Tag: literature

Book Review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A link to this edition’s real source. Please support her site: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, 1928

Not a novel, but a long essay about women authors, notably novelists, and their historical restrictions. The bottom line is straightforward. Writing takes time. It requires some place, some space, to write in (Jane Austin having the exceptional ability to write in a room often crowded with activity), and also the means (money from one source or another) to sustain oneself while engaged in the process. Historically, Woolf notes, women have had none of these things.

Woolf begins by illustrating the restrictions placed on women’s time and space. While visiting Oxford, she was not allowed into the libraries without a male escort or a letter of recommendation. Late in her essay, she mentions Sappho (a Roman erotic poetess of Lesbos whose work is known today only in fragments) and Shikibu Murasaki, a member of the Japanese Royal Court credited with the world’s first “true novel” (Tale of Genji) in 1050 C.E. We don’t know much about Sappho, but Murasaki’s royal status allowed her the time and space to write an absurdly long novel. But Woolf begins by exploring a few examples of 18th-century female poetry suffused with bitterness about women’s place in the world. 

Moving up, Woolf notes that the 19th century’s four great female novelists, Austin, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, were all childless. Child-rearing, especially when one has more than a couple of them, takes a lot of time unless there is wealth to afford nannies; even then, household management is left mostly to the woman. Why, Woolf asks, did women writers gravitate to novels? Novels were, she surmises, the new form, drama and poetry—including epic poetry—having been worked over by men for a few thousand years, while nonfiction demanded scholarship from which most women were excluded (as in Woolf’s chapter one Oxford story).

Lastly, already in the 20th century’s first quarter, women wrote everything: fiction, nonfiction, stories, drama, and poetry, made possible by fairer property laws, the right to vote, and the ability to work in traditionally male occupations. She wonders whether these changes, while lifting women from the status of chattel, wouldn’t end up thrusting her into a pitiless competition with men across all professional and social spheres? Much of her speculation has come to pass, but Woolf would at least applaud what women writers have achieved. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in each year, there are more published female than male novelists!

A long and delightful literary essay (would Woolf write anything less?) whose lesson can be summarized in two sentences: Writing takes time and requires some space in which to focus. Not until the 20th century did women, beyond a rare few, gain that time and space.

Review: How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding. 

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008) 

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)

Review: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1928 The Kindle edition is only $0.99!!

Woolf is mentioned in so many books on writing fiction that I thought I’d better have a look at her. To the Lighthouse is, I am told, one of her “more approachable” novels. 

So what have we got here? Take any group of ordinary people, a few adults, and children of varying ages. Throw them together in an ordinary scene, say a small neighborhood barbecue on a summer evening. Every one of those people, adults and children, has an “inner life,” observations, thoughts, emotions, sometimes vocalized to others in the group, sometimes only thought. You could write a novel exposing these inner lives over the course of a few hours. James Joyce (Ulysses) does this over the course of a day for one character and then, famously, for his wife at the end of the novel.

In Woolf’s case, the people are the Ramsays: husband, wife, and eight children who own a summer home on the Isle of Wight and, along with a handful of guests (helping to afford the food and a couple of servants), occupy the house summer after summer. The first [almost] two-thirds of the novel takes place over one day, from early afternoon to night. Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life is given the most attention—she is the masterful lynchpin of the whole family—but the mental gyrations of Mr. Ramsay and some of the children and guests, in particular Lily, a wannabe painter, are also explored as they reflect on their own thoughts and interactions with others.

The only “story” here is a planned sail (the Ramsays own a small sailboat) to a lighthouse on a rocky island some distance from their home on the bay. The youngest child, five-year-old James, is very excited about the trip but is traumatized by his father, who cancels it due to an oncoming storm that will make the next day’s sail impossible. They all finally go to sleep.

Turn the page, and ten years have passed. Mrs. Ramsay had died. Presumably natural causes. She was only in her fifties. World War I has come and gone. Andrew, the oldest son, was killed. Rue, the oldest daughter, married and then died in childbirth. The house has been unoccupied for some years.

But people are returning. The first mind Woolf relates is one of the servants charged with cleaning the place up, getting it ready. Mr. Ramsay, his six living children (James is now fifteen), Lily, and Mr. Carmichael, another guest from the old days, and two others arrive. In the novel’s last third, Lily, now in her mid-forties and never married, is the mind most often explored. Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (a daughter), along with two other semi-characters—we never know their real names, only James’ mental meanderings about them—end up sailing to the lighthouse—they make it safely. The mental narratives switch back and forth between Lily on shore trying to paint while watching the boat make its way across the bay, and James and Cam on the sailboat. The boat disappears from Lily’s view, safely reaching the lighthouse island. Lily thinks they must be there by now. Mr. Carmichael vocalizes the same thought. Lily makes one last brushstroke on her painting. The novel ends.

Call me crazy, but aside from Woolf’s masterful word-craft, the novel’s rhythm, her representation of thought’s flow, and the novel’s “realism,” the story is trivial—a “shaggy dog” story. I know, I know. The story is deliberately trivial. The novel is about the characters’ minds and how their occasionally expressed thoughts affect one another. Mrs. Ramsay’s death greatly affects Lily, and likewise—we perceive through Lily—Andrew’s death saddens Mr. Charmichael.  But all the “action” is ordinary, lacking in any drama. Except for Mr. Ramsay—who occasionally shows a temper—the conflicts and contradictions experienced remain locked in mind. 

For my part, reading to experience Woolf’s word-craft—do I dare tackle Ulysses?—is the interesting thing about the novel. It all feels like an exercise. “Class… Write me a sixty-thousand-word study of a handful of characters’ mental ruminations while interacting over ordinary matters that can be anything so long as there is no serious drama acted out between them.” OK, it’s more than a mere exercise. But what is the upshot of it all: people have mental lives that are often full of conflict and emotion, even if what happens between them—behavior—is of little consequence. OK. I concur. Real people are like this. Woolf paints minds with words. In the end, I can appreciate that even if the “story” leaves me flat.