Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections - Hardcover

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9780877454946: Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877454949 ISBN 13: 9780877454946

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1999

A coherent view of so extraordinarily chameleon a temperament and talent as Virginia Woolf's is, of course, almost impossible. If Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse needs 'fifty pairs of eyes' to take in a woman as simple as Mrs. Ramsay, even more pairs seem desirable for focusing on Virginia Woolf. The difficulty of a balanced viewpoint for some of her memoirists, a demanding enough task at the best of times, was compounded by the enthusiasm with which she sometimes donned a mask and by conversation whose notorious brilliance veered at moments towards the flamboyant, the wildly inaccurate, or the cruel. To penetrate this mask, Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections provides multifaceted perspectives on Woolf as observed and remembered by relatives, close friends, acquaintances, and fellow writers from Vanessa Bell, Arnold Bennett, and Edith Sitwell to Marguerite Yourcenar, Rose Macaulay, and Stephen Spender. Gathered from widely scattered sources, the forty-one pieces collected here give an intimate and compelling portrait of a fascinating individual whom many consider one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Covering her famous lectures at Cambridge, her role in the Hogarth Press, and her presence in the literary and social world of her day as well as her roles as sister, wife, and friend, this varied collection sheds light on the public and private personalities of Virginia Woolf the subtle poetic novelist, the devoted friend, and the influential and successful publisher.

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About the Author:

J. H. Stape is Senior Research Fellow at St Mary's University, Twickenham, London. He has taught at universities in Canada, France and Asia. The author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has edited several of Conrad's texts for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad series and is co-editor of Conrad's Collected Letters (volumes seven and nine). He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf.

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