There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which represent three different bio...
Virginia Woolf: I'm dying in this town. Leonard Woolf: If you were thinking clearly, Virginia, you would recall it was London that brought you low. Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly? If I were thinking clearly? Leonard Woolf: We brought you ...
In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.
Angelica Bell: What happens when we die? Virginia Woolf: What happens? [pause] Virginia Woolf: We return to the place that we came from. Angelica Bell: I don't remember where I came from. Virginia Woolf: Nor do I.
In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman’s marriage, coincided with Woolf �...
and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern ...
When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.
Virginia Woolf: You return to what? Vanessa Bell: Tonight. Oh, just some insufferable dinner not even you could envy, Virginia. Virginia Woolf: But I do.
Vanessa Bell: Virginia. Virginia Woolf: Leonard thinks it's the end of civilization: People who are invited at 4 and arrive at 2:30. Vanessa Bell: Oh God. Virginia Woolf: Barbarians.
I've never been in love, never in my life. Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night, but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked, and the key is lost.
When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.
The trial of Ernst Zundel has gone down in Canadian history.
What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...
Woolf criticism has not evolved smoothly, and it would be misleading to say that any one approach or interpretation has ever prevailed to the exclusion of others. There are continuities and discontinuities in trends and arguments, areas of common gro...
Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical, historicist, ma...
Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman).
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
One of the shocks of a 50th birthday is realizing the fundamental fact that your youth is irrevocably over.
I'm an amazing mama's boy.
