Virginia Woolf Books

Without a doubt, the finest collection of essays on V.W.'s essays. The editors are to be commended. This is not for everyone, but for the true scholar, this is extremely fine work -- particularly the first half of the introduction.

This is a watershed study by Dr. Levenback on Virginia Woolf's personal experience of World War I, and her transformation through her writing of the deep and lasting effects of The Great War on herself, the non-combatants of Britain, and the rest of the 20th century.

Sustained throughout by original research and exceptional insight, this lucidly written book brings to life Woolf's personal and intellectual response to WWI. Additionally, Dr. Levenback presents Woolf's literary use of the war via the characters in her novels in a stimulating and very enjoyable manner.

If you read one book this year about Virginia Woolf and her writing, this deserves to be the one.

It seems that phallus-worshipping white males have a lot to contend with when Jane Marcus writes another one of her marvellous books. This time she exposes the sexism of male readers who wish to make Virginia Woolf unimportant, secondary in literary (i.e., patriarchal white male writing) canons. It seems that Jane Marcus has insights into the male thought process that few other commentators have; she shows that the way males use language is entirely different from that of women, because males want competition and decending structures, while women want independence and freedom. Virginia Woolf exemplifies the courageous feminist whose radicalism is a threat to white males everywhere. I can't recommend this book highly enough- it is not only exhilerating, it is important.

I wondered what this essay collection would be about when itarrived in the mail. Additionally, would I understand it well enoughto enjoy it? Would I finish reading it because it contained interesting, creative, original, insightful, and lucid commentary? Would I prefer to keep the book?

The answer to all of the above questions is a resounding "yes".

The ten essays, all of excellent quality and very engaging, are about Virginia Woolf and her relationship/experience with 20th century communication media and machines - the cinema,cameras and photography, gramaphones, fast cars, radios and the BBC, telescopes and Zeiss binoculars, fashion magazines, mass production and books, and also our changing connection to Woolf when we connect with her writing via a PC ; her attitude toward the mechanized production of art as well the ideas of Walter Benjamin on the same; scholarily yet accessible interpretations of Woolf's (fiction and non-fiction) and Benjamin's writings on art with aura (an orginal painting has an aura and the postcard of the painting in the museum shop does not); the literary, political, artistic, intellectual, social, and personal dialogue and debate which Woolf conducted with herself and others about the birth and proliferation of these machine(gun)s, new means of (re)production, new products; and much more.

These essays are all that one would expect from the most avant-garde critics/readers of Woolf today. Thanks to the original and detailed research of the contributors and the standards of the editor, this outstanding book is well worth one's most valuable resource: time

Leslie K. Hankins' digital alteration of Man Ray's photographs of Woolf and Benjamin (along with the other illustrations in the book) makes up for the volume being issued without a dustjacket. The binding is well done as is the front cover's illustration of a phonograph from the 1920s.

Tarry not with getting this one. It will go out-of-print quickly like most of Garland's titles.

PS. I do hope that the submitted essays which did not appear in this collection will be available soon in another Woolfian publication, or at the Woolf Conference of 2000.

From inside flap:
Dr. Read is one of the country's most popular Protestant clergyman, as his frequent appearances on national radio and television and his many lectureships both in North America and Europe amply testify. This is a collection of sermons delivered week by week to his New York congregation. They do not represent special occasions but simply the ongoing diet of a Christian community set amid the tensions of the 1960's.

This compact anthology presents a fine selection of fiction and nonfiction by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The selections of essays and memoirs are especially good, and while it can't do full justice to Woolf's longer works, this volume does include several excerpts from her best novels. If you have never read Virginia Woolf before, start with her brilliant book-length essay "A Room of One's Own" (represented here by too brief a portion) along with this anthology. And, for those who have already discovered her work, this collection makes a nice sampler and refresher - a book to pull off the shelf whenever you want to dip into that extraordinary mind (and prose) again.

As a layman seeking to understand the magic of Virginia Woolf, I found that her approach to creativity opened a new vista to my eyes. Reading Jones' treatment to the complex Woolf was like taking a course in painting principles and becoming to appreciate the combination and mixture of colors. Upon having gained that new appreciation, one could go out in the nature about them and perhaps see the colorful beauty of the world for the first time. Jones' text opens the eyes of the reader to the complexity of an author's task.

Through this work I have gained a new found admiration for the laborous task that faces a serious author. Obviously Jones has employed the work ethic of Woolf. J. G. Pastrick

Virginia Woolf was and is, to me, the proto-type of the person who is committed to being as humanly aware as possible (and recording her discovery as literary narrative prose). Woolf's childhood pain and puzzlement about life `drove' her, so to speak, to discover what it means to be alive, the possibilities and potential for living, and how the individual human life operates in the world; in other words, Woolf explored how the individual is created by interaction with parents within the prevailing social milieu, the society that operates `on' us, and in what way we might achieve autonomy by studying our own consciousness. In this book, author James Naremore shows us that while Woolf was born into a highly literate and well-connected family, her discovery and development of the stream-of-consciousness technique (of realistically re-creating the thought patterns of the human mind), transcends economic class, race, gender, and religion. This book is well worth owning in any reference collection. While I generally do not purchase "ex-library" books, I'm glad I got this one: underneath the title "The World Without a Self" someone stamped "DISCARDED." Perfect!

McGee's writing style makes this academic work a joy rather than a chore, to read from beginning to end. Not only does she make a number of noteworthy points, she uses a ton of textual evidence to back up her statements and (and this was the clincher for me) she doesn't just look at Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, but also Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin and others. Highly recommended for scholars in the field and laypersons who enjoy the Modernists.

This film, while very strange and yet good, shows gender dichotomies in a very creative and fresh way. It is an art film.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. A wonderful philosophical journey through a life filled with discovery.

I've watched this movie a few times now, and now it's on my shelf...
Visually stunning, poetic, erotic, mesmerasing movie...

Director Sally Potter's fondly embraceable, slightly over-elaborate big screen version of Virginia Woolf's famously psychedelic tale is a moving study in the power of understatement, and a testimony to how even the most justified taking of print-to-screen liberties may sometimes come back to nip its creator. In giving the androgynous-looking Tilda Swinton (probably best known to US audiences as the White Witch in the recent Narnia adaptation) the starring role as a striking young Elizabethan lad who literally carries out his venerable Queen's command that he not age or wither, and thusly lives through the next four centuries first as a man, later after a metamorphosis as a woman, the makers of this motion picture chose well. As Orlando travels through the decades and centuries, he experiences many things. He falls in love with a fickle Russian noblewoman who is visiting the court of King James I during a winter of deadly cold; he tries his hand at poetry-writing under the guidance of a seventeenth-century con-man; the one-time male makes his entrance in the decadent eighteenth-century as a female, and reaps the consequences of this bodily change. She, Orlando, goes on to spill unexpectedly in love again in Victorian times, endures pregnant during the chaos of World War One, and finally faces a tragically unfair legal confrontation in modern times that undermines even the era-spanning authority of England's greatest queen. The film Orlando is as I said fantasy for thinkers. It sketches its story on the canvas of British history, distant and modern, and if to be dubbed unique is the high praise, then it warrants the highest praise that can be given.

In her most playful and exuberant novel, Virginia Woolf writes the "historical biography" of Orlando, a young boy of nobility during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. A wild ride through four centuries, the novel shows Orlando aging, magically, only thirty-six years between 1588 and 1928. Even more magically, he also changes from a man to a woman. As she explores Orlando's life, Woolf also explores the differing roles of men and women in society during various periods, ultimately concluding that one's role as a man or woman is determined by society, rather than by birth.

From the Elizabethan period, during which Orlando works as a steward for the queen and also serves as her lover, he progresses to the reign of James I, experiencing a profound love for a Russian princess, Sasha, who is herself exploring the role of a man. An interlude in which he is wooed by the Archduchess Harriet/Archduke Harry leads to his ambassadorship to Constantinople, a period spent with the gypsies, and his eventual return to England--as a woman. New experiences and observations await her there.

Throughout the novel, Woolf matches her prose style to the literary style of the period in which Orlando lives, creating always-changing moods and sheer delight for the reader. Some constants continue throughout the four centuries of Orlando's life. Orlando is always a writer, always recording his thoughts, and always adding to a poem he has begun as a child entitled "The Oak Tree." He is always returning to his 365-room house whenever he needs to recuperate from his experiences, and some characters repeat through time.

Literary historians make much of the fact that Woolf modeled Orlando on Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover, and that this study of gender roles was an early exploration of lesbianism, bisexuality, cross-dressing, and transgender identities. The novel is pure fun to read, however, and though it raises serious and thoughtful questions about sexuality and the ways that it controls our lives, there is no sense that Woolf wrote the novel specifically to make a public statement or prove a point. Her themes of gender and its relation to social expectations, of imagination and its relation to reality, of the importance of history in our lives, and of the unlimited potential of all humans, regardless of their sex, transcend the specific circumstances under which Woolf may have written the book. A playful and delightful novel, which broke new ground with its publication. Mary Whipple

Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
A Room of One's Own (Annotated)
To the Lighthouse
Jacob's Room
Moments of Being