A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

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9780712673044: A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712673040 ISBN 13: 9780712673044

Publisher: Pimlico, 1997

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'A work of the highest imaginative genius, with powers of perception and description unexplaned in our time' Isaiah Berlin. Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide the thoughts and images uppermost in her mind. Whether describing public events or the joys and trials of domestic life, gossiping about her friends or wrestling with the difficulties of her art, gossiping about her friends or wrestling with the difficulties of her art, Virginia Woolf writes with unfailing grace, courage and honesty, and a lively wit which make her one of the most moving and entertaining diarists of this, or any, century. 'The moment I begin to read that light, clear, elegant prose I am seduced. (Virginia Woolf's)nephew Quentin Bell claims that the 30 volumes of Woolf's diary are a masterpiece. Anne Olivier Bell has reduced them to a single volume. I think it is still a masterpiece. ' A S Byatt, EVENING STANDARD

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Book Description:

On 1st January 1915 Virginia Woolf set herself to write a day-by-day diary; interrupted after a few weeks by illness, she began again in 1917, and from then until a few days before her death in 1941 she habitually used the diary to record her activities, observations and preoccupations. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language, now available for the first time in paperback in a one-volume abridged edition.

About the Author:

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

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