Posted in books, essays, tagged New books Virginia Woolf on Tuesday 25 October 2011| Leave a Comment »
On Fiction is billed as a unique collection of lesser known essays on reading and story telling. Included are essays articulating Woolf’s views on Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot.
According to the publisher, Wright’s new biography “sheds light on the life and writing of one of the 
Hesperus is also the publisher of A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy, a book I have at the top of my to-read pile. It’s right under To the River by Olivia Lang.
Posted in essays, Virginia Woolf, tagged Anne Fadiman, Virginia Woolf essays on Monday 18 July 2011| Leave a Comment »
I’d read a couple of her essays in Best American Essays collections and went looking for more. I wasn’t surprised to find that she’s a Woolf enthusiast. Her first collection, Ex Libris, is subtitled Confessions of a Common Reader—the homage makes her affinity pretty clear. She loves books and in these personal essays she writes about them lovingly, intimately, humorously. My favorite is the first one, “Marrying Libraries,” in which she talks about the true test of love and commitment: after five years of marriage, she and her husband decide to merge their books and bookshelves, their “mutually quarantined Melvilles.”
I identified with her in “Insert a Caret,” about compulsive proofreading, how misspellings and punctuation errors jump out at her from restaurant menus. In “Eternal Ink,” she writes about pens as muses and fall-guys, citing Woolf’s proclivity to do the same. (Woolf: “What am I going to say with a defective nib?”)
Essays, she says, “provide for the writer a chance to move into the sort of leisurely, slightly hedonistic mode that, in the 21st century, has become a luxury.” They are “pools of opportunity to stop, and sit, and slow down, and think.”
Fadiman claims Woolf as one of her two favorite essayists (the other is E.B. White). Woolf, along with Coleridge and Lamb, would be guests at her ideal dinner party. “Virginia and I would be the centre of attention,” she says.
Posted in books, essays, Stuart Clarke, tagged Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. 6, Virginia Woolf essay reviews on Friday 27 May 2011| Leave a Comment »
Publication of the hardcover volume means that all of Woolf’s essays are available as an entire collection for the first time.
A review of that volume is now posted on The Independent’s website. Written by Michèle Roberts, it describes the volume as “beautifully and expertly edited by Stuart N. Clarke” and praises the intelligence and diversity of this collection of essays.
The Scotsman reviewed the book more than a month ago. Reviewer Jane Shilling praised Woolf’s beautiful writing and her ability to write “tenderly about the humble, the overlooked, the unknown.”
The Irish Times published a review on April 2. In it, author Eve Patten focuses on Woolf’s honing of her essay writing technique.
Posted in books, essays, Virginia Woolf, tagged The Best American Essays 2009, Virginia Woolf essays on Monday 9 November 2009| 1 Comment »
I just treated myself to the new 2009 edition of The Best American Essays. I’m often left speechless at the incredible diversity of work as well as the brilliance, cleverness, wit and pathos of individual selections.
The first essay in the collection, “Taking a Reading” by Sue Allison, starts with, “A yard, a pace, a foot, a fathom. How beautiful the language of measurement is…,” and ends a mere page later, reiterating her point: “A ream is a lot of paper, sold and purchased blank. Written on, it’s a book.”
John Updike and Cynthia Ozick offer insightful pieces about writers. And Brian Doyle, in “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” speaks of the perfect essay as having an ending that provides “a shot of espresso hope.” Wow!
In her editorial introduction, Mary Oliver champions the form. In the essay, she says, “what we receive is not didactic, not even, sometimes, totally believable, but the soul-felt truth from the individual perspective of someone deft in the craft of expression. The essay is not the world of Middlemarch, of Mrs. Dalloway going out to buy the flowers—it is neither less nor more, but different.”
Her reference to Mrs. Dalloway struck me as an irony in that she’s using Woolf the novelist to talk about what the essay is not, and yet Woolf was such a prolific and masterful essayist herself. One only has to revisit “Street Haunting” or “On Re-Reading Novels,” to name just two that come to mind, to recognize that she takes her place among the greats from Montaigne and Samuel Johnson to E. B. White and Joan Didion.
Posted in books, essays, tagged Essays of Virginia Woolf, Stuart N. Clarke on Friday 26 June 2009| Leave a Comment »
