This Penguin Little Clothbound Classic is a collection of short stories, fiction and essays. Two essays were very interesting: “How to Read a Book” and “Women and Fiction”. The mood in both is very feminist, with critiques of gender roles and societal expectations, and the barriers women face in writing. I really liked the last story, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”, where we are taken on a tour of London on the pretext of buying a pencil. All in all, this little book was a first approach to Virginia Woolf for me, where I didn’t find all the stories incredible, but I appreciated the beauty of the sentences and the deep thoughts.
“The genius of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë is never more convincing than in their power to ignore such claims and solicitations and to hold on their way unperturbed by scorn or censure. But it needed a very serene or a very powerful mind to resist the temptation of anger. The ridicule, the censure, the assurance of inferiority in one form or another which were lavished upon women who practised an art, provoked such reactions naturally enough. One sees the effect in Charlotte Brontë’s indignation, in George Eliot’s resignation. Again and again one finds it in the work of the lesser women writers – in their choice of a subject, in their unnatural self-assertiveness, in their unnatural docility. Moreover, insincerity leaks in almost unconsciously. They adopt a view in deference to authority. The vision becomes too masculine or it becomes too feminine; it loses its perfect integrity and, with that, its most essential quality as a work of art.”
“How Should One Read a Book?” was first published in 1926; “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in 1927; “The Sun and the Fish” in 1928; “Women and Fiction” in 1929; “On Being Ill” in 1930; “Great Men’s Houses” and “Oxford Street Tide” in 1932; “Craftsmanship” in 1937; “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car” in 1942; and “Flying Over London” in 1950.