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Virginia Woolf: Essays
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"How queer," Virginia Woolf once observed, "to have so many selves." In her novels and essays, not to mention nearly 4,000 letters and a 30-volume diary, Woolf left behind a voluminous anatomy of self, and in the years since her 1941 suicide, biographers and critics have created a succession of further portraits.
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Virginia Woolf began writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement (London) when she was young, and over the years these and other essays were collected in a two-volume series called The Common Reader (1925, 1933). These studies range with affection and understanding through all of English literature. Students of fiction have drawn upon these criticisms as a means of understanding Virginia Woolf's own direction as a novelist.
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This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but due to criticism Virginia Woolf received about the political nature of the book, she changed the novel and its title. This older version of The Voyage Out has been compiled and is now available to the public under the intended title. She went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success.
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Virginia Woolf is acquiring a totally new place in literature. Her fame has always rested on her novels and partly on her essays, which, though they resemble the feathers in a boa beside the achievements of modern literary criticism, can still delight those who have an ear and an eye as well as a mind. She has always been a phenomenon, an event which anyone who regards the novel as a great art form cannot ignore whether or not he dismisses her claim to be as important as she desperately hoped to be.
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As an essayist Woolf was prolific. She published some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of style - her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational tone. A number of her writings are autobiographical. In the essay on the art of Walter Sickert, which was inspired by her visit in his retrospective show, Woolf asked how words can express colour, and answered that all great writers are great colorists: "Each of Shakespeare's plays has its dominant colour. And each writers differs of course as a colourist..." (Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 1934).
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The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Woolf ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the middle part of the twentieth century. Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic, a literary style which attempts to inspire impressions rather than recreating reality.
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