The sixth and last volume of The Essays of Virginia Woolf appeared in 2009, enabling readers to explore this prodigious body of work with ease. Meticulously edited and annotated by Andrew McNeillie ...and Stuart N. Clarke to chart each essay’s chronological position in Woolf’s oeuvre as well as its publication history, contexts, versions, and allusions, the complete Essays establishes Woolf’s claim to a prominent place among English essayists and invites the vigorous, many-faceted scholarly and ...
Almost seventy years after her death, it is difficult to decide how many short stories Virginia Woolf wrote. She published eighteen during her lifetime, and Leonard Woolf included five more in A ...Haunted House and Other Stories (1944). In May 1973 Stella McNichol assembled seven as Mrs Dalloway’s Party, including “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” (published in the Dial in 1923), “The Introduction” (first published in the Sunday Times Magazine in March 1973), and “Ancestors” (first publication). In...
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf’s art and thought against Bloomsbury’s public thinking about Europe’s future in a period marked by two world wars ...and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father’s library and in Bloomsbury’s London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe’s unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster’s words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe’s future at a moment when democracy’s triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf’s narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.
A period French orientalism surfaces in such details as Madam Cottard's comically clueless anecdote about the "salade japonaise" of Dumas fils' new play, Francillon, at a Verdurin dinner party; the ...Baron's japoniste fan painting; the narrator's word paintings of landscapes and seascapes after Japanese screens and prints; and Odette's "very odd little house full of Chinese things," as one of her myriad former lovers remembers it: a very Parisian courtesan's potpourri of Oriental draperies, Turkish beads, gas-lit Japanese lanterns, silk cushions, chrysanthemums, palms in Chinese porcelain pots, fans, "fierytongued dragons" on a bowl or fire-screen, a silver dromedary with ruby eyes, and a carved jade toad.
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