Among those who plow through Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters, it is common knowledge that she used her pen to wittily criticize members of her set as well as other writers of her time.
She was not alone in this practice. And now a new book, edited by Gary Dexter and just out this month, documents what she and other famous writers said about each other’s work.
Poison Pens, Literary Invective from Amis to Zola is the book, and it is garnering positive reviews.
Woolf’s words about D.H. Lawrence are one of the featured criticisms. In the book, the following remark about Lawrence is featured: “English has one million words: Why confine yourself to six?”
Dexter is the writer of a long-running column for the Sunday Telegraph.
I have to thank her — and Google news — for the reminder. The novel had slipped from my mind after I posted about it in August. Now it’s out in print and back at the top of my must-read list.
I only found two reviews of the novel, and those were mixed.
The L.A. Times called it “intriguing” and said it “highlights not only Barron’s ability to alchemize historical fact into fiction but also her ability to present absorbing details of Sissinghurst’s gardens, history and the surrounding Kentish countryside. But reviewer Paula A. Woods also complained that the plot and characters are formulaic.
Januarymagazine’s mini-review says the novel is “a clever tapestry of past and present.”
I just finished reading something wild and wicked, wonderful and Woolfian. Knowing that I’m always looking for fiction with Woolf references, Beth Hicks (an Australian friend and Woolfophile) told me about Toby Litt’s Finding Myself, a 2003 novel about a novelist who is writing a novel called From the Lighthouse.
Victoria plans to invite a group of acquaintances to spend a month together, all expenses paid, during which she will observe them, with their consent, and write about them. This book is her manuscript, her “docu-novel,” with handwritten comments and deletions from her editor.
She finds a house on the Suffolk coast with not just a lighthouse, but “all the atmosphere one could desire. I kept expecting Virginia Woolf herself to waft round the corner, silk gloves in hand.”
She buys copies of To the Lighthouse for everyone to read for what she envisions as “an extended discussion of Virginia’s masterpiece, all secretly examining the parallels with our own relationships.” And she will, on their last evening, serve boeuf en daube.
She notes in her diary that if it comes out right, it will be “just the best beach book in the world, ever: naughty, gossipy—with just the right ratio of tittle to tattle. Virginia Woolf’s letters are all very well, but they don’t exactly make one throb, do they?”
Woolf is Victoria’s muse and is never far from her mind. When the guests decide to go to church, she is dismayed: “We’re meant to be the Bloomsbury set—who would never have been caught engaging in Anglicanism.”
Writing her notes by hand “seems more fitting to the spirit of Virginia” when necessitated by a computer malfunction. But from the start, the experiment fails to live up to Victoria’s expectations, and a hilarious romp ensues.
Once again, an international artist has found inspiration in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves.
This time, an art installation in Beirut, Lebanon, does the honors.
Thierry Kuntzel’s work, which is on display at the City Center Cinema Dome on the edge of downtown, is part of the Francophone Games.
Kuntzel’s installation, which is open until Oct. 28 from 5 – 9 p.m., references Woolf’s ground-breaking novel.
“’The Waves is a homage to Virginia Woolf, her writing, her invention of time, her personality – this life always on the edge of drowning (which was her real end), between terror and ecstasy,’” are the words Kuntzel includes in the display, according to a review in The Daily Star.
Other artists who have recently drawn on Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel for inspiration include:
Choreographer Zoe Reeve, a graduate student in South Africa, who incorporated its words into her dance production, “Outside + Beside Herself,” staged in July.
English director Katie Mitchell’s multi-media adaptation of the novel, which premiered in the United States in New York City, Nov. 14 through Nov. 22, 2008 and garnered rave reviews.
Princeton, the California band who appeared at Woolf and the City in June, has written and performed a song titled “The Waves.” It’s the group’s most frequently downloaded number from its “Bloomsbury” album.
