Virginia Woolf

We've enlarged the Virginia Woolf section of our site by adding a couple of recently published items. Alexandra Harris had a big success last year with her extended study Romantic Moderns, and she's followed it up pretty smartly with Virginia Woolf. This combines a brief account of Woolf's life history with a very enthusiastic introduction to her major novels. Then, for a taste of the real thing, have a look at On Fiction, a collection of Woolf's essays on writing and the novel. In these she sketches out very elegantly some of the ideas she developed at greater length in later works such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Bestsellers

John Sutherland (professor of literature in London and California) is adept in conveying English Literature and its relevance to the general public (not unlike his contemporary John Carey). This book is typical of his approach. It's a guide to the world of best-selling writers - writers of fiction on the whole. And it's focused on the UK and the USA. He writes in a slick, non-patronising manner - as if talking to a peer group in the senior common room. He sees the USA as the hotbed of the bestseller - unfettered by copyright restrictions for much of the nineteenth century. And he's very well informed on the subject of book publication and the commercial side of 'literature'. What he looks at in particular is the question of why certain books become more popular than others... Read more >>

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