Virginia Woolf's early stories

The latest offering in our book reviews is a charming collection of short stories written in the earliest phase of Virginia Woolf’s career as a writer of modernist fiction when she was only twenty-four years old. Up to that point she had only produced essays and book reviews (some for my home city newspaper, the Manchester Guardian). And in fact the spirit of the reflective essay lingers over these meditations and fictional constructs which have in common the role of women in society. More >>

The Ambassadors - study guidance notes

Lambert Strether is a middle-aged American widower who is engaged to Mrs Newsome, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She dispatches him on an errand to bring back her son Chadwick (Chad) who is living in Paris, so that he can take his place at the head of the family business. She also fears that he has fallen under someone’s bad influence, presumably a woman. Strether makes the journey, and on the way meets Miss Goostrey, a spirited American woman who has lived in Paris for years and offers to act as his ‘guide to Europe’. He discovers that Chad has improved and become more confident and sophisticated ... more >>

The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov

Everyone has now woken up to the fact that Nabokov has been writing stories and novels about older men and younger women (and even younger girls) for quite some time. It's no good taking his word for it that the inspiration for Lolita came from a 'painting' by a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes, when he had written an entire novella (The Enchanter 1939) on exactly the same theme. We now have his posthumous (and presumably last) work, which has been released even though he made an express wish that it should not be published if it were to be unfinished at the time of his death. And it certainly isn't finished. Even to call it 'a novel in fragments' is stretching definitions somewhat. It consists of the drafts of three discernable and coherent chapters, plus lots of notes for other vaguely related materials which Nabokov was working on at the time of his death in 1977... Read more >>

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Joseph Conrad's 'Nostromo'

This is generally regarded by most Conrad commentators as his greatest novel. It embraces wide ranging themes of political struggle, international capitalism, the expansion of Europe and the United States into Latin America, various forms of personal heroism and sacrifice, and the dreams and obsessions which can lead people to self destruction. The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo... Read more >>

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Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square

Having finished my book allocation with some days to spare on this trip, I was forced into my reserve stock and came up with Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square - which coincidentally ends on the day that war was declared exactly seventy years ago. It's a grim tale in naturalistic mode of one man's hopeless obsession with an attractive but cruel slut - all set in the twilight world of daytime drinking and feckless living in bedsit land and seedy hotels around Earl's Court. You can see why it's been considered a minor classic of of quasi-bohemian low life - and like most tales from the school of Zolaesque misery it ends with a double murder and a suicide.

A Smile of Fortune - Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad is essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set entirely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance). He is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He's also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him... Read more >>

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Virginia Woolf — Carlyle's House

This is an unusually exciting event for Woolf fans - the first publication of an undiscovered notebook which had been lost for seventy years. It was written in 1909 when Virginia Woolf was living with her brother Adrian in Fitzroy Square. She was struggling with her first Novel, The Voyage Out and wondering if she would ever be married. It was discovered only a couple of years ago, in Birmingham. The contents of the notebook (which she made herself, by hand) are a series of seven portraits written, as she says of them herself as a sort of artist's notebook: "the only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps and fragments, studies of drapery - legs, arms & noses ... so I take up my pen & trace here whatever shapes I happen to have in my head ... It is an exercise - training for eye & hand"... Read more >>

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Parallel Lives

This is a book which made a big impact when it first appeared, and continues to be a source of inspiration to many biographers. I noticed an appreciative reference to it in Katie Roiphe's recent study of unconventional literary relationships, Uncommon Arrangements. Phyllis Rose has chosen to write about a series of fairly famous Victorian literary marriages in which the personal relationships were unusual by contemporary standards, and which she believes offer modern readers something to think about in our age of apparent sexual free-for-all. [And I couldn't help feeling from hints she drops at regular intervals throughout the book that she was working out some of her own personal issues at the same time.] Read more >>

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How Novels Work

Literary Theory of the academic kind led itself into a one-way, dead-end street in the latter decades of the last century. But traditional literary criticism has survived, largely because it preserved a connection with common sense; it didn't take itself too seriously; and it was more interested in literature than theory. John Mullan's guide to understanding novels belongs to this humanist tradition. It's based on articles he wrote for the cultural supplement to the Guardian. He seeks to examine how novels work by looking at examples of contemporary fiction whilst keeping in mind what we already know about classics. He does this by focusing on some of the most fundamental parts of the novel - its title for instance, how its story is told, its characters created, its style, and even how it ends... Read more >>

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Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland

Writers in Britain (no less than those in any other part of the world) have often been influenced by the localities in which the have been born and grown up. There are whole mythologies built around the Brontes and Yorkshire, Hardy and the West Country, Dickens and London. But the influence actually goes further back than that. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people from all over Europe flocked to Scotland, inspired by the writing of Walter Scott. Wordsworth and his friends almost single-handedly created a passion for the English Lake District which continues to this day. People queue up to peep into Dove Cottage, then go back home to houses ten times the size. Jane Austen has a museum devoted to her in Bath, because she brought the city to life so magnificently in her work, even though she only spent a brief period of her short life there... Read more >>

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The Bloomsbury Group - book review

This is a collection of memoirs, commentary, and criticism - all of which relate to the Bloomsbury Group and its members - of whom it was said that they were 'a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles'. Many of the materials are available elsewhere - people's letters, diaries, and various published papers; but these are scattered sources, whereas here they are all shepherded into one single pen, with the title 'Bloomsbury' writ large at the entrance. Characters reflect on each other - Virginia Woolf on her nephew Julian Bell, Duncan Grant on Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell on Roger Fry, David Garnett on E.M.Forster, and Leonard Woolf on his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey... Read more >>

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Canonizing Hypertext

I remember first coming across hypertext in the early 1990s, and feeling that it was like a glimpse of a newly discovered world. Ted Nelson, Jay Bolter, and George Landow all became my heroes overnight. There wasn't much you could do with it in those days, outside struggling with a few bits of proprietary software such as Hypercard. But as soon as we got the Web, HTML and the first browser (Mosaic: still got my copy) - we were away! Some hyperfictions had been written at that time - and more have since: stories which exploit the possibilities of non-sequential narratives, hyperlinks between pages (or lexia), multiple navigation systems, and reader-generated choices. Astrid Ensslin thinks these creations deserve more attention. Indeed, she wants to argue that they should be included in the 'canon' of literary studies - and this is a book-length explanation of why that should be... Read more >>

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The Intellectuals and the Masses

This book has been around for a while now. I read it on the strength of having enjoyed John Carey's more recent What Good Are The Arts?. His basic argument is that with the rise of mass democracy and universal education at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals reacted with fear to this phenomenon and both denigrated the ordinary person and at the same time deliberately made their art more difficult to understand. None of the major figure of literary modernism escapes his charge: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are all quoted making remarks which are undemocratic, elitist, racist, and tainted with a supremacism which Carey traces back to Nietzsche. These attitudes are then extended to an intellectually snobbish dislike of the 'suburbs' which were built to house the ... Read more >>

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Victorian Literature and Culture

This is a guidance book for students or general readers who want to know more about literary studies in the Victorian period. It's in four parts: the historical and intellectual background; the literature of the period considered in separate genres; critical approaches; and a set of resources for independent study. After a quick overview of what is in fact a long period of history (1837-1901) Maureen Moran goes straight into the themes and issues that constitute the substance of this survey. She starts by introducing the historical, cultural, and scientific developments of what is normally considered three separate periods - early (1837-1850), high (1850-70) and late Victorian society (1870-1901). The main theme which emerges is that of conflicting ideologies underneath what is often thought of as a rather smug and conservative society... Read more >>

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Guide to Joseph Conrad

This comes from a new series by Routledge which offers comprehensive but single-volume introductions to major English writers. They are aimed at students of literature, but are accessible to general readers who might like to deepen their literary understanding.The approach taken could not be more straightforward. Part one is a potted biography of Conrad, placing his life and work in its socio-historical context. Thus we get his early life in Poland, his career as a seaman, his influences and ambitions, and his (relatively slow) rise to fame as a novelist. One of the interesting features of Conrad's development as a writer is that his early novels were largely adult versions of boy's adventure stories, but as his work became richer he tackled themes of intense political complexity. Read Heart of Darkness today and you would swear it had been written quite recently... Read more >>

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Patrick White - a neglected giant

Patrick White was born in Australia but sent to be educated in England. He settled to live in London during the 1930s and served in the RAF during the war. After the war he returned to live in Australia, eking out his small private income by farming. His novels offer great variety in their themes, subjects, and settings - but what they have in common is his use of powerfully rich language, his deeply psychological character portraits, the dramatic incidents of his stories, and a semi-mystical belief system which he invites us to contemplate without making his narratives depend upon it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, and went on to ... Read more >>

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