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“... segregated in self-conscious little groups. In London on more than one occasion in the Thirties, Virginia Woolf reported conversations with Tony Butts, friend of William Plomer and brother of Mary, about his sister. She is a bad woman – pretentious – I can see no merit in her books – pretentious. She corrupts young men. They are always committing ...”

“... things, but words that are living things with the power to move.’ One of Winterson’s models is Virginia Woolf, and Art & Lies is also a Woolfian engine of self-advertisement whereby the text is both the novel and the explanation for the novel. It is militant with excuses; like a pianola, it plays itself again and again. Each of the book’s three ...”

“... which ones. I read a new biography of Catherine of Aragon in proof. I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. It’s like one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I can’t understand what she means when she complains about the ‘poverty of the language’ we have to describe illness. For the ...”

“... Passionate Life’; ‘A Writer’s Life’, the subtitle of her earlier biography of Virginia Woolf (1984), would have been better, since the argument for Brontë’s professional selfconsciousness and fulfilment through writing proves more rewarding than the repeated allusions to hidden fires. Though Gordon duly acknowledges 20th-century ...”

“... selected from texts in some nine different languages, ranging from Homer and the Old Testament to Virginia Woolf, it assumes throughout that reality has an objective existence, is open to perception, and needs no apologetic inverted commas. It can be and enduringly is represented by writers whose work bears the impress not only of their own individuality ...”

“... distinct district Chelsea. Certainly there is evidence of the malicious rage which, for instance, Virginia Woolf vented upon, for instance, Cyril Connolly. ‘There we spent one night, unfortunately with baboon Conolly [sic] and his gollywog slug wife Jean to bring in the roar of the Chelsea omnibus.’ ‘We spent a night with the Bowens, where, to our ...”

“... whereas Harrison’s historical work is likewise forgotten. But Stephen was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the original of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, and a figure in many memoirs that happen to interest us because Bloomsbury interests us. We have a strong preconception of Stephen’s rich melancholic character, and it has ...”

“... can’t ever help anyone on the screen, ‘we see life as it is when we have no part in it,’ as Virginia Woolf said. But many movies pretend very successfully to refuse this nature, and Allen is going out of his way to exploit it. Francine Prose thinks there is a deep misogyny in this film, and has written eloquently about it. She may be right, if ...”

“... might find themselves wishing it was.One of the best descriptions of ASMR comes, oddly, from Virginia Woolf. The Austrian writer Clemens Setz pointed to the moment in Mrs Dalloway where a plane is skywriting an advertisement. A nurse reads the letters out to Septimus one by one, as they appear:‘K … R …’ said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard ...”

“... died young. They were bound to remain, if only in adult memory, umbilically tied to the past. Virginia Woolf’s life of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, is part of that historicising, and usually disparaging, take on ‘Victorianism’ which was so much a matter of modern hindsight. Cooped up with his invalid mistress, Flush ...”

“... century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of images, not unlike the jumble of impressions in The Waste Land. But, as Trotter then ...”

“... are guilty. They do not care, least of all for their own. As in Edward Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the child, imagined or real, is everybody’s child, and is the weapon used by everybody’s parents. Rowan Anderson is insane in his carelessness, his deadness. But it is a mark of Blackwood’s intelligence that in Cressida she shows other ...”

“... in a moment of attention and expectation which isn’t a response – as it might be, say, in Virginia Woolf – to some tremor of life usually unperceived, but which arises only from a situation the author has devised by withholding information. Who is Mrs E. Boyd Golson, why is she compulsively drawn to Eudoxia? The answer hasn’t to do with ...”

“... of the few major English commentaries unnoted by Gottlieb), a precocious and no doubt foolhardy Virginia Woolf came a cropper too. The occasion was the publication of the English translation of Bernhardt’s first – and only – volume of memoirs, Ma Double Vie from 1907. Woolf, intriguingly, chose to review the ...”

“... up and dies just as the heroine decides she might have him after all). Meanwhile, female writers (Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Mew, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Nancy Cunard, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Townsend Warner) allowed the old Victorian spinster a few escape-routes: killing off the controlling father who kept her at home (Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of ...”