Hermione Lee

With Adrian Stephen, Duncan Grant , Guy Ridley , and Anthony Buxton , she toured the premier battleship HMS Dreadnought impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage. Virginia was disguised as Prince Mendax (Latin...

Hermione Lee notes that during this period [p]assionate celebrations of London filled the diaries and letters and spilled over into Mrs. Dalloway.

The Hogarth Press began publishing Freud in 1922, and continued through the following years, mainly through their highly successful production of the International Psycho-Analytical Library. Freud's theories circulated around VW for...

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...

Virginia was thirteen: this death ended her childhood and provoked her first nervous breakdown. She said later that her mother's death was the greatest disaster that could happen, and she remained preoccupied by her...

VW did not discuss this incident specifically until the last years of her life. Hermione Lee , who considers the matter as fully as possible, argues that it would be rash to ignore or belittle...

Both Virginia and Vanessa felt that they were uneducated, and VWfelt intellectually deprived, regretting all her life that she had never competed with other children. She also, however, commented caustically on the advantage...