Virginia Woolf Books

This reference has all the "A-to-Z" entries one would expect but the critical analyses of every one of Woolf's novels makes this a must-have book for the new Woolf fan.

This book supplemented a course I took on the works of Woolf. It is filled with interesting background material and helpful character biographies. Hussey skillfully condensed volumes of biographical and critical work on Woolf into one, user-friendly manual.

If you're a woolf student this book may be useful to have a complete panorama of the critical situation on two of her major books. I used it to have a deeper insight on the two novels, especially on "The Waves" - a book on which critical judgement is not easily found - and found it perfectly responding to the needs of a higher university student.

The book presents the major critical instances on the two works in chronological order, from woolf's contemporaries up to our days. Each chapter deals with a selection of significant reviews, all of which belonging to the same period if not to the same attitude to the works. Moreover each chapter is introduced by a brief text by the curator explaining the main contents of the reviews which are going to follow and the principal critical ideas referring to a period or critical school.

In a few words: this is what you need if you want to get a deeper critical knowledge of "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves", and to gain it in a quite short time - the book in fact is not too long, can be read quite quickly and if you're interested in getting particular pieces of information can also easily be skimmed through.

If you're a woolf student this book may be useful to have a complete panorama of the critical situation on two of her major books. I used it to have a deeper insight on the two novels, especially on "The Waves" - a book on which critical judgement is not easily found - and found it perfectly responding to the needs of a higher university student.

The book presents the major critical instances on the two works in chronological order, from woolf's contemporaries up to our days. Each chapter deals with a selection of significant reviews, all of which belonging to the same period if not to the same attitude to the works. Moreover each chapter is introduced by a brief text by the curator explaining the main contents of the reviews which are going to follow and the principal critical ideas referring to a period or critical school.

In a few words: this is what you need if you want to get a deeper critical knowledge of "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves", and to gain it in a quite short time - the book in fact is not too long, can be read quite quickly and if you're interested in getting particular pieces of information can also easily be skimmed through.

Very complete, well-written, interesting to read, this introduction to Modernism is just what you're looking for, if you're interested in Modernism. It covers a lot of ground, and gives enough context, historical and otherwise, so that Modernism can be seen in perspective. Highly recommended.

Whether you are starting to read Virginia Woolf for the first time or have read and enjoyed her books in the past and want a resource to turn to that will quickly and reliably fill you in on the basics of her biography, her social and cultural background, her fiction, and her contributions to literary criticism, Goldman's introduction is the book for you. She doesn't talk down to beginners, but writes about Woolf in an accessible style while doing a good job of focusing on the important issues. I was especially pleased by the dignitiy she grants her subject. While some biographers have voyeuristically focused on Woolf's childhood sexual abuse, madness, and suicide attempts, Goldman reminds us of the incredible depth and range of Woolf's contributions and of the context in which Woolf took her own life (both that of World War II and of Woolf's fear that she was succombing to another period of madness). Woolf's output was phenomenal: 10 novels (most technically innovative, all worth reading); one drama; a biography of art critic Roger Fry; two important and engaging works of feminist theory (A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN and THREE GUINEAS); and countless essays and short stories. Add to these the volumes of letters and diaries that have been published since her death, and you have a glimpse of what an extremely intelligent, talented, and dedicated person can accomplish in a short life of 59 years. Consider that this was all accomplished under less-than-desirable circumstances, and your awe will muliply ten-fold.

Goldman divides her book into four sections: (1) [Woolf's] Life; (2) Contexts; (3) Works; and (4) Critical Reception. Add to this an index and a brief "Guide to Further Reading" listing carefully selected works by and about Woolf and you have a very helpful 157-page resource. Although all four sections are rewarding, I found section 4 (Critical Reception) especially helpful because it shows how scholars' understanding of Woolf has evolved over the past 60+ years. Knowing when critics wrote reveals a lot about which issues concerned them most and, conversely, which ones they were blind to. (For instance, early critics were universally oblivious to the anti-Empire and anti-colonialism themes in Woolf's writing.)

A heads-up to hasty shoppers: This Introdution by Goldman should not be confused with THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO VIRGINIA WOOLF, a collection of essays by a number of the foremost Woolf scholars and edited by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (2000), nor should Goldman's book be considered the "lite" or "dummies" version of the "Companion." Both volumes are worth owning, though for different reasons.

this is my favorite romance ever. It was written around 1900 and beautifully portrays the mind and responsibilies of a British woman in that time.

Woolf is an outstanding essayist. This work edited and put together by her husband Leonard Woolf is her last volume of essays. It contains essays on a wide variety of subjects beginning with her careful depiction of the 'Death of a Moth' and containing essays on Henry James, Madame de Sevigne, the historian Gibbon, Sara Coleridge, George Moore, E.M.Forster, . She also has essays on 'The Art of the Biography''A Letter to a Young Poet' 'Middlebrow' 'Craftsmanship' ' Professions for Women' 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'.
One of her most revealing set of insights is given in the essay on 'The Art of Biography' There she defends the aesthetic supremacy of her own mode of writing, the novel.

"It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was tied by friends, letters and documents he was laying his finger upon a necessary element in biography; and that it is also a necessary limitation. For the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person only- the artist himself. Their authenticity lies in the truth of his own inner vision. The world created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more wholly of a piece than the world that is largely made of authentic information supplied by other people."

Woolf makes an especially beautiful description of the distinguishing character of a writer whose greatness she defends, Henry James.
"For ourselves Henry James seems most entirely in his element , doing that to say what everything favours his doing , when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time, the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be discerned, which the glare of day flattens out, the depth, the richness, the calm, the humour of the whole pageant- all this seems to have been his natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood."
Her stylistic brilliance and acute aesthetic perception pervades these outstanding essays.

Of all of Virginia's diaries (there are five volumes), volumes 3 and 4 are perhaps the most interesting, if only because they span the period in which she wrote her classics such as Orlando, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves (which itself literally spans the period between Vol 3 and Vol 4.)

If you read the collected Diaries and Woman Of Letters by Phyllis Rose, you will gain a vital series of insights into the life and thoughts of this most haunting of female writers.

Whenever I think of Virginia, I always think of the lines from "Vincent" by Don Maclean...

This world was never meant
for one as beautiful as you...

If you have never read any Virginia Woolf, I would respectfully suggest you rent a copy of Sally Potter's Orlando. While Sally takes artistic license with the novel, she has created a very sympathetic work of Art.

This diary above all gives you many insights into her thought processes and her writing career, including her reactions to the publication of her works and their reception by the public and the sub-species known as Critics.

Recommended.

This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. In 1923, Freud introduced new terms in his book "The Ego and the Id," to describe the division between the conscious and unconscious: 'id,' 'ego,' and 'super-ego.' He thought these terms offered a more compelling description of the dynamic relations between the conscious and the unconscious. The "id" (fully unconscious) contains the drives and those things repressed by consciousness; the "ego" (mostly conscious) deals with external reality; and the "super ego" (partly conscious) is the conscience or the internal moral judge.

The id is the source of our drives and Freud considered it to be the reservoir of libido. 'The libido' or simply 'libido', is the form of energy cathected upon objects or an effect received from objects, predominantly sexual, which underlies all mental processes. Our drives (Freud had very theoretically specific "-drives" such as the death-drive, but drives can often be equated to 'instincts') surge forth from the id and apply libidinal energy to objects, which may result in aggressive or erotic attachments/actions upon chosen objects. The drives of the id are considered to be inborn, operating within the primary psychical processes (those of the unconscious) and are absolutely determined according to the pleasure principle. It is said that the id behaves as though it were unconscious, the reason thought to be is that our ego and our super-ego's ideals and pressures are often in conflict with the id's, causing repression, as the gratification of the id's drives would often be devastating in terms of social- and self-image. The word "id" is taken from the nominative single neuter Latin demonstrative pronoun (is, ea, id) meaning "it" or "that thing."

In Freud's theory, the ego mediates among the id, the super-ego and the external world. Its task is to find a balance between primitive drives, morals, and reality while satisfying the id and superego. Its main concern is with the individual's safety and allows some of the id's desires to be expressed, but only when consequences of these actions are marginal. Ego defense mechanisms are often used by the ego when id behavior conflicts with reality and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and taboos. Although in his early writings Freud equated the ego with the sense of self, he later began to portray it more as a set of psychic functions such as reality-testing, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. The word ego is taken directly from Latin where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and is translated as "I myself" to express emphasis. Ego is the English translation for Freud's German term "Das Ich."

Freud's theory says that the super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because of their conflicting objectives, and is aggressive towards the ego. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and the prohibition of taboos. Its formation takes place during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and is formed by an identification with and internalization of the father figure after the little boy cannot successfully hold the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration. "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on -- in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt" (The Ego and the Id, 1923). In Sigmund Freud's work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he also discusses the concept of a "cultural super-ego". The concept of super-ego and the Oedipus complex is subject to criticism for its sexism. Women, who are considered to be already castrated, do not identify with the father, and therefore form a weak super-ego, apparently leaving them susceptible to immorality and sexual identity complications.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy.

This is the third of a (yet uncompleted) series of collections of Virginia Woolf's essays edited by Andrew McNeillie. Of the projected series of a total of six books of Woolf's essays only four have been published so far. When this great undertaking has finished, we will at last have at our disposal the first COMPLETE publication of all the essays and reviews of one of the best-read women in the western world. This series is of immense significance to Woolf scholars,students and lovers, of which they are increasingly many, not only because all her essays will be collected in a neat series but also, and more importantly, because in all the books of the series, including this volume, there are/will be non-fiction pieces by Woolf which are no longer available to the 'common reader' as they can only be found in the archives of the newspapers, journals and magazines that Woolf wrote for in her times. Till recently, apart from her well-known essays 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas', Woolf's talent and importance as a critic had not been fully appreciated. This volume, along the others in the series, is both one of the factors and the effects of the recent surge of interest in Woolf's critical art, and is an extremely valuable contribution in that it makes manifest the whole range of writing of a literary figure who excelled not just in fiction but was also an equally masterful essay writer and polemical commentator and reviewer of modern times.

Vincent Sherry is a master of the English language. His latest book is simply brilliant: beautifully written, well researched and incisive. A must read for the scholar and student, Sherry's analysis is a huge achievement.