Sherlock Holmes

"Nettles" by Vernon Scannell (poetry reading)

Vernon Scannell

Vernon Scannell (23 January 1922 – 16 November 2007) was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.

Personal life

Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where his father, who had fought in the First World War, developed a reputation as a good portrait photographer and the family’s severe financial difficulties began to ease. Scannell left the local council school at fourteen and got a job in an accountant’s office. His real passions, however, were for the unlikely combination of boxing and literature. He had been winning boxing titles at school and had been a keen reader from a very early age, although not properly attaching to poetry until about aged fifteen, when he picked up a Walter de la Mare poem and was ‘instantly and permanently hooked’.


In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The war took him into action in the North African desert and then the Normandy invasion, where he was wounded near Caen and shipped back to a military hospital before being sent onto a convalescent depot. Scannell had always very much disliked army life, finding nothing in his temperament which fitted him for the part of a soldier. So ‘on impulse’, after V.E. Day, with the war over as far as he was concerned, he deserted and spent two years on the run, earning his living with jobs in the theatre, professional boxing bouts and tutoring and coaching, all the while teaching himself by reading everything he could. During this evasive time Scannell was writing poetry and was first published in The Tribune and Adelphi. He was also boxing for Leeds University, winning the Northern Universities Championships at three weights. In 1947 he was arrested and court-martialled and sent to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental institution near Birmingham. On discharge he returned to Leeds and then London, where, supporting himself with teaching jobs and boxing, he settled down to writing.

Scannell won many poetry awards, including war poems such as ‘Walking Wounded’. A.E. Housman said that ‘the business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe’ and Scannell quoted this with approval. Scannell’s poems, with their themes of love, violence and mortality, were shaped and influenced by his wartime experiences. His final collection 'Last Post' was published in 2007; he had been working on it until not long before his death.

Vernon Scannell died at home in West Yorkshire on 17 November 2007, aged 85.

Teaching

In the late 1950s he was a teacher of English Literature and poetry at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, teaching 8 to 12-year-old pupils. See this for a comment by Sir Simon Jenkins on Scannell as a teacher: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/23/comment.poetry

Awards

He received the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1961 and the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize in 1974. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1960 and granted a civil list pension in recognition of his services to literature in 1981.[1]

He also received a special award from the Wilfred Owen Association, "in recognition of his contribution to war poetry:" Scannell's best-known book of war poetry is Walking Wounded (1965). The title poem recollects a column of men returning from battle: No one was suffering from a lethal hurt, They were not magnified by noble wounds, There was no splendour in that company. Scannell is also the author of a delightful and candid memoir, The Tiger and the Rose (1983). The delight derives from the unadorned narrative, taking in five years' military service and a brief boxing career. The candour lies in Scannell's willingness to write about the conclusion to his Army life: "Twenty-five years ago, 1945...was the year I made what might seem like a desperate decision and performed what might appear to be an act of criminal folly, manic selfishness, zany recklessness, abject cowardice or even, perhaps, eccentric courage. I deserted from the Army. The first recipient of the Owen Award, Christopher Logue, author of some of the best war poetry of the past half century (in the form of versions of the Iliad), spent two years in a military prison, on a charge of handling stolen pass books. What would Owen say? He'd say: Never trust the teller, trust the tale.[2]a

Death

Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley, West Yorkshire, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.[3][4][5]

Works

Graves and Resurrections (1948) poems
The Fight (1953) novel
The Wound and The Scar (1953)
A Mortal Pitch (1957) poems
The Big Chance (1960) novel
The Masks of Love (1960) poems
The Face of the Enemy (1961) novel
The Shadowed Place (1961) novel
A Sense of Danger (1962) poems
New Poems 1962 : A P. E. N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1962) editor with Patricia Beer and Ted Hughes
The Dividing Night (1962)
Edward Thomas (1963)
The Big Time (1965) novel
The Loving Game (1965) poems
Walking Wounded - Poems 1962-65 (1965)
Pergamon Poets 8 (1970) with Jon Silkin
Epithets of War - Poems 1965-69 (1969)
The Dangerous Ones (1970)
Mastering the Craft (1970)
Selected Poems (1971)
Company of Women (c. 1971)
The Tiger and the Rose (1971) autobiography (i)
Incident at West Bay, a poem (The Keepsake Press 1972)
The Winter Man (1973)
Wish You Were Here (1973) broadsheet poem
Meeting in Manchester (1974)
The Apple-Raid (1974) poems
Three Poets, Two Children: Leonard Clark, Vernon Scannell, Dannie Abse, Answer Questions by Two Children (1975)
A Morden Tower Reading (1976) poems, with Alexis Lykiard
Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War (1976) editor
A Proper Gentleman (1977) autobiography (ii)
Of Love And Music (1979)
A Lonely Game (1979)
New & Collected Poems 1950-1980 (1980)
Catch the Light (1982) poems, with Gregory Harrison and Lawrence Smith
Winterlude (1982) poems
How To Enjoy Poetry (1983)
Ring of Truth (1983) novel
How to Enjoy Novels (1984)
An Argument of Kings (1987) autobiographical, World War II
Funeral Games And Other Poems (1987)
Sporting Literature (1987) editor, anthology
The Clever Potato A Feast of Poetry for Children (1988)
Soldiering On. Poems of Military Life (1989) poems
Love Shouts and Whispers (1990)
A Time for Fires (1991) poems
Travelling Light (1991)
Drums of Morning - Growing up in the Thirties (1992) autobiography (iii)
The Black and White Days (1996) poems
Collected Poems, 1950-93 (1998)
Feminine Endings (Enitharmon Press 2000) poems
Views and Distances (Enitharmon Press 2000) poems
Of Love & War (2002)
Incendiary
The Gunpowder Plot
House for sale
Moods of rain
Nettles
A Case of Murder poems
Uncle Albert
Half Past Two
Last Post (Shoestring Press 2007), ISBN 978-1-904886-67-9
A Place to Live (The Happy Dragons' Press 2007)[9]

References
^ a b http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/11/19/db1901.xml Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Telegraph, 19 November 2007
^ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2306066.ece Network your poetry, The Times, 27 July 2007
^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2212801,00.html News in brief, The Observer, 18 November 2007
^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7099849.stm Poet Vernon Scannell dies, BBC News, 17 November 2007
^ "Poet Vernon Scannell dies at 85". BBC News. 17 November 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
^ Walking Wounded by Vernon Scannell - Poetry Archive
^ http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2213245,00.html Alan Brownjohn, Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Guardian, 19 November 2007
^ http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article3174403.ece Anthony Thwaite, Vernon Scannell Obituary, The Independent, 19 November 2007
^ "A Place to Live by Vernon Scannell". Retrieved 30 September 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Scannell

"Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene (story reading)

The Quiet American

The Quiet American (1955) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. It was adapted into films in 1958 and 2002.

Background

The Quiet American is one of Greene's later books, published in 1955, and draws on his experiences as a SIS agent spying for Britain in World War II in Sierra Leone in the early 1940s and on winters spent from 1951 to 1954 in Saigon reporting on the French colonial war for The Times and Le Figaro. He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American in October 1951 while driving back to Saigon from the Ben Tre province. He was accompanied by an American aid worker who lectured him about finding a “third force in Vietnam”. Greene spent three years writing it.

Plot summary

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has been covering the French war in Vietnam for over two years. He meets a young American idealist named Alden Pyle, who lives his life and forms his opinions based on the books written by York Harding, whom Pyle has met twice in his life. Harding's theory is that neither Communism nor colonialism are the answer in foreign lands like Vietnam, but rather a "Third Force," usually a combination of traditions, works best. Pyle is thoughtful and soft-spoken; Fowler finds him naïve.

The two men meet accidentally at the Continental, a popular Saigon hotel. Pyle dances with Fowler's live-in lover, Phuong. Only twenty years old, Phuong is considered the most beautiful girl in Saigon. Her sister's goal in life is to marry Phuong off to a rich American; she does not like Fowler because he is married. Fowler and Pyle meet again at the Continental. Some vulgar Americans and Brits who have been drinking too much go off to the House of Five Hundred Women. Pyle goes with them, but Fowler rescues him. Later that night Pyle seems protective of Phuong.

Fowler goes to the city of Phat Diem to cover a battle there. Pyle travels there to tell him that he has been in love with Phuong since the first night he saw her, and that he wants to marry her. They make a toast to nothing and Pyle leaves the next day. Fowler gets a letter from Pyle thanking him for being so nice about Phuong. The letter is annoying because of Pyle's complete confidence that Phuong will choose to marry him. Meanwhile, Fowler's editor wants him to transfer back to England.

Pyle comes to Fowler's place and they ask her to choose between them. She chooses Fowler, her lover of two years. She does not know that he is up for a transfer. Fowler writes his wife to ask for a divorce in front of Phuong.

Fowler and Pyle meet again in a war zone. They end up captive in a tower, and spend an extraordinary night talking about everything from sex to God. As they escape, Pyle saves Fowler's life. Fowler goes back to Saigon where he lies to Phuong that his wife will divorce him. Pyle exposes the lie and Phuong moves in with Pyle. After receiving a letter from Fowler, his editor decides that he can stay in Indo-China for at least another year. Fowler investigates Pyle's activities more closely and finds out that Pyle is importing military supplies into Vietnam from the United States. Fowler goes into the war zone and does some serious reporting.

When Fowler returns to Saigon, he goes to Pyle's office to confront him but Pyle is out. Pyle comes over later for drinks and they talk about his upcoming marriage to Phuong. Later that week there is a terrible explosion and many innocents are killed. Fowler puts the pieces together and realizes that Pyle is behind the bombing. Fowler decides that Pyle must be eliminated. His naive theories and interference are causing innocent people to die. Fowler takes part in a murder plot against Pyle. Although the police believe that Fowler is involved, they cannot prove anything. Phuong goes back to Fowler as if nothing had ever happened. In the last chapter Fowler receives a telegram from his wife. She says that she has changed her mind and that she will start divorce proceedings.

Major characters

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has been covering the French war in Vietnam for over two years. He has become a very jaded and cynical man. He meets Alden Pyle and finds him naïve.

Alden Pyle is the "quiet American" of the title. Pyle is thoughtful, soft-spoken, intellectual, serious, and idealistic. He comes from a privileged East Coast background. His father is a renowned professor of underwater erosion who has appeared on the cover of Time magazine; his mother is well respected in their community. Pyle is a brilliant graduate of Harvard University. He has studied theories of government and society, and is particularly devoted to a scholar named York Harding. Harding's theory is that neither Communism nor colonialism is the answer in foreign lands like Vietnam, but rather a "Third Force", usually a combination of traditions, works best. Pyle has read Harding's numerous books many times and has absorbed Harding's thinking as his own.

Phuong, Fowler’s lover at the beginning of the novel, is a beautiful young Vietnamese girl who stays with him for security and protection, and leaves him for the same reason. She is viewed by Fowler as a companion to be taken for granted and by Pyle as a delicate flower to be protected, but Greene never makes clear which, if either, of these views is actually the truth. Pyle's desire for Phuong was largely interpreted by critics to parallel his desire for a non-communist south Vietnam. Her character is never fully developed or revealed. She is never able to show her emotions, as her older sister makes decisions for her. She is named after, but not based on, a Vietnamese friend of Greene’s.

Vigot, a French inspector at the Sûreté, investigates Pyle's death. He is a man torn between doing his duty (pursuing Pyle's death and questioning Fowler) and doing what is best for the country (letting the matter go). He and Fowler are oddly akin in some ways, both faintly cynical and weary of the world; hence their discussion of Blaise Pascal. But they are divided by the differences in their faith: Vigot is a Roman Catholic and Fowler an atheist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_American

GRAHAM GREENE

Born: October 2, 1904
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
Died: April 3, 1991
Vevey, Switzerland

English author, novelist, and dramatist

The works of the English writer Graham Greene explore issues of right and wrong in modern society, and often feature exotic settings in different parts of the world.

Childhood 

Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in England. He was one of six children born to Charles Henry Greene, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and Marion R. Greene, whose first cousin was the famed writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). He did not enjoy his childhood, and often skipped classes in order to avoid the constant bullying by his fellow classmates. At one point Greene even ran away from home.

When Greene began suffering from mental and emotional problems, his parents sent  him to London for psychotherapy (the treatment of a mentally or emotionally disturbed person through verbal communication) by a student of the famous Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). While he was living there, Greene developed his love for literature and began to write poetry. Writers Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) became lifelong mentors (teachers) to him before he returned to high school.

After graduating in 1922, Greene went on to Oxford University's Balliol College. There, Greene amused himself with travel as well as spending six weeks as a member of the Communist Party, a political party that supports communism, a system of government in which the goods and services of a country are owned and distributed by the government. Though he quickly abandoned his Communist beliefs, Greene later wrote sympathetic profiles of Communist leaders Fidel Castro (1926–) and Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969). Despite all these efforts to distract himself from his studies, he graduated from Oxford in 1925 with a second-class pass in history, and a poorly received volume of poetry with the title Babbling April. 
Writing career

In 1926 he began his professional writing career as an unpaid apprentice (working in order to learn a trade) for the Nottingham Journal, moving on later to the London Times. The experience was a positive one for him, and he held his position as an assistant editor until the publication of his first novel, The Man Within (1929). Here he began to develop the characteristic themes he later pursued so effectively: betrayal, pursuit, and death.

His next works, Name of Action (1931) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), were not well received by critics, but Greene regained their respect with the first book he classed as an entertainment piece. Called Stamboul Train in England, it was published in 1932 in the United States as Orient Express. The story revolves around a group of travellers on a train, the Orient Express, a mysterious setting that allowed the author to develop his strange characters with drama and suspense.

Twelve years after Greene converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, he published Brighton Rock (1938), a novel with a highly dramatic and suspenseful plot full of sexual and violent imagery that explored the interplay between abnormal behavior and morality, the quality of good conduct. The Confidential Agent was published in 1939, as was the work The Lawless Roads, a journal of Greene's travels in Mexico in 1938. Here he had seen widespread persecution (poor treatment) of Catholic priests, which he documented in his journal along with a description of a drunken priest's execution (public killing). The incident made such an impression upon him that this victim became the hero of The Power and the Glory, the novel Greene considers to be his best.

Later life

During the years of World War II (1939–45: when Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States [from 1941 until the end of the war]) Greene slipped out of England and went to West Africa as a secret intelligence (gathering secret information) officer for the British government. The result, a novel called The Heart of the Matter, appeared in 1948, and was well received by American readers.

Steadily, Greene produced a series of works that received both praise and criticism. He was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature but never won the award. Still, many other honors were given to him, including the Companion of Honor award by Queen Elizabeth in 1966, and the Order of Merit, a much higher honor, in 1986.

In 1990 Greene was stricken with an unspecified blood disease, which weakened him so much that he moved from his home in Antibes, the South of France, to Vevey, Switzerland, to be closer to his daughter. He lingered until the beginning of spring, then died on April 3, 1991, in La Povidence Hospital in Vevey, Switzerland.

S e l e c t e d  b o o k s

1925 Babbling April 
1929 The Man Within
1930 The Name of Action
1932 Rumour at Nightfall
1932 Stamboul Train ( Orient Express )
1934 It's a Battlefield
1935 England made Me
1936 Journey without Maps
1936 A Gun for Sale ( This Gun for Hire )
1938 Brighton Rock
1939 The Lawless Roads ( Another Mexico )
1939 The Confidential Agent
1940 The Power and The Glory ( The Labyrinthine Ways )
1943 The Ministry of Fear
1948 The Heart of the Matter
1950 The Third Man
1951 The End of the Affair
1955 The Quiet American
1958 Our Man in Havana
1961 A Burntout Case
1963 A Sense of Reality
1966 The Comedians
1969 Travels with My Aunt
1973 The Honorary Consul
1978 The Human Factor
1980 Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party
1982 Monsignor Quixote
1985 Getting to know the General
1985 The Tenth Man
1988 The Captain and the Enemy

For More Information

Greene, Graham. Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. Edited by A. F. Cassis. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994.

Shelden, Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House, 1994.

Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. New York: Viking, 1989.

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Greene-Graham.html

Desdemona's Wooing from Othello, Act 1 Scene 3 by William Shakespeare (speech)

"Sonnet 94 They That Have Power To Hurt" by Will Shakespeare

Sonnet 71 "No Longer Mourn for me when I am Dead" by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 73 "That Time of Year..." by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 60 "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore" by Will Shakespeare

Sonnet 29 When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes, by Will Shakespeare

Sonnet 17 "Who will believe my verse in time to come..." by William Shakespeare (poetry reading)

"The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells (story reading)

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)

English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, whose science fiction stories have been filmed many times. H.G. Wells's best known works are THE TIME MACHINE (1895), one of the first modern science fiction stories, THE INVISIBLE MAN (1897), and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). Wells wrote over a hundred of books, about fifty of them novels.

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water." (from War of the Worlds)

Along with George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which was a pessimistic answer to scientific optimism, Wells's novels are among the classics of science-fiction. Later Wells's romantic and enthusiastic conception of technology turned more doubtful. His bitter side is seen early in the novel BOON (1915), which was a parody of Henry James.

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent. His father was a shopkeeper and a professional cricketer until he broke his leg. In his early childhood, Wells developed love for literature. His mother served from time to time as a housekeeper at the nearby estate of Uppark, and young Wells studied books in the library secretly. When his father's business failed, Wells was apprenticed like his brothers to a draper. He spent the years between 1880 and 1883 in Windsor and Southsea, and later recorded them in KIPPS (1905). In the story Arthur Kipps is raised by his aunt and uncle. Kipps is also apprenticed to a draper. After learning that he has been left a fortune, Kipps enters the upper-class society, which Wells describes with sharp social criticism.

In 1883 Wells became a teacher/pupil at Midhurst Grammar School. He obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied there biology under T.H. Huxley. However, his interest faltered and in 1887 he left without a degree. He taught in private schools for four years, not taking his B.S. degree until 1890. Next year he settled in London, married his cousin Isabel and continued his career as a teacher in a correspondence college. Wells left Isabel for one of his brightest students, Amy Catherine, whom he married in 1895. Their first son, George Philip, was born in 1901.

From 1893 Wells devoted himself entirely to writing. As a novelist Wells made his debut with The Time Machine, a parody of English class division. The narrator is Hillyer, who discusses with his friends about theories of time travel. A week later their host has an incredible story to tell - he has returned from the year 802701. The Time Traveler had found two people: the Eloi, weak and little, who live above ground in a seemingly Edenic paradise, and the Morlocks, bestial creatures that live below ground, who eat the Eloi. The Traveler's beautiful friend Weena is killed, he flees into the far future, where he encounters "crab-like creatures" and things "like a huge white butterfly", that have taken over the planet. In the year 30,000,000 he finds lichens, blood-red sea and a creature with tentacles. He returns horrified back to the present. Much of the realistic atmosphere of the story was achieved by carefully studied technical details. The basic principles of the machine contained materials regarding time as the fourth dimension - years later Albert Einstein published his theory of the four dimensional continuum of space-time.

The Time Machine was followed by THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1896), in which a mad scientist transforms animals into human creatures. The story is told in flashback by a man named Prendick. He travels with a biologist to a remote island, which is controlled by Dr. Moreau. In his laboratory he experiments with animals, and has created Beast People. Moreau is killed by Puma-Woman. Prendick escapes from the island, and returns to London. He concludes the tale: "Even then it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like as sheep stricken with the gid." Wells, who was a Darwinist, did not reject the evolutionary theory but attacked optimists and warned that human progress is not inevitable. In film versions the character of Dr. Moreau has inspired such actors as Charles Laughton, Burt Lancaster, and Marlon Brando.

The Invisible Man was a Faustian story of a scientist who has tampered with nature in pursuit of superhuman powers, and The War of the Worlds, a novel of an invasion of Martians. The story appeared at a time when Giovanni Schiaparelli's discovery of Martian "canals" and Percival Lowell's book Mars (1895) stirred speculations that there could be life on the Red Planet. The narrator is an unnamed "philosophical writer" who tells about events that happened six years earlier. Martian cylinders land on earth outside London and the invaders, who have a "roundish bulk with tentacles" start to vaporize humans. The Martians build walking tripods which ruin towns. Panic spreads, London is evacuated. Martians release poisonous black smoke. However, Martians are slain "by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put on this earth."

Cecil B. DeMille bought the rights of the novel in 1925. In 1930 Paramount offered the story to the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, but he never attempted an adaptation. Its later Hollywood version from 1953 reflected Cold War attitudes. THE FIRST MEN ON THE MOON (1901) was prophetic description of the methodology of space flight, and THE WAR IN THE AIR (1908) foresaw the importance of air forces in combat. Although Wells's novels were highly entertaining, he also tried to arise debate about the future of the mankind. His novel, IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET (1906), was about a giant comet, that nearly hits Earth, but its tail gases cause changes in human behaviour. One of Wells's earlier stories, 'The Star' (1887), tells of a planet, that almost demolishes the world before hitting the sun. However, in THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (1933), Wells failed to anticipate the importance of atomic energy, although in THE WORLD SET FREE (1914) a physicist manages to split the atom.

Dissatisfied with his literary work, Wells moved into the novel genre with LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM (1900). Kipps strengthened his reputation as a serous writer. Wells also published critical pamphlets attacking the Victorian social order, among them ANTICIPATIONS (1901), MANKIND IN THE MAKING (1903), and A MODERN UTOPIA (1905). In THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY (1909) Wells returned to vanished England.

Passionate concern for society led Wells to join in 1903 the socialist Fabian Society in London. It advocated a fairer society by planning for a gradual system of reforms. Wells did not believe in Marx's proletarian socialism, and wrote a messianic dystopia about socialist revolution, WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES (1899), in which the organiser of the revolution, Ostrog, says: "All power is for those who can handle wealth. . .. You must accept facts, and these are facts. The world for the Crowd! The Crowd as Ruler! Even in your days that creed had been tried and condemned. To-day it has only one believer--a multiplex, silly one--the mall in the Crowd."

Wells soon quarreled with the society's leaders, among them George Bernard Shaw. This experience was basis for his novel THE NEW MACHIAVELLI (1911), which portrayed the noted Fabians. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Wells left his lover, Elizabeth Von Arnim, and began a love affair with a young journalist, Rebecca West, 26 years his junior. West and Wells called themselves "panther" and "jaguar". Their son Anthony West later wrote about their difficult relationship in Aspects of a Life (1984).

In his novels Wells used his two wives, Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Odette Keun and all the passing mistresses as models for his characters. ''I was never a great amorist,'' Wells wrote in EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1934) ''though I have loved several people very deeply.'' Rebecca West became a famous author and married a wealthy banker, Henry Andrews, who had business interests in Germany. Elizabeth von Arnim dismissed Wells, and Moura Budberg, Maxim Gorky's former mistress, refused to marry him or even be faithful.

"Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands." (from The World Set Free, 1914)

After WW I Wells published several non-fiction works, among them THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY (1920), THE SCIENCE OF LIFE (1929-39), written in collaboration with Sir Julian Huxley and George Philip Wells, and EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1934). At this time Wells had gained the status as a popular celebrity, and he continued to write prolifically. In 1917 he was a member of Research Committee for the League of Nations and published several books about the world organization. Wells Rising militarism disgusted Wells. "The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind," he said, "no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such calling." (from The Outline of History, 1920)

Although Wells had many reservations about the Soviet system, he understood the broad aims of the Russian Revolution, and had in 1920 a fairly amiable meeting with Lenin. In the early 1920s Wells was a labour candidate for Parliament. Between the years 1924 and 1933 Wells lived mainly in France. From 1934 to 1946 he was the International president of PEN. In 1934 he had discussions with both Stalin, who left him disillusioned, and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them without success to his world-saving schemes. Wells was convinced that Western socialists cannot compromise with Communism, and that the best hope for the future lay in Washington. Also one of his mistresses, Moura Budberg, turned out to be a Soviet agent for years. In THE HOLY TERROR (1939) Wells studied the psychological development of a modern dictator exemplified in the careers of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Orson Welles' Mercury Theater radio broadcast, based on The War of the Worlds, caused a panic in the Eastern United States on October 30, 1938. In Newark, New Jersey, all the occupants of a block of flats left their homes with wet towels round their heads and in Harlem a congregation fell to its knees. Welles, who first considered the show silly, was shaken by the panic he had unleashed and promised that he would never do anything like it again. Later Welles attempted to claim authorship for the script, but it was written by Howard Koch, whose inside story of the whole episode, The panic broadcast; portrait of an event, appeared in 1970. Wells himself was not amused with the radio play. He met the young director in 1940 at a San Antonio radio station, but was at that time mellowed and advertised Welles next film, Citizen Kane.

"Those who have not read The War of the Worlds may be surprised to find that, like much of Wells's writing, it is full of poetry and contains passages that catch the throat. Wells tried to pretend that he was not an artist and stated that "there will come a time for every work of art when it will have served its purpose and be bereft of its last rag of significance." This has not yet happened for the best of Wells's science fiction, though it has done so for all but a few of his realistic and political novels." (Arthur C. Clarke in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, 1999)

Wells lived through World War II in his house on Regent's Park, refusing to let the blitz drive him out of London. His last book, MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER (1945), was about mankind's future prospects, which he had always viewed with pessimism. "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe," he wrote already in The Outline of History. Wells died in London on August 13. 1946.

For further reading: The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells by Michael Coren (1993); A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds, ed. by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld (1993); H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film by Thomas C. Renzi (1992); H.G. Wells by Brian Murray (1990); H.G. Wells under Revision, ed. by Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (1990); H.G. Wells by Brian Murray (1990); H.G. Wells: A Comprehensive Bibliography, published by the H.G. Wells Society (1986); The Time Traveller: Life of H.G. Wells by Norman and Jean Mackenzie (1973); H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. by P. Parrinder (1972); H.G. Wells by L. Dickson (1969); The Early H.G. Wells by Bernard Bergonzi (1961); A Companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of History," by Hilaire Belloc (1926); The World of H.G. Wells by Van Wyck Brooks (1915) - See also: Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Selected works:

• TEXT-BOOK OF BIOLOGY, 1892-93
• HONOURS PHYSIOGRAPHY, 1893
• THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS, 1894 - Voimakoneitten herra ja muita tapauksia (suom. Vдinц Hдmeen- Anttila)
• THE STOLEN BACILLUS AND OTHER STORIES, 1895 - Varastettu basilli ja muita kertomuksia (suom. Vдinц Hдmeen-Anttila)
• THE TIME MACHINE, 1895 - Aikakone (suom.: Lyyli Vihervaara; Matti Kannosto; Tero Valkonen) - film 1960, dir, by George Pal; film 2002, dir. by Simon Wells, starring Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Phylidda Law, Orlando Jones and Jeremy Irons
• THE WONDERFUL VISIT, 1895
• SELECT CONVERSATIONS WITH AN UNCLE, 1895
• THE RED ROOM, 1896 - Punainen huone (suom. Matti Rosvall)
• THE WHEELS OF CHANGE, 1896
• THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, 1896 - Kauhun saari (suom. Teppo Heino) / Tohtori Moreaun saari (suom. Markku Salo) - film 1932, dir. by Erle C. Kenton; film 1977, dir. by Don Taylor; film 1996, dir. by John Frankenheimer, starring Burt Lancaster, Michael York, Nigel Davenport
• THE INVISIBLE MAN, 1897 - Näkymätön mies (suom.: Tapio Hiisivaara; Aino Tuomikoski) - film 1934, dir. by James Whale, starring Claude Rains
• THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS, 1897 - Hämähäkkilaakso ja muita kertomuksia (suom. Werner Anttila)
• THE PLATTNER STORY, 1897
• THIRTY STRANGE STORIES, 1897
• CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS, 1897
• THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, 1898 - Maailmojen sota (suom. Matti Kannosto) - Orson Welles's radio dramatization of it in October 1938 caused widespread panic in the U.S. In Byron Haskin's film from 1953 the alien ship attacks Los Angeles. 'Haskin admits that the film was a war picture even without the Martian shots: "if Russia and the United States had started hostilities, you could have substituted the Russian invasion and have had a hell of a war film. "' (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, 1999). Roland Emmerich's film Independence day (1996) sticks closely to the plot of Well's story. Film 2005, dir. by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by David Koepp, starring Tom Cruise, Justin Chatwin, Dakota Fanning, Tom Robbins. Spielberg's film is set in New Jersey today.
• TALES OF SPACE AND TIME, 1899
• WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES, 1899 - Kun nukkuja herää (suom. Jalmari Finne; Tero Valkonen)
• A CURE FOR LOVE, 1899
• TALES OF SPACE AND TIME, 1899
• THE VACANT COUNTRY, 1899
• LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM, 1900
• ANTICIPATIONS, 1901
• THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, 1901 - Ensimmäiset ihmiset Kuussa (suom. S. Samuli)
• ANTICIPATIONS OF THE REACTIONS OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE AND THOUGHT, 1901
• THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE, 1902
• THE SEA LADY, 1902
• TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM, 1903
• MANKIND IN THE MAKING, 1903
• THE FOOD OF GODS, 1904
• A MODERN UTOPIA, 1905 - Nykyaikainen Utopia (suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen)
• KIPPS: THE STORY OF A SIMPLE SOUL, 1905 - Kipps esiintyy seurapiireissä (suom. Ahti M. Salonen) - film 1941, dir. by Carol Reed
• IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET, 1906
• SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY, 1906
• FAULTS OF THE FABIAN, 1906
• THE FUTURE IN AMERICA, 1906
• RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 1906
• WILL SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME?, 1907
• THIS MISERY OF BOOTS, 1907
• TONO-BUNGAY, 1908
• THE WAR IN THE AIR, 1908 - Ilmasota (suom. Toivo Wallenius)
• FIRST AND LAST THINGS, 1908
• NEW WORLDS FOR OLD, 1908 - Uusia maailmoita vanhojen sijaan (suom. J. Hollo)
• ANN VERONICA, 1909
• THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY, 1910 - film 1948, dir. by Anthony Pelissier
• THE NEW MACHIAVELLI, 1911
• THE H.G. WELLS CALENDAR, 1911
• THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, 1911
• THE DOOR IN THE WALL, 1911
• MARRIAGE, 1912
• THE GREAT STATE, 1912 (ed. with G.R.S. Taylor and Frances Evelyn Warwick)
• KIPPS, 1912 (play, with Rudolf Besier)
• GREAT THOUGHTS FROM H.G. WELLS, 1912
• FLOOR GAMES, 1912
• THE LABOUR UNREST, 1912
• LIBERALISM AND ITS PARTY, 1913
• LITTLE WARS, 1913
• WAR AND COMMON SENSE, 1913
• THOUGHTS FROM H.G. WELLS, 1913
• THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS, 1913
• THE STAR, 1913
• THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN, 1914
• THE WORLD SET FREE, 1914
• AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD, 1914
• THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR, 1914
• BOON, 1915
• THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT, 1915
• BEALBY, 1915
• THE PEACE OF THE WORLD, 1915
• THE ELEMENTS OF RECONSTRUCTION, 1916
• WHAT IS COMING?, 1916
• MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH, 1916 - Mr. Britling pääsee selvyyteen
• GOD THE INVISIBLE KING, 1917 - Kuninkaitten kuningas (suom. Eino Palola)
• THE SOUL OF A BISHOP, 1917
• GOD THE INVISIBLE KING, 1917
• INTRODUCTION TO NOCTURNE, 1917
• A REASONABLE MAN'S PEACE, 1917
• WAR AND THE FUTURE, 1917
• BRITISH NATIONALISM AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1918
• IN THE FOURTH YEAR, 1918
• JOAN AND PETER, 1918
• HE UNDYING FIRE, 1919 - Ikuinen liekki (suom. Susanna Hirvikorpi)
• HISTORY IS ONE, 1919
• THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1919 (with others)
• THE WAY TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1919 (with others)
• THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY, 1920; rev. ed. 1931 (see also Raymond Postgate) - Historian ääriviivat
• FRANK SWINNERTON, 1920
• RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS, 1920
• THE NEW TEACHING OF HISTORY, 1921
• THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION, 1921
• THE WONDERFUL VISIT, 1921 (play, with St. John Ervine)
• THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART, 1922
• A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD, 1922
• WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE, 1922
• THE WORLD, ITS DEBTS, AND THE RICH MEN, 1922
• SOCIALISM AND THE SCIENTIFIC MOTIVE, 1923
• contributor: THIRTY-ONE STORIES BY THIRTY AND ONE AUTHORS, 1923
• MEN LIKE GODS, 1923
• TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, 1922-23
• THE DREAM, 1924 - Uni (suom. Väinö Nyman)
• THE P.R. PARLIAMENT, 1924
• THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER, 1924
• WORKS, 1924 (28 vols.)
• A YEAR OF PROPHESYING, 1924
• A FORECAST OF THE WORLD'S AFFAIR, 1925
• A SHORT HISTORY OF MANKIND, 1925
• CHRISTINA ALBERTA'S FATHER, 1925
• THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD, 1926
• MR. BELLOC OBJECTS TO "THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY", 1926
• WORKS, 1926-27 (24 vols.)
• IN MEMORY OF AMY CATHERINE WELLS, 1927
• WELLS' SOCIAL ANTICIPATIONS, 1927
• MEANWHILE, 1927
• DEMOCRACY UNDER REVISION, 1927
• THE SHORT STORIES OF H.G. WELLS, 1927
• MR. BLETTSWORTHY ON RAMPOLE ISLAND, 1928
• H.G. WELLS COMEDIES, 1928 (plays, with Frank Wells)
• THE OPEN CONSPIRACY, 1928
• THE WAY THE WORLD IS GOING, 1928 THE COMMON SENSE OF WORLD PEACE, 1929
• IMPERIALISM AND THE OPEN CONSPIRACY, 1929
• THE KING WHO WAS A KING, 1929
• THE ADVENTURES OF TOMMY, 1929
• THE SCIENCE OF LIFE, 1929-30 - Elämän ihmeet (suom. Aarno Jalas)
• THE AUTOCRACY OF MR. PARHAM, 1930
• DIVORCE AS I SEE IT, 1930 (with others)
• POINTS OF VIEW, 1930 (with others)
• THE PROBLEM OF THE TROUBLESOME COLLABORATOR, 1930
• THE SCIENCE OF LIFE, 1930 (with Julian S. Huxley and G.P. Wells)
• SETTLEMENT OF THE TROUBLE BETWEEN MT. THRING AND MR. WELLS, 1930
• THE WAY TO WORLD PEACE, 1930
• THE WORK, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS OF MANKIND, 1931
• THE STOLEN BODY, 1931
• THE NEW RUSSIA, 1931
• SELECTIONS FROM THE EARLY PROSE WORKS OF H.G. WELLS, 1931
• THE WORK, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS OF MANKIND, 1931-32
• THE BULPINGTON OF BLUP, 1932
• AFTER DEMOCRACY, 1932
• THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, 1933
• EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1934
• STALIN-WELLS TALK, 1934
• THE NEW AMERICA, 1935
• THINGS TO COME: A FILM STORY BASED ON THE MATERIAL CONTAINED IN HIS HISTORY OF THE FUTURE "THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME", 1935 - film 1936, directed by William Cameron Menzies, adapted by H.G. Wells . "The book, unlike the film, does not end on a note of risk taking and space exploration; it is more interested in establishing the importance of the confluence of wills over the importance of individuals." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)
• THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES: A FILM STORY, 1936
• IDEA OF A WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA, 1936
• THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION, 1936
• THE CROQUET PLAYER, 1937
• BRYNHILD, 1937
• THE CAMFORD VISITATION, 1937
• STAR BEGOTTEN, 1937
• THE FAVORITE SHORT STORIES OF H.G. WELLS, 1937
• WORLD BRAIN, 1938
• APROPOS OF DOLORES, 1938
• THE BROTHERS, 1938
• THE HOLY TERROR, 1939
• THE FATE OF HOMO SAPIENS, 1939
• TRAVELS OF A REPUBLICAN RADICAL IN SEARCH OF HOT WATER, 1939
• ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT, 1940
• BABES IN THE DARKLING WOOD, 1940
• TWO HEMISPHERES OR ONE WORLD?, 1940
• SHORT STORIES BY H.G. WELLS, 1940
• THE COMMON SENSE OF WAR AND PEACE, 1940
• H.G. WELLS, S. DE MADARIAGA, J. MIDDLETON MURRY, C.E.M. JOAD ON THE NEW WORLD ORDER, 1940
• THE NEW WORLD READER, 1940
• THE RIGHTS OF MAN, 1940
• YOU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL: A SAMPLE OF LIFE 1901-1951, 1941
• GUIDE TO THE NEW WORLD, 1941
• THE POCKET HISTORY OF THE WORLD, 1941
• THE CONQUEST OF TIME, 1942
• MODERN RUSSIAN END ENGLISH REVOLUTIONARIES, 1942
• THE NEW RIGHTS OF MAN, 1942
• THE OUTLOOK FOR HOMO SAPIENS, 1942
• PHOENIX, 1942
• SCIENCE AND WORLD-MIND, 1942
• A THESIS ON THE QUALITY OF ILLUSION, 1942
• THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, 1943
• THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST, 1943
• THE LAND IRONCLADS, 1943
• THE NEW ACCELERATOR, 1943
• THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT, 1943
• CRUX ANSATA, 1943
• THE MOSLEY OUTRAGE, 1943
• '42 TO '44, 1944
• RESHAPING MAN'S HERITAGE, 1944 (with J.S. Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane) )
• THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST AND THE NEW ACCELERATOR, 1944
• MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, 1945
• MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, AND THE HAPPY TURNING, 1945
• THE HAPPY TURNING: A DREAM OF LIFE, 1945
• MARXISM VS. LIBERALISM, 1945
• TWENTY-EIGHT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, 1952
• SEVEN STORIES, 1953
• THE DESERT DAISY, 1957
• THE H.G. WELLS PAPERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 1958 (ed. by Gordon N. Ray)
• SELECTED SHORT STORIES, 1958
• HENRY JAMES AND H.G. WELLS, 1958
• ARNOLD BENNET AND H.G. WELLS, 1960
• GEORGE GISSING AND H.G. WELLS, 1961
• JOURNALISM AND PROPHECY 1893-1946 (ed. by W. Warren Wagar), 1964
• HOOPDRIVER'S HOLIDAY, 1964 (play, adaptation of the novel The Wheels of Change)
• THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS, 1964
• THE CONE, 1965
• THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST, AND NINE OTHER STORIES, 1965
• THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF H.G. WELLS, 1966
• contributor: MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE FICTION, 1967
• THE WEALTH OF MR. WADDY, 1969
• A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME, 1976
• H.G. WELLS'S LITERARY CRITICISM, 1980
• H.G. WELLS IN LOVE: A POSTSCRIPT TO AN EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1984
• THE MAN WITH A NOSE, 1984
• TREASURY OF H.G. WELLS, 1985
• H.G. WELLS SCIENCE FICTION TREASURY, 1987
• THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF H.G. WELLS, 1987
• THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE, WITH THE COMMON-SENSE OF WORLD PEACE AND THE HUMAN ADVENTURE, 1989
• BERNARD SHAW AND H.G. WELLS, 1995 (ed. by J. Percy Smith)

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/hgwells.htm

"Sonnet 2 When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow" by William Shakespeare (poetry reading)

"The Haunted House" by Virginia Woolf (short story reading)

Virginia Woolf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf (pronounced /ˈwʊlf/; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother, a renowned beauty, Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson) (1846–1895), was born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson and later moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.^[1] Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer.^[2] The young Virginia was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children from her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth, Stella Duckworth, and Gerald Duckworth. Her father was married to Minny Thackeray, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with the family until she was institutionalized in 1891.^[3] Leslie and Julia had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian Stephen (1883).

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's youngest daughter), meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's honorary godfather, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and Vanessa (unlike their brothers, who were formally educated) were taught the classics and English literature.

According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department)^[4]. Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department.

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized.^[3] Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested,^[5] were also influenced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks until her suicide.

Bloomsbury

After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008). In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and the couple's interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Virginia's development as an author.^[6]

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. Despite his low material status (Virginia referring to Leonard during their engagement as a "penniless Jew") the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making — after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.^[7] The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s.^[8] In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."^[8] After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at the age of 26.

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.^[9] Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.^[10]

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost modernists.^[12]

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s.^[13]

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an anti-semite, despite her being happily married to a Jewish man. This anti-semitism is drawn from the fact that she often wrote of Jewish characters in stereotypical archetypes and generalizations, including describing some of her Jewish characters as physically repulsive and dirty.^[14] The overwhelming and rising 1920s and 30s anti-semitism possibly influenced Virginia Woolf. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to the composer, Ethel Smyth, quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."^[15] In another letter to her dear friend Ethel Smyth, Virginia gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew has more religion in one toe nail--more human love, in one hair."^[16] Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf actually hated and feared 1930s fascism with its anti-semitism knowing they were on Hitler's blacklist. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.^[17]

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.^[17]

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.^[18]

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.^[19]

Orlando (1928) has a different quality from all Virginia Woolf's other novels suggested by its subtitle, "A Biography", as it attempts to represent the character of a real person and is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for being a girl and for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.^[20]

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.^[21]

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style being chiefly written in verse.^[22]

While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.^[23]

Her works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers of the calibre of Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Suicide

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.^[11]

On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's skeletonised body was not found until 18 April 1941.^[24] Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

“

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.[25]

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo reads most of Woolf's life and career through the lens of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a young woman in her 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women in education and society.

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf holds that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. This is not accepted by Leonard's family but is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. Victoria Glendinning's book Leonard Woolf: A Biography, which is even more extensively researched and supported by contemporaneous writings, argues that Leonard Woolf was not only supportive of his wife but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Accounts of Virginia's supposed anti-semitism (Leonard was atheist) are not only taken out of historical context but greatly exaggerated. Virginia's own diaries support this view of the Woolfs' marriage.^[26]

Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin Bell.

In 1992, Thomas Caramagno published the book The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005 is the most recent examination of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (ISBN 0-7658-0321-6) was published in 2006.

Rita Martin’s play Flores no me pongan (2006) considers Woolf's last minutes of life in order to debate polemical issues such as bisexuality, Jewishness and war. Written in Spanish, the play was performed in Miami under the direction of actress Miriam Bermudez.

In films

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was an American play (1962) by Edward Albee and film (1966) directed by Mike Nichols (screenplay by Ernest Lehman adapted from the play). Virginia Woolf does not appear as a character. According to the playwright, the title of the play — which is about a dysfunctional university married couple — refers to an academic joke about "who's afraid of living life without false illusions".

• Virginia Woolf is a character in the film The Hours (2002). For her portrayal of Woolf, actress Nicole Kidman won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Short story collections

• Monday or Tuesday (1921)
• A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944)
• Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973)
• The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)

"Biographies"

Virginia Woolf published three books to which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":

• Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually characterised Novel, inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West)
• Flush: A Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as "stream of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the sense of telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940, usually characterised non-fiction, however: "[Woolf's] novelistic skills worked against her talent as a biographer, for her impressionistic observations jostled uncomfortably with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of facts."^[27])

Non-fiction books

• Modern Fiction (1919)
• The Common Reader (1925)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• On Being Ill (1930)
• The London Scene (1931)
• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
• Three Guineas (1938)
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
• The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
• The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
• Granite and Rainbow (1958)
• Books and Portraits (1978)
• Women And Writing (1979)
• Collected Essays (four volumes)

Drama

• Freshwater: A Comedy (performed in 1923, revised in 1935, and published in 1976)

Autobiographical writings and diaries

• A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary
• Moments of Being (1976)
• A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia Woolf from 1915 to 1941
• Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)
• Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris
• The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, Expanded Edition, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2008)

Letters

• Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)
• The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888-1941 (six volumes, 1975–1980)
• Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)

Notes

1. ^ Smith College libraries biography of Julia Prinsep Stephen
2. ^ Alan Bell, ‘Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006
3. ^ ^{a b} Robert Meyer, 1998, Case Studies in Abnormal Behaviour, Allyn and Bacon
4. ^ Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith, ‘“Tilting at Universities”: Woolf at King’s College London’, Woolf Studies Annual, volume 16, 2010, pages 1-44."
5. ^ Bell 1996: 44
6. ^ Briggs, Virginia Woolf (2005), 69-70
7. ^ Claire Messud (10 December 2006). "The Husband". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Messud.t.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-08-10.
8. ^ ^{a b} "Matt & Andrej Koymasky - Famous GLTB - Virginia Woolf". Andrejkoymasky.com. http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wool2.html. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
9. ^ "Virginia Woolf". http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vwoolf.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-05.
10. ^ Haule, J. (1982). Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage out". Contemporary Literature, 23, 100-104.
11. ^ ^{a b} Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
12. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, Introduction, p.1
13. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, Introduction, p.1,3,53.
14. ^ "Tales of abjection and miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's Jewish stories" Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Leena Kore Schroder, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_3_49/ai_n6130106/pg_17/
15. ^ ""Mr. Virginia Woolf"". Commentarymagazine.com. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801&page=2. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
16. ^ "The Letters of Virginia Woolf" Volume Five 1932-1935, Nigel Nicolson & Joanne Trautmann, 1979, p. 321.
17. ^ ^{a b} "The Hours" DVD, "Special Features", "The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf", 2003.
18. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, p.13,53.
19. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, p.15-17.
20. ^ "The Novels of Virginia Woolf", Hermione Lee, 1977, pp.138-157.
21. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, p.19.
22. ^ "Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf", Morris Beja, 1985, p.24.
23. ^ "From Clapham to Bloomsbury: a genealogy of morals", Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, 2001. http://www.facingthechallenge.org/himmelfarb.php
24. ^ Panken, Shirley (1987). ""Oh that our human pain could here have ending" — Between the Acts". Virginia Woolf and the "Lust of Creation": a Psychoanalytic Exploration. SUNY Press. pp. 260–262. ISBN 9780887062001. http://books.google.com/books?id=de4UyeBbCIwC&pg=PA260. Retrieved 13 August 2009.
25. ^ Rose, Phyllis (1986). Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Routledge. pp. 243. ISBN 0863580661. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nco9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA243&dq=%22I+don%27t+think+two+people+could+have+been+happier+than+we+have+been.%22&sig=ACfU3U1_LUxP8T1rxk5kPkwqS9qeGHDtSA#PPA243,M1. Retrieved 2008-09-24.
26. ^ ""Mr. Virginia Woolf"". Commentarymagazine.com. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
27. ^ Frances Spalding (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Paper Darts: the Illustrated Letters, Collins & Brown, 1991, (ISBN 1-85585-046-X) (hb) & (ISBN 1-85585-103-2) (pb), pp. 139-140