Virginia Woolf and the Real World (First Edition)

Discusses the influence of historical events, politics, and social movements on Woolf's fiction, describes her ideology, and examines her major works.

The majority of Woolf studies produced in the wake of the 1970s discovery of her unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters cast Woolf through her esthetics, use of literary tradition, exploration of the psyche and "dark side"as an "ivory tower" introvert. In this lively and closely argued study, University of California professor Zwerdling (Yeats and the Heroic Ideal, etc.) aims at a more balanced view, stressing Woolf's social vision. Through a detailed examination of such themes as feminism, class, money, politics and war, he demonstrates forcefully that her major workfrom Jacob's Room to Between the Acts (with the exception of The Waves, whose intense subjectivity Woolf herself considered a dead end)exhibits a "dialogue between public and private voices." Since Zwerdling is more intent on characterizing than evaluating that often ironic dialogue, however, he does relatively little to substantiate his estimate of Woolf as a major writer.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Zwerdling aims to correct the standard image of Woolf as an "immured priest ess in the temple of artdedicated, sol itary, out of touch with the life of her time." He constructs his argument around Woolf's "intense interest in the life of society and its effect on the indi vidual," and treats such topics as class and money, the social system, the fam ily, feminism, the turbulent politics of the 1930s, and pacifism. This approach provides new angles of vision on novels that have been much discussed. But the book is no sociological treatise: Zwer dling shows how Woolf translates the sociopolitical currents of her time into the delicate, ambivalent language of fic tion. In the process he manages to say something both new and convincing about Woolf. Keith Cushman, Eng lish Dept., Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.