Volume 27, Number 18 · November 20, 1980
Temperament of Genius
By V.S. Pritchett
The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Vol. VI, 1936-1941
edited by Nigel Nicolson, edited by Joanne Trautmann
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 556 pp., $19.95
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. III, 1925-1930
edited by Anne Olivier Bell, with Andrew McNeillie
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 384 pp., $15.95
To the present-day reader who can know 'Bloomsbury' only by hearsay, and for a critic like myself who read Virginia Woolf's works as they came out but who had no acquaintance with the older survivors of the set until their middle age in the Second World War, they must seem like the natives of some lost tropic of this century's early history. One is apt to forget that they were not the only distinguished writers, artists, thinkers, Puritans, or hedonists of the time. After 1939 that phase of our civilization, sometimes known as the sunset of the high bourgeois culture of Europe, had clouded over. As the dramatis personae reappear in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, patiently annotated by Anne Olivier Bell, in the Letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, and in Quentin Bell's Life, their voices, with their cool antique accent, come back.
Review, 2670 words
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