The Art of the Short Story

I've spent the summer months studying the art of the short story - and used some classic examples to develop tutorials and study guides for students of English Literature. The first group are from the late nineteenth century by Henry James. Then I selected a second group from the turn of the twentieth century by Joseph Conrad (which include some fine examples of the novella). Finally, a selection of experimental short fictions from the height of the modernist period by Virginia Woolf. The latest of these are The New Dress and Moments of Being, and there'll be more to come at Woolf - Stories.

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.

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 >>

Mrs Dalloway - a literary mashup

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of Virginia Woolf's great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events.

She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, 'What is it like to be alive?' And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features ...Read more >>

Virginia Woolf's 'Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room (1922) was the first of Virginia Woolf's novels to be self-published. She took the opportunity of being free from someone else's editorial control to push the boundaries of her experimental literary technique. It thus marked an important step in modernism and a breakthrough to a greater degree of self-confidence in her work.

" Virginia's Jacob's Room was our first major work, a full-length novel. 1,200 copies of it were printed for us by R. and R. Clark of Edinburgh. [It] was published in October 1922 and began at once to sell fairly briskly, and I had a second impression of 1,000 copies printed by Clark. By the end of 1923 we had sold 1,413 copies; the cost of printing and publishing up to that date had been £276 1s. 6d. and the receipts had been £318 6s. 0d., so that our publisher's profit was £42 4s. 6d. We though that we had done extremely well. "

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

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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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Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays

These essays are completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which Virginia Woolf thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic - on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life. She writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups - reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art... Read more >>

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The Letters of Leonard Woolf

Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband.What's not so well known about him is that in fact he had two 'wives' - the second technically married to somebody else - who happened to be his business partner. This definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner. The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz - though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite... 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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Virginia Woolf - A Critical Memoir

This was the first extended study of Virginia Woolf's work to be written in English. It appeared in 1936, whilst she was still alive, shortly after the publication of her last major work, The Waves. The author Winifred Holtby was herself a novelist (best known for South Riding) a journalist, a radical feminist, and lifelong friend of Vera Britten, who wrote about their relationship in Testament of Friendship. Holtby takes what at the time was a fairly conventional approach to literary criticism, which was to read what was known of the author's biography into the fiction as a way of explaining it. Thus the parent figures in both The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse are assumed to be portraits of Woolf's own mother and father; and the recurrence of sea imagery in her work is seen as simply a reflection of her childhood holidays in Cornwall... Read more >>

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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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Virginia Woolf - an illustrated biography

This is a best-selling book from Thames and Hudson. It's slim, cheap, and you might almost say a little old fashioned - yet it goes on being popular year after year. And it's easy to see why. The text is written by John Lehmann who actually worked for Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press. Indeed, at one time he even wanted to take it over and run it on fully professional lines - something which Leonard quite rightly resisted. But the real delight the book offers is a wonderful collection of pictures of Woolf and her friends who were part of the Bloomsbury Group. More than that, it combines a lightness of touch in presenting Woolf's biography with a very engaging introduction to each of her major works... Read more >>

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Hyde Park Gate News

This gem of Bloomsbury juvenilia was hidden for years in the British Library's Department of Manuscripts. It comes to us now in a beautiful paperback edition with full scholarly notes and some contemporary photographs. It's a compilation of family 'newspapers' written by Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) with her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby. What makes it of interest for Woolf scholars and readers is that it deals with the small events of domestic life out of which she was later to make so much imaginative use. It's a mixture of letters, stories, advice columns, answers to questions, and reports on family events - all retailed in a satirical and parodic fashion, The style is modelled on Tit Bits, which had been launched in 1881 and established a weekly circulation of around 500,000 ... Read more >>

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Harold Nicolson's Some People

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son's account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a series of portraits which are partly documentary and partly fictional. They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend 'was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations'. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf's Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing ... Read more >>

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Leonard Woolf's Love Letters

Everybody knows that Leonard Woolf nursed his wife Virginia through periods of mental and physical illness, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. What is not so well known is that he did this at the same time as being a full time journalist and author, a Labour Party activist responsible for the development of he League of Nations, and a successful commercial publisher in charge of the Hogarth Press. Even less well known is the fact that within twelve months of his wife's death he began a relationship with a woman which was to last for the rest of his life, right up to his own death in 1969. Not that there was anything wrong with his forming a new relationship - but the woman happened to be married to someone else. She was Trekkie Parsons, an artist and book illustrator, and her second husband Ian Parsons, a publisher with Chatto and Windus, eventually became Leonard Woolf's business partner ... Read more >>

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Portrait of a Marriage — a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother's study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. This book is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn't cover. It's not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at 'depending' on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to 'elope' to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn't have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn't love or desire .. Read more >>

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