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“... Stalin’s game, the tell-tale word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell ...”

“... expense of reticence is boringness, and if you want literary gossip you’ll still have to go to Virginia Woolf, and if you want self-revelation, to D.H. Lawrence. Nevertheless the letters are the man – or such of the man as he allowed the world to see. And because the man was a great artist, even that shaped and shielded self is worth ...”

“... that Powys, in a Victorian manner, somehow made a contribution to the impressionism explored by Virginia Woolf: ‘the seaside of Weymouth Sands is a Boudin painted by Monet.’ Perhaps. But in After My Fashion he strikes me as more like a thoroughgoing Victorian, offering the sort of landscape painting Ruskin admired in William Dyce. (The ...”

“... servants were often bizarre and at the end of his life became highly disquieting to his friends. Virginia Woolf remarked that Jane Austen was the hardest of novelists to catch in the act of greatness, and something like this might be said of Hartley too; but greatness caught in fiction’s act can often have a derivative element to it, and Hartley’s ...”

“... that had a direct effect on women’s lives. In its earliest days, suffragettes and feminists like Virginia Woolf were invited to speak, and later pressure was put on governments on a range of issues: equal pay, maternity provision, equal compensation for war injuries, the payment of Family Allowance to mothers not fathers, school meals, uniform telephone ...”

“... Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as such bear some relation to life ...”

“... housemaid. Not many Johannesburg miners rejoice in the richly blooming confusion of their lives. Virginia Woolf saw the world as a bundle of vivid fragments, but one wonders if her gardener did. Perhaps Murdoch evolved against the grain of her age, starting off as a woman writer and ending up as a lady novelist. The latter title might also be reserved ...”

“... of contemporary women novelists’; the New York Times Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double act, acclaiming each other’s masterpieces; for ...”

“... characters who instantly presented themselves, and later instantly reminded you who they were. Virginia Woolf complained that, when he feared a reader’s attention might wander, Dickens would throw another character on the fire. Woloch more sympathetically observes that his description of minor characters often ‘ebulliently dilates’. He believes ...”

“... think Bossy might have said of Evennett’s book on the Counter-Reformation something like what Virginia Woolf said about Middlemarch: the first English novel written for grown-ups.) More recently, the old Bossy reappeared in his Birkbeck Lectures, delivered in Cambridge, where St Charles Borromeo’s version of Catholicism was contrasted with ...”

“... indicates, although she makes little of it: feminists’ relationships with their mothers. Women, Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘think back through our mothers’, but what Inventing Herself shows is that feminists are much more likely to do the opposite, defining themselves in opposition to mothers who are seen as prohibitive and soul-destroying – an ...”

“... she desires. Never has the passion of novelist for protagonist been so intently formulated. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Artemisia is a kind of dance with its protagonist: through it course all the relations that the author can devise with the fascinating woman whose biographer she has decided to be. The lost novel has been recast as a novel about a ...”

“... it come off?’ he asks, and answers: ‘Not quite.’ Muir thought it lacked ‘causality’. Virginia Woolf also disliked Ulysses. One gets a sense that in those years innovation was wanted, thought necessary, apparently sure of a welcome; yet when it appeared – as in James and Ford and Lawrence and Woolf and ...”

“... identify itself with an aesthetic, and it was this, perhaps, which aroused the envy and wonder of Virginia Woolf, who found herself unable to work the artistic miracle the other way round, to move from the aesthetic and the social into the world of desire which unites and animates the two. In a sense, the most blatant of Proust’s pretences is the whole ...”

“... most copiously in Autumn Journal, the one long poem MacNeice wrote that has survived its occasion. Virginia Woolf thought it feeble, and MacNeice was apologetic about its topical, personal, rambling journal-form: but now it seems not only the fullest expression of the poet’s sensibility, but also the truest expression of its moment in history – the ...”