From "Mrs. Brown" to Marryat

This book, a companion to Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth" and "The Moment," and to her earlier "Common Readers," is probably the last volume of her essays which will be published. Many of the essays in the book have appeared separately before. Written at various times in the last 20 years of her life, they represent a wide variety of subjects, from a dissertation on the novels of Turgenev to a plea for the abolition of book reviewers.

A large body of the essays in this volume could be loosely called literary biography. These are brief and charming sketches, some of famous men, Conrad, Hardy, Oliver Goldsmith, and some of obscure figures, known only through a terse diary or a packet of family letters. In all of them, Virginia Woolf exercises her talent of character-drawing. She uses with extraordinary deftness little details about her subjects' lives and periods; her essays sparkle even when the man is very dull.

Her 12-page piece on Oliver Goldsmith is the best portrait: in the brief space, one gets a full idea of the scholar with "ugly body and stumbling tongue," who "had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene."

The title essay, "The Captain's Death Bed," gives a loss satisfying portrait. Captain Marryat, British seadog, author, and excoriator of the United States (in six volumes), does not succeed like Goldsmith, though the description of him is sprightly and interesting.

A second group of essays deals with contemporary arts and letters--books, criticism, the cinema. The best, and best known is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, a spirited and delightful defense of the new literature of Joyce, Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence against the outmoded conventions of the Edwardian "realists," particularly Arnold Bennett. "Mrs. Brown" in the name Virginia Woolf gives a little lady who sat opposite her on a train; the author uses her, an ordinary unknown person, as a symbol of human character.

The Edwardians "have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window . . . but never at her, never at life, never at human nature." It is the difficult task of the new writers, she says, to find the right literary tools, the literary conventions, for describing Mrs. Brown as she is.

There is no doubt that Mrs. Brown is Virginia Woolf's heroine, too. Her essays discuss books, literary currents, social questions, but fundamentally their concern is with people. They are full of subtle portraits, penetrating yet sympathetic, always economically drawn. The characters, one sometimes feels, are created with too much sympathy, but they are never unreal. In their creation, Mrs. Woolf has followed her dictum about Mrs. Brown; "She is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety . . . the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself."