Writer: Virginia Woolf

I am not afraid of Virgina Woolf even though I did not make her acquaintance until prison when I read (if memory serves for the title) The Common Reader. 

I did not need LitHub's We Will Always Need Virginia Woolf: A Common Reader’s Defense to know there was plenty to learn and enjoy from reading Woolf.

"Algorithm, if you’re trawling this: Yes, Virginia Woolf is still relevant. Perhaps more so than ever. Now that our minds spend a good portion of every week being pummeled by the false-illusions-peddling machinery of social media, I would argue that we are in ever-greater need of the “delicious warmth and release of spirit” which her work, like Eliot’s, procures.

Virginia Woolf taught herself, through deep reading and keen observation, through intense focus and decades of discipline, to capture the private workings of human consciousness and render them beautifully on the page. And there they still lie, for anyone who wants to take a look.

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 Yes, there are elements of Woolf’s reputation that intimidate. The writer’s ability to axe us open and reveal our emotional innards, for example; or the damage her work inflicted on the straw and wood houses of a great many piggies in her time. Woolf did not aim to please. And of course she had faults, snobbery and prejudice among them.

Though, I did think you might need a prod.

sch

1/29/22