Barrett brought together several of Woolf's writings and criticisms about women and writing. It's a fascinating collection that expands one's view of Virginia Woolf as a writer and as a thinking, highly intelligent woman. Her reviews of some of her contemporaries or such writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontës are thought-provoking and revealing about Woolf's inner life. Coupled with Barrett's insightful introduction, this book is a welcome addition to anyone's Woolf collection or to those interested in women as writers. It expands a bit on the notions presented in her famous "A Room Of One's Own".

You start out wanting to like this author. She has a witty, humorous way with words, a reverence for the written word and a telling grasp of what distinguishes writers of various eras. Of Elizabethan dramatists, she writes, "Theirs is the word coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping." She writes about Classical Greek damatists as one who understands what separates them from all writers who follow: "To understand him," she says of Aeschylus, "is is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words ... for words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray..." For her, the best writing, whether that of a Greek or an Englishman, has a meaning that defies words, a meaning that we percieve in the mind -- without words. Coming down the centuries and pausing to consider Jane Austen, she captures the essential writer in terms that encourage and enlarge: "Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discriminaiton of human values." Along with her interest in the well known (she treats many more than the few mentioned here)she has a teasing regard for near greats and nobodies, whose seldom touched books rest in near oblivion. Of the memoirs of one, Laetitia Pilkington, she writes: "... the dust lies heavy on her tomb ... nobody has read her since early in the last century when a reader ... left off in the middle and marked her place with a faded list of goods and groceries." Nor is it just to have a chuckle that she looks at such relative unknowns, but to give us a look at their pained and frequently bereft lives. Laetitia Pilkington was badly used by men in her life. Woolf has a compassion for such women. You begin by wanting to like this woman who claims it's the common reader who makes or breaks an author. As you read on, you find yourself happily taken in and smiling at her wit, humor and insight.

This biography is written by one of the best writers of the 20th century and concerns one of the most influential art critics of visual art. Roger Fry loved traditional Italian art and was converted through a very gradual and natural process to become an advocate for modern art. Roger Fry came to see and apprecaite his contemporaries in visual art as making and having made important contributions. Time has proved Roger Fry correct and his critics wrong. Who among us doesn't not know that van Gogh, Gaugain and Cezanne are important artists? Virginia Woolf is a perceptive and excellent writer. This is her only bow to biography. It is a pleasure to read about a significant personality written by such a good writer.

I had to read this in class, and it was great. Nothing I was able to find did half the job this book did! I would definatly recommend it...

"Between the Acts" was the last novel Virginia Woolf wrote, and it appropriately feels like a swansong; a sorrowful farewell to a country on the eve of a war that very well might have spelled its devastation. While it uses the modernist experimentation that characterized "To the Lighthouse," it is very easy to follow, but still invites several rereadings to explore its depths more fully.

The novel takes place on a single day in June of 1939 at an English country manor called Pointz Hall, owned by the Olivers, a family with such sentimental ties to its ancestry that a watch that stopped a bullet on an ancient battlefield is deemed worthy of preservation and exhibition. Every year about this time, the Olivers allow their gardens to be used by the local villagers to put on a pageant for raising money for the church. This year, the pageant is supposed to be a series of tableaux celebrating England's history from Chaucerian times up to the present.

The Olivers themselves are tableaux of sorts, each a silent representation of some emotion separated from the others by a wall of miscommunication. Old Bartholomew Oliver and his sister, Lucy Swithin, both widowed, are now living together again with much the same hesitant relationship they had as children. Oliver's son Giles is a stockbroker who commutes to London and considers the pageant a nuisance he has no choice but to suffer. Isa, his discontented wife, feels she has to hide her poetry from him and contemplates an extramarital affair with a village farmer.

Attending the pageant is a garrulous woman named Mrs. Manresa, who is either having or pursuing an affair with Giles. She has brought with her a companion named William Dodge, whose effeminate sexual ambiguity is noticed with reprehension by Giles and with curiosity by Isa. The somewhat romantic interest Isa shows in Dodge implies that she knows Giles would be annoyed less by her infidelity than by his being cuckolded for a fop like Dodge.

The other principal character is not an Oliver at all, and this is Miss La Trobe, the harried writer and director of the pageant. At first, she appears to serve the mere purpose of comic diversion, as she frustrates herself over details that nobody in the audience notices anyway; however, when the pageant is over, a new aspect of her character is revealed, one that has made her an outcast among the village women. Nevertheless, she graciously accepts the role of a struggling, misunderstood woman artist, and in this sense, she echoes the character of Lily Briscoe in "To the Lighthouse," as does Isa with her repressed poetry.

At the end of the pageant, to celebrate the "present," Miss La Trobe has planned something special and startling: She has the players flash mirrors onto the audience as if to say, "Look what England has become. Shameful, isn't it?" Likewise, with this novel Woolf holds up a mirror to humanity, reflecting our unhappiness in her characters. It's not a cheerful notion, but it's a fitting one to sum up the career of a writer like Woolf, one of our greatest chroniclers of sadness.

I just finished the most amazing book I've read this year (After Sputnik Sweetheart though) and its called "Between The Acts" by Virginia Woolf. This was the last work of a gifted genius and the first that I read of this author. Amazing! Simply Superlative to the core!

The story goes like this:

Written in 1939 - the year Woolf Died..."Between the Acts" is a masterpiece in its own genre. Lyrical and highly poetic, this is one of its own.

The story goes like this:

On a single day of June, 1939--with the war imminent but virtually unperceived--the action takes place at Pointz Hill, an English country house. It revolves about a pageant played upon the lawns by the local villagers. Despite her necessity, the solitary, thick-legged, masculine Miss La Trobe,who knew how "vanity made all human beings malleable," is not one of the principal characters. The chief actors are the members of the Oliver household. The head of the house is old Bartholomew Oliver, who like so many retired English soldiers has only his India to cling to. He marvels at his widowed sister's orthodoxy. ("Deity," as he supposed, "was more of a force or a radiance, controlling the thrush and the worm, the tulip and the hound;
and himself too, an old man with swollen veins.") This aging sister, Mrs.Swithin, who would have become a clever woman is she could ever have fixed her gaze, is the most sympathetic figure in the book. Living with the older Olivers are Isa, the poetry-quoting daughter-in-law, temporarily attracted to a gentleman farmer, and Giles, the stock broker son, handsome, hirsute,
virile and surly.

To this special group are added buoyant, big-hearted Mrs. Manresa, "a wild child of nature" for all that her hands are bespattered with emeralds and rubies, dug up by her thin husband himself in his ragamuffin days in Africa. Uninvited she drops in at luncheon, bringing along with the picnic champagne a maladjusted, putty-colored young man named William Dodge, whom Giles contemptuously sizes up as "a toady, a lickspittle, not a downright plain man of his senses, but a teaser and a twitcher, a fingerer of sensations;picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have a straightforward love for a woman."

William tries dallying with Isa, and Giles, partly to annoy his wife, pays court to the full-blown charms of sparkling Mrs. Manresa, who confesses she loves to take off her stays and roll in the grass.

the cream of "Between the Acts" lies between the lines--in the haunting overtones. And the best of the show--the part one
really cares about--happens between the acts and immediately before the pageant begins and just after it is over. So the play is not really the thing at all. It is merely the focal point, the hub of the wheel, the peg on which to hang the bright ribbons and dark cords of the author's supersensitive perceptions and illuminated knowledge. It is in her imagery,
in her "powers of absorption and distillation" that her special genius lies. She culls exotic flowers in the half-light of her private mysticism along with common earthgrown varieties and distills them into new essences. Her most interesting characters move in an ambiente of intuition. With half a glance they regard their fellow-mortals and know their hidden failures. They care less for the tangible, the wrought stone, than for fleeting thought or quick desire.

"Between the Acts" has no more ending, no more conclusion than English history. The pageant is played out, the guests depart, night falls.

The physical embodiment of Virginia Woolf is no more, but her inimitable voice remains to speak to generations yet unborn. The first line of her last book begins, "It was a Summer's night and they were talking"--The last paragraph ends: "Then the curtain rose. They spoke."

A Must Read for Everyone!!

This under-appreciated work is slowly gaining the recognition it deserves from Woolf critics... but I would say that, since I wrote my dissertation on it! Woolf's fiction is never light reading, but Woolf lovers will here find a masterful synthesis of descriptive power, her exhaustive knowledge of English history and literature, her feminism, her passionate hatred of war and her conviction that only aesthetic experience can enable humanity to question the status quo and *perhaps* create a better world... interested readers might consider reading it alongside The Years, Three Guineas, Moments of Being, the last volumes of the diary, or such Woolf essays as "Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid," as well as Shakespeare's Tempest. This slim novel speaks volumes; it is a work of mature genius by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

Woolf's only play is a farce about her great-aunt, Julia Cameron, a famous Victorian photographer. The edition with drawings by Edward Gorey is marvelous and succinct. I am not sure I got all the references nor the inside humor (and it all seems like one big private joke [this play was intended for private enjoyment after all]), so I am not as moved as I usually am by Woolf's work, and yet it has a sort of magic and wit. Overall it's a welcome addition to one's collection of Woolf or Gorey, even if it is nearly inaccessible to the layman.

I stumbled upon this book while looking for Edward Gorey illustrations and have since bought two to give as gifts! Freshwater gives the reader insight into Virginia's life, humor, times, and friends. An amusing, quick read that makes you want to get a group of people together to act it out.

I am a graduate student who has spent the last four months learning everything I can for a class project about Leonard -- which is QUITE A LOT. Two books in particular have fairly good, reasonably balanced accounts of Leonard Woolf: Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee and A Marriage of True Minds by George Spater and Ian Parsons. Please read those carefully researched, scholarly, interesting, and vivid books to find out more about both Virginia Woolf's illnesses and Leonard Woolf's responses/contributions/whatever to her health. The relationship between the two was complex and deserves to be written about intelligently and carefully.

As Irene Coats, the author of Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf, states, Quentin Bell's authorized biography of Virginia Woolf presents Leonard Woolf as Virginia's loving, attentive, self-sacrificing husband. However, even as I read and enjoyed Bell's book, I came away feeling that there was something sinister about Leonard, as if he had some hidden agenda. Therefore, when I came across Coats' book, I was extremely intrigued, but having read it I am instead extremely disappointed.

Rather than presenting, or at least attempting to present, a balanced, lucid, objective case that Leonard was not the saint he appeared, her book is an unremitting demonizing of Leonard Woolf. Coats has presented the known events and existing letters by interpreting all as proof of Leonard's malicious intent and devious manipulation. I find this an extremist viewpoint that works against good biographical writing.

In addition, the book comes with the most appalling index: a name index where each name is followed by lines and lines AND LINES of undifferentiated locators making it totally useless to the reader. This is definitely an example of no index being better than a bad one.

Over the years, many readers have been cynical about the despair and rage expressed in Virginia Woolf's feminist works, such as "A Room of One's Own". After all, wasn't Virginia a wealthy upper middle-class woman who never worked a day in her life? Wasn't she petted and cared for by an adoring husband? Didn't she have a beautiful home (which is now a tourist spot?)and a circle of stimulating and enlightened intellectual friends? "What the heck did she have to complain about?", those overloaded with children and dreary jobs have often wondered bitterly.

Well, according to Coates, the answer is - quite a bit. Coates gives us an entirely new view of Virginia's life and marriage, one which seems straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins or Sheridan LeFanu. Virginia is seen as the heroine entrapped by a cruel husband, who presents to the outside world the face of kindness and care, while viciously tyrannizing and silencing his wife, who can appeal for help only in carefully coded letters and diaries. Coates presents Virginia Stephens as an isolated and sheltered young girl, manipulated cleverly into marriage to an ambitious and greedy man. Leonard Woolf gained access to her social set as a college friend of her adored brother, who died young. Woolf is here portrayed as a man willing to stop at nothing to get ahead, a Jew who abandoned and rejected his own religion and family to strive for upward mobility in the English middle class. His marriage to Virginia was pushed by her sister Vanessa, who wanted her younger sibling off her hands, and by Leonard's friends, who wanted him to marry a rich wife as a way of remaining in England, rather than return to a civil service job in Ceylon. Virginia allowed her initial resistance to be worn down, with disastrous results - having married the rich Gentile wife he wanted, Leonard then despised and exploited her. (But he might not have been happy with any woman - most of his Cambridge friends were gay, and while Leonard considered himself heterosexual, he obviously shared many of their views on women - Coates quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey in which Woolf describes male sexuality as "noble" and female as "vile".) Their early married life was a disaster, and Coates goes so far as to suggest that Virginia's first suicide attempt was, in fact, attempted murder. Her husband insisted she see a doctor of his choosing, who told her that she was too disturbed to become a mother (Leonard detested children). He then left her distraught, with an open box of sleeping pills beside her, and gave himself the alibi of a visit to her sister Vanessa. As he had hoped, she took an overdose, and was saved only through the unexpected visit of a woman friend, who promptly summoned help from a medical student living in the building. The long-term result was the total destruction of Virginia's independent existence. Leonard refused to let her see her family physician (who considered her perfectly healthy and capable of motherhood) only allowing her to consult his tame specialists. To have had her certified as a lunatic would have deprived Leonard of money or of a divorce, so he chose to have her declared incompetent - giving him, as her guardian, total control of her money, and preventing her from applying for a divorce, while he could still divorce her. He now had what he wanted, total control, and any protests against her sexual and financial exploitation could be seen as the ravings of a madwoman. And sadly, there is no suggestion anywhere in the book that Virginia ever tried to seek outside legal, medical, or spiritual advice.

Virginia's only escape came through writing, and through her one love affair, with Vita Sackville-West, a strong, independent woman. Vita balanced not only an "open" marriage, but a whirl of children, travel, gardens, and dogs. Through her relationship with Vita, Virginia realized bitterly how constricted her own life had become. Their homes had been bought with her money, but chosen and organized by Leonard - she hated their country house, which he had remodeled to his own taste, giving himself a huge studio, while she was relegated to a hut in the garden. Her money had paid for their business, the Hogarth Press, which gave Leonard editorial control of all her books, and for a car, which she wasn't allowed to drive. In the Woolf family, even the gardens and dogs belonged to Leonard - when Vita gave her a spaniel puppy, Leonard promptly annexed it as his own. It was this bitterness and rage that finally burned through in "A Room of One's Own", which was first given as a lecture, with Vita at her side.

But the affair did not last - they remained friends, but Vita sought other lovers - and Virginia was once more trapped without support, and her husband's increasing hostility and disrespect. She was offered speaking engagements and American lecture tours, but Leonard insisted she turn them all down. He was furiously jealous of the increased sales of her work. As WWII began, daily life grew harder and harder - Leonard interfered with the servants, forcing Virginia to do the cooking and cleaning herself, and refusing to let her visit friends. Finally, in despair, she killed herself - or did she? Coates thinks that Leonard deliberately drove her to it - at the very least knowing that she was suicidal and not helping her - and at the worst, she hints that he may actually have killed her. If so, he got away with it, and his punishment was this - to always be known as "Virginia's husband".

This is sure to be a controversial book. But is it accurate? This reviewer, who is not particularly expert on - or enthusiastic about - Bloomsbury, finds it to ring psychologically true. The ambitious poor man who marries a rich wife and then despises her is all too familiar. The legal position of both women and the mentally ill was such at the time that the trap set for Virginia was almost inescapable. And this account well explains the bitterness and despair in her works, in a way that pictures of her as a cosseted and loved wife fail to do.

Interesting title, promising subject. But the book is a huge disappointment. If you are looking for a brief biography of Woolf that touches on her bipolar disorder, then this may be what you want. If you want any real discussion of the disorder and a decent analysis of how she developed it and how it manifested itself, go elsewhere.

Dally is a psychiatrist who came of age in the 1950s. He is particularly interested in "manic depression" and anorexia nervosa, and he found both in Woolf. He used her extensive diaries to divine what troubled her, and his own background to determine why.

Dally has a tendency to trot out theories and present them as facts. From the beginning he describes Woolf's illness as genetic and attributes it to her father's side of the family. His "proof" is a family tree that shows that some members of her father's family suffered from various nervous disorders and he could not find as much evidence of such illness on her mother's side. He offers no proof of the genetic basis but merely proclaims it. In the appendix he notes that the genetic basis has not been proven "but it is only a matter of time".

Yet, in his own description of Virginia's childhood, he offers a much more potent and believable basis for her later depressions. Her mother did not want her, essentially rejected her, and always considered her of less value than the males of the family. There was nothing Virginia could do to win her mother's approval, yet she continued to try. As is typical with those with depression, she could not outright reject her mother or blame her for her own pain, and as a result her anger turned inward. This seems a far more plausible reason for her bipolar disorder than some vague genetic predisposition.

He also provides absolute treatment prescriptions, as if he were prescribing an antibiotic for a bacterial infection. Manic-depressives need quiet. They need to be kept from becoming excited. They need people around who will support them. They need to be protected from stress.

Is this true? Would Virginia have not killed herself if she had never had to face stress, if she were kept in the country, if nobody ever offered her any excitement? Even though she herself craved excitement, social interaction? Would she have truly been better off without the parties, the various stresses of everyday living? I was not at all convinced.

Dally's assumptions don't stop with Virginia and Leonard. He proclaims that Virginia's lover, Vita Sackville-West, was incapable of forming long-term intimate bonds. By what means did he make this diagnosis? He never met the woman. He can't possibly know if she was outright "incapable", and he certainly offers no basis for this assertion.

I found the book offensive for these reasons. He has reduced a writer of amazing creativity to a creature with a genetic disease, and has offered no substance for his simplistic analysis.

I never did figure it out or finish it. It might be a fine book but it bored me to sleep every night for weeks until I just tossed it on the shelf for good.

I thought that this book was absolutely terrible. I had the hardest time trying to comprehend what was going on. I did not enjoy it at all. I would not recomend it to anyone either. I would not even give it one star. It is not worthy of it.