Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
Yes, Santa, There Is a Virginia
By Frank Kermode
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 371 pp., $12.95
The Unknown Virginia Woolf
by Roger Poole
Cambridge University Press, 285 pp., $11.95
Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf
by Phyllis Rose
Oxford University Press, 298 pp., $12.95
There has of late been a transformation in the fortunes of Virginia Woolf. It is not that she has belatedly grown famous; her name has been a household word since the mid-Twenties, and even at the start of that decade she was able, as this new diary shows us, to predict with sardonic accuracy the reactions of reviewers ('Mrs Woolf…must beware of virtuosity. She must beware of obscurity…her great natural gifts &c…. She is at her best in the simple lyric…'). She lived to see a good deal written about her; and even in the years when her reputation went into its posthumous slump there was a steady stream of books and articles. But what is happening at the moment transcends mere fashion. She is being received into the canon.
Review, 2757 words
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