Volume 7, Number 4 · September 22, 1966
In Praise of Virginia Woolf
By Stuart Hampshire
Virginia Woolf and Her Works
by Jean Guiguet
Harcourt, Brace & World, 487 pp., $8.50
It is difficult to guess, more than thirty-five years after The Waves was published (1931), how slight or how strong the hold of Virginia Woolf upon contemporary readers may still be. 1931 was a year of catastrophe; Between the Acts appeared in 1941 in an even greater blackness. Reading these novels as they appeared, one did not doubt that one was watching an extension of English literature, an addition to the resources of the language, which might have no consequences, but which would never be forgotten. For me, as probably for many Englishmen, these two novels, and To the Lighthouse as well, are not easily separated from the setting in which they first appeared. Together with the poetry and prose of the later Eliot, of Auden, Isherwood, and Spender, they belong to that brilliant pre-war phase of English experimental writing; they recall the disappointed enthusiasms of the Popular Front and intellectuals protesting against Fascism. Virginia Woolf was a contributor, on at least one occasion, to the Daily Worker; there was a splender in this incongruity, even if the episode marked principally the desperation of that time.
Review, 2690 words
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