The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays

by Virginia Woolf

These twenty-five short essays demonstrate the beauty of style, the wit, and the sensibility for which Woolf is admired. "This book contains...the same delicious things to read as always....Virginia Woolf was a great artist, one of the glories of our time, and she never published a line that was not worth reading" (Katherine Anne Porter). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Classics, Short Stories, Literature

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1973

About the author

(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."

Reviews

[Sara]

A collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, as near as I can tell, collected from leftover writings after she died. They are fragmentary and very different from each other - some sound like letters, others like speeches, still others like memories or literary criticism. One theme I was pleased to find in nearly all the selections is a "meta" view of the world. She is an author writing about authors. She describes a dinner conversation in which she seems to have participated in order to talk about an artist as he was discussed during dinner. Viewpoints telescope and change dramatically. The essays, for lack of a better word, are strange and self-referential pieces. Even when Woolf is not literally present in the subjectivity of a given essay, she hovers around the thing. Her creator's hand is easy to spot, but not in a clunky way. Although the ornateness of her grammar struck me more in these essays than they have in most of her writings (save Orlando perhaps), that might be explained if these were published posthumously and before she had edited them to her own satisfaction. An intriguing read in any case.

[Samuel Maina]

This is the last collection of essays by Leonard Woolf. I like it. Not all essays were “standing out of the crowd” but I liked the wit in which they were composed.
Whenever Virginia writes about someone, it is like she studied them for a lifetime and gives anectodes sufficing the true definition of a critic. In my opinion, I wish she wrote more Biographies in her lifetime.
I have learnt so much about Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Walter Raleigh, Ruskin, Crabbe et al. I have a long list of books to read from this single collection of essays, safe to say Virginia Woolf was an ardent reader of books. The selection is wide and varied, both Poetry and prose….
Awesome read.

[Kienie]

2.5/5

Her essays are at times condescending, at times dull, at times vivid, and at other times pretentious. They are always a close examination of the people involved, be it a review of an author or the description of a flight she never took. Occasionally there are passages that make me wish I had written them, but for the most part I wish she'd get to the point. I am never sure of her tone. Is she being ironic? If so, to what extent? I cannot in good conscience recommend Woolf to anyone, but neither can I categorically condemn her.

[Clint Jones]

In these collected essays Woolf demonstrate the impact that literature, art and culture have on each other: art influences and captures a culture. In turn, culture demands new perspectives of Art in order to stay relevant.

From "The Novels of Turgenev":

[The scene] expands in the mind and lies there giving off fresh ideas, emotions, and pictures much as a moment in real life will sometimes only yield its meaning long after it has passed.

Turgenev's reader would have questions:

... about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment.

From "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown":

... novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes. They go a step further, they feel that there is something permanently interesting in character in itself.

Woolf describes the 20th-century, where, for the Moderns, the role of the author is a non-authoritative role; a partnership remains between author and reader, but for this period, the reader faces more demands than before in order for the experience to be honest. Writers who hold to the old standard are trite and irrelevant:

It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. Hence spring those sleek, smooth novels, those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time.

Most striking is the way she demonstrates an informed sensitivity to guide critical exploration of each subject, and the way she internalizes it. This is the essay as an art form.

From the essay "Life Itself":

It is taking a walk and making up the life and character of James Woodforde as we make up our friends' characters, turning over something they have said, pondering the meaning of something they have done, remembering how they looked one day when they thought themselves unobserved.

From "Reading":

Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals.

From "Walter Sickert":

The novelist is always saying to himself how can I bring the sun on to my page? How can I show the night and the moon rising? And he must often think that to describe a scene is the worst way to show it. It must be done with one word, or with one word in skilful contrast with another.

Here are a few of many other insightful passages:

Fromo "Selina Trimmer":

Soon it must have been dawned upon Trimmer ... when her pupils were in bed that she had taken up her lodging in the abode of vice. Downstairs there was drinking and gambling; upstairs there were bastards and mistresses.
...
Could it be possible, then, that an absence of conventional morality brings into being a real morality?

From "The Novels of Turgenev":

... the writer has a choice... Shall he be the "I" who has suffered this slight, that injury, who desires to impose his own personality, to win popularity and power for himself and his views; or shall he suppress that "I" in favour of the one who sees as far as he can impartially and honestly...

... the man who speaks is not a prophet clothed with thunder but a seer who tries to understand.

From "Mr. Conrad: A Conversation," Conrad is described as having two aspects:

[Conrad] is your sea captain, simple, faithful, obscure; and he is Marlow, subtle, psychological, loquacious.

[Conrad] sees once and he sees for ever. His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash.

... the complex vision becomes simple, and Marlow and the sea captain combine to produce a world at once exquisitely subtle, psychologically profound, yet based upon a very few simple ideas 'so simple that they must be as old as the hills'

(Note: Frederick Marryat is the "Captain" from the title: a Royal Navy officer in the War of 1812, novelist and acquaintance of Charles Dickens)

[Ellen Moth]

Revisited the collection because my reading group was doing "Gas" and "Flying Over London." Lots of little gems I'd skipped over. (I'm still not quite sure how to read essay collections: slowly, then all at once?)

[Tatsu Monkman]

Virginia Woolf yur amazing

[Michael]

Here are Woolf's deep cuts. While some of the essays would read better as contemporaneous pieces, several of them capture her timeless brilliance.

[Laila]

Smell: 6/10
Texture: 8/10, very smooth, as if a pearl

[RK Byers]

really beautiful writing in the beginning. guess it wore off toward the end.