As Big as the Bible

It took me forever to read this.

This exhaustive biography is more than just a biography; it is a life study which makes commentary on the art of biography. A fortunate subject for Lee, Virginia Woolf was a prolific self-chronicler and had very definite conceptions of biography, had engaged the idea of biography within her novels (Orlando) and had refused and accepted to write biographies (her father, Roger Fry respectively).

Virginia Woolf is not strictly chronological but moves in circles towards her end in 1941, dealing with dates and years by concepts – parents, childhood, wars. The reader is left with a thorough picture of Virginia Woolf’s world – not just her interior world: her acquaintances, her reading habits, the social and familial circles that she definitively inhabited, the social inheritance of her parents Leslie and Julia Stephens, her siblings and step-siblings, her attraction to women and the lives of those women, and finally her lifelong dependable, saving marriage to Leonard Woolf.

Lee draws extensively from Woolf’s writings, diaries and correspondences, and also the writings, diaries and correspondences of her peers, often showing a single trivial event through the eyes of two or more diarists. When our present generation is dead, a generation fluent in the arts of texting, blogging, emailing and facebooking, I can’t imagine that we’ll have carefully notated minutiae left to those who follow as VW’s.

Most useful information gained from reading this book (and then Wikipedia) – the River Ouse (where VW drowned herself) is pronounced “Ooze” not “Wheeze.” At last, I can say it with confidence.

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The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

I’ve a short story in the latest edition of The Stinging Fly , which is a brilliant Irish literary journal. If you’d like a copy (or if you like Claire-Louise Bennett or Kevin Barry or Danielle McLaughlin or Colin Barrett, who’ve all been published by SF ) you can get it here Or, you know, go to Dublin.

A Shelf of One's Own

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