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littlepanda's review against another edition
3.0
I rather liked this book, however some essays were more comprehensible than other. I think that it is difficult to read any of these if you didn't read the book the essay is one.
plan2read's review against another edition
4.0
On fiction - "The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like this.' Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it."
jmiae's review against another edition
4.0
I made the mistake of not understanding that this book is meant to be a collection of (relatively easily digestible) literary criticism essays until about the sixth essay, which rather hindered my comprehension initially. Additionally, and perhaps it's just me, I generally find it difficult to fully appreciate literary criticism unless I am fairly familiar with the writers whose work is being critiqued. As a result, my favourite essays were those on Jane Austen, the Brontes, the Russians, as well as the more general ones on the Modern Essay and contemporary writing.
In particular, it was amazing to read her perspective on the work that was being published at the time she was writing, and compare it to the preceding century (1800-1821). We have the privilege of hindsight to fawn over the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, in the same way that she praised Jane Austen, John Keats, Walter Scott, etc. But her thoughts on the influence of Time on the determination of an age's literary masterpieces are sublime:
"Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made."
In particular, it was amazing to read her perspective on the work that was being published at the time she was writing, and compare it to the preceding century (1800-1821). We have the privilege of hindsight to fawn over the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, in the same way that she praised Jane Austen, John Keats, Walter Scott, etc. But her thoughts on the influence of Time on the determination of an age's literary masterpieces are sublime:
"Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made."
valariesmith's review against another edition
3.0
Heresy for a Woolfian, I know, but the subjects of many of the essays (Elizabethan dramas, Defoe, Chaucer) weren't of interest to me. I really loved "Modern Fiction" and the essays on Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Montaigne and the Russians, though.