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“... notion of the anxiety of influence, is a reasonable one, best illustrated here in the essays on Virginia Woolf. Gillian Beer persuasively suggests that in her first novel, The Voyage Out, not only do Woolf’s descriptions of a South American forest echo those of Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle, but also her ...”

“... Leonard Woolf’s earlier years coincided with the last great age of letter-writing. Moreover his friends were people who had what may now seem an unusually pressing need to keep in touch with one another, even when not very far apart, and this need was well served by the Post Office, which, before 1914, gave London eight deliveries of mail each day ...”

“... he was an Apostle. He married the daughter of a Vice-Provost of Eton, a kinswoman by marriage of Virginia Woolf, and, on the evidence of A Nineteenth-Century Childhood, a more accomplished writer, at any rate of books, than her husband. He was an important but not a dedicated member of the Bloomsbury group, and shows up in memoir after memoir as a man ...”

“... domestic and sexual permutations would have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t ...”

“... trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, is out because he is not in our sense a serious writer – deliberately not, one would have supposed. Things have come to the point where we are in danger of ...”

“... circles, though it is set in the 17th century to disguise any resemblances to contemporaries. Virginia Woolf, gossiping extravagantly about her visit to Paris, reported seeing Hope and Jane ‘billing and cooing together’. Mirrlees – Harrison’s pupil and later her companion – is the third woman in Beard’s story. She seems to have worked on ...”

“... It is fatal for a woman,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘in any way to speak consciously as a woman.’ Fatal for her as a writer, Woolf meant, but even so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man ...”

“... exiles and dreams that form this book is to extend those frontiers. Some fifty years ago Virginia Woolf likened the biographer to the miner’s canary ‘testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. Compared to fiction and poetry, biography had only recently begun its career, but such ...”

“... knew of one another – in l911, there was a partial, temporary and gingerly link-up, initiated by Virginia Woolf; and all along James Strachey, born to be Bloomsbury but in love with Rupert Brooke, functioned as a sort of inter-coterie courier. So it’s easy to get confused, and although, like most generalisations, Delany’s compare-and-contrast ...”

“... by a hard May. My varsity jacket. The sky between leaves is the brightest thing in nature, Virginia Woolf told the inquiring Rupert Brooke. Whatever. Laisser-faire I can really only feign disapproval of my youngest dibbling his semolina’d fingers in the satiny lining of her red coat. Is it decided Planetary weather, A glittering canopy of ...”

“... moyenne sensuelle, unashamed, with nothing very noble or sensitive to commend her. The Diary of Virginia Woolf it is not. But she preserves for us the street vitality of a certain time and place. Ah, Bohemia ... when artists lived in garrets, wore corduroys and beards, had sardonic eyes and struck attitudes: ‘Bloody useless – bloody virgin too ...”

“... moving about it: the diary form embodies the truth of the emotion, not minding about the words. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, is uncomfortable to read because the smart striking words of her diary seem to give her no ease: she is outside even the other self it offers, and cannot have a love relation with its contents, the sort of relation which is ...”

“... young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library ...”

“... discussed at great length and in exhaustive depth as ‘representative’ of the century are Virginia Woolf, Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, H.D. and Sylvia Plath. The Harlem Renaissance novelists, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, have a collective chapter as well; and elsewhere the authors manage to work in a ...”

“... An obituary,’ Virginia Woolf wrote on Saturday, 6 January 1940. Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc creams with him at Eileen Power’s. An admirer sent them. This was a fitting tribute. A theatrical-looking glib man. Told me he was often asked if I were his wife. Volunteered that he was happily married, though his wife lived – Geneva? I forget ...”