Virginia Woolf
Revelling in the music of words
Michael Cunningham helps us appreciate the ‘cello-like flow’ of clauses or the hiss of an ‘s’ in other contemporary authors’ works, while turning a critical eye on his own novels, too
Stay within the lines to realise your full creative energy
Narrow boundaries can lead to focus and innovation, argues David Epstein, whereas total freedom can be paralysing and result, paradoxically, in conformity
In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction
Using his life as a case study, Brian Dillon sets out to demonstrate that education is just as much about questioning things as it is about obtaining answers
‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Stein coined the phrase to describe the disillusioned writers and artists she mentored – but it is the woman herself who proves most elusive
Frederic Prokosch – the man who seemed to know everyone
A beguiling memoir boasts intimate encounters with many of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers – but should we believe a word of it?
Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst shows us the rewards of reading slowly and attentively – and making connections between seemingly disparate things
The lonely passions of Katherine Mansfield
Mansfield’s early infatuations led to many catastrophic rejections – and even in their brief marriage, her husband John Middleton Murry would treat her with wounding indifference
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? The BBC, it seems
‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary…
A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed
De Kretser’s witty, innovative take on the immigrant’s predicament tries ingeniously to persuade us that we are not reading fiction but documentary truth
Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed
An Oxford undergraduate makes a detailed plan for getting the most out of a quiet Sunday in January, but soon starts musing on what it feels like to be distracted
What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf’s mind was ‘agape & red & hot’ when reading him, and he was an everyday companion to most of the Group – but what they couldn’t bear was to see the plays acted
‘All I desire is fame’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett admires the brave and wayward Duchess of Newcastle, whose idiosyncratic writings astonished 17th-century English society
The work that’s never done
Like many women in mid-life, Marina Benjamin found herself caring for the very young and the elderly – leading her to ‘a radical feminist turn’
Weird and bold
Laura Elkin looks at women artists from the past century onwards who boldly portray the female body from their own intimate experience
Home truths
Can we know an artist by their house, asks Laura Freeman
A vroom of one’s own
Oh how I loved my old Mini
That way madness lies
There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…
A true European
Virginia Woolf admitted to her journal: ‘I haven’t that reality gift.’ Her contemporary Arnold Bennett had it in spades. He…
Disappearing doilies
This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some…
The new immortals
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk…
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
Flower power
Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive…
Inside stories
Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its…
Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square
The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’…
