Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections

by J.H. Stape (Editor )

A coherent view of so extraordinarily chameleon a temperament and talent as Virginia Woolf's is, of course, almost impossible. If Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse needs 'fifty pairs of eyes' to take in a woman as simple as Mrs. Ramsay, even more pairs seem desirable for focusing on Virginia Woolf. The difficulty of a balanced viewpoint for some of her memoirists, a demanding enough task at the best of times, was compounded by the enthusiasm with which she sometimes donned a mask and by conversation whose notorious brilliance veered at moments towards the flamboyant, the wildly inaccurate, or the cruel. To penetrate this mask, Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections provides multifaceted perspectives on Woolf as observed and remembered by relatives, close friends, acquaintances, and fellow writers from Vanessa Bell, Arnold Bennett, and Edith Sitwell to Marguerite Yourcenar, Rose Macaulay, and Stephen Spender. Gathered from widely scattered sources, the forty-one pieces collected here give an intimate and compelling portrait of a fascinating individual whom many consider one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Covering her famous lectures at Cambridge, her role in the Hogarth Press, and her presence in the literary and social world of her day as well as her roles as sister, wife, and friend, this varied collection sheds light on the public and private personalities of Virginia Woolf the subtle poetic novelist, the devoted friend, and the influential and successful publisher.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Andra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed it so much!!
Also, I must add some quotes to introduce you to how Virginia Woolf really was like:
"I remember going round to have tea with her at No. 52 Tavistock Square. I would climb the rather bleak stone stairs and be let in by the maid half-way up, and when at last at the top, Virginia would be there to welcome me, longlegged, longfingered, and with silver hair escaping about her head...
Leonard would come up from the cellar in which was the office of the Hogarth Press and have tea with us... and Virginia would call him Leo, almost as though she were trying to make me think of him as a noble lion with a mane and then she would banter him through me. 'What shall we make old Leo tell us about?' she would say. 'Has he caught many mice today in the cellar?' (...)"
•
"I hadn't realised that she felt she was going to go mad again. We were living close by at the time and I saw her a few days before it happened. I realised that she was under the weather, and she made this tremendous demand for love that she was in the habit of making rather. Particularly, I think, because I was an undemonstrative child, she would quite often say: 'But, Angelica, don't you love me, don't you adore me, you hate me, you know you don't like me at all' - this sort of going on. She did it particularly on that day, and I was particularly cold and undemonstrative, and then the next thing I heard was a telephone call to say that she had drowned herself."

Both of these texts are quotes of Virginia Woolf's niece, Angelica Garnett.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and historically important.