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“... Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The gripping narratives, ‘telling ...”

“... Abbey, where a plaque was unveiled in 1993. Among the leaders of the Trollope revival was Virginia Woolf. She admired him for providing ‘the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below’, and she envied his ability to convey both the ‘moments of non-being’ that are life as ...”

“... an essay ‘Against a New Formalism’, partly a meditation on a passage near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves where Rhoda says: ‘The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying “Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”.’ Bayley distinguished between those writers – he had ...”

“... as fact. Orlando is The Biographer’s Tale’s most dashing predecessor, and the comparison with Virginia Woolf brings out something important about Byatt as a writer. Orlando was conceived as a ‘writer’s holiday’ and pitched with beautiful buoyancy against the dead-weight of historical, literary and biographical tradition. The interest for ...”

“... it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and greenery of Winchester, Virginia, to a feckless gentleman farmer and his beautiful Southern belle wife, she was removed from the landscape she loved at the age of nine, when the family moved to the harsh, flat, frozen prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. This, the first rude trauma of ...”

“... a help. And other modern voices which deal with the language of consciousness, such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Beckett, must have been useful too. Brodkey’s grand project stands apart because his narrator is not concerned with the social but with the self. He does not observe the world, or measure himself in relation to others, or talk about last ...”

“... form. Still Life is in no sense a contemporary equivalent of To the Lighthouse, even though Virginia Woolf is one of the novelists whose cadences Byatt (I would judge unconsciously) sometimes echoes. This is, rather, a novel in which certain aspects of painting (notably the theory and practice of colour) are subjected to discursive analysis. The ...”

“... been ‘hallucinating’), there is a general air of cold fish about all Macaulay’s work, as Virginia Woolf noted of the successful 1920 novel, Potterism: ‘Rose, judging from her works, is a Eunuch – that’s what I dislike most about Potterism. She has no parts. And surely she must be the daughter of a don?’ The ‘lack of parts’ is ...”

“... and way of talking prompted E.M. Forster to say that her ‘every word … should be recorded.’ Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘her genius of personality’ and borrowed some of her characteristics (her rapidity of gesture and quick changes of mood) for Lucrezia, Septimus’s wife in Mrs Dalloway. After Keynes’s death in 1946, Lydia gradually withdrew ...”

“... bride, whose reception was attended by a mixture of Quakers, ‘bruisers’, chorus girls and Virginia Woolf, who remarked that it was ‘a very queer party’. Through all of this Bedford had clung to her childhood ambition to be a writer. The struggle to write was literal as well as intellectual. Nobody had taught her to read: she picked it up by ...”

“... Of Human Bondage and Katherine Mansfield and Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie and quite a lot of Virginia Woolf, but she could never get anybody to talk with her about books any more, because Lakey said her taste was sentimental.’ Or: ‘But the red-letter day in Mr Andrews’s life was the day he became a Trotskyite. Not just a sympathiser, but an ...”

“... was intended as much to clear away the old as to make it new. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf argued that writers should strip away the extraneous stuff that the novel had accumulated around itself, and that marred the work of ‘materialist’ novelists like Wells and Galsworthy. Instead, she argued, they should record the ‘atoms as ...”

“... then on to the name of a c.1914 painting by Walter Sickert, with interpretations of the word by Virginia Woolf and A.L. Hendriks. Scholar notes that Sickert chose his title as ‘an émigré word we cannot assume either of the painting’s subjects would necessarily know’. The two people not only look bored but appear as if they wouldn’t need ...”

“... and ambiguities. It is also a locus amoenus, where lack is transfigured into potentia or fantasy. Virginia Woolf described this brilliantly in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’; there is so much we will never know, including basic pronunciation, and what exactly counted as humour. But ‘there is the compactness of expression. Shelley takes 21 words ...”

“... age of 42, when he married the beautiful and ambitious Ann de Vere Cole, sister of that friend of Virginia Woolf who reviewed the Channel Fleet in disguise as the Emperor of Abyssinia (Neville was relieved to find that Ann wholly deplored such exploits). Aloof, reserved, devoted to hobbies and private life, somewhat contemptuous of his fellow ...”