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“... biography. Thurman’s life can easily slide in alongside Hermione Lee’s recent biography of Virginia Woolf as a somewhat unlooked-for end-of-century masterwork, being vital, absorbing, delectably written and psychologically astute beyond anything anyone had any right to expect, especially given the mass of books (many excellent) already devoted to ...”

“... always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s Dance contains ...”

“... socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy for picking up girls my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless. I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste ...”

“... old silver’ school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West etc – they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first – and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to ...”

“... Immediately after becoming a woman, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando returns from a spell as Ambassador Extraordinary in Constantinople for tea and literary gossip with Addison, Pope and Swift – only to find that her pleasure in their company dissipates when the volatile Pope turns the force of his anger against her ...”

“... its front page. Her extraordinary fame has also led to this extraordinary completeness. Maybe only Virginia Woolf’s diaries are comparable as a record of a woman becoming the writer she hoped but wasn’t sure she could be, though Woolf’s legend is different.Plath grows up in Cold War America, deceived by a God who ...”

“... out, I not only have many different selves, but I am often, as they say, not myself at all.’ In Virginia Woolf’s remarkable ‘A Sketch of the Past’, drafted as she wrote her biography of Roger Fry, the gap between narrating and narrated selves – ‘the two people, I now, I then’ – proves recalcitrant and persistent, refusing to close. In any ...”

“... It can also be seen as a pessimistic companion-piece to A Room of One’s Own, a riposte to Woolf somewhat influenced by the work of Our Lady of Straw, Camille Paglia. Our discoveries of female poets of the past, Greer claims, are not real discoveries. The women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting ...”

“... job question is quite serious enough. I remember in my first term we were reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and the leader of the class (it always had a specific leader, just as it would now in Communist China) came and said: ‘We think we had better not write an essay on Mrs Dalloway, because it might have political implications.’ I hadn’t ...”

“... for the moment, the wisdom of looking to Spokane for anything at all), we hear the voice of Virginia Woolf, who wrote to her sister Vanessa in 1928 on hearing from Eliot of his conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has ...”

“... dictionary and its supplements, satirically underscored by the lament of Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas that ‘it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids . . . are to be found’. In the 63 volumes published by 1901, only about 4 per cent of subjects are female, and even the most recent supplementary volume (on the ...”

“... whimsical that never quite coheres. As Harris explains, she has taken much of her inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a hard act to follow and not always a helpful influence. Harris describes her own approach in the introduction as having ‘tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it’. It’s an ...”

“... female ethos. It’s in the Oxford Street Debenhams, which had been Marshall & Snelgrove, that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando finds herself in her last manifestation on 11 October 1928. Having travelled through time, she enters from the crowded street and the essence of department store joy comes over her. ‘Shade and scent enveloped her. The present ...”

“... from a striking snapshot of the Twenties or Thirties, showing Eliot blocked off by a towering Virginia Woolf from a cowering Vivien. The trouble with this insistence on actuality is that in practice the source-materials continually resisted the interpretation imposed on them. The play’s numb hero could never have written a line, and the action ...”

“... This suits Amis fine – but it does give rise to certain questions about knowledge: like Virginia Woolf, Amis elides authorial free-ranging intelligence with the restricted reactions of the protagonist, and it is often hard to see where one becomes the other. Would an amnesiac think of cars as ‘daredevil roadsters’ or invent the elaborately ...”