English literature Archives - Page 42 of 44

Vile Bodies

March 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Vile Bodies (1930) was Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, published as a follow-up to the success of his first – Decline and Fall (1928). It uses the same formula of presenting a farcical and deeply satirical portrait of the 1920s and the Wild Young Things who became the upper-class celebrities of the decade. It also features other aspects of modern society which help to fuel the culture of fashionable excess – tabloid journalism, artificially cultivated publicity, and the cinema.

first edition – design by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies – commentary

Narrative presentation

The most interesting thing about the narrative is the manner in which so much of it is presented via short and very rapidly changing scenes. The effect is almost like the abrupt editing of cinema film to produce ‘jump cuts’ – and probably reflects the influence of moving pictures at that time. It is a style perfectly suited to the frivolous and erratic behaviour of the characters in the story.

Waugh was setting out to capture the irresponsible and anarchic behaviour amongst the youthful offspring of a privileged elite in the 1920s – which in America was labelled ‘the Jazz Age’. This featured mis-spent wealth, reckless self-indulgence, warped ambitions, greed, and sexual libertinism – all fuelled on a heady mixture of alcohol and (some) drugs. It was also a culture in which Evelyn Waugh had plenty of first hand experience.

Indeed, crass and unprofessional film production becomes one of the objects of satire towards the end of the novel. And Waugh takes great delight in presenting the two people who own the production company (Mr Isaacs and Colonel Blount) as interested in little else except trying to get rid of what is obviously a financial loss-maker by selling the business on to somebody else.

Waugh treats newspaper journalism in a similar fashion – concentrating on the frivolous and inconsequential parts of popular newspaper gossip columns. The upper-class journalists merely record the names of so-called celebrities who have been ‘seen’ at fashionable events in society. And if they are stuck for news, they invent it. When Adam becomes ‘Mr Chatterbox’ on the Daily Excess, the paper is being sued by various celebrities for libel, and who therefore cannot be mentioned. (This is almost one hundred years before the Leveson Enquiry into phone hacking and the ethics of the British press.)

Adam spices up the flagging column with a series of ‘Notable Invalids’ – well known people who are deaf, bald, disabled, one-legged, and certified insane. When he has exhausted this line of entertainment, he begins to invent celebrities who do not actually exist. He creates the society beauty Imogen Quest and fills his column with her spectacular successes and designer clothes. Eventually she becomes so popular that the editor of The Daily Excess Lord Monomark wants to meet her. Adam is forced to despatch the Quest family to Jamaica the same day.

Waugh had worked as a journalist for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born owner of the Daily Express – and he used the joke about journalists inventing what we now call ‘fake news’ in his later novel Scoop (1938).

The ending

There are two curious features in the conclusion of the novel. The first is the fact that all the farcical goings-on of the plot are brought to an abrupt stop by the declaration of war. For a book published in 1930, the reader is forced to wonder ‘What war is that?’ The text does does not refer to the war of 1914-18, and the Second World War was still a decade away. It turns out to be an imaginary war, which does not sit easily with the essentially realistic mise en scene of the remainder of the novel.

The antics of the Bright Young Things might be comically exaggerated, but they are set in a credible world of London and the home counties – of Mayfair, Shepherd’s Market, Fitzrovia, and Manchester Races. But a war which had not taken place is a different fictional – and moral – universe altogether.

The second curiosity is the abrupt shift in tone – from frivolous satire to an almost apocalyptic vision of battleground Europe – largely constructed of images derived from the trench warfare of 1914-1918. It has often been remarked that Evelyn Waugh’s rather painful divorce from his first wife (who was also called Evelyn) occurred during the composition of Vile Bodies. This may be a reasonable biographical explanation for the sudden change of mood, but it does not repair the damage done to the novel’s structural coherence.

Vile Bodies – study resources

Vile Bodies – Penguin – Amazon UK

Vile Bodies – Penguin – Amazon US

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Vile Bodies – plot summary

Returning from France, Adam Fenwick-Symes has the manuscript of his autobiography seized and burnt by the border customs officers. His publishers give him a new contract, but with crippling conditions. He cancels his engagement to Nina Blount, but then wins a thousand pounds in a hotel bar, so he renews the engagement.

He puts the money on a horse racing bet with a ‘Major’ who promptly disappears with the money. Adam goes to a fancy dress party where he meets Nina. They ‘go on’ afterwards to continue their revelries, staying with a girl who turns out to be the Prime Minister’s youngest daughter. The party-goers at Number 10 Downing Street are all reported in the morning newspapers.

Nina suggests that Adam ask her father for money to enable them to get married. Adam travels out beyond Aylesbury where the absent-minded Colonel Blount gives him an elaborate lunch and a cheque for one thousand pounds. Adam and Nina drive out and stay overnight at a pub in Arundel. In the morning, Nina point out that the cheque has been signed with the name ‘Charlie Chaplin’.

Gossip journalist Simon Balcairn wants to get into Margot Metroland’s party, but she refuses to admit him. Instead, he gets horsewhipped by the angry father of a girl he has written about. Lady Metroland gives her party, where she tries to recruit young girls for her nightclubs in South-America. Balcairn gatecrashes the party disguised in a false beard, but he is found out and expelled. He files completely invented stories about the guests to his newspaper, then commits suicide.

Adam replaces Balcairn as Mr. Chatterbox on the Daily Excess. He writes about famous people who are disabled, and then begins to invent ficticious celebrities. He meets ‘Ginger’ Littlejohn at Manchester Races and puffs him as a rich colonial in his column. They go to a party held in a tethered hot air balloon and then go on to a dingy night club. There are lots of complaints in society about the reckless behaviour of the Younger Generation.

Adam goes off to see Colonel Blount again. A cheap historical film is being shot at the house. Blount deliberately misunderstands Adam again, and thereby avoids giving him any money. Adam is fired from his job on the paper.

Adam and friends drive out to see some motor races. They stay at a boarding house and leave without paying. Amidst much confusion at the race, Adam meets the drunk Major, who claims he has got Adam’s winnings – at odds of thirty-five to one. The Major borrows money from him then disappears again. Miss Runcible drives a racing car whilst drunk, crashes it, and is taken to a nursing home.

Next day Nina announces that she is going to marry Ginger. The Young Things meet at the nursing home where Agatha Runcible is recovering. A party starts up in her room. When Nina has dinner with Adam, it makes Ginger jealous – so Adam offers to sell Nina to Ginger for £100. Agatha dies.

Nina returns from her honeymoon and Ginger is recalled to his regiment. She takes Adam to her father’s house for Christmas. Colonel Blount shows boring extracts from his film at the vicar’s house and causes an electrical power failure. He tries to sell the film company to Adam. Suddenly, war is declared.

During the war Nina returns to Ginger. As a soldier Adam is fighting in France. He meets the drunken Major. They share confiscated Champagne with one of Lady Metroland’s nightclub hostess girls, who has become a camp follower.

Vile Bodies – principal characters

Adam Fenwick-Symes	a young would-be writer and journalist
Nina Blount	Adam’s fiancee, a spoilt and frivolous young woman
Colonel Blount	Nina’s father, a confused and confusing country gent
Lottie Crump	the dipsomaniac landlady of Shepheard’s Hotel
The Drunken Major	a confidence trickster and n’er do well
Ginger Littlejohn	a friend of Adam’s and rival for Nina
Simon Balcairn	an aggressive young journalist who commits suicide
The Honourable Agatha Runcible	a drunken and raffish young woman who kills herself in a racing car
Mrs Melrose Ape	an American evangelist with a troupe of girl followers
Lady Metroland	(a recurrent figure in Waugh’s novels)
Mr Isaacs	owner of The Wonderfilm Company

More on Evelyn Waugh
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Virginia Woolf and Cubism

December 28, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the development of literary and visual modernism

Virginia Woolf and Cubism might seem at first a rather odd conjunction, but in fact her literary experimentation was taking place at exactly the same time as the pioneering movement in modern visual art, and it had very similar objectives. Picasso’s great breakthrough masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, and the development of his cubist works along with those of Georges Braque were created from 1910 onwards into the 1920s. This is the same period during which Woolf established herself as one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

Picasso said ‘I paint forms as I think of them, not as I see them’ which resulted in objects and sitters portrayed in a fragmented manner, from a number of different perspectives, in a series of overlapping planes – all of which the viewer is invited to recompose mentally to form a three-dimensional image, rendered on a two dimensional surface (though there were also a few cubist sculptures).

Virginia Woolf composed in a similar fashion by analysing her subject and reconstructing it from the fragments by which it was perceived, often overlapping, and in particular from a mixture of time periods which combine the fictional present with the past – often within the same sentence of her narrative.

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?

Mrs Dalloway is walking in Westminster and the first world war is over, but her appreciation of the fresh morning in June evokes memories of her youth at Bourton and the man who was in love with her, who failed to marry her, but who she will meet later on in the day.

Woolf like her exact contemporary James Joyce, sought to represent human consciousness not as a linear and well-organised set of reflections on distinct topics, but as a vibrant and kaleidoscopic jumble of thoughts, often having little connection with each other. The artistry of her rendition was to provide the links between them via the selection and arrangement of details – just as the painter chooses the fragments of an object which the viewer reassembles into the object as a whole.

Woolf’s cubism is a shifting narrative viewpoint – flashes of a person’s character as seen by other people, of shifting periods of time, and changing locations and characters, the connections between which are not explicitly revealed. The result is a narrative often described as a mosaic of fragments – which is precisely the effect for which Woolf was striving.

The similarities between a literary technique and its equivalent in painting are not at all accidental. Woolf was surrounded by painters – from her sister Vanessa Bell, to Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, and most importantly the painter and art theorist Roger Fry, whose biographer she became. It was Fry who organised the important exhibition of modern post-Impressionist painters at the New Grafton Galleries in 1910, at which Virginia Woolf famously said that ‘human character changed’.

In her study of this subject Sarah Latham Phillips offers a detailed reading of Jacob’s Room in the light of these ideas, then of Mrs Dalloway and some of the experimental short stories Woolf produced between 1917 and 1932. She makes a reasonable case for the mould-breaking story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1918) having been influenced by her sister Vanessa’s cubist painting The Conversation (which is reproduced here in full colour).

She also sees similarities between Woolf and cubist painters in their selection of everyday objects from the world around them as the raw materials of their art. For the painters, the newspaper, the glass and wine carafe on a bistro table; for Woolf the hustle and bustle of the London streets, or their exact opposite – the silent ruminations of a woman sitting in an empty room, reflecting upon ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

This pamphlet-sized publication comes from the Bloomsbury Heritage series of essays and monographs published by Cecil Woolf in London. These are scholarly productions which range over neglected or hitherto undiscovered topics in Bloomsbury culture – such as unpublished manuscripts, ceramics, gardens, bookbinding, personal reminiscences, painting, houses, and even anti-Semitism. The publisher Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and his publications do the Bloomsbury tradition honour.

Sarah Latham Phillips, Virginia Woolf as a ‘Cubist Writer’, London: Cecil Woolf, 2012, pp.43, ISBN 978-1-907286-29-2

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

Virginia Woolf criticism

April 24, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Virginia Woolf criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Virginia Woolf and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Frances Spalding’s illustrated study Virginia Woolf: Art, Life, and Vision for one penny.

Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis – E. Abel, University of Chicago Press, 1992. A reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf’s novels and essays.

Virginia Woolf: A Study of her Novels – T.E. Apter, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Bloomsbury – Quentin Bell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

Bloomsbury Recalled – Quentin Bell, Columbia University, 1996. Biographical sketches of all the Bloomsbury principals, including Quentin Bell’s aunt, Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf: a Biography – Quentin Bell, London: Pimlico, 1996. This prize-winning biography describes Virginia Woolf’s family and childhood; her earliest writings; the formation of the Bloomsbury Group; her marriage to Leonard Woolf; her mental breakdown of the years 1912-15; and the origins and growth of the Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist – Joan Bennett, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Virginia Woolf as Feminist – Naomi Black, Cornell University Press, 2003. An examination of Woolf’s feminist connections and writings, including her public letters and her connections with political organisations.

Virginia Woolf (Longman Critical Readers) – Rachel Bowlby, London: Routledge, 1992. An anthology of articles that conjures up the enormous richness and variety of recent work that returns to Woolf not so much for final answers as for insights into questions about writing, literary traditions and the differences of the sexes

Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf –
Rachel Bowlby, Edinburgh University Press, 1997. A collection of essays which look at Woolf in a number of new frames – as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; and as a writer on love.

Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works – Julia Briggs, London: Virago, 1994. A collection of up-to-date essays on Virginia Woolf’s novels, polemical writings, essays and short stories, which place each work in its historical and literary context.

Virginia Woolf’s Women – Vanessa Curtis, The History Press, 2007. This biography concentrates exclusively on Woolf’s close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life.

Virginia Woolf – David Daiches, Editions Poetry, 1945.

Virginia Woolf and the Visible World – Emily Dalgarno, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines how Woolf’s writing engages with visible and non-visible realms of experience, and draws on ideas from the diverse fields of psychoanalytic theory, classical Greek tragedy, astronomy, photography and photojournalism.

Virginia Woolf And Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy – Jane Dunn, London: Virago, 2001. A study of the deep and close relationship between two sisters, the influence they exerted over each others’ lives, their competitiveness, the fierce love they had for each other, and also their intense rivalry.

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading – Avrom Fleishman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. A work of formalist criticism which offers a thorough, incisive, and genuinely original analysis of Virginia Woolf’s major novels.

Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity – Ralph Freedman, , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf – Jane Goldman, Cambridge University Press, 2001. A revisionary, feminist reading of Woolf’s work, focusing on her engagement with the artistic theories of her time, and tracing the feminist implication of her aesthetics by reclaiming for the everyday world of history and politics what seem to be private mystical moments.

Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life – Lyndall Gordon, London: Virago, 2006. A biographical study that rocks back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of ‘the infinite oddity of the human position’.

Virginia Woolf and her Works – Jean Guiguet, trans. Jean Stewart, London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

Virginia Woolf – Alexandra Harris, London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. A short, readable, illustrated biography and outline of Woolf’s major works.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’: a Study in Alienation – Jeremy Hawthorn, Sussex University Press, 1975.

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir – Winifred Holtby, London: Continuum, 2007. Holtby’s careful reading of Woolf’s work is set in the context of the debate between modernist and traditional writing in the 1920s and 1930s.

A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf – Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. This acclaimed bibliography, prepared with Leonard Woolf’s co-operation, has been greatly expanded since its first publication in 1957 and the revised editions of 1967 and 1980. The fourth revised edition is the result both of the explosion of new editions of existing books, and of the appearance of much previously unpublished material.

The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End – Mitchell A. Leaska, Littlehampton Book Services, 1979.

Granite and Rainbow: the hidden life of Virginia Woolf – Mitchell A. Leaska, London: Picador, 1998. Contains new and revealing material on Virginia Woolf’s relationships with her parents and the deeper story of how she sought to create harmony out of such profound divisions.

The Novels of Virginia Woolf – Hermione Lee, London: Routledge, 2010. A a much-needed introduction to Virginia Woolf’s nine novels, written in the hope of turning attention back from the life to the fictional work.

Virginia Woolf – Hermione Lee, London: Vintage, 1997. This study moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions – the impact of Woolf’s childhood, the cause and nature of her madness and suicide, the truth about her marriage, her feelings for women, plus her prejudices and obsessions.

Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage – Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (eds), London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975. A historical survey of reviews and literary comment tracing the development of Woolf’s critical reputation.

New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf -Jane Marcus, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981.

Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf – Herbert Marder, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved – Allen McLaurin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Discusses the influence of Samuel Butler on the philosophy and especially the aesthetics of Bloomsbury, and the relationships between the writings of Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry.

Virginia Woolf (Writers and Critics) – A.D. Moody, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963.

Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject – Makiko Minow Pinkney, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. This study shows that Woolf’s most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism. Rather, it can be best seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles of a patriarchal social order.

The Unknown Virginia Woolf – Roger Poole, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. This study uses the phenomenological concept of embodiment to address the concealed intentionality that lies behind apparently deviant behaviour. It shows how Woolf’s challenge to accepted conventions of communication, in both her life and work, is an appeal for meaning.

Virginia Woolf in Context – Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, Cambridge University Press, 2012. These essays highlight connections between Woolf and key cultural, political and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender and class and the bearings of colonialism.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. New second edition of compendium which includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere

Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf – Phyllis Rose, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations – Anna Snaith, London: Palgrave Schol, 2003. This study offers a fresh understanding of Woolf’s feminism, her narrative techniques, her attitudes to publication, and her role in public debate.

Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies – Anna Snaith, London: Palgrave Schol, 2006. A guide to the ever-expanding body of criticism, written for both researchers and teachers of Woolf. It includes chapters on feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and biographical criticism.

Virginia Woolf: Art, Life, and Vision – Frances Spalding, National Portrait Gallery, 2014. Charming study illustrated with over a hundred works from public and private collections, documentary photographs, and extracts from her writings, this book catches Woolf’s appearance and that of the world around her.

The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf – N.C. Thakur, London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective – Eric Warner (ed), London: Macmillan, 1984.

Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist – Jane Wheare, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Concerns itself with Virginia Woolf’s artistry in The Voyage Out, Night and Day and The Years, where Woolf exploited and developed the realist model, finding in it the most appropriate vehicle through which to put across obliquely her own ideas about women and society.

Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context) – Michael H. Whitworth, Oxford University Press, 2009. This book includes a biography and chronology of Virginia Woolf’s life and times, historical and social background, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.

Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism – Alice Wood, London: Bloomsbury, 2015. A study that scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript, and proof documents within their historical contexts to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf’s cultural analysis during 1931-1941.

Virginia Woolf – E.H. Wright, London: Hesperus, 2011. A brief critical biography structured by childhood, Bloomsbury, 1920s, 1930s, and the final years.

Virginia Woolf and the Real World – Alex Zwerdling, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Discusses the influence of historical events, politics, and social movements on Woolf’s fiction, describes her ideology, and examines her major works.

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

Virginia Woolf selected essays

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

non-fiction meditations from a great novelist

Virginia Woolf selected essays is a completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which she thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic – on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life.

She writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments at the time. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups – reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art. She believes that the essay is an expression of the individual vision, but it is interesting to note how much of her own expression is couched in generalizations addressed in the first person plural – “We feel .. this and that”. I was reminded of George Orwell who whilst railing against generalizations and stereotypes was quite happy to fall into the trap of devising his own – as in ‘What is Englishness?’.

It’s also true to say that a lot of her argument is conducted in extended similes and metaphors. These give the essays unquestionable elegance, but they also allow her to hide behind these rhetorical flourishes. They often conceal a paucity of concrete examples to back up her arguments.

It’s a subtle and seductive method, because it draws any unwary reader into accepting unfounded generalizations without their realising it. Her judgments are sound whilst she is in the safe traditions of earlier centuries, but when it comes to her contemporaries – well. “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”

But her analysis of reading fiction (‘How Should One Read a Book?) is truly inspirational. In it, she argues for a totally sympathetic submersion in the writer’s work, followed by an equally severe judgment in which each work is held up for comparison against the finest of its kind.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it … It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

‘The New Biography’ is her thoughtful response to the subject, prompted by her reading of Harold Nicolson’s excellent and much under-rated Some People. She is astute enough to spot that he was onto something quite new (and what a shame it is that he didn’t produce some more writing of this kind).

A companion piece to this essay is ‘The Art of Biography’, a meditation on Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Elizabeth and Essex, arguing that the former is more successful because Strachey stayed within the confines of known facts, whereas in the latter he invented them, and turned the book into a work of artistic imagination – whereupon it failed by straying outside the ‘rules’ of biography.

‘On Being Ill’ is a reflection on the fact that illness, although a common human experience, is hardly present in literature as a subject. It was written before she read Marcel Proust, but it also dances around the subject of what literature we read (and cannot read) when ill.

‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ expresses her ambiguous political notions but her personal sympathy with a movement which her husband Leonard Woolf had enthusiastically supported, along with the Co-Operative movement. She knows perfectly well that she is privileged, a ‘lady’, but it doesn’t stop her entering imaginatively into the lives of Mrs Burrows from Edgebaston and Mrs Philips from Bacup – delegates to a conference she attended.

The collection ends with essays on contemporary life and culture. There’s an extraordinarily prescient reflection on the end of Empire prefigured by an account of a thunderstorm at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924; a meditation on the art of the cinema (1926) in which she correctly predicts that its time was yet to come; and a riveting account of flying over London in an aeroplane which perfectly demonstrates her imaginative skill – since she had never done any such thing.

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David Bradshaw (ed), Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.244, ISBN 0199212813

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

Virginia Woolf short stories

March 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, synopses, commentaries, and study resources

This is an ongoing collection of tutorials and study guides featuring the short stories of Virginia Woolf. The earliest story dates from 1906 and the latest from 1940, written for American Vogue magazine shortly before her death. They are presented here in alphabetical order of title. The list will be updated as new titles are added.

A Haunted House
A Simple Melody
A Summing Up
An Unwritten Novel
Ancestors
Happiness
In the Orchard
Kew Gardens
Moments of Being
Monday or Tuesday
Phyllis and Rosamond
Solid Objects
Sympathy
The Evening Party
The Introduction
The Lady in the Looking-Glass
The Legacy
The Man who Loved his Kind
The Mark on the Wall
The Mysterious Case of Miss V
The New Dress
The Shooting Party
The String Quartet
The Symbol
The Watering Place
Together and Apart

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf’s works

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Writing app

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Virginia Woolf’s Women

July 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of major figures in her life

Virginia Woolf’s Women is a study of the principal females in Virginia Woolf’s life and the influences they may have had in shaping her views of the world. It begins naturally enough in her early home life. Vanessa Curtis argues that Virginia Woolf inherited suffering, illness, and self-deprecation from her grandmother Mia and her mother Julia Stephen whose saintly beauty was cut short by an early death when Woolf was only thirteen. In this environment she also had direct personal contact with the concept of ‘the angel of the house’ against which she was later to argue. Its author Coventry Patmore was a visitor to the house as a friend of her grandmother.

Julia Stephen

Following Julia’s death, Woolf’s older step-sister Stella Duckworth became a surrogate mother to the seven children of the Stephen family. But no sooner was she established in this role than two events snatched away her comforting presence – first her marriage to Jack Hills, and then immediately following the honeymoon, her sudden death.

Curtis traces echoes of these events in The Voyage Out and Night and Day and even the much later To the Lighthouse. Of course it is legitimate to see elements of biography expressed in the fiction – but it is not a legitimate practice to read back from fiction as a valid source of biographical information. More legitimately, Curtis attributes Woolf’s scepticism about the prospects of successful heterosexual love to this trio of family martyrs.

The next major figure is her elder sister Vanessa (Bell), who took over from Stella as head of the household. The two sisters had a very close relationship, yet one which occasionally spilled over into rivalry. Vanessa was a liberating factor in organising the family’s move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after their father’s death. She also remained closely alongside Virginia when she sank into periods of depression and near-madness.

The two sisters established weekend homes near each other in Rodmell and Charleston in East Sussex, and they shared a common circle of friends amongst the various members of the Bloomsbury Group. The roles of care-giver and invalid were only ever reversed on the occasion of Vanessa’s collapse when her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Even Bloomsbury enthusiasts might not recognise the importance in Woolf’s life of the next figure – Violet Dickinson – a six foot tall upper class woman (seventeen years older) who was a lifelong supporter and Woolf enthusiast. It was Dickinson who first introduced her to newspaper and magazine editors – which enabled her to establish herself as a reviewer and a journalist.

Curtis speculates about the exact nature of the relationship between the two women, her uncertainty reflected in the fact that she calls it Woolf’s “first emotional and physical love” whilst admitting that there is no evidence of any physical connection between them. Her summing up is probably more accurate – a ‘warm-up’ for the later relationship with Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf’s relationship with Ottoline Morrell does not reflect well on her in terms of sincerity, or moral integrity. Like many of the other artists and writers who accepted Morrell’s generous hospitality at Garsington Manor, she repaid it by scoffing and making fun of the hostess behind her back.

He relationship with Katherine Mansfield was of a different order. The two writers circled round each other, both of them aware that they were literary rivals, yet respectful of each other’s work. They chose similar topics to write about, and for a while even had similar literary styles. They shared a profound scepticism about heterosexual males, and both wrote cautious tales of Sapphic desire. Following Katherine Mansfield’s early death in 1923, Woolf expressed the wish that she had been closer to her rival.

Dora Carrington

A whole chapter on Dora Carrington fails to establish any significant influence on Woolf herself, despite uncovering many similarities between them as creative artists. The two women were simply rivals for the friendship of Lytton Strachey, to whom they were both attached – and Carrington won hands down on that attachment, for which she paid with her life.

Curtis has more success, understandably, with Vita Sackville-West. The history and nature of their affair is well known – an affair facilitated by the fact that neither of them had sexual relationships with their own husbands. There is a detailed tracing of the ups and downs of the emotional tensions between them, but the account ignores opportunities to consider any possible mutual influence as writers.

This is a loss, because at the time their relationship, Sackville-West was at the height of her fame as a writer, and she was actually published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But by way of compensation Curtis does acknowledge and discuss Vita’s significance as the inspiration for Orlando.

Virginia Woolf with Ethyl Smyth

The most extraordinary figure is saved for last. Ethyl Smyth was a pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer, who by the time she met Woolf was seventy-three years old, stone deaf, and sporting an enormous ear-trumpet. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the much younger writer, and although this feeling was only weakly reciprocated Curtis makes a reasonable case for her influence on Woolf’s work as a writer.

The first influences were Smyth’s radical feminism, her support for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and her struggles to find acceptance as a female creative artist in a musical world which was dominated by men (as it still is). Curtis points out that these topics, which Woolf discussed with Smyth, found their way directly into the bombshell polemic Three Guineas. And the other influence was that Woolf introduced musical notions of composition and form, particularly into her later works.

There are no surprise revelations in these studies: most of the information will be well known to Bloomsbury enthusiasts, and Woolf’s life has been worked over thoroughly by any number of biographists. But as a general introduction to the social and intellectual milieu of the period it’s an excellent piece of work, well illustrated, and supported by a full scale critical apparatus.

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Vanessa Curtis, Virginia Woolf’s Women, London: Robert Hale, 2002, pp.224, ISBN: B00KXX3TCU

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Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

May 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

Nabokov began writing shot stories as a young man in early 1920s Berlin, publishing them along with chess problems in Rul’, the emigre Russian newspaper established by his father. He continued to do so in the 1930s whilst establishing his reputation as a novelist, writing under the name Vladimir Sirin. Production slowed down when he emigrated to the USA, and then stopped. in 1950 as his academic work and his international fame as a novelist took up all his time. Nevertheless he published four volumes in all during his own lifetime, totalling fifty stories. Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories brings all those together in one volume and adds as a bonus thirteen extra tales that Nabokov didn’t think worthy of publishing in book form whilst he was alive. He listed these in a handwritten note as ‘Bottom of the Barrel’.

Nabokov used the short story as a writer’s laboratory, exploring fictional devices and strategies that he then deployed at greater length in his novels. Not that there is anything unfinished or tentative about the results: Almost all his stories are superbly shaped and polished, and the most successful of them rank amongst the greatest modern short stories.

It’s impossible to prove without seeing the original publications, but one can’t help but suspect that many of the stories were revised and re-polished for their first presentation. The whole Nabokov family was complicit in presenting its only wage earner’s work in the best possible light, and Nabokov used the services of both his wife and son as translators and literary assistants. [The recent publication of VN’s manuscript index cards for The Original of Laura demonstrates that the Olympian master was not above committing simple errors of spelling and grammar.]

Nabokov had an amazing range in the tone and subjects of his stories, even whilst retaining his own unmistakable prose style. The tales vary from lyrical evocations of childhood and prose poems which celebrate the surface textures of everyday life, through to narratives of black comedy and a taste for dramatic irony which treads a fine line between beauty and cruelty.

The Eye (almost a short novel, which strangely enough has not been included) is a masterpiece of narrative complexity and deception in which a first person narrator tries to convince us of his wit and popularity, does just the opposite, then resolves to kill himself half way through the story. How can this be? Nabokov contrives this narrative conundrum as another opportunity to show off his powers of subtlety and manipulation of point of view.

Spring in Fialta (which I think qualifies as a novella) is without doubt Nabokov’s most complex and successful achievement. The story of events is almost inconsequential. A narrator encounters an old lover and recalls his previous meetings with her. His memories of their apparently romantic past are wound together with his account of their latest episode in Fialta.

But the main focus of interest is the narrator’s reliability. He tells us one thing, but the facts as narrated suggest the opposite, even though they come to us from his account. Taken at face value, it’s just a romantic memoir: read more carefully, it’s a roccoco study in self-deception and narrative manipulation which might take several readings to fathom.

Nabokov continued his puzzle-making right to the end. One of his last short stories, The Vane Sisters is a tale in which the solution to a puzzle (a message left behind by someone who has died) is actually woven into the story itself. The narrator is unable to see the message, but provides enough information for the reader to do so. These are stories-cum-puzzles which as Nabokov himself claimed ‘can only be attempted once every thousand years’.

This is an excellent compilation of his whole oeuvre as a writer of short stories. It contains all Nabokov’s notes on the bibliographic history and full details of each story from their first publication, and it has an introductory essay by his son Dmitri which throws extra light on the collection as a whole.

Analysis of Nabokov’s 50+ Stories

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Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.333, ISBN: 0141183454

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Vladimir Nabokov criticism

April 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Vladimir Nabokov criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Nabokov and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Jayne Grayson’s Vladimir Nabokov – Illustrated life for one pound.

Nabokov’s Otherworld – Vladimir E. Alexadrov, Princeton University Press, 2014. This book shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ as synonyms.

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov – Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 2014. Reprint of a 1995 collection of articles and critical essays on Nabokov’s work, plus background reading to his life and suggestions for further reading.

Nabokov’s Dark Cinema – Alfred Appel, Oxford University Press, 1975.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. This is the first volume of the definitive biography.

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 1993. This is the second volume of the definitive biography.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. Boyd argues that the book has two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern – and more interesting than ever.

Stalking Nabokov – Brian Boyd, Columbia University Press, 2013. This collection features essays incorporating material gleaned from Nabokov’s archive as well as new discoveries and formulations.

Nabokov’s ADA: The Place of Consciousness – Brian Boyd, Cybereditions Corporation, 2002. Provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov’s metaphysics, and has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita (Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism) – Christine Clegg, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Examines the critical history of Lolita through a broad range of interpretations.

Nabokov’s Early Fiction : Patterns of Self and Other – Julian Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1992. This book traces the evolution of Vladimir Nabokov’s prose fiction from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. It focuses on a crucial subject: the relationship between self and other in its various forms (including character to character, character to author, author to reader).

Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives – Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999. This volume brings together the work of eleven of the world’s foremost Nabokov scholars, offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov’s personal beliefs and experiences and his art.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Julian W. Connolly (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2005. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.

Vladimir Nabokov (Writers & Their Work) – Neil Cornwell, Northcote House Publishers, 2008. A study that examines five of Nabokov’s major novels, plus his short stories and critical writings, situating his work against the ever-expanding mass of Nabokov scholarship.

Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire – Maurice Couturier, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. A study which argues that Nabokov presented a whole spectrum of sexual behaviours ranging from standard to perverse, either sterile like bestiality, sexual lethargy or sadism, or poetically creative, like homosexuality, nympholeptcy and incest.

Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Leyland De la Durantaye, Cornell University Press, 2010. A study focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), asking whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed.

Nabokov His Life in Art a Critical Narrative – Andrew Field, Little, Brown & Co, 1967. A combination of biography and exploration of other works by one of the first serious Nabokov scholars – though they later fell into disagreement.

V. N.: Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrew Field, TBS The Book Service, 1987. Andrew Field was one of the first major critics and biographers of Nabokov, although they later disagreed about his work and its interpretation.

Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels – Michael Glynn, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. This study seeks to counter the critical orthodoxy that conceives of Vladimir Nabokov as a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality.

Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated life – Jane Grayson, New York: Overlook, 2004. Short biography and introduction to his work, charmingly illustrated with period photos and sketches.

Freud and Nabokov – Geoffrey Green, University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius – Kurt Johnson, McGraw-Hill, 2002. This book, which is part biography, explores the worldwide crisis in biodiversity and the place of butterflies in Nabokov’s fiction.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play – Thomas Karshan, Oxford University Press, 2011. This study traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov’s aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov’s exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre.

Reading Vladimir Nabokov: ‘Lolita’ – John Lennard, Humanities ebooks, 2012. Provides convenient overviews of Nabokov’s life and of the novel (including both Kubrick’s and Lyne’s film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody.

Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel – Yuri Leving, Academic Studies Press, 2011. A new systematization of the main available data on Nabokov’s most complex Russian novel. From notes in Nabokov’s private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel’s first appearance in print, this work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses.

Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, the Original of Laura – Yuri Leving, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. A collection of essays which investigate the event of publication and reconstitute the book’s critical reception, reproducing a selection of some of the most salient reviews.

Speak, Nabokov – Michael Maar, Verso, 2010. Using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait.

Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice – Paul D. Morris, University of Toronto Press, 2011. Offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov’s Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. The study re-evaluates Nabokov s poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial lyric voice.

Vladimir Nabokov – Norman Page, London: Routledge, 2013. The Critical Heritage is a collection of reviews and essays that trace the history and development of Nabokov’s critical reputation.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook – Ellen Pifer, Oxford University Press, 2002. This casebook gathers together an interview with Nabokov as well as nine critical essays. The essays follow a progression focusing first on textual and thematic features and then proceeding to broader issues and cultural implications, including the novel’s relations to other works of literature and art and the movies adapted from it.

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrea Pitzer, Pegasus: Reprint edition, 2014. This book manages to be a number of things all at once – a biography, a primer on revolutionary Russian history, a critical survey of Nabokov’s novels, an act of literary detective work, and a cliffhanger narrative concerning a fateful dinner appointment between literary legends.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography – Ellendea Proffer (ed), Ardis, 1991.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute – Peter Quennell, Littlehampton Book Services, 1979.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – David Rampton, Cambridge University Press, 1984. This study assembles evidence from Nabokov’s own critical writings to show that the relationship of art to human life is central to Nabokov’s work. It pursues this argument through a close reading of novels from different stages of Nabokov’s career.

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita – Robert Roper, Bloomsbury USA, 2015. Roper mined fresh sources to bring detail to Nabokov’s American journeys, and he traces their significant influence on his work – on two-lane highways and in late-’40s motels and cafés – to understand Nabokov’s seductive familiarity with the American mundane.

Nabokov at Cornell – Gavriel Shapiro, Cornell University Press, 2001. Contains twenty-five chapters by leading experts on Nabokov, ranging widely from Nabokov’s poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family’s life in Ithaca by Nabokov’s son, Dmitri.

Nabokov’s Shakespeare – Samuel Shuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century.

Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again – Graham Vickers, Chicago Review Press, 2008. This study establishes who Lolita really was back in 1958, explores her predecessors of all stripes, and examines the multitude of movies, theatrical shows, literary spin-offs, artifacts, fashion, art, photography, and tabloid excesses that have distorted her identity and stolen her name.

Nabokov and the Art of Painting – Gerard de Vries and Donald Barton Johnson, Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Nabokov’s novels refer to over a hundred paintings, and show a brilliance of colours and light and dark are in a permanent dialogue with each other. Following the introduction describing the many associations Nabokov made between the literary and visual arts, several of his novels are discussed in detail.

Vladimir Nabokov (Critical Lives) – Barbara Wyllie, Reaktion Books, 2010. This book investigates the author’s poetry and prose in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur across the span of his works

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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Vladimir Nabokov more short stories

July 18, 2012 by Roy Johnson

a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

In 1995 Dmitri Nabokov (the novelist’s son and translator) was preparing a collection of his father’s complete short stories for publication by Alfred A.Knopf in New York. He was able to include a number of early works which had not been available previously in English translation. Vladimir Nabokov had considered the idea of issuing his earlier unpublished or uncollected stories during his own lifetime, and he left behind a list of seven tales to which he gave the tongue-in-cheek title Bottom of the Barrel. His son eventually added some items that had been forgotten or lost. In the end, twelve additional stories were prepared for addition to those already available. The additional stories are listed below.

The earliest of these stories were written whilst Nabokov was still a student at Cambridge University, where he completed his education whilst the rest of the Nabokov family went to live in Germany. Many of these tales were published in the Russian émigré newspaper Rul’ (The Rudder) which his father had established in 1919 in Berlin – the ‘first’ centre of Russian emigration (Paris being the second).

I have not tried to insert these extra stories chronologically into the fifty stories already analysed in this online collection, so as not to disrupt their sequence and the continuity of argument in what was written some years ago. Instead, they will appear on this page with links, and on their main home page in alphabetical order.

> The Wood Sprite (1921)

> Russian Spoken Here (1923)

> Sounds (1923)

> Wingstroke (1924)

> Gods (1924)

> The Seaport (1924)

> Revenge (1924)

> Benificence (1924)

> La Veneziana (1924)

> The Dragon (1924)

> The Fight (1925)

> The Razor (1926)

> Solus Rex (1940)

> Ultima Thule (1942)

> Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster (1950)

Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

Vladimir Nabokov web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Vladimir Nabokov web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylkvania State University Library.

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.
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Vile Bodies

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Vile Bodies – commentary

Vile Bodies – study resources

Vile Bodies – plot summary

Vile Bodies – principal characters

Virginia Woolf and Cubism

the development of literary and visual modernism

Virginia Woolf criticism

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Virginia Woolf selected essays

non-fiction meditations from a great novelist

Virginia Woolf short stories

tutorials, synopses, commentaries, and study resources

Virginia Woolf podcast

Study resources

Writing app

Further reading

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s Women

biographical studies of major figures in her life

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

Vladimir Nabokov criticism

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Vladimir Nabokov more short stories

a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov web links

a selection of web-based archives and resources

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