The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 9 November 1998
by Virginia Woolf
In this startling book, two days in the life of an English family vacationing along the seaside are described. But Virginia Woolf makes the story so very much more than that. She brilliantly gives voice to feelings and thoughts that, while always lurking beneath the surfaces of human interactions, rarely see light of day. Beneath and around the relationship of a woman to her husband, and between the children and the patriarch, are intense emotions colored by the social morés of the time and the expectations everybody has of everybody else. Indeed, the first part of the book delves deeply into the position of the woman, once strong and beautiful, subordinate to the man, intellectual and distant. At times it reads like intensely feminist literature, but there is even more to it than that. Time passes, and we see characters cut adrift in the sea of life after the moorings of their relationships are cut. Woolf's writing is intricate and beautiful, engaging and hypnotic. The seaside house, as much a character as the people who inhabit it, seems beautiful and remote. Only a few of the many characters in the book are explored in depth, but that depth is almost shockingly real.
Also by Virginia Woolf: [Orlando] [The London Scene] [Mrs. Dalloway]