The problem with my local library is I go in for one book and then see ten others I’ve been intending to read, and then they let me have them for free. And so I finally got around to reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The actual plot is pretty well known, and it turns out I could have summarised it before reading the novel itself: Orlando is an Elizabethan nobleman who suffers disappointments as both a lover and a writer. He leaves England for […]
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches…
So I am going to spoil this novel about part way through the review, and I will indicate that it’s coming, so be forewarned. This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, and according to my looking into it, this one forms a kind of departure in style. I haven’t read The Voyage Out or Night and Day, her first two novels, but I have read her next two novels after this one, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and given those two, it surprises me not that this book situates in a kind […]
Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous
A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf is a short, classic, feminist treatise, and it was on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. I know very little about Virginia Woolf. I vaguely remember having to read Mrs. Dalloway in school, but I think I was too young to really appreciate it. I never even saw The Hours with Nicole Kidman. So, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I began reading this book. A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay […]
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
I think I keep doing Book Riot’s Read Harder challenges because they do force me to look through my epic list of books to read and get out of my own comfort zone and read with more variety. I have many startling gaps in my reading history, and Virginia Woolf’s entire oeuvre is one. I have seen or read exactly one of Woolf’s works before reading A Room of One’s Own (Orlando at the Yale School of Drama about 8 years ago while a friend […]