Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones- A Give A Way

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Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones (2010, 524 pages)




On The Occasion of the Publication of the Paperback Edition-A one year ago look back

The Reading Life Katherine Mansfield Project

Katherine Mansfield:   A Getting Start Guide

Read to the end of the post for information on the author sponsored international  give-a-way  contest and feel free to enter.  

This post is a revised and rethought post of one I did in December of 2010.     I am occasioned to redo this post by the news that a paperback edition of Katherine Mansfield:   The Story Teller by Katherine Jones has just been published and is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

In the year since I did this post, I have gotten more and more into short stories, a form I once foolishly scorned.   I feel secure now in saying Mansfield is among the top ten for sure and maybe top three short story writers of all time.   Chekhov is the consensus best and when at the top of his form Guy de Maupassant is my and most people's second place choice.   Maybe Mansfield belongs in second place but personally I would put her third.   As a quick note, some of de Maupassant's stories were just quickly written by a formula stories, all of Mansfield's are carefully crafted.     Maybe as I read more Raymond Carver, he will probably rise up in my rankings.   There is also always James Joyce looking down from Mount Parnassus and smiling.   Among Americans, the South has it covered with Flannery O'Connor  and Eudora Welty, among others.    R. K. Narayan is also a genius at the format and Virginia Woolf's best stories are marvels.   There are lots of writers who wrote a few great short stories, not so many who wrote as many as Mansfield did in her way too short life.

From the fact that I have posts on 85 of Mansfield's stories on my blog and several secondary books (all very much worth reading) I know based on my blog stats that the stories of Mansfield are being taught at universities and collages all over the world.   Her work seems very popular in Korea and Moscow, for example and I have people from all over India reading posts on her stories.   The most read of my posts on Mansfield is on "Miss Brill".

I feel very privileged to have been given the is opportunity to read shortly after its publication what I am sure will be the definitive biography of Katherine Mansfield,  Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones.    There have been four other major biographies of Katherine Mansfield (the last one was Kathleen Mansfield:   A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin published in 1989.)     Only Kathleen Jones has had full access to the vast correspondence that has been published  since 1989 as well as the full notebooks of Katherine Mansfield.

  Kathleen Jones spent more than ten years working on Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller during which she spent a great deal of time in New Zealand studying archives there and meeting with people who had actually known Katherine Mansfield or her family.     She traveled extensively in England and France visiting the places where Mansfield lived out her life.    She has also written highly regarded biographies of Margaret Cavendish, The Duchess of Newcastle (A Glorious Fame),   Christina Rosetti (Learning Not to Be First); and an account of the lives of women who lived with the English Lake Country Poets (Passionate Sisterhood)..    More information on the very interesting background and career of Katherine Jones can be found at her web page.)

My history with Mansfield began in May of 2010 when I read her story "Miss Brill" when it was selected as the classic short story of the day on  a web page I follow.    I confess I had never heard of Katherine Mansfield prior to that day.    I was  very taken by  "Miss Brill".    I thought it was a brilliantly illuminating look into a sad and lonely life.    I did a bit of research and read a few more of her stories.     I like to know something of the lives and import of the writers that matter to me and I soon discovered many consider Katherine Mansfield the best ever female writer of short stories.     She is considered to have radically altered the nature of the short story.    I then decided I wanted to read and post on each of her 85 or so short stories individually.   As I posted on the stories I tried to gradually learn something about Mansfield and her life and background.     Virginia Woolf famously said of Mansfield that she was the only writer that ever made her jealous.    Mansfield has clear ties to Joyce and Woolf but unlike them she is also a writer for lonely people who never quite fit in anywhere, for people who retreat into visions of beauty,  for those happy to sit for hours alone in a cafe watching people walk by with no hope of understanding them.        I think Woolf was also a bit afraid Mansfield saw into the roots of her madness.   Anyway, I thought I should explain a bit why I am interested in Mansfield.   I will talk more on it when I shortly post my The Reading Life Guide to getting into Katherine Mansfield.

When I first received my copy of Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller I was very impressed by the very high production values of the book (published by Penguin/Viking).    It includes a lot of wonderful photographs of Mansfield, her parents and siblings, her husband John Middleton Murry, and others that were close to Mansfield.  

One of the dominant themes of Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller is the acknowledgement of the very deep   impact of the beauty of New Zealand on Mansfield's  mind and sensibility.   As I read Mansfield's stories   I tried to get to know at least a little the person behind them, to see beyond the mask.   I saw a woman caught up in an ugly time in England and France.     I saw a woman used to being taken care of (her father was the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand) reduced to trying on occasion to figure out how to pay for her meals.    I also saw a woman with a very powerful sensuous nature.    She liked beautiful exotic to her women and handsome near fey young men.    Mansfield is considered to have had affairs and brief encounters with both men and women.    As she lived in the days before people disclosed their full sex lives in public on talk shows, the Internet, and in tabloids and  in tell it all autobiographies we have no precise knowledge of her exact sexual preferences and proclivities.   We do know she had long term relationships with other women that look like romances or crushes.

Jones gives us beautiful descriptions of the natural beauty of New Zealand.    Unlike any other writer I am aware of, Jones talks about the influence of the Maoris on Mansfield.    Mansfield had a relationship with a Maori princess that many felt was a romantic one.    We do not know if this was simply a school girl crush or if it was an intimate relationship.     I confess I did not know much concerning the culture of the Maoris in early 20 century New Zealand and was a bit surprised to learn that one of the cousins of Mansfield's  father  married a rich Maori woman.   Jones writes in a very interesting way about the colonial roots of Mansfield.   (I think the normal uninformed take on the Maori is that they are similar to the Aborigines of Australia.)     She made me see what a backwater New Zealand must have seemed like to people in London and Paris and how much Mansfield felt initially liberated when she moved to London.  The commute took around six weeks.     Later Jones made us see how Mansfield often seemed to long to return to New Zealand.  

Jones gives us a good look at the day- to- day struggles of Mansfield to feed and house herself.   Mansfield got a  modest allowance from her father that she could have lived on if she lived very modestly.   Jones tells us in a very clear fashion of all the various men and women with  whom Mansfield was linked with romantically.   Jones spends a lot of time talking about D. H. Lawrence's and Frieda Lawrence's relationship to Mansfield and her husband.   Jones also helped us understand  Mansfield's relationship with Virginia Woolf but does not exaggerate it.    The relationship was close but there was no real intimacy and their times together were more like meetings than two friends spending time together.    We learn a bit about various Bloomsbury figures (Mansfield was not for a number of reasons a member of the Bloomsbury set.   My guess is she would have scared most of them!).     The general atmosphere of the set Mansfield moved in can be described as erotically charged.     Mansfield was attracted to guru - like men ranging from her second husband John Middleton Murry to D. H. Lawrence.     Mansfield went through a "Russian phase" also.   Jones deals with the issue of the claim that Mansfield plagiarized a Chekhov story.     Basically Jones says the whole matter is much ado about nothing and I agree completely.

Jones goes into enough details about the terrible effects of tuberculous on Mansfield so that we understand it.   We see how an effort to cure it while at the same time ignoring it dominated the last few years of Mansfield's  short life.

Jones also spend a lot of time helping us understand the role of Ida Baker in Mansfield's life.    I would say I still do not quite understand fully the relationship of Baker and Mansfield but I understand a good bit more than I did before I read Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller.    This relationship shows us an ugly side of  Mansfield where she would use Ida when she needed her and push her away when she did not.


Jones takes two risks in Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller.   One of the risks is a stylistic one.   Most of the book is written in the present tense as if it were happening now.   Some reviewers of the book have not liked this.    To me it is brilliant touch on the part of Jones to let us live in the present with Mansfield, not see her as remote long, dead woman from an era we can barely relate to.    Jones brought Mansfield very much to life for me.     Many of the backgrounds and autobiographical nature of the most important stories are  explicated in a very illuminating fashion by Jones.  

The second risk is her treatment of the life of John Middleton Murry (1889 to 1957) who lived on long after Mansfield died.   Mansfield and Murry had an odd at times difficult relationship.   Mansfield was not nearly as good a husband as Leonard Woolf.    I think Jones has seen that one of the keys to understanding Mansfield may be in trying to understand why Murry meant so much to her.   Jones deals in sort of interlude chapters in Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller with each of Murry's  three post Mansfield marriages.   One of the wives looked very much like Katherine and I admit I got chills when that wife, Violet,   was happy to learn that she had Tuberculous just like Katherine Mansfield did.    Each of the three other women seemed to embody a part of the full psyche of Mansfield.    We can decide for ourselves how we feel about the way Murry handled the literary estate of Mansfield and the wealth it brought him.

Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller will be the definitive  Mansfield biography for a long time, I think.    Jones knows Mansfield well and has read deeply and widely in her work and era.   Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller is not just about Mansfield.   It has a lot   to teach us of the historical period it deals with and the  diverse set literary figures  in Mansfield's world.   It tells us a lot about the state of relations between the sexes in the period.   We get  look at life in Edwardian England from the ground up through the eyes of an outsider who never really fit in anywhere.  Jones also lets us understand a lot about how the creative process works by letting us see the struggles of Mansfield.

Added notes-there are some very interesting things one could say about Mansfield's treatment of Germans, her train rides and boat trips, her fondness for sidewalk cafes, her Russian phase, and much more.   At first I thought her treatment of Germans was perhaps just a very understandable prejudice of the times but I think her stories say a lot about how much freer English women were than German women.

There are somethings I wish I knew more about.   I confess I would like to know the details about the cure programs that Mansfield's mother sent her to in German "Spas" to be treated for her sexual interest in women. Not to be too Freudian but I have heard that it involved being sprayed by high pressure hoses!   I would like to know if she did in fact ever have what might be called sex with Ida Baker and I would like to know more about the relationship of the Mansfields to the Maori.   How did her cousin come to marry a Maori Princess?    Were her sisters able to have long term satisfying relationships with men?    It seems Mansfield never met Ford Madox Ford which seems odd, I would like to be sure this is true.   I wonder what life was like aboard the ships on the six week trip from New Zealand to England.     There are other open questions on the private life of Mansfield.   How many hours a day did she write?   What did she have for breakfast?   Did she read Gogol?   What short stories writers did she like most, besides Chekhov.  

One great thing about the Internet is almost all of her stories but a few very early ones can be read online  (there are links to the stories in my posts on them).

The author has kindly authorized me to offer an Christmas gift to a reader-a free copy of her wonderful biography.   If you are interested in winning the book, please fill out the form below.  




Mel u

Cousin Henry by Anthony Trollope

Cousin Henry by Anthony Trollope ( 1879, 280 pages)




When the Classics Circuit announced their next event was to be on Anthony Trollope I had just completed Ford Madox Ford's magisterial work, The March of Literature.     Ford is very exuberant in his praise of Trollope.  Trollope's Framley Parsonage is mentioned numerous times as a perfect novel.    I wanted to read that work for the Classics Circuit but sadly none of the stores here in Manila seem to have it in stock.   By happy coincidence there was a sale at one of the book stores I frequent that included a number of Oxford Classics for 85 percent off the cover price.    I do not know exactly how it works but books that do not sell in the USA or Australia often end up for sale here.   The edge of the book is normally marked with a black marker.    They had  three Trollope's for sale.    Two were very long books in the middle of a series and one was Cousin Henry.


Anthony Trollope ( 1815 to 1882-England) was an incredibly prolific novelists with over 40 works to his credit. (There is  lot of very good background information in the other posts in the circuit so far.)    This was my first Trollope.   I think I may not have yet read one of his works because of my love of Dickens.    As I began to read Cousin Henry I was at first very struck with how the style of the work was somehow so relaxing.    Cousin Henry centers on a small family.    Cousin Henry knows that his elderly affluent ill uncle has recently disinherited him in favor of his cousin Isabel.   Isabel has lived with her uncle since her mother died some years ago.     For a while she stayed with her father but he remarried and his new wife did not want Isabel in her house.    The uncle knows that Isabel is much more sincere in her affection for him and will be a better manager for his tenants than Henry but he is also very old school in his belief that the oldest male relative should inherit his entire estate.     I will leave out anymore of the plot as it is fun to see it unravel though maybe there are no huge surprises.


Trollope is a master of subtle character development.    I really liked how the characters of the people in the story developed and were revealed slowly just as we might get to know a person in real life.   Somehow Trollope also shows us why people are as they are also.    I also   liked the fact that nothing terrible happened to anyone in the story that did not get set right in time.  Even the undeserving seem to be taken care off in the long run.     One cannot help but really like the lead character Isabel and even the villain of the novel, Cousin Henry is more weak than evil and half way tries to do the right thing.  


Fleur Fisher also read Cousin Henry for the circuit.  


I will for sure be reading more Trollope in the future.      


I thank the mangers of The Classics Circuit for all their hard work.


Mel u

Reading Plans -Dec 15 to February 15, 2011-Sunday Salon

Just for fun and to help me plan I have made in the spirit of the Sunday Salon a tentative account of my reading plans for the next 45 days or so-If anyone has any suggestions or comments I would love to hear them and if anybody wants to read along let me know.

Canon Works I Hope to Read

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy- I want to read a Hardy novel soon and I have this work

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol-been a long time coming!

A George Sand novel-to be determined

A Balzac novel-to be determined

Pending Canon Status Works

This is a category I made up for the purposes of this post.   I think all of these books have a good chance to become part of the canon one day.

Spring Snow by Yukiro Mishima-part one of the Sea of Fertility tetrology

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov-I loved his Pale Fire

The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford-part  one of a trilogy-third best Ford work?

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez-I have six of his novels -saving best for last?

Loving by Henry Green-maybe also Living and Party Going

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen-said to be her best novel-set in WWII London

Literary Fiction

Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto-I love her work

The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt 

Help by Kathryn Stockett-super well regarded in the book blog world-this is a maybe-would like comments-all who post on this book seem to love it but is it just  "classy chic lit?"

Short Stories

I hope to read between 30 and 45 short stories in this period.    Among the writers I will read more of are

1. Colette-I just got a collection of her stories-100 of them-core GLBT writer
2. Thomas Hardy-read on line
3. Elizabeth Bowen-I have a 900 page collection of all her stories-100 or so-no I wont post on all!
4. Kafka-at least "The Hunger Artist"
5. Kate Chopin-one or two more at least-
6. James Joyce-one or two more
7. Willa Cather-a short story is a great way to try a new to you writer
8. Louisa May Alcott-same as Willa Cather-
9. Guy du Maupassant-one or two
10. Anton Chekhov-one or two more

This still leaves me plenty of time for "impulse reads" or to take part in Book Blog events.   It assumes if I continue reading at my normal pace that I will read about 25 novels in this period of time and a short story at least every other day.   I read most of my short stories online so I am restricted to older works, by and large.   Assuming I do read 25 novels and as things happen I only read nine of my 13 planned books (which I find ok) I will then have 16 books I can decide on as I go along.   

I may also begin to read through the Annotated Edition of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Any suggestion for other ideas or comments on my selections would be greatly appreciated-

Mel u

Welcome All Literary Book Blog Hoppers-Dec 9 to Dec 12th

 To me the Literary Book Blog Hop is a great event.    I read and post on mostly classics, short stories, Asian Fiction and what I see as literary novels.   Lately I have been very into the work of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf but I am also reading through the work of Kenzaburo Oe and Junichiro Tanizaki, for example.

I admit sometimes I have felt out of place on events where it seems almost all the other bloggers post on young adult books, paranormal and vampire books.   

Every week the Literary Book Blog asks that participants answer a question-here is the question for this week

What is one of your literary pet peeves?  Is there something that writers do that really sets your teeth on edge?  Be specific, and give examples if you can.

I really  find most attempts by authors to capture the speech patterns of characters from lower economic levels annoying.   For example I recently read Stephen Crane's "Maggie:   Girl of the Streets" and I found I was being distracted from the core experience of the story by the need to figure out what the characters from the streets of New York were saying.      I love her prose but I nearly abandoned  Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South because of all the dialect discourse.   In many cases authors are depicting the speech patterns of people with whom they have no contact.   One exception to this for me recently was the marvelous use of colonial speech patterns in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Here is an example of what I do find annoying-from The Provost by John Galt

Na, na, gudeman, ye need na be sae mim; every body kens, and I ken too, that ye’re ettling at the magistracy.  It’s as plain as a pikestaff, gudeman, and I’ll no let ye rest if ye dinna mak me a bailie’s wife or a’ be done”—

I was not ill pleased to hear Mrs Pawkie so spiritful; but I replied,

“Dinna try to stretch your arm, gude-wife, further than your sleeve will let you; we maun ca’canny mony a day yet before we think of dignities.”

I return all follows from fellow literary book bloggers

Mel u

The Red and The Black by Stendhal

The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830, 532 pages-translated by Roger Gard in 2002 from the French)

The Red and the Black by Stendhal (pen name for Henry Marie Beyle-1783 to 1842-France) has been on my  read soon list for a very long time.     The Red and the Black is on pretty much all lists of 100 best novels and on many top ten lists.     I recently read and posted on his one other canon status work,  The Charterhouse of Parma.      Of the two, The Red and the Black is the most still read.    I think anyone who reads one of these two books will want to go on to read the other one.     There simply is no higher status canon writer of the 19th century than Stendhal, not even Tolstoy or Flaubert or Dickens.      He has a few peers but no superiors.     I have said before that the modern Japanese novel came into existence via young Japanese men with elite education being creatively stimulated by the greats of 19th century French literature.     For these writers, above all this meant Stendhal.    Kenzaburo Oe  among many others studied French literature before he began to write his great works.    Michio Takeyama, author of one of the very best novels about WWII from the point of view of a Japanese soldier The Burmese Harp  carried a copy of The Red and the Black in his rucksack through out his years in the Japanese army.   When I  found out that Stendhal was one of the ten percent who survived the French Army's  march back to France from Moscow                                                          bn with the  Napoleon's troops I knew he was at the very least a man of very strong character.

Clifton Fadiman in The Life Time Reading Plan says The Red and the Black is one of  the first novels centering around a young man from the provinces coming to the big city (Paris) to make his fortune.   In France in the early years of the century a bright young man with no family status or wealth had few options to make his fortune.     There was the red of the uniform of Napoleon's army and the black for the cassock of the clergy.     

The central character of The Red and  the Black, Julian Sorel is a bookish young man born into a working class family.   Julian has no interest in spending his life in hard labor in the saw mills like his father.     Through a lucky set of contacts Julian in time obtains a good clerical position in the church and with the recommendation of a cardinal he becomes the bookkeeper for a wealthy   merchant with a much younger love starved wife.    From there Julian goes on to have a series of adventures and encounters which I do not want to spoil for future readers.    

I found  The Red and the Black not at all a stale stuffy old book.   It has a lot of very acute psychological observations.   It is a great adventure story because we know and care about Julian even though we know he is no epic hero!.    It is a funny satire of the French society in the early 19th century that is pretty much a universally applicable story.    Historically the influence of this book is huge.     I think maybe one of the reasons Michio Takeyama took this book to war with him is he wanted to be able when he could to retreat into a wonderful work of art by a man who also withstood the horrors of war.  

The Red and the Black is not a hard book to follow.    There are only a few central characters.    It is actually quite funny in parts.    I think I would  advise readers new to Stendhal to first read The Red and The Black and then The Charterhouse of Parma.       


Roger Gard in his introduction to the book gives us some good historical background.   I really respected him when  after completing his biographical and historical data section he tells the first time reader to skip the rest of his introduction as  you really do not need a set of instructions to read this book.   He says if you want to you can come back and read the rest of his introduction after you are finished with the book but he really sees little need to do so!.   There is an honest man.


Mel u

"The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol-The Reading Life Version of a part of The March of Literarture

"The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol ( 1842, 26 pages, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky from Russian)

In March this year I read Nikolai Gogol's (1808-1852-Russian) short story, "The Overcoat", also written in 1842.     "The Overcoat" is listed on most "top short stories of all times" lists.    Vladimir Nabokov comes close to saying it is the best work of literature ever produced.    (I recently listened to some videos on Youtube relating to the lectures of Nabokov and I could not help but imagine him refering to "The Nose" as a purely "Gogolian" work.)  

"The Nose" is the story of a nose that somehow falls off the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov (also known as "Major Kovalyov").  Gogol writes a lot about sort of mid-level civil servant types.    As the story opens a barber finds a nose on the floor of his shop and is horrified to see it is the nose of one of his regular customers.    Perhaps fearing he may have accidentally cut the nose off while shaving Kovalyov the barber tries to throw the nose in the river but is caught by the police who of course see it as hiding the evidence of foul play, maybe even murder.     Now the story takes on the elements of a dream.    Kovalyou awakes to see his nose is missing and there is just a smooth place on his face where his nose once was.     He goes out looking for his nose and he finds the nose in front of the local cathedral.    However the nose has now taken on a life of its own and has a higher rank in the civil service than Kovalyov himself.

Then story  at this point takes some twists.  There is more to the plot but the story is a lot of fun and just plain crazy so I will not say more of the action.   It opens itself up to a diverse range of interpretations.    We wonder if it has all been a dream brought on by the anxieties of Kovalyov in the face of a marriage he is being pressured into.    Some have said it is about male anxieties.  

"The Nose" is a powerful work.     Maybe it gets overlooked because "The Overcoat" is the Gogol story taught in schools world wide and the one on "best story ever lists".    

In addition to reading the translation by Pevear and Volokhovsky (1998) I also read the first page of an older translation now in the public domain (trans. name not given).     Of course I cannot judge the veracity of the translations but the new one was a much more enjoyable read.  

In The March of Literature  Ford Madox Ford makes no mention of Gogol or Kafka.     Here is a very simplified march of literature just for fun -Gogol to Kafka-then we branch from Kafka into several splits-in Continental  Europe we get much of  modern Literature including so called existential novelists and thinkers-in South America the lineage turns into Magic Realism,  the works of Borges and the novels of the absurd such as those of Bolano-in post war Japan the writers and thinkers find the means for coping with the destruction of their culture and world view in the thoughts of French heirs to Kafka and their  vision of an absurd society.    In Russia it is said that all Russian literature flows from "The Overcoat",  Tolstoy being an exception.     In the contemporary Filipino novel the influences are very clear.    In England and the USA the story is too big to encapsulate but it is there.   In Rushdie's use of magical reality to cope with the nightmare like history of India we also see it.   Gogol is a writer of aloneness just as Kafka was.  

Here is a  break down to give an example of the influence of this trend in Japanese literature:

Gogol to

Kafka to

Sarte-Camus to

Kobe and Oe-(Oe wrote a dissertation on Sarte), Murakami to

21th century Japanese literature- abounds in depictions of a culture without root values-the Japanese writers found no  comfort in their own culture for  dealing with their defeat in WWII and turned to European models.

I know this is hyperbolic and is not meant entirely seriously and I invite others to give their own March of Literature.    

Mel u

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf-Update on The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927, 256 pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

I have  had Virginia Woolf on my must read soon list for a very long time but it seems I kept getting sidetracked from reading her.    When I won a copy of The Waves from a very gracious blogger  (links to all my posts on Virginia Woolf can be found at The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project link above) I decided this was my push to at last read one of her masterworks.   I had just completed Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and this helped put me in a mind set for reading The Waves.     I really enjoyed  The Waves a lot.     I took the approach  of just letting the prose go over me in waves (lots of water images in the work) and did not stress over achieving what some would call an intellectualized understanding of the book.    I knew then I wanted to read a lot more Woolf.    I decided to first read Hermione Lee's wonderful biography Virginia Woolf  to expand my background knowledge.     By then I knew Woolf has four consensus masterworks,   The Waves, Orlando, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.    I decided to read the other three of these works next.    My thinking was that by doing this if I end up only reading four of her works I will have experienced her best novels and if I do go on to read all of them I could go back and reread the major ones.  I have now read the Woolf "big four".

I also decided to read some short fiction along the way.     In addition to this I read Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, a really fun book and easy to follow.   It might not be a bad first Woolf.   I also read Jacob's Room.    I read her very famous A Room of One's Own, a few short stories and some essays.    

As I began To the Lighthouse I knew that much like The Waves the novel makes use of the stream of consciousness rather than plot action or conversations between the characters.     The central characters of the novel are Professor Ramsey, a well known philosopher and author,  his wife, their children and various guests at the Ramsey's home in Hebrides Islands.    All of Woolf's work seems quite social and to involve groups of people and their relationship to each other and their common experiences.    The opening section of the novel, "The Window" is taken up with interactions of the Ramsey's and their guests.  In section II, "Time Passes" we learn of the events of ten years in the lives of the Ramsey family.   One of their sons was killed in WWI and Mrs. Ramsey has passed away.     The relationship between the Ramseys is a brilliantly done depiction of mutually dependency in marriage.   In the last section the family finally makes the trip to the lighthouse.    Much like Parade's End I see To the Lighthouse  as a kind of Cubist novel in which we are shown how reality is created through a consensus of perceptions once one passes mere physical reality.

Of course the language is beautiful and lots of references are made to books and art that anyone will love.   I know people spent a life time reading Woolf and that there is a vast secondary literature on her and I respect that.    Leonard Woolf said To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf's best novel.    I suppose the sensible thing to do now would be to read her remaining novels in order of publication and then come back to the "big four".   Probably I will pretty much do that but for now I think I will next read her book length essay Three Guineas,   dealing with some of the political thoughts of Woolf, next.

All of the Woolf I have read so far can be read online at the University of Adelaide Library web page.

Mel u