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A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf (Selections)

nazlusha waysofblackink
2024-09-05
During the Mrs. Dalloway classes, I will continue to share writing advice from Virginia Woolf, this time from her diaries. We'll see how she's reading, writing, and thinking as she makes her way to the years of composing and publishing Mrs. Dalloway. I chose the following excerpt knowing Woolf considered including a Greek chorus in the novel. She later dismissed the idea and replaced by the sound of the bells telling the hour. 

1918
Monday, August 19th
I finished by the way the Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it's not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made and improved and freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors and authors and critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer and subtler touches will tell, and words can be spared. At any rate my feeling always is that one can't read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line and hint; and that the apparent bareness is only on the surface.


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