The Bedside Virginia Woolf

This is a really curious book, both in appearance and content. The text is presented in double columns like a Victorian newspaper, and its subject is just about everything you could think of regarding Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury - but offered in quick snatches and potted summaries. It's not a continuous narrative but a series of overlapping sketches and thematic surveys. The chapters switch from biography to social history, then on to Woolf's major fictional writing, and back again to the geography of Bloomsbury, the houses they all lived in, and their relationships with feminism, the two world wars, and even animals. This renders the treatment rather superficial, but I imagine it will make the book more interesting to the people it is aimed at - because new characters, incidents, and themes are coming up on almost every page... Read more >>

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