Virginia Woolf

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Start with Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse

R2 Thanks!

DL is too misogynistic for this kind of thread.

Start with To the Lighthouse and her diaries from the 1930s.

Her letters and diaries are great, I couldn't get into her fiction. I really got into the whole Bloomsbury crowd after reading the diaries. I would start there.

Eileen Atkins' one person show of A Room of One's Own is superb.

What about Orlando?

I'm a college professor who teaches and publishes on Woolf (my first published article was on her).

The diaries are five volumes, so they can be overwhelming for a first-time reader. But if you enjoy her novels, they are incredibly fun since she's very funny and knew so many famous people.

I would suggest reading "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" first, because they are masterpieces and representative of her work, and the ones most taught to college students. "Orlando" is great, and quite approachable (it was her first NYTimes bestseller), but she regarded it as a minor work, and it's not really representative of her main corpus.

Her two other masterpieces are "The Waves" and "Between the Acts," but they are harder than "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse."

Start with Quentin Bell’s biography. It’s a great introduction to her writing life, relationships and, most importantly, her marriage. To the Lighthouse us her most accessible novel and I’d start with that. Her collected essays are wonderful, too. The Waves is a brilliant novel and considered her masterpiece.

I've never read Mrs. Dalloway but I did read "To The Lighthouse" and you could tell it was written by a person with a mood disorder - it was like being a rocking boat. One minute, she was staring lovingly at her children, musing about what perfect creatures they were and the next she was thinking about how she'd ruined them and what was the point anyway? Unlike a lot of authors used that class distinction/social mores as vehicle for story telling, she seemed to use it as this oppressive cloud that pushes down & stifles everyone, even those at the top of the heap.

While treating mental illness & moderating one's mood is clearly a good thing, it makes you think that her creative might've been largely suppressed if she wasn't so manic

I loved Woolf when I was in college but I reread her a few years ago and was surprised how childish and silly it was. Not a lot of deep thought in the books, just a stream of consciousness from narrators who don't seem all that conscious . THey're mostly interesting as a look at a mind (Woolf's) that was clearly disintegrating.

She's still riding the woke wave at colleges but once that's over I doubt she'll remain in the pantheon on great writers. There are many other, far better writers from the early 20th century.

During her adult years, from the publication of "To the Lighthouse" in 1927 until her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf was widely considered the single most important living British novelist. Her writing lost some of its cachet especially in the UK right after her suicide, which w as seen at the time (wrongly) as prompted by a suspicion that she couldn't take the prospect of a Nazi invasion (although even then she was celebrated as a cult novelist). But she was rediscovered in the 70s in the US as a major novelist with the advent of second-wave feminism, and then celebrated as a major novelist in the UK again in the 1980s. There is now an International Virginia Woolf Society, there are multiple conferences on her work every year, and multiple public statues and busts have been put up in her honor in cities in the UK.

She has since the 70s and 80s been celebrated again as one of the most original and important British novelists of the 20th century. It's been a good fifty years in the US and 40 in the UK since she's reclaimed her position of importance. Given the sheer amount of influence she has had on younger writers who are themselves considered major novelists and who have claimed her as an important influence on their writing--Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Michael Cunningham, Helen Oyeyemi, Sigrid Nunez--I would consider it extremely unlikely she would again slip out of the canon of major twentieth-century British writers, if only for that reason.

I’ve always loved her unfinished _Between the Acts_ more than anything else she wrote. A close second for me would be _Jacob’s Room_. I’ve never been one for the more canonical _Mrs Dalloway_ or _To the Lighthouse_, though I can see why they defined Woolf’s literary iconicity.