no need to hurry no need to sparkle meaning

Sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sank among the cushions in the window seat.'' We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company. Of its aftermath, she writes: ''No need to hurry. Her joy in sensual satisfaction is magnificently expressed in her description of lunch at an Oxbridge men's college it is one of the ''OneĬannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,'' she insists. Woolf finds the body good, the senses delightful: they feed, they do not distract, the spirit. Yet, unlike the mystics, with their dualistic bias. Serenity, selflessness, freedom from rage: the words recall the mystics' counsels. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.'' She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. It is the fault Woolf finds with Charlotte Bronte: ''The woman who wrote those pages (of ''Jane Eyre'') had more genius in her than Jane Austen īut if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. When the writer's personal grievances intrude, the art is muddied, cracked.

To be ri d of the self the writer must be born into a world which never a llows grievances to appear, or must be born of a soul made of stuff that will not bear the impress of resentment. To writers like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, who have expressed their genius ''whol e and entire,'' demands a radical lack of self and ego that might be required of a saint. Th e clarity of heart and spirit that she attributes Woolf's sen se of the writer's vocation is religious in its intensity. Writer in the form of a windfall or a legacy, or it will bring with it attachments, obligations. And the money cannot be earned it must come to the Genius needs freedom it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible. In order to write - is inevitably connected to questions of class: ''Genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.'' The words are hard how infuriating they must have been The thesis of ''A Room of One's Own '' -women must have money and privacy One in which a miner's wife can have her rights to property Woolf's passion is for literature, not for universal justice. Woolf is concerned with t he fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women her plea is that we create a world in which Shakespeare's sister might survive her gift, not ''A Room of One's Own'' opened Woolf up to the charges - snobbery, estheticism - by that time habitually laid at the Bloomsbury gate by the generation that came of age in the late Twenties. It is eclipsed by his spiritual brother the college beadle, chasing women from lawns, forbidding them the library. The name of Mussolini is spoken by Woolf in this essay, but his presence is peripheral Understandably, the political attentions of intellectuals were turned not to the problems of women but to economic and world crisis. It is astonishing to contemplate that ''A Room of One's Own'' fell into the hands of the London literary public at the same time that Wall Street investors were leaping from their Was published in October 1929 at a time when feminist writing was so little in vogue as to be effectively moribund, when the Feminist Movement, connected as it had come to be almost exclusively with female suffrage, considered its Originally given as lectures at Newnham and Girton colleges, ''A Room of One's Own'' Yet it is easy to see why it was, by some critics, so perceived. You feel the creature arching its back & galloping on, though as usual much is watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice.''Īs usual, Woolf's standards for herself were mercilessly high. It isĪ trifle, I shall say so it is, but I wrote it with ardour and conviction.

I am afraid it will not be taken seriously.

I shall get a good many letters from young women. that the press willīe kind & talk of its charm, & sprightliness also I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist. Virginia Woolf foresaw with clarity the responses to ''A Room of One's Own.'' She wrote in her diary in 1929: ''I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind. This introduction to ''A Room of One's Own'' will appear in the new edition of the book to be published in November by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in honor of the centennial of Virg inia Woolf's birth. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy MARY GORDON Mary Gordon's most recent novel is ''The Company of Women.''

September 13, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article

No need to hurry no need to sparkle meaning