91桃色

“What an extraordinary volume! Here we meet newly discovered, revised versions of Virginia Woolf’s early stories based on the life of Violet Dickinson. These tales are laugh out loud funny. They are also profound early experiments in the fiction/biography blend that later gave rise to Orlando and the feminist musing about women’s education, marriage, and literary history that infuse A Room of One’s Own. An illuminating preface and afterword by Urmila Seshagiri bring Dickinson’s biography and intellectual contributions into view and deftly analyzes the stories and their place within Woolf’s oeuvre. Must reading for lovers of Woolf’s fiction.”—Jessica Berman, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf

“Delightful and important, The Life of Violet is an instant classic for all readers of Virginia Woolf. The stories are lighthearted, but in them we see how, as early as 1907, Woolf was concerned with the major themes of her career: the need for a room of one’s own, the value of an ordinary woman’s life, and the imperative to remake the way fiction is written. Urmila Seshagiri, a peerless editor of Woolf, has added a new chapter to Woolf’s career, filling in her apprenticeship in ways that will shift our understanding and deepen our appreciation.”—Anne Fernald, editor of Mrs. Dalloway: A Norton Critical Edition

“The Life of Violet shows us the young Virginia Woolf planting her stake in the midst of the waves. Mature works such as Orlando and A Room of One’s Own swim into possibility in Violet’s first two sections, which explore the edges of ‘man-woman-or Violet kind’ with nervy self-assurance. The outlandish fabulations of section three, meanwhile, read like uncanny memories of a darker future.”—Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form