Blogging Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s normal wake-up time was 9 a.m., according to this graphic included in a post on Brain Pickings that discusses the literary productivity of 37 famous authors.

In another Brain Pickings post, author Maria Popova takes on the age-old battle of the brows — highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow and broadbrow. In it, Popova discusses the criticism Woolf received from English novelist and critic J. B. Priestley for being a highbrow and the words she lobbed back in response.

Woolf’s response started out as an unsent letter to New Statesman and ended up as an essay titled “Middlebrow.” It was published in 1942 in the posthumous collection The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, a volume that contains 26 essays written over a period of 20 years. “Craftsmanship,” the essay Woolf broadcast on BBC Radio on 29 April 1937, is also included in the volume.