Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, disabuses readers of the Guardian of their misconceptions about Virginia Woolf.
‘Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of literary history with a stone lodged in her pocket.
She did, of course, have her darker interludes. More on that in a moment. But first I’d like to announce, to anyone who might not know, that she, when not sunk in her periodic depressions, was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.
And, fearless feminist though she was, she could be reduced to days of self-recrimination if someone made a snide remark about her outfit. She had some difficulty putting herself together and, like many of us, suffered from a dearth of fashion sense. She was also enormously insecure about her work. She suspected, more often than not, that her “tinselly experiments” in fiction would be packed away with the rest of the artefacts and curiosities, all the minor efforts that occupy various archives and storage rooms.’
Charles Moore reviews David Pryce-Jones’ history of the English’s love of desolate places.
‘The higher you rise in the intellectual scale, the more likely you are to hate your own country. This is particularly true, as George Orwell once noted, of the English (though not of the Scots or the Welsh). It is an odd phenomenon. It involves, in theory, a love of the rights of the masses and, in practice, a lofty disdain for the common herd.’
The Guardian’s Stephen Moss talks to Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winning novelist has turned political. Very political.
‘Roy talks about the resistance as an “insurrection”; she makes India sound as if it’s ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don’t hear about these mini-wars? “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers,” she says, “that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.” I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don’t believe it’s corrupt.’
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