Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
by Quentin Bell
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 314 pp., $12.50
Lytton Strachey: The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers
edited by Paul Levy
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 176 pp., £3.70
Bloomsbury is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season. It is not a natural place for fish, but rather a water stocked for the fisherman so that he may not cast his line in vain. It is a sort of catered pastoral, and lively, thoroughbred trout rise to the fly with a special leaping grace and style. But it wearies as an idea, a design, a gathering, and one would like to have each speckled specimen alone, singular. The period, the letters, the houses, the love affairs, the blood lines: these are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again.
Review, 4775 words
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