Entertaining the Alien

16. Women and Writing, Virginia Woolf

I have this strange tendency to sometimes read a writer's nonfiction work before ever getting around to their fiction (see also, Ursula K. LeGuin). I bought this book while I was still in school and on a feminist critical theory kick, but never got around to reading it.

Woolf had some interesting ideas of what good writing was, and seemed devoted to some cold, ethereal, abstract notion of Art as separate from the real world. Still, whether or not I agree with her aesthetics, she has some interesting things to say about women writers from a historical perspective. Apparently one of her favorites was Jane Austen, along with the Bronte sisters. (I suppose she and I would agree on that point, at least.)

This book is a small one, and mostly served to whet my appetite for the subject once again--might be time for me to go digging through my old lit textbooks...