Book Review: Virginia Woolf: Essays on the Self
2017; Bridgewater State University; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1539-8706
AutoresMargarita Esther Sánchez Cuervo,
Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoVirginia Woolf: Essays on Self, Joanna Kavenna, 2014. Notting Hill Editions: London. 187 pages. Woolf's picture and Biography, Index, Kavenna's Introduction, Notes included. [pounds sterling]14.99, hardcover. Virginia Woolf: Essays on Self, by Joanna Kavenna, last printed collection of Virginia Woolf's essays. On this occasion, theme of book self which, as her author states in introduction, is central, in some way, to every that she has selected. Virginia Woolf's essays have been compiled both during her lifetime and more or less continuously after her death. She was witness to publication of The Common Reader. First Series (1925), and The Common Reader. Second Series (1932) by Hogarth Press. Several posthumous books of essays were compiled by Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf, also by Hogarth Press. They were The Death of Moth and Other Essays (1942), The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958). Her husband also responsible for publication of Collected Essays, 4 Volumes (1966-67). Subsequent publications of Woolf's essays have been made, bearing in mind several topics for which she more wellknown, like literature, feminism and women's writing. In this line, collections like On Women and Writing (1979), edited by Michelle Barrett; Selected Essays: Woman's Essays (1992), and Selected Essays: The Crowded Dance of Life (1993), edited by Rachel Bowlby; and Killing Angel in House: Seven Essays (1995), edited by Penguin Books, reflect these concerns. In a different vein, book The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life (2006), shows Woolf's love for London; and Selected Essays (Oxford's World Classics) (2009), edited by David Bradshaw, just another sample of some of her most famous texts. In addition to all these titles, The Essays of Virginia Woolf. VI Volumes (1987-2011), comprises all essays that Woolf wrote from 1904 until she died in 1941. This final edition by Andrew McNeillie, who responsible for first four volumes, and Stuart Clarke, editor of volumes 5 and 6, includes texts that had never been in book form before. In Essays on Self, Kavenna opposes our current interest in self with Woolf's and other Modernist writers' preoccupation with subjective self. With this topic in mind, Kavenna chooses a more or less known group of essays. For example, one of Woolf's visions of self analysed in Modern Fiction, famous essay that reflects her ideas about modernist literature and dichotomy that she introduces between spiritualist and materialist writers. Woolf blames method that used in creative practice of her time and that impedes writers their inner wish to venture beyond and into the dark places of psychology. Kavenna then focuses on another equally well-known essay, Character in Fiction. This text was first read to Cambridge Heretics in 1924 and on 30 October 1924 it was published by Hogarth Press as we know it today, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. Likewise, author of collection equals subjective quality that absent in materialist writers with self that allows a novelist to create characters. With this purpose, she considers that male and female novelists try to reflect convincing characters such as those devised by Arnold Bennett. In this author's opinion, only real characters may survive, but these characters do not represent, in Woolf's opinion, the spirit we live by, life itself. Kavenna links writer's attempt to show self with reader's subsequent effort to pursue it and become him, that is, writer himself, in How Should One Read a Book. Likewise, in A Letter to a Young Poet, Woolf states that bad poetry the result of forgetting oneself. However, poets must also write about other people when they have finished writing about self, or so she recommends to young poet to whom she writes to in this essay. …
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