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Genio y tinta
Entre los grandes colaboradores que tuvo desde su creación en 1902 el Times Literary Supplement, considerado el medio literario más respetable de la época por T. S. Eliot, figuraban nombres como los del propio Eliot y Henry James, pero, según su director, la joya de la corona fue sin duda Virginia Woolf. En estos ensayos extraordinarios, la joven crítica supo arrojar nueva luz sobre escritores conocidos y construir manifiestos provocadores acerca del futuro de la novela; y, gracias a ellos, disfrutó de la ansiada independencia económica. Tras su escrutinio de autores que conformaron su canon literario -como Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett y Joseph Conrad- se vislumbra el pensamiento que iluminó su producción narrativa. Pero, sobre todo, se percibe a la Virginia Woolf lectora, para quien, como nos recuerda Ángeles Caso en el prólogo, leer nunca fue un refugio, sino "el acto supremo de insumisión, la mejor manera de hacer frente a la violencia siempre dominante con un gesto callado pero lleno de desafío", y cuyo entusiasmo por la gran literatura sigue inspirándonos hoy más que nunca. Un volumen inédito que refleja el ingenio y la inteligencia de una autora icónica.
205 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 28, 2019
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About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,836 books28.8k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
June 4, 2021
A collection of articles by Woolf, all published in the Times Literary Supplement anonymously (as all articles were). They range over twenty years and some have appeared in other collections. There are essays on Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Conrad, Hardy, Marryat, James’s letters, Montaigne, Elizabethan plays, re-reading novels and a few others. Inevitably there is some variability and things to disagree with; I don’t have Woolf’s appreciation of Conrad’s earlier novels for example. But there is much to ponder and comment on:
“There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.”
This also contains her brief and now rather famous assessment of Ulysses:
“a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”
She can also be sharply perceptive, looking at Eliot and issues relating to gender and women writers:
“In fiction where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, of the opposite sex have resented, half-consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.”
Her criticisms are generally balanced, she talks about Hardy’s uncertain genius and focuses on his early novels. She also suggests his rural scenes and minor characters are his real strength, warning against sentimentality. She clearly sees Jude the Obscure as problematic (an understatement I think), but glosses over the problem pretty briefly. Nevertheless she made me think I ought to revisit Hardy’s early works.
The essay on the ridiculousness of Elizabethan plays is very funny and well worth reading. All in all a pretty good collection and it’s interesting to see the development over twenty years
“There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.”
This also contains her brief and now rather famous assessment of Ulysses:
“a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”
She can also be sharply perceptive, looking at Eliot and issues relating to gender and women writers:
“In fiction where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, of the opposite sex have resented, half-consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.”
Her criticisms are generally balanced, she talks about Hardy’s uncertain genius and focuses on his early novels. She also suggests his rural scenes and minor characters are his real strength, warning against sentimentality. She clearly sees Jude the Obscure as problematic (an understatement I think), but glosses over the problem pretty briefly. Nevertheless she made me think I ought to revisit Hardy’s early works.
The essay on the ridiculousness of Elizabethan plays is very funny and well worth reading. All in all a pretty good collection and it’s interesting to see the development over twenty years
October 28, 2020
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read is a collection of articles that Woolf wrote (originally) for the Times Literary Supplement, and some (if not most) of which were later reworked by Woolf in her collection The Common Reader. I have a lovely Hogarth edition of The Common Reader (both parts) on my shelf, but haven’t read them, yet. I’m taking my time with Woolf.
Judging by the fact that I’ve read half of this book in one afternoon, I think it supports my theory that Woolf’s non-fiction is a) brilliantly clear, and b) just so much easier on the reader than her fiction.
The downside of basically having ploughed through this is that I need to go back through and extract the many fun quotations that I failed to mark with sticky notes because I was having so much fun reading.
What has struck me about her TLS (Times Literary Supplement) articles is that it must have been odd at times to combine a defense of traditional classics (that she loved) with an equal passion for new writing which sought to abandon the structures and themes of the past.
There are quite a few references to literary criticism of her contemporaries, which it must have been odd to write: does one review a book by a friend (or another author fighting her corner) honestly even if one doesn’t like it, or does one feel the need to be generous?
It seems that reviewing issues have not changed.
Some of her very diplomatic put-downs were hilarious, though. This one is not about a contemporary, but one that was "safer" to opine about:
“The diary, for whose sake we are remembering his three-hundredth birthday, is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar. But he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man, we have to confess what everybody knows – that it is impossible to read works of genius all day long.”
(in “John Evelyn” p.81/82)
Finally, I need to find out whether the TLS essay “Hours in a Library” (the title of which is borrowed from her one of her father’s books) is available on the Internet somewhere for free because it is basically a love letter to reading and deserves to be shared. Woolf even mentions TBRs (as “lists”, not as “tbrs”) and how much fun it is to compile them!
This review was originally posted on my WP blog.
Judging by the fact that I’ve read half of this book in one afternoon, I think it supports my theory that Woolf’s non-fiction is a) brilliantly clear, and b) just so much easier on the reader than her fiction.
The downside of basically having ploughed through this is that I need to go back through and extract the many fun quotations that I failed to mark with sticky notes because I was having so much fun reading.
What has struck me about her TLS (Times Literary Supplement) articles is that it must have been odd at times to combine a defense of traditional classics (that she loved) with an equal passion for new writing which sought to abandon the structures and themes of the past.
There are quite a few references to literary criticism of her contemporaries, which it must have been odd to write: does one review a book by a friend (or another author fighting her corner) honestly even if one doesn’t like it, or does one feel the need to be generous?
It seems that reviewing issues have not changed.
Some of her very diplomatic put-downs were hilarious, though. This one is not about a contemporary, but one that was "safer" to opine about:
“The diary, for whose sake we are remembering his three-hundredth birthday, is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar. But he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man, we have to confess what everybody knows – that it is impossible to read works of genius all day long.”
(in “John Evelyn” p.81/82)
Finally, I need to find out whether the TLS essay “Hours in a Library” (the title of which is borrowed from her one of her father’s books) is available on the Internet somewhere for free because it is basically a love letter to reading and deserves to be shared. Woolf even mentions TBRs (as “lists”, not as “tbrs”) and how much fun it is to compile them!
This review was originally posted on my WP blog.
November 6, 2020
According to Francesca Wade's succinct introduction to this collection of essays originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf's first review appeared on 10 March 1905, and she continued to write regularly for the periodical until her editor retired in May 1938. All Woolf's reviews were published anonymously--as was the practice at the TLS until 1974. As Wade notes:
There's also a brilliant and occasionally hilarious essay on the differences between 19th-century novels and Elizabethan plays ("with all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say 'You have oft for these two lips / Neglected cassia'... The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him: he must tame his swiftness to sluggardry, keep his eyes on the ground, not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing 'Lay a garland on my hearse / Of the dismal yew; / Maidens, willow branches bear; / Say I died true,' he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the undertakers' men snuffling past in four-wheelers"); and essays on writing itself, full of gem-like observations such as "to believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality."
A wonderful collection to be savored, essay by essay. One can only envy Woolf's matchless ability to encapsulate what good writing is.
This meant that Woolf didn't have to fear public disapproval for her forthright views, but rather was invited to speak as part of a collective authority, assuming an expertise conferred by dint of the periodical's prestige. [...] She never set out to provide an impersonal, authoritative assessment of a work or author, but something...radical and generous.... [F]or Woolf, a book's interest lay in the feelings it stirred in its reader, which would inevitably--crucially--be entirely personal and subjective.The essays collected here are just that: there are marvelous, wide-ranging summings-up of individual authors: Charlotte Brontë ("she is primarily the recorder of feeling and not of thoughts.... No writer...surpasses her in the power of making what she describes immediately visible to us"); George Eliot ("by becoming...marked [by her living with the married George Lewes] and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist was serious"); Henry James ("who lived every second with insatiable gusto and in the flux and fury of his impressions obeyed his injunction to 'remain as solid and fixed and dense as you can'"), Joseph Conrad ("he never believed in his later and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early seamen; because when he had to indicate their relation to...the world of values and convictions, he was far less sure what those values were"); Thomas Hardy ("like every great novelist, he gives us not merely a world which we can liken to the world we know, but an attitude towards it, an atmosphere surrounding it"); Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh ("stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders").
There's also a brilliant and occasionally hilarious essay on the differences between 19th-century novels and Elizabethan plays ("with all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say 'You have oft for these two lips / Neglected cassia'... The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him: he must tame his swiftness to sluggardry, keep his eyes on the ground, not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing 'Lay a garland on my hearse / Of the dismal yew; / Maidens, willow branches bear; / Say I died true,' he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the undertakers' men snuffling past in four-wheelers"); and essays on writing itself, full of gem-like observations such as "to believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality."
A wonderful collection to be savored, essay by essay. One can only envy Woolf's matchless ability to encapsulate what good writing is.
February 15, 2020
Interesting collection of Woolf’s essays for TLS (later reworked and published in Common Reader 1 & 2). A brilliant prose stylist with interesting things to say about writers largely of the past. Even her writing on writers hardly read today is strikingly expressed.
January 10, 2020
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read is a newly packaged collection of some of the most beautiful prose Virginia Woolf has written on the creative, radical, and rebellious act of reading.
Read more: https://bookoblivion.com/2020/01/10/v...
Read more: https://bookoblivion.com/2020/01/10/v...
August 28, 2021
Qué delicia leer cómo Woolf escribía sobre la lectura y los autores. Ya no se hacen artículos así.
February 21, 2020
Through these brilliant TLS reviews and essays, we are introduced to Virginia Woolf the reader who is at par with Virginia Woolf the writer. The reviews are the result of extraordinary observation and pure wit and genius...qualities that we are used to associating with Virginia Woolf. I am in awe of this great, great writer. She is, I believe, incapable of writing any thing dull. I take my hats off to the astonishing, astonishing Virginia Woolf.
October 5, 2021
Leggere Virginia Woolf che scrive di letteratura è sempre una gioia infinita. Questo libro è una raccolta di 14 recensioni che la scrittrice inglese ha scritto per il Times Literary Supplement tra il 1916 (il pezzo su Charlotte Bronte) e il 1935 (il pezzo che chiude il libro, Il capezzale del capitano).
Ci sono pezzi specifici dedicati a diversi autori, come Conrad, George Eliot e Henry James, e altri più "generali". Devo dire, questi ultimi sono i miei preferiti, soprattutto Ore in biblioteca e Sul rileggere i romanzi. Ma ogni saggio e recensione di questo volume è prezioso, va letto lentamente per cogliere in pieno il pensiero dell'autrice. Sapessi io scrivere delle recensioni così interessanti, da cui traspare tutta la sua curiosità intellettuale e anche il suo umorismo.
L'ho letto in quasi un mese ma perché, come ho detto, ero interessata a gustarmelo, a leggerlo attentamente. Ed è stata una lettura che mi ha arricchita, non solo sulla conoscenza dei singoli autori, ma su come si scrive una recensione perfetta.
Ci sono pezzi specifici dedicati a diversi autori, come Conrad, George Eliot e Henry James, e altri più "generali". Devo dire, questi ultimi sono i miei preferiti, soprattutto Ore in biblioteca e Sul rileggere i romanzi. Ma ogni saggio e recensione di questo volume è prezioso, va letto lentamente per cogliere in pieno il pensiero dell'autrice. Sapessi io scrivere delle recensioni così interessanti, da cui traspare tutta la sua curiosità intellettuale e anche il suo umorismo.
L'ho letto in quasi un mese ma perché, come ho detto, ero interessata a gustarmelo, a leggerlo attentamente. Ed è stata una lettura che mi ha arricchita, non solo sulla conoscenza dei singoli autori, ma su come si scrive una recensione perfetta.
October 5, 2021
I love Virginia Woolf's writing in all its forms. These essays were incredibly witty, intelligent and engaging. I especially liked the ones about Charlotte Bronte, Montaigne and 'Hours in a Library'.
January 28, 2024
I adored “On Re-reading Novels”
November 8, 2020
A nice collection of Woolf's essays for the TLS. 'On Re-reading Novels', 'How it Strikes a Contemporary', and 'Montaigne' are required reading.
January 23, 2022
not what I expected
It feels wrong to rate anything by Woolf less than five stars. However I hadn’t realised this book was a collection of literary essays and I confess to a type of allergic reaction as it reminded me of my university days. The pomposity of literary criticism. Yuck.
One bonus: re-kindled my enthusiasm and interest in the classic: Austen, Eliot, Hardy, Bronte sisters.
It feels wrong to rate anything by Woolf less than five stars. However I hadn’t realised this book was a collection of literary essays and I confess to a type of allergic reaction as it reminded me of my university days. The pomposity of literary criticism. Yuck.
One bonus: re-kindled my enthusiasm and interest in the classic: Austen, Eliot, Hardy, Bronte sisters.
February 22, 2024
This attractive volume collects fourteen of the unsigned reviews Virginia Woolf wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Although she complained of paltry pay and deadline pressure, this gig was important for her development as a writer. She had grown up in an intellectual household, but was acutely aware that her brothers went up to Cambridge while she and her sister were kept home. She had the run of the father’s library, though, and became convinced that her perceptions and reactions to what she read were the equal of anyone with a formal education. But having those views sought out by an editor, printed, and remunerated, was the external confirmation she needed.
Soon, her confidence as a reader was joined by ambition to be a writer. To receive a book at the beginning of the week and produce 1500 words before the week was out was a good discipline.
When I read (and reread) Woolf’s novels, I often feel on shaking ground, as if I’m not quite getting them. But her review essays are accessible and beautifully-written. They display a lively, penetrating intelligence applied to the act of reading. Her appreciations of Conrad and Hardy, for instance, published on the death of each, are finely balanced in their praise and criticism. The essay on Elizabethan drama had me laughing out loud.
Her essay on Montaigne, viewed side by side with that on Hardy, make me marvel at the human mind and its capacity of produce imaginative literature. We not only perceive the world around us but, like Hardy, we can propose a world—his Wessex is not exactly Dorset—and make it seem real to us. Or someone like Montaigne can use the same faculty to explore itself, the human mind at work.
I bought this book on an impulse, momentarily suppressing the thought that I undoubtedly had most, if not all of these essays in the collections already on my shelf. But I was far away from home and added it to my stack of purchases. I’m glad I did—it was a wonderful traveling companion; small enough to fit easily in my small backpack and be taken out at the airport or inflight to enjoy one or two of the essays, then read the rest in the evenings after arriving back home, waiting for sleep to creep up on me.
Soon, her confidence as a reader was joined by ambition to be a writer. To receive a book at the beginning of the week and produce 1500 words before the week was out was a good discipline.
When I read (and reread) Woolf’s novels, I often feel on shaking ground, as if I’m not quite getting them. But her review essays are accessible and beautifully-written. They display a lively, penetrating intelligence applied to the act of reading. Her appreciations of Conrad and Hardy, for instance, published on the death of each, are finely balanced in their praise and criticism. The essay on Elizabethan drama had me laughing out loud.
Her essay on Montaigne, viewed side by side with that on Hardy, make me marvel at the human mind and its capacity of produce imaginative literature. We not only perceive the world around us but, like Hardy, we can propose a world—his Wessex is not exactly Dorset—and make it seem real to us. Or someone like Montaigne can use the same faculty to explore itself, the human mind at work.
I bought this book on an impulse, momentarily suppressing the thought that I undoubtedly had most, if not all of these essays in the collections already on my shelf. But I was far away from home and added it to my stack of purchases. I’m glad I did—it was a wonderful traveling companion; small enough to fit easily in my small backpack and be taken out at the airport or inflight to enjoy one or two of the essays, then read the rest in the evenings after arriving back home, waiting for sleep to creep up on me.
January 13, 2020
Woolf's ability to introspect and to verbalize the results is showcased in this compilation of her critical writing. Due to the anonymity at the time of writing, this is VW unleashed. Though she doesn't pull any punches, she always balances her criticisms to soften any possible injury. Light and dark, funny and clever beyond measure, and forever, above all else, with a love of literature that reaches through the decades and takes us by the heart and by the hand to look at a handful of classic.
I won't deny that some essays had me scanning the same page over and over without taking a single word in, but I think this was, in part, due to the fact that some of the selections were so unknown to me-- I couldn't really follow at some points. Even in these sections, however, I often found comments that resonated. My favourite essays were those that touched upon the act of reading (especially: On Re-reading Novels). Woolf's love of literature is a beautiful constant expressed with emotion and with eloquence throughout the entirety of this collection.
I won't deny that some essays had me scanning the same page over and over without taking a single word in, but I think this was, in part, due to the fact that some of the selections were so unknown to me-- I couldn't really follow at some points. Even in these sections, however, I often found comments that resonated. My favourite essays were those that touched upon the act of reading (especially: On Re-reading Novels). Woolf's love of literature is a beautiful constant expressed with emotion and with eloquence throughout the entirety of this collection.
August 15, 2024
Normally I love Woolf, but this was kind of a miss for me. Woolf writes eloquently and engagingly, but it is the topics of the essays that hold this collection back. I guess these essays are great if you're familiar with the writers and/or works she is discussing, but that was not the case for me which makes it difficult to see what she is exactly responding to or in/through what frame we should see her comments.
As always, Woolf has a marvellous style, but--for me--the contents of the essays were too detached from me to really get into them.
As always, Woolf has a marvellous style, but--for me--the contents of the essays were too detached from me to really get into them.
October 22, 2021
"Comunicar es nuestra empresa principal; la sociedad y la amistad nuestros mayores deleites; y leer, no para adquirir conocimientos ni para ganarnos la vida, sino para ampliar la interacción más allá de nuestra época y provincia"
"La comunicación es salud; la comunicación es sinceridad; la comunicación es felicidad"
"La comunicación es salud; la comunicación es sinceridad; la comunicación es felicidad"
January 31, 2020
Virginia Woolf's nonfiction is same amount of brilliance. These essays have the same flow as her fiction does; they don't feel heavy but they still give a lot of food for thought. I think this would be a good place to start with Woolf's nonfiction as it is short and the selection is brilliant.
December 12, 2019
So pleased that Audible is now presentng recordings of Woolf's essays as well as her fiction. This is a nice selection with an informed intro.
December 28, 2021
Half the time I didn't understand what was going on, but Woolf's prose is lovely.
April 25, 2024
Virginia Woolf wasn't only a novelist and a diarist. She was also an incisive critic, drawing on an extraordinary breadth of reading and thinking.
This book, produced by (my favourite) the Times Literary Supplement, features a dozen pieces she wrote for the journal. Most examine some new book or other, or are features on the death of a famous author.
The pieces themselves are not short of literary flare. Her knowledge and perception of the authors is not in question. She writes with wit and verve, and is not afraid to lambast if she feels it necessary.
Unfortunately for this book, it's difficult to enjoy them in the compilation they find themselves. Most require a working knowledge of the author under review to be enjoyable. And even though I count myself someone with above average knowledge of Hardy and Henry James, I still struggled to connect.
One for the specialists, or to dip into after reading a Victorian classic!
This book, produced by (my favourite) the Times Literary Supplement, features a dozen pieces she wrote for the journal. Most examine some new book or other, or are features on the death of a famous author.
The pieces themselves are not short of literary flare. Her knowledge and perception of the authors is not in question. She writes with wit and verve, and is not afraid to lambast if she feels it necessary.
Unfortunately for this book, it's difficult to enjoy them in the compilation they find themselves. Most require a working knowledge of the author under review to be enjoyable. And even though I count myself someone with above average knowledge of Hardy and Henry James, I still struggled to connect.
One for the specialists, or to dip into after reading a Victorian classic!
January 13, 2023
What a writer Woolf was!
This is a wonderful collection of essays on (and reviews of) several different authors and their texts.
I wouldn’t do the reviews justice by writing reviews on them, so I will just have to say that I thought this book was really good, the language beautiful, and that Virginia Woolf made me want to read almost every book and poem and diary that she mentioned - and also read more of the books written by the author herself.
I listened to it as an audiobook, and while I enjoyed it, I know that I missed out on some things. (For example, there was some French sentences that weren’t translated?? And with my meager knowledge of French I couldn’t understand any of them.)
I am certain I will read this again, but next time it will be on paper :))
This is a wonderful collection of essays on (and reviews of) several different authors and their texts.
I wouldn’t do the reviews justice by writing reviews on them, so I will just have to say that I thought this book was really good, the language beautiful, and that Virginia Woolf made me want to read almost every book and poem and diary that she mentioned - and also read more of the books written by the author herself.
I listened to it as an audiobook, and while I enjoyed it, I know that I missed out on some things. (For example, there was some French sentences that weren’t translated?? And with my meager knowledge of French I couldn’t understand any of them.)
I am certain I will read this again, but next time it will be on paper :))
March 11, 2022
Que pongo cinco estrellas a Virginia. Pues si. Siempre. Una recopilación de escritos que te invitan a la lectura. La lectura, la novela en general y algunos autores en concreto. Autores que no he leído (ni leeré), autores para leer mejor. Da igual. Aunque algunas cosas no las acabe de pillar. Y esa ironía fina. Siempre.
January 6, 2020
From: The Guardian 21/12/2019
Genius and Ink by Virginia Woolf review – essays on ‘how to read’
How did the young critic Virginia Woolf become the famous novelist? This book provides an answer
Virginia Woolf, aged 23, recently orphaned and still 10 years away from publishing her debut novel, was first commissioned to write reviews for the TLS in 1905. She began, as Francesca Wade points out in her preface to this collection, like any novice – by reviewing anything the editors sent her: guide books, cookery books, poetry, debut novels. Often she was filing a piece a week, reading the book on Sunday, writing – in the anonymous, authoritative TLS first-person plural “we” – up to 1,500 words on Monday, to be printed on Friday. The reviews gave her independence, and they made her a writer.
Through these pieces she “learnt a lot of my craft”, she once recalled; “how to compress; how to enliven”, how “to read with a pen & notebook, seriously”. She could not of course have managed it without a childhood of reading (“the great season for reading is the season between the ages of18 and 24”, as she puts it, somewhat archly, in “Hours in a Library”). Also essential was the cultural capital she took for granted as the daughter of leading man of letters Leslie Stephen (and which she recognises as a foundation of Fanny Burney’s work: “all the stimulus that comes from running in and out of rooms where grown-up people are talking about books and music”). She possessed the journalist’s and then the novelist’s gift for detail (the 107 dinner parties Henry James attended in one season, for instance, without being appreciably impressed by any of them), and the humility, at least at first, to understand that she must earn the attention of “busy people catching trains in the mornings” and “tired people coming home in the evening”.
She was working out, too, what being a critic meant. ‘A great critic” – a “Coleridge, above all” – “is the rarest of beings” she believed; what’s more, he wrote of drama and of poetry. The criticism of fiction “is in its infancy”, she wrote. This was an opportunity, but also a challenge – for where, as a young woman, and an autodidact, did she fit in? That gender-ambiguous “we” sometimes feels like a cloak swept about her with too much bravado.
What she can always defend, however, is her own taste: the licence to talk of “what one liked because one liked it” and “never to pretend to admire what one did not”. This method can produce blind spots – about Ulysses, most famously (“a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”), and more complicatedly when it comes to issues of class (an alternately kowtowing and condescending attitude to “rural” writers such as Thomas Hardy). But it is also where some of her best insights come from, because one of the things she clearly liked was serious craft. And the joy of a collection like this is to watch her hunting for that craft in what, for us, is a kind of real time: this is not the Woolf of posterity, but a young woman working out where she stands. This turns out to be in support of integral description versus decorative description; true emotion versus manipulative emotion; and a clear point of view, whether close or august and sweeping.
Her sense of reader and writer in their physical selves – their age, their illness or health, their social and geographical context, their individual memory and experience, and especially their emotional development – yields valuable dividends. This is never more true than when she is considering the effect of gender. So there’s George Eliot, “the grave lady in her low chair”, punished by overwhelmingly male critics for not being charming – “a quality … held to be supremely desirable in women”. (Eliot’s failing, for Woolf, lay in her heroines, who contained more of the intellectual life force of their creator than she believed their provincial settings could allow.) Or Charlotte Brontë, whose novels are a “superb gesture of defiance”. Or Aurora Leigh, crippled by the limitations imposed on its feminine creator. Calling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “a masterpiece in embryo” is no idle choice of words.
Then there is her description of Eliot reaching out for “all that life could offer the free and enquiring mind”, for that, of course, was what Woolf herself was doing. The reviews are full of such interfaces and echoes – between herself and her subjects, but also between her language and her subjects. So the rhythm of her description of the best of Joseph Conrad’s books echoes its content – a sentence so still it feels poised on a Conradian night time deck, describing achievements “very chaste and very beautiful” that “rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way, first one star comes out and then the other”. And her bravura, and funny trashing of almost all Elizabethan plays bar Shakespeare, in language that reflects their pile-ups of hectic incident. What does for the plays in the end is not their woeful characterisation and risible plots but their utter lack of solitude and silence – the unmistakable cri de coeur of the novelist, which she had by then (1925, the year Mrs Dalloway appeared) emphatically become.
Aida Edemarian
Genius and Ink by Virginia Woolf review – essays on ‘how to read’
How did the young critic Virginia Woolf become the famous novelist? This book provides an answer
Virginia Woolf, aged 23, recently orphaned and still 10 years away from publishing her debut novel, was first commissioned to write reviews for the TLS in 1905. She began, as Francesca Wade points out in her preface to this collection, like any novice – by reviewing anything the editors sent her: guide books, cookery books, poetry, debut novels. Often she was filing a piece a week, reading the book on Sunday, writing – in the anonymous, authoritative TLS first-person plural “we” – up to 1,500 words on Monday, to be printed on Friday. The reviews gave her independence, and they made her a writer.
Through these pieces she “learnt a lot of my craft”, she once recalled; “how to compress; how to enliven”, how “to read with a pen & notebook, seriously”. She could not of course have managed it without a childhood of reading (“the great season for reading is the season between the ages of18 and 24”, as she puts it, somewhat archly, in “Hours in a Library”). Also essential was the cultural capital she took for granted as the daughter of leading man of letters Leslie Stephen (and which she recognises as a foundation of Fanny Burney’s work: “all the stimulus that comes from running in and out of rooms where grown-up people are talking about books and music”). She possessed the journalist’s and then the novelist’s gift for detail (the 107 dinner parties Henry James attended in one season, for instance, without being appreciably impressed by any of them), and the humility, at least at first, to understand that she must earn the attention of “busy people catching trains in the mornings” and “tired people coming home in the evening”.
She was working out, too, what being a critic meant. ‘A great critic” – a “Coleridge, above all” – “is the rarest of beings” she believed; what’s more, he wrote of drama and of poetry. The criticism of fiction “is in its infancy”, she wrote. This was an opportunity, but also a challenge – for where, as a young woman, and an autodidact, did she fit in? That gender-ambiguous “we” sometimes feels like a cloak swept about her with too much bravado.
What she can always defend, however, is her own taste: the licence to talk of “what one liked because one liked it” and “never to pretend to admire what one did not”. This method can produce blind spots – about Ulysses, most famously (“a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”), and more complicatedly when it comes to issues of class (an alternately kowtowing and condescending attitude to “rural” writers such as Thomas Hardy). But it is also where some of her best insights come from, because one of the things she clearly liked was serious craft. And the joy of a collection like this is to watch her hunting for that craft in what, for us, is a kind of real time: this is not the Woolf of posterity, but a young woman working out where she stands. This turns out to be in support of integral description versus decorative description; true emotion versus manipulative emotion; and a clear point of view, whether close or august and sweeping.
Her sense of reader and writer in their physical selves – their age, their illness or health, their social and geographical context, their individual memory and experience, and especially their emotional development – yields valuable dividends. This is never more true than when she is considering the effect of gender. So there’s George Eliot, “the grave lady in her low chair”, punished by overwhelmingly male critics for not being charming – “a quality … held to be supremely desirable in women”. (Eliot’s failing, for Woolf, lay in her heroines, who contained more of the intellectual life force of their creator than she believed their provincial settings could allow.) Or Charlotte Brontë, whose novels are a “superb gesture of defiance”. Or Aurora Leigh, crippled by the limitations imposed on its feminine creator. Calling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “a masterpiece in embryo” is no idle choice of words.
Then there is her description of Eliot reaching out for “all that life could offer the free and enquiring mind”, for that, of course, was what Woolf herself was doing. The reviews are full of such interfaces and echoes – between herself and her subjects, but also between her language and her subjects. So the rhythm of her description of the best of Joseph Conrad’s books echoes its content – a sentence so still it feels poised on a Conradian night time deck, describing achievements “very chaste and very beautiful” that “rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way, first one star comes out and then the other”. And her bravura, and funny trashing of almost all Elizabethan plays bar Shakespeare, in language that reflects their pile-ups of hectic incident. What does for the plays in the end is not their woeful characterisation and risible plots but their utter lack of solitude and silence – the unmistakable cri de coeur of the novelist, which she had by then (1925, the year Mrs Dalloway appeared) emphatically become.
Aida Edemarian
May 13, 2021
As brilliant as Woolf always is. My enjoyment of these essays varied somewhat depending on their subject matter but Woolf’s magnificent prose made each and every one worth reading. A fantastic collection uniting some of her most interesting works of literary criticism/review!
June 6, 2024
Some essays sparkle with timeless insights for readers and writers, but other essays are too mired in their context and are a bit of a slog to get through. Definitely worth a read for fans of Woolf or enthusiasts of 19th/20th century literature.
November 9, 2020
What any extraordinary mind Virginia Woolf has. And what a prickly joy it is to watch it work/play. Much overlap with the common readers, so if you've read them, you probably don't need to read this.
May 23, 2021
A collection of VW's writings from the Times Literary Supplement. Very much of its time, but she knows her stuff and I'll definitely go back to it.
September 7, 2024
Artık bitsin diye havaalanında hasta gibi kitap okuyan o kız --- Victorianlardan çok bahsetmesek olur mu bazı arkadaşların (bne) çok kalbi kırılıyormuş ağlamak istiyorlarmış
March 4, 2022
nokre av essaya var bra, men dei kunne liksom vore litt lengre (og det var fleire som òg var sånn meh?)
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