20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

The Bedside Companion to Virginia Woolf

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

This is a really curious book, both in appearance and content. The text is presented in double columns like a Victorian newspaper, and its subject is just about everything you could think of regarding Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury – but offered in quick snatches and potted summaries. It’s not a continuous narrative but a series of overlapping sketches and thematic surveys.

The chapters switch from biography to social history, then on to Woolf’s major fictional writing, and back again to the geography of Bloomsbury, the houses they all lived in, and their relationships with feminism, the two world wars, and even animals. This renders the treatment rather superficial, but I imagine it will make the book more interesting to the people it is aimed at – because new characters, incidents, and themes are coming up on almost every page.

Sandwiched amongst the main text there are panels featuring such topics as the other artistic movements of the period, the geography of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, synopses of Woolf’s major novels, and issues such as pacifism and even films based on Bloomsbury. There are biographical sketches of most of the principal characters, from Virginia Woolf’s family and outwards, covering minor figures such as Saxon Sydney-Turner and Dora Carrington. Each of these sections has suggestions for further reading which are commendably up to date.

It’s also worth saying that the book is generously illustrated with some refreshingly original photographs – but also with some amateurish sketches which would have been better left out.

Sarah Hall is very good at keeping track of the many complex relationships which were established in Bloomsbury and its outer reaches. Speaking of the artist Duncan Grant she notes:

Through a friendship with the art critic Bernard Berenson’s step-daughters, Ray and Karin Costelloe (Ray became Bunny Garnet’s first wife, Karin married Adrian Stephen), he stayed at the Berenson’s villa in Florence, I Tatti, and learned at first hand the politics of art dealing.

She takes a sympathetic view of Bloomsbury – sometimes to the point of almost naive enthusiasm. She thinks that Virginia and Leonard Woolf were ‘faithful’ to each other during their marriage, and that Bloomsbury’s homosexual men were ‘not promiscuous’ – which would have been news to most of them.

If a good test of critical writing is that it makes a reader wish to re-visit the work, then one of the most successful chapters is on Virginia Woolf’s short stories which offers a sympathetic and insightful account of those profoundly experimental studies. Other highlights include chapters on the Hogarth Press, Lytton Strachey, and the Memoir Club.

It would not matter which aspect of Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury you wished to pursue – be it Woolf’s feminism or mental illness, the lives of her relatives, the writing and art works of her friends, or even the popular walking tours which retrace her steps through London and the Home Counties – this would be an excellent point of departure.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Sarah M. Hall, The Beside, Bathroom, and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.206, ISBN 0826486754

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Bellarosa Connection

April 4, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a novella in which Saul Bellow examines three aspects of what he calls ‘Jewish history’ – and to which might be added the epithet ‘Jewish immigrant history’. It’s also the first major piece of his fiction in which he addresses the issue of the Holocaust. As he said of this topic in an interview, commenting on the absence of these topics in his earlier work:

Somehow I managed to miss the significance of some very great events. I didn’t take hold of them as I now see I might have done. Not until The Bellarosa Connection. So I have lived long enough to satisfy a few neglected demands.

In this novel (or novella) he looks at the plight of the Jews in Europe who in the twentieth century have been persecuted first by the Russians (and others) and then by the Germans. Many of them emigrated to America, where he examines two generations. The first was glad to escape persecution and worked hard to establish a new life. The second generation grew up as naturalised Americans, but they had a family background, a cultural tradition, and a ‘history’. They could either ignore this and become ‘Americanised’ or take on the burden of their social inheritance.

The Bellarosa Connection – critical comment

Literature and history

Whilst the characters in the novel are fictional constructs, Billy Rose was a real-life historical person. He was a famous theatrical impresario and a showman who amassed a huge personal fortune and founded a sculpture garden in Jerusalem. He also wrote the lyrics to popular songs such as Me and My Shadow and It’s Only a Paper Moon. However, suspicions exist that he paid ghost writers to do most of the work – a rumour that Bellow incorporates into the novella.

The rescue operation bearing his name is a fictional transposition of the fact that Billy Rose did become involved in organising fund-raising events in America for the aid of European Jews. Thus Saul Bellow is mingling fact and fiction here – in a way which became quite fashionable in post second world war American fiction.

The reader is being asked to ‘suspend disbelief’ – that is, to simultaneously accept information from a historical and an invented source. Questions arise such as “Did this really happen?” and “Is this really true?” and such doubts must be dealt with as a matter of aesthetic judgement by the reader. We ask ourselves – Are these events plausible? Do they make sense? Is the author pushing invention too far here?

We are being invited to accept the simultaneous existence of Billy Rose, a real-life historical figure whose biographical details can be looked up in Wikipedia, and the Fonsteins who are fictional constructs (even if they were based on people who Bellow knew personally).

The narrator

The reader’s dilemma in making these judgements is perhaps made easier by the sheer drive and panache of Bellow’s first person narrator. In most of his novels from Augie March onward he employs narrators who are clear substitutes for Bellow himself as a sophisticated intellectual with an enormous grasp of cultural history. He develops narrators who are witty, well-informed, and very entertaining. The result is that as readers we tend to believe what they are saying, even though we know they are fictional constructs.

He also employs a style of narration which is a fascinating admixture of street language, colloquial expressions, slang, and the vocabulary of intellectual and even philosophic discourse.

I was at the bar of parental judgement again, charged with American puerility. When would I shape up, at last! At the age of thirty-two, I still behaved like a twelve-year-old, hanging out in Greenwich Village, immature, drifting, a layabout, shacking up with Bennington girls, a foolish intellectual gossip, nothing in his head but froth—the founder, said my father with comic bewilderment, of the Mnemosyne Institute, about as profitable as it was pronounceable

What’s more, this narrative voice was consciously developed, and is a reflection of Bellow’s desire to fuse Eurocentric culture absorbed via his higher education with the American demotic in which he had been raised as the son of first-generation immigrants:

What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance … Street language combined with a high style.

Americanisation

Bellow sees the question of Jewish history in three phases. First is the flight of parents from anti-Semitism and poverty in Europe. Second is immigration and establishing an economic foothold in America. The third phase for their children is a choice between their Jewish heritage or assimilating as Americans. As his narrator makes quite clear:

“But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U.S.A. be too much for them?”

Immigration and race

In connection with the issue of race and American society,
as has been argued in a similar analysis of his late novel Ravelstein, it is slightly surprising that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society which then exploited and persecuted them.

Bellow is not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life, but the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not seem to occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison. Bellow is very conscious of modern history, but the fact is that the Africans were made forcible ‘immigrants’ to American society from the sixteenth century onwards, whereas the Jewish diaspora affected America largely from the late nineteenth century.

The Bellarosa Connection – study resources

The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon US

The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – plot summary

A successful and un-named academic specialises in memory studies. He wishes to record a history of emotions and states of being, conscious of his poor Jewish immigrant background. He recalls the story of his relative Harry Fonstein who escapes Hitler and flees to Italy where he works as a waiter in Rome.

Fonstein is arrested at a fascist reception and jailed, but then his escape is arranged by a clandestine operation organised by Billy Rose (‘Bellarosa’). Rose is a flamboyant theatrical impresario and newspaper gossip columnist who collects fine art and has made a fortune from show business. He keeps his rescue operation secret and will not even meet the people he saves. The narrator assumes that the Mafia are also involved in his operations.

Fonstein escapes to America where he is detained on Ellis Island. From there he is exported to Cuba, and forbidden to mention Billy Rose. In Cuba he works as an assistant and educates himself through part-time study.

A marriage is arranged with an overweight woman from America, which gives him naturalisation papers. He moves to New Jersey where he becomes successful running a plumbing supplies business. When he tries to thank Billy Rose for saving his life, all his overtures are rejected..

The narrator discusses ‘Jewish history’ with Fonstein’s obese wife Sorella, but finds the Nazi horrors ‘burdensome’. He then meets the Fonsteins on holiday in Israel, where Billy Rose is staying at the same hotel. Sorella reveals that Rose’s assistant kept a secret journal and papers documenting all Rose’s personal foibles and shady business deals. The narrator declines the offer of seeing the documents.

Sorella arranges a meeting with Billy Rose and uses the documents as blackmail in an attempt to persuade Rose to give her husband a brief audience. Rose vigorously defends his reputation and refuses her request. She throws the documents at him – but they go out of the window..

Some years later the narrator is asked for Fonstein’s contact details by a Rabbi who is seeking help for an insane man who claims to be a relative of Fonstein. The narrator makes phone calls to people who might know – and gets short shift from them.

When he finally locates the address, a young man is house-sitting. He reveals that the Fonsteins were killed in a motor accident six months earlier. They were on their way to their mathematically gifted son who had taken up gambling and was in trouble.

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Captain’s Death Bed

February 11, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed (1950) is the third volume of collected reviews and essays to be published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press after the death of his wife Virginia Woolf in 1941. They represent her work as a journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, and essayist over the last twenty years of her life – a period which saw the production of her most famous experimental novels – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

In his introductory editor’s note to this collection, Leonard Woolf suggests that these essays and reviews would have been rewritten and polished for republication by Virginia Woolf had she lived – as she had had been in the habit of doing with all of her work. This may well be true, but the advantage for the reader is that the essays are in the condition in which they were first released for publication, and we can trace the development of her style as the years progress. Not that there was a great deal of development: she was writing fluently and imaginatively from almost her earliest work. These pieces span the years 1924 to 1939.

As in many of her essays and reviews, she offers interesting reflections on keeping diaries, something she did herself to great effect. For instance, Parson Woodforde is a completely ordinary man, to whom nothing of any importance happens, but this gives her the launching pad for one of her favourite literary topics – the rhythms and content of everyday life in all its mundanity. This was a theme she was to explore again and again in her fiction – the fact that our lives are not composed of high dramas and spectacular conflicts, but of fleeting thoughts, shifts of mood, evanescent memories, and fragments of observation – what she called ‘life itself’.

In one sense this is something of a naturalistic approach when applied to the creation of fiction – but Woolf combines it with both a lyrical, quasi-poetical literary style and a philosophic meta-critique of the phenomena she is describing. If Mr Smith thinks of his wife whilst making his commute to the office, she generalises the nature of memory and the shifting significance of individuals in each other’s lives.

Similarly, the captain of the title piece is a seafarer (the novel-writing Captain Marryat, no less) whose works capture the everyday facts of life in a way that no later novelist can:

because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness.

She presents sympathetic portraits of writers as diverse as Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Turgenev, and even some whom she knew personally such as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, both of whom were friends of her father Sir Leslie Stephen.

The most famous piece in the collection is the much quoted and reprinted lecture of 1924 on character in fiction, entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. This is a variation on a subject she had treated before, in her 1920 short story An Unwritten Novel – which describes the attempt of a narrator to explain the character of someone unknown occupying the same carriage on a railway journey.

In this piece she takes issue with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H.G. Wells as novelists who had failed to notice her famous claim that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’. She suggests that Wells would have put Mrs Brown in one of his impossible Utopias; Galsworthy would place her in an economic analysis of her class; and Bennett would offer a sociological sketch of her house and its surroundings. In other words none of them would capture the essence of her character as a credible human being.

But she asks herself what have later, Georgian writers to offer as alternatives? She identifies the work of Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce as brave attempts at establishing new contracts between author and reader, but urges patience, giving them time to develop. We now know that they did develop – none more so than the one great writer she modestly leaves out of the list – which is herself.

In an article on book reviewing first published as a Hogarth Press pamphlet in 1939 she spells out the history and the condition of book reviewing as distinct from serious literary criticism. She suggests it is a difficult and an often-abused system, and so proposes an alternative whereby authors pay a certified reviewer a consultancy fee for an advisory interview conducted in private. Leonard Woolf, as her editor, adds a note which sums up In three pages the whole business and the economics of publishing book reviews.

There are also some delightful surprises – essays on what was then modern technology – for instance, the cinema and flying. She views the early movie classics and immediately perceives that cinema has at its disposal a ‘secret language’ of symbols and metaphors which make laboured explanations of what is happening on screen unnecessary.

For a strange thing has happened – while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say.

The most amazing piece is her account of Flying Over London in which the novelties and incongruities of solid human beings hurtling through the air are explored in a series of aerial metaphors and shifts in point of view. Given the danger of this enterprise, it is not surprising that before long images of death and extinction are mingled with impressions of floating through clouds and witnessing City traffic congestion like lines of crawling insects. But the real beauty of the essay comes from the fact that she never left the ground, and has not flown at all. It is a work of fancy and utterly convincing imagination.

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon UK
The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Captain’s Death Bed – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Oliver Goldsmith
White’s Selborne
Life Itself
Crabbe
Selina Trimmer
The Captain’s Death Bed
Ruskin
The Novels Of Turgenev
Half Of Thomas Hardy
Leslie Stephen
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
The Cosmos
Walter Raleigh
Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown
All About Books
Reviewing
Modern Letters
Reading
The Cinema
Walter Sickert
Flying Over London
The Sun And The Fish
Gas
Thunder At Wembley
Memories Of A Working Women’s Guild

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Case of Comrade Tulayev

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

By the time he came to write The Case of Comrade Tulayev Victor Serge had miraculously escaped the worst of political persecution in Europe. He began the novel writing as an exile in Paris, continued it in Marseilles whilst waiting for an exit visa, wrote more in the Dominican Republic, and finished the book in Mexico where he spent the last seven years of his life. His living conditions were impoverished and austere – but it was as if he found the psychological space in which to develop his mature style. All his best work was produced in the last few years left to him, including his autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his two final novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.

Comrade Tulayev has a fluency, a confidence, and a consistency of tone that far surpasses his earlier works. His narrative flows effortlessly from one character and one point of view to another. The most serious political issues are delivered alongside a sensitive apprehension of the everyday world. Tyrants and bullies have moments of doubt and sentimental attachment. Even the heroic figures have flaws and weaknesses, including the most tragic ideological weakness of all – believing that they are making sacrifices in a good cause.

There is also a powerful thematic unity to the novel. It reveals the deprivations suffered by millions in the world’s worst ‘planned economy’; it reveals the bureaucratic corruption that created the shortages, waste, and even famines; and it dramatises magnificently the ideological struggles between those old Bolsheviks who had sacrificed everything to create a better society, and the New Men who had taken over to betray their efforts.

At the height of the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s a petty clerk Kostia shoots Central Committee member Tulayev almost on a whim – just because he happens to have acquired a gun. This sets in motion a new wave of purges which percolate all the way through Soviet society. Government officials are arrested; oppositionists and critics of the Party are jailed; there are mass arrests of ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’. None of these people have done anything wrong: the paranoid madness of Stalinism merely requires guilty victims. All of these people realise that no matter how long their torment lasts, their future is either years in the GULAG or a bullet in the back of the head.

Serge’s great achievement is to show how people from the top to the bottom of Soviet society coped with the terror of the purges. But most especially, he is keen to reveal how former Bolshevik loyalists managed to persuade themselves, when charged with all sorts of crimes they did not commit, that they were agreeing to confess in order to serve a greater good. That is, they put the Party above everything. And the circular logic of the Party’s argument is brilliantly compressed into the expression “obey or betray”. It’s what we might now call a Catch-22 situation. You can help the Party achieve its ends by agreeing to your own guilt (and death) or you can resist, and die anyway. In the first case, your sacrifice will help us; in the second, you are besmirching everything you have worked for over the last twenty years.

The flaws in this argument are now well known. The Party was certainly not any guide to sensible policy: it was liquidating its best intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and even military leaders just when it needed them most. It did not represent the working class on whose behalf its claims were made, because it was a corrupt bureaucracy. And the democratic principles to which it appealed were a complete sham. The entire system of government in the Soviet system was based on lies, fabrications, corruption, injustice, falsified statistics, inefficiency, and terror (which is why it eventually collapsed in 1989). But at the time Serge was writing not many people were aware of the gigantic gulf between propaganda and reality. Many writers in the west swallowed the Soviet propaganda wholesale. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, (The Truth About Soviet Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization) are now risible museum pieces, though many at the time took them seriously.

Each of the principal characters in the novel is shown grappling with the central problem in his own way. Makayev a dull and brutish peasant rises through the ranks to become a local leader because of his willingness to do the party’s bidding; but he has no intellectual or moral reserves when he finds himself on the wrong side of the investigation. Even the investigators themselves fall under the wheels of the Juggernaut – because failing to deliver results is branded as counter-revolutionary and ‘sabotage’. Old Bolshevik Ryzhik is dragged back from an unimaginably severe and miserable life in exile beyond the Arctic Circle, and faced with the same accusations as everybody else. He chooses to thwart his captors by starving himself to death in jail.

Even foreign policy is affected. Kondratiev, a loyal Soviet agent working in Spain in the middle of the civil war is swept up into the madness. His job is to eliminate Stalin’s rivals whilst appearing to support the Republican movement. Recalled to Moscow and invited by Stalin himself to give a truthful report on events, he does so – and although branded as a Trotskyist sympathiser and expecting every moment to be jailed and shot, he is one of the rare examples of someone ‘spared’ because of his old links with Stalin. He is merely banished to a Siberian mine.

No such luck for Xenia, the daughter of prosecutor Popov who is on an official visit to Paris. On hearing that the incorruptible old Bolshevik Rublev has been accused, she makes a vain series of attempts to have messages of support sent back to Moscow. This alerts the secret service agents who are already spying on her activities, and she is taken back to Moscow under arrest. And because they are related, her father is arrested too.

The show trials take place, the accused are convicted, and the episode has what we now call closure. The three principals Erchov, Makeyev, and Rublev (who have absolutely nothing to do with each other) meet their death, and the corrupt system that has brought this about goes on. Even when the original assassin writes a letter to the prosecutor confessing his guilt, the letter is destroyed – because it compromises the Case, which has now been closed.

The novel is tragic in the very best sense. It shows enlightened and courageous individuals inspired by noble ideals who are brought to a pitiable end by ideological flaws in the system they embrace. It offers a first-hand account of the Soviet system written by somebody who was a high-ranking insider. And most important of all it reveals the secret mechanisms of the the Terror and the Show Trials which were at the time a baffling mystery to everyone. We have known the technical details for over seventy years now, but the artistic truth offered by a magnificent novel such as The Case of Comrade Tulayev lives on forever.

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Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, New York: New York Review Books, 2004, pp.362, ISBN: 1590170644

More on Victor Serge
Twentieth century literature
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The Castle

August 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s last major work

The Castle was Kafka’s last novel, and like most of his others (except The Trial) it was never completed. Indeed, it ends abruptly, breaking off half way through a sentence. But it towers like some sort of an unfinished masterpiece over the rest of his work. Anthea Ball, the translator of this new edition from OUP, makes the case that The Castle is unlike The Trial because it is set in the countryside and it is mainly concerned with a village community. This is what might be called a ‘charitable’ interpretation.

Others are likely to note that it has a very similar protagonist, with the same initial name (K) who seeks acceptance into the village and is condemned to failure in his attempts to gain admission to the Castle. This building dominates the entire locality and houses swarms of unseen officials and various bureaucrats representing authority in the absence of its real owner, who never appears.

The castle is also likened to a church or cathedral – and the villagers do in fact pay it religious devotions. Visitors to Kafka’s home town of Prague do not have to look far to see the likely origin of this powerful symbol. Prague Castle towers above every possible view from the surrounding city.

The villagers live in a state of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ because of their reverence for this unseen authority. Kafka’s other works are mainly set in a city – and he himself rarely left Prague where he was born, went to school and university, and worked – until the very end of his short life. But The Castle is world of shabby, overworked and undernourished peasants who live in hovels and endure brutish behaviour from everyone above them in the pecking order.

K does his best to challenge in a rational manner the benighted obeisance in which the villagers are held because of their irrational respect for the Castle’s authority – especially in the form of Klamm, an official of such awesome power that people are even afraid to say his name or look at him. But K is met with ambiguity, contradiction, and absurdity at every attempt to deal with the strange world in which he finds himself.

There is also the usual sexual ambiguity one comes to expect in Kafka’s work. When K arrives in the village, Frieda the barmaid is Klamm’s mistress, but she gives him up in favour of the newcomer K. The two of them consummate their passion on the floor of the bar room amongst beer puddles, unknowingly observed by the comic twins Artur and Jeremiah. This experience transports K into ‘another land’ – and yet he quickly gets fed up with her and spends all his time thinking about gaining access to the Castle.

Any number of possible interpretations of the novel have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. It has often been seen as a novel-length version of his parable ‘Before the Law’ in which a man seeks entry to the Law but is denied by a gatekeeper. The man decides to wait and only when he is dying asks why no other people have ever sought entrance. The gatekeeper replies “This entrance was assigned only to you. And now I am going to close it”.

These new editions of Kafka’s main works from Oxford University Press offer fresh translations, and they come with extended introductory essays, full explanatory notes, a bibliography, and both a biographical preface on Kafka and a chronology of his life. They also explain the very complex provenance of the text.

The Castle is not for readers new to Kafka. Better to start with the short stories, such as Metamorphosis or his shorter novel The Trial. But for anything like a complete Kafka experience, this one is unmissable. It is also a surprisingly funny novel at times, despite its sombre overtones.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Franz Kafka, The Castle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.279, ISBN 0199238286

More on Franz Kafka
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The Chase

December 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Chase (El Acoso) was first published in 1956 whilst Alejo Carpentier was living in Venezuela, in self-imposed exile from what he regarded as his native Cuba, which was under the dictatorship of General Batista at the time. Although neither the fictional country nor the city is named in the novel, most commentators accept that he captures the spirit (and the terror) of Havana during a period of political persecution and social unrest.

Old Havana

The Chase – critical commentary

Literary style

Carpentier’s literary style is not dissimilar to that of two other modernists, Woolf and Joyce, in seeking to achieve a sense of temporal simultaneity in his prose. He writes about more than one subject and one period in the story at the same time, by switching from one topic or character to another, often within the same sentence.

It is significant that in general he makes very little use of the paragraph, and extensive use of the ellipsis (…) the semicolon, and the dash – as this passage describing the fugitive’s fear in the concert hall demonstrates:

It might be a Sign; my eyes will try to avoid it, looking above it, below it, finally making me dizzy; I must clench my teeth, clench my fists, calm my stomach—calm my stomach—I must stop that running sensation in my guts, that breakdown of my kidneys which sends sweat to my chest; one thrust and another, one jolt and another; I must tighten myself up, cover up the falling apart inside, cover up what’s flowing out of me, boiling out of me; piercing me; I must tighten myself up over the thing that’s drilling and burning, in this immobility to which I am condemned, here, where my head must remain at the same height as every other head.

Carpentier also narrates the fictional past and present simultaneously. The fugitive is trying to escape from his assailants from the very beginning of the novel, but mingled with his thoughts and fears, we are gradually given the account of his past.

He also mixes first and third person narrative modes – third person objective statements recounting the fugitive’s movements and descriptions of the city, and at the same time first-person accounts of his thoughts, fears, and memories.

Structure

Despite the complexities of the narrative and the manner in which the story is delivered, the structure of the novel is quite simple. In Part I, the un-named fugitive arrives at the concert hall, on the run from his assailants. He gives the student ticket seller a fake banknote, which the student then unsuccessfully tries to spend through buying a night with the prostitute Estrella.

The events of Part II take place before those of Part I, and reveal the desperate life of the fugitive as a political agent, an assassin, and a traitor up to that point. He too has been a client of Estrella’s, and is now in fear of his life after betraying his comrades.

Part III of the narrative goes back to the point at which it broke off in Part I, and the story concludes with the student returning from the prostitute, the end of the concert, and the shooting of the fugitive.

There are several neat structural links between the separate parts of the story. When the fugitive gives the fake (or out-of-date) banknote to the ticket seller, the student tries (unsuccessfully) to buy a night with the prostitute Estrella. But we learn later that the fugitive has also been a regular client of Estrella’s, and has had the banknote turned down by her for the same reason earlier on the same day.

Moreover, the ticket seller is a student of music, and the fugitive has previously been a student of architecture before his activities as a political undercover agent. Both music and architecture were favourite subjects of Carpentier himself. He wrote a study of Music in Cuba (1946).

There are other small details which tie the two parts of the story together. In Part I the ticket seller is fascinated by the erotic spectacle of the lady in the fox fur who has removed some undergarment because of the heat. And in Part III when the fugitive is hiding in the concert hall, he too notices the same woman who is a member of the audience.

Novel or novella?

The Chase is sometimes referred to as a novel or a short novel, but in fact it has all the characteristics of the novella in terms of unity of character, place, time, action, and theme.

The whole narrative is concerned with just one character – the un-named fugitive – with the ticket seller and Estrella acting as very incidental characters of secondary importance.

In terms of place, the entire narrative unfolds in the city (of Havana) with no extraneous locations or shifts of scene. And it can be argued that the time or action are even more concentrated. Although Part II of the narrative recounts the background to the fugitive’s desperate life, the real events of the story begin with his abrupt dash to hide in the auditorium (Part I) and end shortly afterwards when the concert ends and he is shot dead. This is a time span of less than the performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony which is being played.

This leaves us with the question of the theme.

What is the theme of the text?

There is normally an expectation that the central character in a novella will be tragic or at least admirable, but the fugitive in The Chase does not seem to qualify for either of these categories. He has been a student of the humanities, but has drifted into violent political activism as a member of the Communist Party. This might still be regarded as heroic in the tyranny of General Batista’s Cuban dictatorship which forms the backdrop to the story, except for two further issues.

The fugitive goes on to betray his colleagues when threatened with torture. This too might be seen as an understandable human weakness, but he also has another guilty secret. He appears to be working as a double agent – because he believes he has the protection of the ‘Exalted Personage’ – presumably a member of the government dictatorship against which the rebels are fighting. From this source he is hoping to obtain an exit visa and money to escape.

When this avenue of relief is closed with the destruction of the Personage’s villa, his personal drama reaches its climax in the cafe when he spots two men who are going to kill him. He believes that these assassins are acting for the rebels, seeking revenge for his betrayal, but they turn out to be police, acting for the government. If there is a tragedy here therefore, it is perhaps the tragedy of a society under the tyranny of a dictatorship, and the lengths to which some of its citizens are driven.

The Chase – study resources

The Chase – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El Acoso – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Chase ) – at Amazon US – (text in English

El Acoso – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

The Chase – plot summary

Part I

In an un-named Latin-American city (Havana), a young music student is working as a ticket-seller in a concert hall, meanwhile reading a biography of Beethoven. When a fugitive enters the hall pursued by two men, he leaves a large banknote at the ticket office.

The fugitive hides in the audience, consumed by a terror-stricken panic that he will be discovered. He feels oppressed by the music, and invokes his religious faith to support himself.

The music student is with the prostitute Estrella, who complains of an ‘Inquisition’ by the authorities. When he offers her the banknote, it turns out to be worthless, so she throws him out. He thinks back to a childhood sweetheart and feels humiliated by his lack of worldly success, finally returning to the concert hall just before the performance ends.

Part II

The fugitive is hiding out in an old house with a belvedere, protected by an old woman who was once his nurse. He is waiting for details of an ‘Arrangement’.

He has been a student of architecture and also a member of the Communist Party. He is now disciplining himself for some task that awaits him. He is trying desperately to battle against hunger.

He endures four days without eating, and fantasises about eating wood and boiled leather. But he remains in hiding, behind a barricaded door.

He finds logical reasons for justifying his intense religious beliefs, and hears music coming from an adjacent building, then discovers that the old woman has died. He is fearful of going back into society and being recognised.

He attends the wake of the old woman, then goes back fearfully into the streets, making his way to the house of Estrella the prostitute.

He spends the night with Estrella, but feels slighted by her. She in her turn, and despite a certain pride in herself, feels degraded by her profession.

He gives instructions to Estrella to collect information from an important person on the other side of the city. But she returns telling him that the banknote he has given her is a fake. When an argument develops outside, the fugitive escapes by a rear exit.

The fugitive makes his way in the shadows towards a house of rendezvous. He has assassinated a politician with an exploding book, and has recently been in prison where he has confessed and betrayed his accomplices. He wants his government contact to provide him with an exit visa and some money.

He thinks back to his desperate actions as a revolutionary, during which time he has taken part in a tribunal which resulted in a vote to execute one of his comrades.

He has participated as an under-cover agent and committed acts of political violence that have left him feeling ashamed. Arriving at the house of his high office protector, he finds it in ruins.

He has also been part of an assassination squad and graduated in the ‘bureaucracy of terror’. But after the exploding book incident claimed its two victims he has been arrested and threatened with torture – at which point he has capitulated and betrayed his colleagues.

He finds refuge in a church where a marriage is taking place, and hopes to find spiritual comfort by confessing his sins to a priest. But when the ceremony is over, the parish priest turns him out and tells him to come back next day.

Trying to return to the funeral wake as his only place of refuge, he is intercepted by two rabid student fans of violence. Then, as a storm begins, he spots two men with guns watching him, and narrowly escapes them into the concert hall.

Part III

He cowers in the hall, thinking that his former colleagues are waiting for him outside, ready to execute him for his betrayals. He finally decides that the safest thing will be to stay behind, hiding in the hall when the concert is over.

The student ticket collector is in the act of closing up when two policemen stay on after the performance and shoot the fugitive where he is hiding.

Alejo Carpentier – other works

The Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
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The Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
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Alejo Carpentier weblinks

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Common Reader first series

October 12, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series is a famous collection of essays by Virginia Woolf that explore the rich history of literature and English writing from the classical period to what was the present day of 1925 when the book was first published. The essays had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Atheneum, the Nation, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, and in America in the Dial, and the New Republic. The publication proved so successful that it led to another collection (second series) in 1932.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

Virginia Woolf had been writing essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews ever since her earliest work had appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1905, and this present compilation reflects both the depth and the wide range of her interests and her literary education. Although she never had what we would now call formal schooling, she had educated herself, via access to the private library of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, who was an eminent Victorian man of letters and the first general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had read the classics, the Elizabethans, novelists of the eighteenth century onwards, and was up to date with contemporary fiction. It perhaps helped that Thomas Hardy and Henry James were friends of the family.

She begins with a formidable piece on the Paston Letters and Chaucer, vividly re-imagining medieval English history in a manner she was later to make famous in her own novel of fictional biography Orlando (1927). ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is not just an appreciation of classical literature, it is also a discussion of what distinguishes it from and defines the essence of post-Renaissance literature that is so much closer to us.

The essays are arranged in chronological order of subject – from medieval literature to Joseph Conrad – but there is no reason why they should be read in this order. They were written at widely different times and for a variety of audiences. But it has to be said that the spirit that pervades them all is remarkably consistent. Her writing is poised, fluent, humane, and distinctly non-academic. She takes her definition of the common reader from Samuel Johnson:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he has come by, some kind of whole— a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

A review of Hakluyt’s Voyages is the springboard for reflections on exploration which become an analysis of Elizabethan prose styles. And she is not over-reverential. She explains cogently why many minor Elizabethan plays are so bad and even boring – because their authors were operating in a different cultural medium than obtains in the modern world.

She repeatedly compares the way ‘we’ see things (writing in the early twentieth century) to the way writers have seen them in the past. Montaigne revelling in the diversity and contradictions of life; John Evelyn calmly recording the events in a torture chamber. She throws off perceptive remarks on nearly every page: ‘the late plays of Shakespeare … are better read than seen’ and ‘the second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces’.

Sometimes she takes creative liberties. An essay written to commemorate two-hundred years since the publication of Robinson Crusoe becomes a detailed examination of Moll Flanders and Defoe’s other novels, all of which she sees as the foundation of modern realism.

Similarly, a volume of Jane Austen’s juvenilia is the occasion for an appreciation in which she shows how a great novelist’s technique actually works:

she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat.

Woolf makes a spirited explanation of the essence of Russian literature – which had only recently been made available in English at the time of her writing. There is discussion of the apparently inconclusive endings of Chekhov’s stories; the restless and chaotic soul-searching of Dostoyevski; and the sharp-eyed observations of Tolstoy.

There is even an essay about the nature of essays themselves, which she insists should not be heavy, didactic, or composed of polysyllabic prose. This is a piece from which Max Beerbohm emerges triumphant: ‘the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style’.

A tribute to Joseph Conrad plays interestingly with the relationship between Conrad the author and Marlowe his regular first person narrator and it ends with the provocative notion that it is the early novels – Youth, Lord Jim, and Typhoon – that will survive as Conrad’s highest achievements, whilst the later works – Chance, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes – will be seen as curiosities. It might have seemed so in 1924 when this essays was written, but my guess is that most serious (if not common) readers of Conrad will today think just the opposite.

But she anticipates such arguments – acknowledging that each generation will make its own review of the literature handed down to it – and since this collection is almost a hundred years old, still in print, and still being discussed, we have every reason to say that it has assumed the status of a classic.

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Volume 1, London: Vintage Classics, 2003, pp.288, ISBN: 009944366X

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader first series – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader first series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

The Common Reader
The Pastons and Chaucer
On not knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison
Lives of the Obscure–
1. Taylors and Edgeworths
2. Laetitia Pilkington
Jane Austen
Modern Fiction
“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”
George Eliot
The Russian Point of View
Outlines–
1. Miss Mitford
2. Dr. Bentley
3. Lady Dorothy Nevill
4. Archbishop Thomson
The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How it strikes a Contemporary

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Common Reader second series

December 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series (1935) is a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, the second to be published in her own lifetime. It followed on the success of The Common Reader first series which was published in 1925. Sales of the first volume had surprised both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard working together at their own enterprise, The Hogarth Press.

first edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell
The amazing thing is that whilst Woolf was producing all her great novels of the English modernist period, she was also a very productive journalist. This collection includes critical essays, journalism, and book reviews that had previously appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro.

The Common Reader second series – commentary

Following the pattern established in The Common Reader first series the essays are arranged in chronological order by subject. The volume begins with a study of Elizabethan writers and ends with an appreciation of Thomas Hardy – who was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen. This collection also includes the much-quoted essay “How Should One Read a Book?” in which Woolf offers some profound reflections on the relationship between reader and text. In the first instance her advice appears deceptively simple:

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”.

But it turns out that these instincts and this reason are to be based on a very wide reading experience indeed – of novels, biography, history, and poetry. And the experience itself will be multi-layered, for each book must be compared with others of the same kind, and will finally be judged against the best of its kind. And this is not offered in any spirit of elitism – because she fully realises that much of what we consume as readers will be fairly trivial:

The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of … fleeting moments in the lives of man, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish reading, you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder.

At their best these essays combine a high degree of erudition with the enthusiasm of a writer who is a great lover of literature but who also wants her opinions to be read. Her study of John Donne is part biography, part practical analysis and also an explanation of why he is so ‘modern’ after three hundred years. She explains the relationship between the subjects of his poems and the audience or individual patrons for whom he was writing. She also traces his acceptance of contradictions in himself and life in general which makes him appeal to modern sensibilities.

An essay written on the occasion of the death of Thomas Hardy in 1928 is a survey of his entire work as a novelist. It reveals her deep appreciation of his talent as a creator of powerful human dramas, a countryman and self-taught scholar with poetry at his fingertips, Even though Hardy was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s family she is not at all sycophantic in her judgements. She sees flaws in Jude the Obscure (overly pessimistic) and is even critical of his style.

Her article on Robinson Crusoe is not only an appreciation of the novel in the context of a history of the English novel, but also a meditation on fiction and biography. She takes a topic, brings a great deal of literary erudition to bear upon it, but then relates the topic to a much larger cultural context – as well as generating sparkly digressions that show her to be a passionate reader herself.

The range of her interests is quite breathtaking. There are articles on Swift, on Laurence Sterne, Lord Chesterfield, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Gissing, and on George Meredith, who in her own lifetime had sunk from untouchable fame to a writer who nobody read any more. [Today his critical reputation is more or less extinct.]

It is certainly true that the pace and tone of the literary essay was significantly different one hundred years ago when these examples were composed. Writers even as well informed and technically skilful as Woolf were given license to ramble and generalise in a manner that would not generally be permitted today. But in the essay form she demonstrates a profound cultural intelligence to which the occasional flights of fancy are an acceptable and very stylish bonus extra.

The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader second series, London: Mariner Books, 2003, pp.336, ISBN: 0156028166

The Common Reader second series – contents

The Strange Elizabethans
Donne After Three Centuries
“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”
“Robinson Crusoe”
Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”
Swift’s “Journal to Stella”
The “Sentimental Journey”
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son
Two Parsons
1. James Woodforde
2. The Rev. John Skinner
Dr. Burney’s Evening Party
Jack Mytton
De Quincey’s Autobiography
Four Figures
1. Cowper and Lady Austen
2. Beau Brummell
3. Mary Wollstonecraft
4. Dorothy Wordsworth
William Hazlitt
Geraldine and Jane
“Aurora Leigh”
The Niece of an Earl
George Gissing
The Novels of George Meredith
“I Am Christina Rossetti”
The Novels of Thomas Hardy
How Should One Read a Book?

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf

November 26, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all Woolf’s shorter fiction. She wrote many of these stories as experimental sketches or exercises in which she developed new techniques for prose fiction and the art of story-telling. The majority of the stories were written between 1917 and the early 1930s – a period which also saw the creation of her most famous modernist novels. The series is an on-going compilation and is shown here in alphabetical order. Dates given are for first publication.

A Haunted House — (1921)
A Simple Melody — (1925)
A Summing Up — (1944)
An Unwritten Novel — (1920)
Ancestors — (1923)
Happiness — (1925)
In the Orchard — (1923)
Kew Gardens — (1917)
Moments of Being — (1925)
Monday or Tuesday — (1921)
Phyllis and Rosamond — (1906)
Solid Objects — (1920)
Sympathy — (1919)
The Evening Party — (1920)
The Introduction — (1925)
The Lady in the Looking-Glass — (1929)
The Legacy — (1940)
The Man who Loved his Kind — (1944)
The Mark on the Wall — (1917)
The Mysterious Case of Miss V — (1906)
The New Dress — (1927)
The Shooting Party — (1938)
The String Quartet — (1921)
The Symbol — (1930s)
The Watering Place — (1941)
Together and Apart — (1944)

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bellarosa Connection – critical comment

The Bellarosa Connection – study resources

The Bellarosa Connection – plot summary

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary – critical commentary

The Canary – study resources

The Canary – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

Kafka’s last major work

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Chase – critical commentary

The Chase – study resources

The Chase – plot summary

Alejo Carpentier – other works

Alejo Carpentier weblinks

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series – commentary

The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series – contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – web links

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