired generations of readers and writers ever since their publication.
Her personal struggles with depression and mental illness, and her feminist beliefs come across strongly in her work, illuminating an important period in British social history, not just for women’s rights, but for a whole nation scarred by the effects of two world wars.
Winifred Holtby gives us Woolf the critic, the essayist and the experimental novelist in this critical memoir which is of particular interest as the work of one intelligent, though very different, novelist commenting on another.
Holtby’s careful reading of Woolf’s work is set in the context of the debate between modernist and traditional writing in the 1920s and 1930s.
Although Holtby greatly admires Woolf’s art, she considers its limitations as an elite form that ignores the material conditions of everyday life and the consequent social responsibility expected of the novel.
Choosing to write about Woolf as ‘the author whose art seemed most of all removed from anything I could ever attempt, and whose experience was most alien to my own,’ Holtby has written a candid appreciation of the complex, groundbreaking work of a contemporary writer at the height of her career.
Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) was an English novelist and journalist. She is also the author of the ‘South Riding’ series.
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99p today..."
I've now taken a "look inside" at Amazon and have bought this - I think it will be very interesting in showing more about both authors. Thanks again, Susan.
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I picked it up, too. It was 99 cents here.
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Good news, Jan :)
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I'm quite enjoying it and will return to some sections after reading the book in question, but I think it is just as much about Holtby as about Woolf.
It also discusses the whole plots of books, with no concern about spoilers.
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That can be a bit annoying, as I found in the Ngaio Marsh biography, Judy. I found myself skipping whole sections, thinking, "I haven't read this yet!"
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I read Jacob's Room many years ago so would like to revisit - To the Lighthouse is one I've read more recently, but I don't remember it in enough detail to follow Holtby's discussion properly.
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The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Orlando.
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Thanks, Hugh. I am hoping the biography also helps put her work in context, of course.
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The Waves is not easy to follow but it probably is the most innovative.
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Max Richter - Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works (2017)
...which might interest a few amongst you.
German-British composer Max Richter is known mostly for his film scores.
In 2015, the choreographer Wayne McGregor premiered “Woolf Works,” a narrative dance piece based on three Virginia Woolf novels (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves) at the Royal Opera House. He enlisted Max Richter to pen an original score for the c120 minute, three act performance.
Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works is an abridged version of the ballet score.
Each of the work's three sections begins with a spoken quotation from Virginia Woolf herself, the first of them consisting of an actual recording of Woolf's voice from 1937; the other two are read by actors.
The rest of the movements are instrumental and are connected to a greater or lesser degree to the three novels named in the titles of the three sections, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves.
Only the Woolf quotation for Orlando comes from the novel named in its section title. The music in that section consists of a set of variations on the Baroque-era-ground La Folia, and the medium is constantly shifting: from full orchestra to chamber instruments, solo groups, and electronic variations (the music is performed by Richter himself on piano and synthesizer, plus the Deutches Filmorchester Babelsberg and assorted other musicians).
You probably wouldn't guess Virginia Woolf without prior knowledge. The final section though, with an opening reading spoken by Gillian Anderson, is taken from Woolf's suicide note, and although Richter indicates that the rest of the music evokes the poetic mood of The Waves, its intense climax (unlike the rest of the music, this is a lengthy movement of more than 20 minutes) seems to keep the suicide note in the listener's mind.
Sources:
https://www.allmusic.com/album/max-ri...
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/...
Max Richter is familiar to me thanks to Vashti Bunyan!
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https://www.cnet.com/news/google-dood...
Don't forget our Buddy Read of the Hermione Lee biography Virginia Woolf
This starts next week, but I will open the thread at the weekend, as people have more time then.
Google just told me it's her 136 'birthday' today.
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Susan wrote: "Today is the anniversary of Virginia Woolf's birthday.https://www.cnet.com/news/google-dood...
."
Thanks for the birthday reminder Susan! :)
Always worthwhile to celebrate such a great writer. Love her essays!
The Google powers that be decided to commemorate Virginia Woolf instead of the usual Robert Burns. That will have a few Scots spluttering into their Irn-Bru.
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https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wool...
She was not alone in her view....
The term middlebrow became a pejorative usage in the modernist cultural criticism, by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and Russell Lynes, which served the cause of the marginalization of the popular culture in favour of high culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebrow
Anyway for more middlebrow chit chat head on over to this Celebrating the Middlebrow thread....
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Or discuss VW's views here.
Virginia Woolf is not entirely consistent on this point. What is Mrs. Dalloway but a celebration of the middlebrow in the deeply middlebrow figure of Clarissa Dalloway herself? Catch this passage:"But suppose Peter said to her, 'Yes, yes, but what's the sense of your parties?' All she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague...She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance..."
For me, this is the crux of the novel. Because it is very clear that Woolf is drawing a parallel between her novel-writing and Clarissa's party-giving, both of which exist "for no reason whatever" except as offerings for the sake of offering. Even when art / entertainment has a money-making motivation, it is still an offering.
This is something I try to keep in mind when I read, view, listen, experience. I'm as tempted by snark as the next guy, but an offering is an offering, whether highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, or outsider, whether "good" or "bad", and offerings even when they need to be rejected should not be spurned or flung back in the offerer's face.
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To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.
Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death.
Really keen to read this, as well as
A Room of One's OwnHas anyone thoughts on either?
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A Room of One's Own is still a model of how to 'do' feminist literary criticism - but just bear in mind that Woolf is factually wrong about her Judith Shakespeare: there were plenty of female writers in the Renaissance period. Still, she's remarkably astute about the economics of privilege and exclusion - and much of what she says sadly hasn't dated.
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Came across this - the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf.http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20...
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""Almost enjoyable"? Well, quite.
I know RC loves Woolf's books; I have the profoundest respect for her judgement and she and I agree on a great deal, but our responses to both Proust and Woolf diverge markedly 😊 "
So many people I admire and respect love VW, including many of my favourite people here at RTTC. It puzzles me why I have yet to derive any pleasure from her work.
Ultimately it's another reminder of just how differently we respond to the same words on a page.
I sometimes wonder if the people who love VW really love VW. But, of course, I know they are really sincere.
Something I find so impenetrable and boring is a joy to others. That's just the way it is and, until my breakthrough comes, VW remains filed under "life's imponderable mysteries"
I just had a look at the GoodReads quotes from To The Lighthouse. Perhaps it's unfair to look at these out of context but it does remind me just why I find To The Lighthouse, and VW more generally, such a tedious struggle...
“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
...or...
“There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.”
...or...
“It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.”
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Yes, I honestly, truly do love VW - but not Lighthouse to date. That said, I love that 'There it was before her - life' quotation (Mrs Ramsay, I presume?) whereas the 'It was odd' one makes me shudder a bit!
I can see why Sid and others find VW self-absorbed but I see it as her trying to express characters' inner life textually on the page. Like Joyce, she is trying to capture the extraordinariness of ordinary life, the important stuff that doesn't happen as a dramatic event but a small shift inside, or an ephemeral moment captured. And her prose is often lovely.
But it's fine not to like her, Nigeyb - we all have those puzzling readerly blank spots.
Nigeyb wrote: "Sid wrote: ""Almost enjoyable"? Well, quite.
I know RC loves Woolf's books; I have the profoundest respect for her judgement and she and I agree on a great deal, but our responses to both Prou..."
The pieces you've picked out as 'tedious' I find quite beautiful, in all the ways R C describes. I think that's why this appealed to me so much during adolescence, there's that sense of intensity, of moments verging on epiphany, of heightened awareness that fits well with the emotional force of youth.
I think someone said you have to be in the mood for Virginia, and that's how I feel. Her books fall in two categories for me.1. Brilliant when in the mood for a very close reading:
A Room of One's Own
Mrs. Dalloway
and
2. Accessible and not as dependent on mood:
Night and Day (I adore this for some unknown reason)
Orlando
Between the Acts
Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
Monday or Tuesday
I've read and loved all of these.
I'm sure To the Lighthouse goes in the first category, but I'm not settled about that one yet. I read it in college and thought it was mind-blowing. Then I read it decades later and thought it was totally boring. Don't know where the next read will land me!
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Roman Clodia wrote: "Kathleen, I adore Night and Day too! It's the closest VW probably gets to a conventional 'marriage plot' novel and I love all the insights into the suffragette campaign."Yes! It's so conventional, but with these wonderful unconventional details showing up everywhere. Glad you liked it too, RC.
Kathleen wrote: "Roman Clodia wrote: "Kathleen, I adore Night and Day too! It's the closest VW probably gets to a conventional 'marriage plot' novel and I love all the insights into the suffragette campaign."Yes!..."
I read 'The Years' recently, which is also quite conventional apart from the structure, and loved it. I'd forgotten how good a writer she is, in general.
Alwynne wrote: "I read 'The Years' recently, which is also quite conventional apart from the structure, and loved it. I'd forgotten how good a writer she is, in general."Ah--The Years should be my next of hers. I think that's a great point. We get so waylaid by trying to figure her out that we overlook what a good writer she is, and these more conventional books take us back to enjoying that.
Definitely, I've been slowly making my way through her diaries, I splashed out on a complete set a while ago, which I'm also enjoying. I was planning to re-read more of hers soon, mainly because I was so absorbed by 'The Years'.
I have just read To the Lighthouse. It wasn't my first Woolf as I read The Voyage Out a few years ago; I quite liked it but found it overlong. But it's quite conventional, and Lighthouse, well, isn't. Review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...For what it's worth I liked it the book, but it does seem to inspire dislike amongst some, perhaps because it's been a set book at A level in the past. I'm not sure a bored 17-year-old would get on with it that well.
Mike wrote: "I have just read To the Lighthouse. "Terrific review, Mike. I'm trying to brace myself to read this - I haven't got on at all well with the Woolf I've read - and you've encouraged me to try it, at least.
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An extra point of interest was that the character is based on novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. She was Woolf's "Aunty Anny" although they were not related by blood (she was the sister of Woolf's father's first wife). A glimpse of how Woolf's relations were surrounded by mementoes of such a different writer!
This reminds me that I've been meaning for years to try something by Anne Thackeray, but haven't done so yet.
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I think Kathleen's point #88 about some books being dependent on mood and time is correct: I had all day to read this slowly with few distractions - and it left me pleasurably weepy by the end!
www.goodreads.com/review/show/4928173450
Roman Clodia wrote: "I have finally read To The Lighthouse and loved, loved, loved it! I think Kathleen's point #88 about some books being dependent on mood and time is correct: I had all day to read this slowly with..."
Brilliant review, and you've inspired me, at a time when I can read luxuriously, to give this another try!
That’s a lovely review, RC. I read To the Lighthouse as a freshman, 40 years ago, in college and decided then that stream of consciousness was not for me. In subsequent years I’ve learned to love stream of consciousness so I should read this again. I only recently read Mrs. Dalloway, which I appreciated more than enjoyed. The book I’m most eager to read next is Orlando.
I think both of these have potential for Woolf fans, Sophie Cunningham's This Devastating Fever and Michele Cahill's Daisy & Woolf. This article is mainly about Cunningham but relates it to Cahill's novel too:https://theconversation.com/sophie-cu...
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
Between the Acts (other topics)The Years (other topics)
The Benson Diary: I: 1885-1906; II: 1907-1925 (other topics)
Selected Letters (other topics)
Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (other topics)William Makepeace Thackeray (other topics)
Aldous Huxley (other topics)
Vita Sackville-West (other topics)
Virginia Woolf (other topics)
