3.75 stars
I am always willing to read Woolf as I am always willing to eat yummy vegan cake; I know I'm going to enjoy it in the moment, in the act, not only after some mental mastication. Kew Gardens for example, is so dazzling, such prosepoem painting lozenges of light stained by the times, the war. I have read it four times with undiminished delight
The very funny satirical story 'A Society' whets the appetite marvellously for the searing feminist polemic of A Room of Ones Own and 'Lappin and Lapinova' seems to me a radical literary critique of the cult of masculinity, or at least of the atomising materialist zeitgeist of the era, very much associated with the highly gendered thrust of 'progress'
I valued highly the introduction to this edition and thorough notes, which guided me in understanding the allusions to sex work in 'The Shooting Party' and addressed the problematic piece 'The Duchess and the Jeweller'. It was also interesting to read how Woolf wrote her short fiction, very rapidly, while slogging at her novels (though he does not mention that she claimed in letters to be writing Orlando in the same manner - as a treat for herself, while working on heavier material) The only point I want to disagree with Bradshaw on is the ending of the title story, when I think the snail, with its hidden curve of vanishing infinitestimal chambers, far from being a disappointingly mundane end to the reverie, is highly symbolic in the context of memory and daydream.