Saturday, March 3, 2018

All About Virginia

As we all know, Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941. This caused quite a stir in the intellectual community and many famous authors, friends, and family of Virginia wrote to each other or to her husband Leonard expressing their condolences and their own heartbreak over her death. T. S. Eliot was one of those people. He wrote Leonard, "I merely feel quite numb at the moment, and can’t think about this or anything else." He also wrote in his own obituary for her that English literary culture would have been left "formless" or "marginal" without her at the center of it, and he's totally right. I was hoping to find some essays or other works by T.S. Eliot about Virginia (she's one of my favorite authors, sue me) but I found nada. T.S. Eliot wrote essays critiqueing and analyzing other people's works but he didn't critique Virginia and I think I know why...concerning Virginia, Eliot apparently wrote that it wasn't his place to question or judge literary elites or something like that. Regrettably, I wasn't able to re-dig up the article in which he said that (I kinda stumbled upon it) but I'm kinda guessing he had the utmost reverence for her.

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