Results for 'virginia woolf'

1. Molly Masters

Bibliotherapy

A beautiful, thoughtful guide to finding your perfect next read, no matter what life’s throwing at you

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion

Explores Virginia Woolf’s engagements with a broad range of religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism.

1. Virginia , Woolf

To the Lighthouse

Set on an island off the Scottish coast, To the Lighthouse minutely examines the fleeting impressions of a large cast of family, friends, lovers, and hangers-on. Who can we be, Virginia Woolf invites us to ask, if no one can ever know our hearts-if they're unknowable even to ourselves? To the Lighthouse remains one of the most important Modernist novels, exquisitely composed by one of the most gifted writers of the Modernist movement.The opening section follows the passage of a day with a thwarted objective: to go to the nearby lighthouse. The concluding section revisits this expedition a decade later, when so much is irrevocably changed, as a chance to glimpse interpersonal understandings and connections. The novel provides a brilliant example of stream-of-consciousness writing, and raises questions that provoke us still: questions about whether children are the fullest realization of one's posterity, how women artists are regarded socially, and how money and status enable-or close off-networks, relationships, and the dreams we hold most dear.As masterful as its technique is, however, the lasting value of this novel for twenty-first-century readers may be its sharp representation of the emotional labor that people-particularly women-perform in order to manage the needs and expectations of others. Woolf wrote in an age when women's participation in society was tightly restricted by class norms and stultifying domesticity. Nearly a century later, scholars still have a great deal to say about Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and the tension between Mr. Ramsay and his son James.Woolf's fifth novel, and one of her most successful books both critically and commercially, To the Lighthouse was originally published in 1927, simultaneously in England and the United States. Due to a quirk in the management and correction of the proofs, according to scholar Hans Walter Gabler, the two editions were "not identical, since in a significant number of instances Virginia Woolf marked up the first proofs differently" for her two publishers. The Standard Ebooks edition is based primarily on the Hogarth UK edition.

1. Virginia , Woolf

Night and Day

Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book's deeper concerns are resolutely subversive. The main characters-a quartet of friends and would-be lovers-come together, pull apart, and struggle to reconcile socially-prescribed norms of love and marriage with their own beliefs and ambitions.

1. Virginia , Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Probably Virginia Woolf's best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction-whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades.This is a novel to read and cherish, if only to marvel at Woolf's linguistic acrobatics. Words and phrases swoop and soar like swallows. Woolf's sentences are magnificent: sinuous, whirling, impeccably detailed. As narrative perspective shifts from character to character-sometimes within a single sentence-readers come to understand the oh-so-permeable barrier between self and other. Through Clarissa we meet Septimus Warren Smith, his wife Rezia, and a cast of dozens more, all connected by the "leaden circles" of Big Ben marking the passage of every hour, by the pavements of Bloomsbury that lead everywhere and nowhere. Modernist London has never been portrayed more sublimely: replete with birdsong and flowers, resplendent in sunshine, youthful yet eternal-and even in the aftermath of war and pandemic, resilient.Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's attempt to express that which may be inexpressible. It offers a close examination of how difficult it is, even when our hearts are brimming, to say what we really feel; and it examines the damage we inflict through our reticence with words, our withholding of love. It is a novel of the soul, and a work of immense beauty.

1. Virginia , Woolf

Jacob's Room

In her third novel, Virginia Woolf departs from conventional narrative and explores storytelling through discordant scenes and impressions. Jacob Flanders' life story is told through the perspectives of the people in his life.In Jacob's Room, we see Jacob grow from a young boy to an ardent student of Classical culture while the world around him moves closer to an impending war. Jacob is described in flashes by the women around him-his mother and his lovers.