Holograph notebook labeled “Modern Novels (Joyce)“
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Holograph notebook labeled “Modern Novels (Joyce)”
ca. 1919
This slender notebook includes the running notes Woolf kept while reading the first seven episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Although she would later deem the novel “a mis-fire,” she did not arrive at that assessment lightly, and was a serious reader of the work—which certainly influenced her own writing. In these pages, Woolf notes the beauty of Joyce’s phrases and remarks that “it is an attempt to get thinking into literature,” which was also Woolf’s aim.
Woolf then reworked these notes, along with additional material in the notebook, into the essay “Modern Novels,” published in The Times Literary Supplement on April 10, 1919, and collected as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader.
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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