Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot
had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 49
Hilary Mantel
, reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
VW
continued to write personal essays on a range of subjects, some weighty, some witty, but her literary and critical essays are the centre of her work in this genre. In these she wrote about...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
The article formed the basis
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Facts on File.
168
of a paper titled Character in Fiction that VW
read to the Heretics Society
in Cambridge
on 18 May 1924. The paper was published, as Character in Fiction...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Virginia Woolf
Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press.
3: 421
living writers into two...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
The press issued this little book on the same day as Eliot
's Poems and John Middleton Murry
's The Critic in Judgment.
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
T. S. Eliot
visited VW
for the first time, thereby beginning a lasting association.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
47
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
1: 218-19
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot
wrote in a letter that VW
had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
T. S. Eliot
visited VW
and read The Waste Land to her from manuscript. She recorded in her diary her early impressions of the poem, which the Hogarth Press
published for the first time in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Virginia Woolf
Yet, though her voice (and her social and political views) were and would remain quite different from theirs, she was keenly attentive to the works of male contemporaries who were, like her, working to create...
Material Conditions of Writing
Virginia Woolf
VW
published in T. S. Eliot
's newly-renamed The New Criterion her essay On Being Ill, which she had written the previous autumn while she was indeed ill.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 58n1, 46
Publishing
Virginia Woolf
VW
published in The Dial her short story Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, after Eliot
had declined to take it for The Criterion.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Allen Lane.
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
They developed a relationship that was competitive yet sustaining and essential to both. In August 1920 Woolf commented on Mansfield in her diary: a woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I...
