Virginia Woolf

I took a break recently from fiction to read a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf. Let me say, they did not disappoint. 

It's clear while reading the essays just how gifted Woolf was, and how attuned she was to the art of narration. Woolf enhances many of her essays by introducing imagined characters (even, at times, imagined dialogue). The result is tremendous: here is an essay, focused on the politics of writing, which incorporates fictional digressions in order to further an argument which in itself is only loosely connected with literature. 

In other essays, Woolf is ahead of her times, prescient and perspicacious. On any number of issues -- including women's rights and capitalist inequality -- Woolf offers insights which appear decidedly modern. I would not overstate the case: Woolf does not proceed as a contemporary feministic might. But there is a very evident strain in her work which focuses on looking ahead, on envisioning what could be. 

And of course, there's the writing itself. Over and over again, Woolf delights with a clever aphorism here, a memorable turn of phrase there. The essays are metered and deliberate, but build, in almost all cases, toward a crescendo. Woolf loved literature, it is clear. But she also had a real admiration for England, and for London. Those emotions, and others, are on display in her essays -- which I found uncluttered and refreshing. 

The last word is reserved for Woolf:

"And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those beasts, our fellow men?"