Claire Messud: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Essays in The Yale Review
updated 5mo ago
Claire Messud: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Essays in The Yale Review
The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.
from On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf by Literary Hub
ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time
from On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf by Literary Hub
- But the essay as a literary form has long preceded the internet. So has the debate over the aesthetic metrics of a good essay. Merve Emre cites Virginia Woolf’s 1905 screed “The Decay of Essay Writing,” where Woolf bemoans the “amazing and unclothed egoism” of a new class of writers. “If one can set aside [Woolf’s] disdain, there is a larger point,... See more
from ౨ৎ Girl blog
Alex Burns added