Another effort at what Woolf herself once described as the ``compromise, evasion, understatement, overstatement, irrelevance which we call biography.'' Woolf biographies and studies are still churned out at nearly an annual rate. Leaska, the editor of Woolf's early journals (A Passionate Apprentice) and her correspondence with Vita Sackville-West, as well as the author of several critical studies of her work, is a longtime mainstay of that academic industry. His appraisal of Woolf's life, here made largely through the lens of her writings, offers a thoroughgoing and yet curiously limited version of her portrait. Crucial aspects of her father, Leslie Stephen, the emotionally demanding patriarch of letters, and of her devoted but distant mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, are viewed essentially through their fictional counterparts in To the Lighthouse. According to Leaska, the influence of her parents combined Leslie's dependency on others for approval and affection with Julia's defensive aloofness, leaving Woolf unbalanced as she embarked on her writing career and marriage. Perhaps Leaska took Woolf at her word when she wrote, ``Nothing is real unless I write it.'' He overdoes it with documentation, plumbing her voluminous diaries, as well as her novels, at the expense of taking a wider and more objective view of her relationships with the remarkable people in her life: husband Leonard, sister Vanessa, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Vita Sackville-West. Typically—and narrowly—these people are characterized as parental substitutes. Unsurprisingly, Vita emerges in a pivotal role as both a strong father-figure and an emotional mother-substitute (and as the inspiration for Orlando). Leaska seems overly concerned with Woolf's imaginative existence and not curious enough about her daily life. Earnest and faithful, but do we really need another after last year's superb Woolf biography by Hermione Lee? (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-16659-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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