Virginia Woolf Books

This is one of the great novels of the twentieth century; truly innovative and heart-breaking. It is not hard to read, one only needs to pay attention.

I really liked the movie "the Hours", loosely based on this book, so I thought I'd read it... I couldn't get through it. I love many classic books, but I'll not try another by Virginia Woolf.

Considering the context of this writing, I believe Virginia Woolf is not only competely on target for the early twentieth century, but she was also (apparently from reading the previous review) speaking to generations extending into the 21st century. When one states facts, an author's potential sexist opinions are not even an issue. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf described a historical pattern of facts, not a sexist opinion. Women as men's property was not a sexist propaganda ploy purported by Woolf; it is a fact, and Woolf deals with the corresponding consequences of such a fact in this revolutionary work.

I have read many books about womens rights and I agree with many of them. But A Room of One's Own is the most despicable piece of literature that I have every read. Virginia Wolf was a sexest pig who only cared about the advancement of the female race in society. There is nothing wrong with advocating womens rights but Virgia Wolf went too far. I strongly desagree with anyone buying such a pitiful excuse of a essay. Wolf wrote two and a half page paragraphs which just went on and on.

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This is a nice children's book, with okay illustrations and the text written by Virginia Woolf. However, since it was published far after her death, I fail to see the usefulness in claiming Woolf as the author. She had absolutely nothing to do with the making of the book, and may not even have wanted it published in such a format. If you're a Woolf fanatic, it would be nice to have in your collection, just to say you've read the text, but in terms of children's books, there are far better ones out there.

The author's aim is to explore the way T. Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and V. Woolf push out the boundaries of the novel, moving fiction away from the relatively realistic and social concerns of nineteenth-century fiction into unknown regions of the universe and of hte psyche. But these three authors are by no means the only ones of their time to have shown an interest in either the workings of the unconscious and/or the plotless narrative.

Sumner suggests that modernist fiction reflects the fact that the more the novel is concerned with the life of the mind, the greater the risk of fragmentation. The writers' exploitation fo the relation of consciousness ot the external work adds another dimension of complexity to the form of the novel. But the way in which this relationship functions is often misinterpreted. For instance, in the first chapter of The Return of the Native, Hardy does not suggest that "humanity no longer feels in harmony with mild and gentle landscapes", but that the destruction of nature constitutes a menace to human consciousness, as it works as its reflection.

The comparison between Hardy and the Surrealists in chapter 3 tends to overlook the influence of the classical form of Greek tragedy on Hardy's construction of his plots. Therefore, the use of "chance", whatever Roy Morrell may say in Thoams Hardy: the Will and the Way (1965), has probably more to do with careful plot construction than with openness, even despite Hardy's real interest in experimentalism. The comparison with Karl Popper's Indeterminism and Human Freedom, though suggesting, is not fully accounted for. The final quote of Richard Rorty is not even accompanied of the necessary bibliographic support at the end of the book or in the body of the main text.

The comparison with Lawrence acknowledges both authors's gift for characterisation. Even though their characters may be considered to partake of an extent of Indeterminacy, or inconclusiveness, the same cannot be said of the "endings" of Hardy's novels. When Hardy offers two alternative endings at the end of The Return of the Native, he is not denying the reader "the comfort of a single meaning", but challenging hisown personal capacity to ascertain the workings of the real as the result of the confrontation of a variety of wills. "Those with an austere artistic code", says Hardy, referring to the initiated readers, "will manage to discern which ending is the true one".

In my opinion, Hardy's interest in innovation and experimentalism in form has to be understood alongside his reliance on the tragedy as a structural form.

While analysing Woolf, Sumner concludes that what unites these authors (and separates them from Joyce) is their interest in non-human things. While she goes on to mention Einstein and quantum theory as a philosophical background to their writing, she has forgotten to mention such relevant works to this study as Woolf's essay "The Novels of Thomas Hardy", in The Second Common Reader (1932), and Lawrence's "A Study of Thomas Hardy". Amazingly, these do not appear in the bibliography at the end of the book. Her final dismissal of Joyce on the grounds that "he only cared about human things" makes his own trend of modernism more appealing, in the light of everything that has gone to make up the description of the others.

The book is slight and practically written out of nothing at all, like a dust fairy.

Lee takes apart the recent novel THE HOURS and shows why it is not accurate about the facts of Virginia Woolf's life, then shows why the movie is even less accurate. Well, duh.

She is on firmer ground when she describes what happened to Shelley's heart, which was supposedly plucked from his burning body by a friend, Edward Trelawney, after the poet's drowning death in Italy in July, 1822, with a volume of Keats tucked into one pocket. The witnesses to this burning scene all wrote very different accounts of it later, and Lee asks, sensibly enough, if any of them can be believed. Perhaps the organ plucked from the body was not the heart at all, but Shelley's liver.

The best piece might be her analysis (it's slight and inconsequential, but it is still analysis of a sort) of a number of differing interpretations by Jane Austen's biographer about an occasion on which she fainted when her mother told her that the family would be moving to Bath. It is amusing seeing what different folk believe about this faint and about the move to Bath. Biographers build up their cases like lawyers on the one hand, novelists on the other.

She can be scathing about other biogaphers, especially poor Claire Tomalin, who gets it (twice!) for her admittingly annoying habit of extrapolating the pattern of any one person's life out of background information about the period. Richard Holmes, the esteemed biographer of Shelley, won't be so happy reading this book if he thought he had a friend in Hermione Lee. She poses as an author who has not only thought through all the problems of biography but as one who has licked them; there isn't a passage or sentence in which she describes any uncertainty about her own motives or results. Pity.

This book is so boring i cant read it without falling aslee

ok, where is the "literary merit" everyone seems to be talking about?! I found this book to be dry and dull, not to mention disorganized! I don't mean to bash anyone who liked it, or Ms. Woolf, but this "literary merit" must be very subjective...

It seems like many of the other reviewers are reviewing the actual book, which I'll admit isn't my favorite. But, as far as the Cliff Notes go, they do what they are supposed to. They give you a sense of the characters, context, plot, etc. So maybe the book isn't great, but at least with the Cliff Notes you don't need to read the whole book. Grade for the cliff notes: A+

Mrs. Dalloway is one of the true gems of English literature. Even if a work does not deal with subject matter one finds "interesting", one should appreciate the merit of the work itself.

Mrs. Dalloway is one of the greatest of Modern texts. If the reader doesn't understand that this was written in a Modern (not contemporary btw)framework, then the reader will obviously not understand the literary merit of it. Modern texts are difficult to read, because it was a way for authors to break away from the complacency of late Romantic and Victorian literature. Just because a book is a little challenging, does not make it boring, and to say that the movie version was better because it was more organised, is falling very far into the trap of "Hollywoodisation". Be careful when you make claims of merit for one genre over another, you may discover that the "popular" one is so because it does not challenge, and only caters to a lazy audience.

I almost threw this book away after reading the first few pages. Author Coates is completely off her rocker. She tries to argue that Leonard Woolf was responsible for his wife's supposed madness. Her argument falls apart in the first few pages when Coates notes that Virginia Woolf had two nervous breakdowns (with hallucinations) even before she met Leonard. But it's worth a look for those who have a shelf or two full of Virginia Woolf biographies, diaries, novels, and critical essays. But wow, what a nut (the author, that is).

At last a reputable competent biographer is going to address the life of Leonard Woolf. Glendinning's bios of Anthony Trollope and Vita Sackville-West are rational and well written and thoroughly researched.

I am a graduate student who has spent the last four months learning everything I can for a class project about Leonard -- which is QUITE A LOT. Two books in particular have fairly good, reasonably balanced accounts of Leonard Woolf: Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee and A Marriage of True Minds by George Spater and Ian Parsons. Please read those carefully researched, scholarly, interesting, and vivid books to find out more about both Virginia Woolf's illnesses and Leonard Woolf's responses/contributions/whatever to her health. The relationship between the two was complex and deserves to be written about intelligently and carefully.

As Irene Coats, the author of Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf, states, Quentin Bell's authorized biography of Virginia Woolf presents Leonard Woolf as Virginia's loving, attentive, self-sacrificing husband. However, even as I read and enjoyed Bell's book, I came away feeling that there was something sinister about Leonard, as if he had some hidden agenda. Therefore, when I came across Coats' book, I was extremely intrigued, but having read it I am instead extremely disappointed.

Rather than presenting, or at least attempting to present, a balanced, lucid, objective case that Leonard was not the saint he appeared, her book is an unremitting demonizing of Leonard Woolf. Coats has presented the known events and existing letters by interpreting all as proof of Leonard's malicious intent and devious manipulation. I find this an extremist viewpoint that works against good biographical writing.

In addition, the book comes with the most appalling index: a name index where each name is followed by lines and lines AND LINES of undifferentiated locators making it totally useless to the reader. This is definitely an example of no index being better than a bad one.

Over the years, many readers have been cynical about the despair and rage expressed in Virginia Woolf's feminist works, such as "A Room of One's Own". After all, wasn't Virginia a wealthy upper middle-class woman who never worked a day in her life? Wasn't she petted and cared for by an adoring husband? Didn't she have a beautiful home (which is now a tourist spot?)and a circle of stimulating and enlightened intellectual friends? "What the heck did she have to complain about?", those overloaded with children and dreary jobs have often wondered bitterly.

Well, according to Coates, the answer is - quite a bit. Coates gives us an entirely new view of Virginia's life and marriage, one which seems straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins or Sheridan LeFanu. Virginia is seen as the heroine entrapped by a cruel husband, who presents to the outside world the face of kindness and care, while viciously tyrannizing and silencing his wife, who can appeal for help only in carefully coded letters and diaries. Coates presents Virginia Stephens as an isolated and sheltered young girl, manipulated cleverly into marriage to an ambitious and greedy man. Leonard Woolf gained access to her social set as a college friend of her adored brother, who died young. Woolf is here portrayed as a man willing to stop at nothing to get ahead, a Jew who abandoned and rejected his own religion and family to strive for upward mobility in the English middle class. His marriage to Virginia was pushed by her sister Vanessa, who wanted her younger sibling off her hands, and by Leonard's friends, who wanted him to marry a rich wife as a way of remaining in England, rather than return to a civil service job in Ceylon. Virginia allowed her initial resistance to be worn down, with disastrous results - having married the rich Gentile wife he wanted, Leonard then despised and exploited her. (But he might not have been happy with any woman - most of his Cambridge friends were gay, and while Leonard considered himself heterosexual, he obviously shared many of their views on women - Coates quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey in which Woolf describes male sexuality as "noble" and female as "vile".) Their early married life was a disaster, and Coates goes so far as to suggest that Virginia's first suicide attempt was, in fact, attempted murder. Her husband insisted she see a doctor of his choosing, who told her that she was too disturbed to become a mother (Leonard detested children). He then left her distraught, with an open box of sleeping pills beside her, and gave himself the alibi of a visit to her sister Vanessa. As he had hoped, she took an overdose, and was saved only through the unexpected visit of a woman friend, who promptly summoned help from a medical student living in the building. The long-term result was the total destruction of Virginia's independent existence. Leonard refused to let her see her family physician (who considered her perfectly healthy and capable of motherhood) only allowing her to consult his tame specialists. To have had her certified as a lunatic would have deprived Leonard of money or of a divorce, so he chose to have her declared incompetent - giving him, as her guardian, total control of her money, and preventing her from applying for a divorce, while he could still divorce her. He now had what he wanted, total control, and any protests against her sexual and financial exploitation could be seen as the ravings of a madwoman. And sadly, there is no suggestion anywhere in the book that Virginia ever tried to seek outside legal, medical, or spiritual advice.

Virginia's only escape came through writing, and through her one love affair, with Vita Sackville-West, a strong, independent woman. Vita balanced not only an "open" marriage, but a whirl of children, travel, gardens, and dogs. Through her relationship with Vita, Virginia realized bitterly how constricted her own life had become. Their homes had been bought with her money, but chosen and organized by Leonard - she hated their country house, which he had remodeled to his own taste, giving himself a huge studio, while she was relegated to a hut in the garden. Her money had paid for their business, the Hogarth Press, which gave Leonard editorial control of all her books, and for a car, which she wasn't allowed to drive. In the Woolf family, even the gardens and dogs belonged to Leonard - when Vita gave her a spaniel puppy, Leonard promptly annexed it as his own. It was this bitterness and rage that finally burned through in "A Room of One's Own", which was first given as a lecture, with Vita at her side.

But the affair did not last - they remained friends, but Vita sought other lovers - and Virginia was once more trapped without support, and her husband's increasing hostility and disrespect. She was offered speaking engagements and American lecture tours, but Leonard insisted she turn them all down. He was furiously jealous of the increased sales of her work. As WWII began, daily life grew harder and harder - Leonard interfered with the servants, forcing Virginia to do the cooking and cleaning herself, and refusing to let her visit friends. Finally, in despair, she killed herself - or did she? Coates thinks that Leonard deliberately drove her to it - at the very least knowing that she was suicidal and not helping her - and at the worst, she hints that he may actually have killed her. If so, he got away with it, and his punishment was this - to always be known as "Virginia's husband".

This is sure to be a controversial book. But is it accurate? This reviewer, who is not particularly expert on - or enthusiastic about - Bloomsbury, finds it to ring psychologically true. The ambitious poor man who marries a rich wife and then despises her is all too familiar. The legal position of both women and the mentally ill was such at the time that the trap set for Virginia was almost inescapable. And this account well explains the bitterness and despair in her works, in a way that pictures of her as a cosseted and loved wife fail to do.

Comprehensive, very useful for my people. Not for me or other 100% disabled vets, who are permanently and totally disabled. Many of our options are limited by the classifications.

"Federal Benefits for Veterans and Dependents" is simply a reprint of the same thing from the US Department of Veteran Affairs. If you'd rather not get the information from the VA directly, whether in its own publications or its website, you might like this book. However, with a little bit of work you can get as much or more information online. The book is merely a summary and much less of a guide to claiming benefits.

I found "Veteran's Guide to Benefits" much more useful.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people can arrive at such different conclusions from the same set of facts. This book is a great example of that. With nearly every page I found myself marveling at the unsupported conclusions, the questionable assumptions, and the moralistic (and misguided) value judgements left right and center. I found myself editing as I read, deleting whole paragraphs of blather as I went along. There is a set of facts about her illness, and you must arrive at your own interpretation of those facts. But some conclusions come nearer the truth than others -- and if you ask me, this one misses by a mile. If you want a book about Woolf's illnesses, read Caramagno's book "The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic Depressive Illness".

This is far and away the least insightful, least knowledgeable, least useful book I've ever read about Virginia Woolf. If I ever come across a book by this doctor again, I will shun it like the plague. Here are a few of the many, many ways he went wrong:

1) The "family tree" in the back of the book that supposedly supports his claim that Woolf's mental health issues were genetic is totally incomplete. So far as an informed reader can tell, he only named and "diagnosed" immediate family members of Leslie Stephen and family members who he could identify as having some kind of problem related to Woolf's. Another problem is that he doesn't appear to have presented his evidence for having determined that these people even suffered from the same difficulties one to the other, let alone to Virginia Woolf's manic depression.

2) He constantly undermines the evidence given by women (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell -- Bell is supposed to have not even known whether or not she had a miscarriage in 1911) while bolstering the evidence given by men. He promotes the causes of George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen, and belittles the evidence that George at least may have committed some serious offenses against his half-sisters. In the spirit of humility and a recognition that he was not there and did not know these people, Dally should at least have indicated that the evidence might be sketchy and presented the evidence for his views as *possible*. His attitude towards women is, at best, outdated. Given that, I don't think he should have undertaken to write about one.

3) Dally "diagnoses" medical conditions of people for whom he has extremely limited information without defining his terms. What is cyclothemia? Well, I could look it up in a book, but what it means to Dally or how he came to his conclusion, I'll never know.

4) Dally uses only published sources for his book. Yes, some of them may have been out of print and quite difficult to find, but that doesn't change the fact that he allowed himself to be limited to published sources. There are a lot of documents (Leonard Woolf's letters, for one) that were not published or were published only in part at the time that Dally's book was written. But many of these resources are readily available at university libraries. How he can presume to diagnose and criticize based on an incomplete record -- well, it's an astonishing act of arrogance, and if he were practicing REAL medicine would probably get him sued.

I could say a lot more about Dally's characterizations of Woolf's motivations, his overlooking the importance of various people in her life, his lack of understanding of the period about which he wrote, his utter lack of sympathy for the values of Bloomsbury -- but I don't have enough space.

Bottom line -- this book is junk and although it could have been a terrific addition to Woolf scholarship, any half-competent graduate student could have produced something really useful and far more insightful than this exercise in medical chauvinism. It's exactly the sort of thing Virginia Woolf would have expected from a doctor.

I was window shoppping at Amazon.com as I often love to do when I came across a book that I have treasured for some time. I was dismayed to see that Peter Dally's magnificent tour de force was not being recognized as such. Frankly, it is beyond comprehension that this would be so! One cannot understand the scope and depth of Virginia Woolf without reference to the marriage to which she so desperately needed in order to achieve the balance and stability necessary (given her illness) which resulted in our watershed of wonder in having such Masterpieces to read and enjoy today! Also, Dally's most compassionate view of her bipolar disorder provides to anyone who has had real experience with this disease profound insight into a curse, really, for so many artists that surely would have resulted in her suicide far sooner had it not been for Leonard Woolf. Surely, he is not perfect. No one is. But Dally provides that all-important insight into the need for all of us to accept the fact that no man or woman is an island unto themselves and in the absence of another upon whom we can rely in times of trial and trouble -- we are all lost. Given the unimaginable low price for this book, if you love VW -- you will not be disappointed!

I never did figure it out or finish it. It might be a fine book but it bored me to sleep every night for weeks until I just tossed it on the shelf for good.

Interesting title, promising subject. But the book is a huge disappointment. If you are looking for a brief biography of Woolf that touches on her bipolar disorder, then this may be what you want. If you want any real discussion of the disorder and a decent analysis of how she developed it and how it manifested itself, go elsewhere.

Dally is a psychiatrist who came of age in the 1950s. He is particularly interested in "manic depression" and anorexia nervosa, and he found both in Woolf. He used her extensive diaries to divine what troubled her, and his own background to determine why.

Dally has a tendency to trot out theories and present them as facts. From the beginning he describes Woolf's illness as genetic and attributes it to her father's side of the family. His "proof" is a family tree that shows that some members of her father's family suffered from various nervous disorders and he could not find as much evidence of such illness on her mother's side. He offers no proof of the genetic basis but merely proclaims it. In the appendix he notes that the genetic basis has not been proven "but it is only a matter of time".

Yet, in his own description of Virginia's childhood, he offers a much more potent and believable basis for her later depressions. Her mother did not want her, essentially rejected her, and always considered her of less value than the males of the family. There was nothing Virginia could do to win her mother's approval, yet she continued to try. As is typical with those with depression, she could not outright reject her mother or blame her for her own pain, and as a result her anger turned inward. This seems a far more plausible reason for her bipolar disorder than some vague genetic predisposition.

He also provides absolute treatment prescriptions, as if he were prescribing an antibiotic for a bacterial infection. Manic-depressives need quiet. They need to be kept from becoming excited. They need people around who will support them. They need to be protected from stress.

Is this true? Would Virginia have not killed herself if she had never had to face stress, if she were kept in the country, if nobody ever offered her any excitement? Even though she herself craved excitement, social interaction? Would she have truly been better off without the parties, the various stresses of everyday living? I was not at all convinced.

Dally's assumptions don't stop with Virginia and Leonard. He proclaims that Virginia's lover, Vita Sackville-West, was incapable of forming long-term intimate bonds. By what means did he make this diagnosis? He never met the woman. He can't possibly know if she was outright "incapable", and he certainly offers no basis for this assertion.

I found the book offensive for these reasons. He has reduced a writer of amazing creativity to a creature with a genetic disease, and has offered no substance for his simplistic analysis.