Virginia Woolf [antikvár]

Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf can delight those who delight in language or metaphor. She can bring cheer to any who love wry humor, clean pattern, or private traps set by a writer to catch life. Her subjects are sometimes thought to be epitomized in the first sentence of her second novel: ". . . In common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea." But the second sentence answers detractors: "Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied . . ." To say the worst, her characters pour out steeped emotion and sensibility, not tea. In the power of making images, she told her diary, she was to Shakespeare as the housekeeper was to her. She did not wish to waste a keen mind in making rational statements that any educated fool could make. The physical beauty of Adeline Virginia Stephen, as a girl and long after her marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912, came from the delicate but continuous line of her profile. She lived among persons who acknowledged their own intellectual superiority and helped to direct the national mind. Sir Leslie Stephen, her father, entertained the major living writers later included in the Dictionary of National Biography, of which he was the first editor. It meant something to him that in 1882 Arnold published Irish Essays, Darwin died, and Virginia was born. An agnostic and a liberal, he opened his library to his daughters. After his death in 1904, Virginia, her sister Vanessa (an accomplished painter who married the critic Clive Bell) and their two brothers moved to the house in Gordon Square [3]