Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

<p><strong>FOREWORD BY ALI SMITH</strong></p><p><strong>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADE</strong></p><p><strong>Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf?</strong></p><p>In the early years of its existence, the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em> published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.</p><p>The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of <em>A Room of One’s Own</em>.</p><p>Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a “substitute for living” because she was “forbidden to scamper on the grass”. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.</p>