Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee likens the extraordinary impact of this juvenile work to that of an archaeological dig which reveals the rooms and furnishings and small ordinary objects of a legendary monarch, all as fresh as on...

Hermione Lee reads the story as an imagined meeting between the Stephen sisters of Bloomsbury and their alternative selves (as they would have been if their lives had remained in the track mapped out for...

She classed Sickert as a literary painter, even while admitting that words could not touch or grasp the core of his paintings. Hermione Lee sees Sickert 's paintings of squalid London interiors as a major...

Hermione Lee points out that in this year—a typical one, though broken by illness—Woolf's productivity included making final pre-publication revisions to a novel and an essay collection, beginning work on another novel, writing eight...

Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson 's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...

Hermione Lee calls this VW 's novel of friendships, her Bloomsbury novel, and in the context of its six characters she recalls Woolf's tracing Bloomsbury to six people who were remarkable for nothing but...

Freshwater was the name of Julia Margaret Cameron 's estate on the Isle of Wight, where Anne Thackeray Ritchie had a cottage. The Stephen children had stayed there. This farcical presentation of Victorian life...

VW worked long and hard on the lengthy novel which finally became The Years. Its genesis goes back to her speech of 21 January 1931 at the London and National Society for Women's Service

Her first Christian name, never used, was given in memory of her mother's sister, who died shortly before Virginia's birth.Ginia was her earliest family nickname. She later gave herself many more, using different...