Essays on the Self E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In these essays Virginia Woolf explores the nature of the finite self and how individual experience might be relayed. She discusses the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, social inequality and the future of the novel.

Leseprobe

Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882–28 March 1941) was an English novelist, critic and publisher. She was born to an affluent and influential London family; her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. With other contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, Woolf became a key figure within, and partisan advocate of, literary modernism. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941), and her campaigning non-fiction includes A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). She wrote extensive criticism, often for newspapers, and this was collected in works including The Common Reader (1925 and, second series, 1932) and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). As co-founder, with her husband Leonard Woolf, of the Hogarth Press, Woolf published many of her contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot. In 1941, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse, near her Sussex home.

Joanna Kavenna is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the LRB, the New Scientist, the Guardian and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2008 she won the Orange Prize for New Writing, and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists..

VIRGINIA WOOLF: ESSAYS ON THE SELF

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with an introduction by

Joanna Kavenna

Contents

– Title Page –– Introduction by Joanna Kavenna –– Note on the Text and Select Bibliography –– Modern Fiction –– Character in Fiction –– A Letter to a Young Poet –– How Should One Read a Book? –– The Man at the Gate –– Sara Coleridge –– William Hazlitt –– Professions for Women –– Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car –– The Sun and the Fish –– Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid –– The Humane Art ––From A Writer’s Diary –– About the Publisher –– Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –– Copyright –

Joanna Kavenna

– Introduction –

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote scintillating prose on a variety of themes, but I have chosen to focus this selection on the ‘self’. So the question I should immediately answer is why? Why not choose the rights of women or the revolutions of modernity or the phases of the novel? Why start grappling with the finite and possibly illusory self? Why drag Woolf in as well? What is the self? What does it mean? Whose definition? The self of the artist, or their social self? The self of the individual coerced by ordinance, the self behind the mask? Yet where does mask end and self begin? One self, or an inestimable quantity? Shifting, or indivisible?

The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, the past, present and future of the novel. She is eloquent on social inequality and the agony of war. She is a robust literary antiquarian, she rakes through the past in search of treasure. She is transfixed, as well, by the aesthetic contests of the present, the dynamic incompleteness of her era. She fights with local demons, she mocks those who mock her, and generally prevails. The essays I have chosen were written between 1919 when Woolf was 37 and 1940 when she was 58. During this time, Woolf changed, many times over, her opinions changed, her circumstances too; she was not a fixed entity, reiterating a rigid and immaculate position each time she picked up her pen.