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On Fiction
On Fiction

On Fiction

On Series

LITERARY CRITICISM

120 Pages, 5 x 8

Formats: Trade Paper

Trade Paper, $14.99 (US $14.99) (CA $21.99)

Publication Date: December 2011

ISBN 9781843916185

Rights: US, CA, AU & NZ

Hesperus Press (Dec 2011)

Price: $14.99
 
 

Overview

The only available edition of a collection of essays celebrating the ever-popular pastime of reading and storytelling, from one of the 20th century's greatest literary figures

The only available edition of a collection of essays celebrating the ever-popular pastime of reading and storytelling, from one of the 20th century's greatest literary figures

"Here, then, very briefly and with inevitable simplification, an attempt is made to show the mind at work upon a shelf full of novels and to watch it as it chooses and rejects, making itself a dwelling-place in accordance with its own appetites. Of these appetites, perhaps, the simplest is the desire to believe wholly and entirely in something which is fictitious."
 
Her readings sensitive, her prose style elegant, authoritative, and at times thoroughly opinionated, who better equipped than Virginia Woolf to ruminate on the art of fiction? In this selection of lesser-known essays on reading and storytelling, Woolf turns her critical gaze on treasured favorites including "the four great women novelists—Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot," and unearths some less familiar talents. Her discussion of differing approaches to reading is characteristically forward-thinking, and pinpoints the joys of this favorite pastime, in all its guises.

Reviews

"[On Fiction] is a great way of approaching Virginia Woolf the essayist by (a remote) way of the Brontës." —The Bronte Blog

Author Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is one of the foremost innovative writers of the 20th century, most famous for her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.