What Others Have Said...

               There is much to be said about Virginia Woolf. One could explore her writing for a sufficient amount time just detailing how she uses style, let alone her themes and other aspects. Here are just a few individuals who had something to say about Woolf:

                  Robert Atwan, in his book Ten On Ten, gives a view of Woolf through examining her writing style. Style, he mentions, is one of those things that is hard to discuss, and in regards to Woolf’s essay one must take an “aesthetic approach” (Atwan 515).

Style is most definitely art; I doubt one would say differently, and just as painting comes with an instruction manual detailing different brush strokes and color schemes, style comes with an instruction manual detailing things such as different placements of a semicolon, but at the end of the day it’s your choice what to do with those brush strokes and colors; it’s your choice where the semicolon best fits in your ideas. So one has no choice but to view Woolf’s essay through an artistic viewpoint. And Atwan notes how “the writer’s style is nearly inseparable form her own notion of who she is, reading and essay by Woolf leaves us with the feeling of having been engaged in conversation with an utterly charming, utterly brilliant woman” (Atwan 515). This clearly states how Woolf writes, she doesn’t just give you words to read; she gives you something to actually interact with.

                  A second individual who gave insight on Woolf’s writing is Carl Klaus, a now English professor.  He describes a relationship that developed over a span of many years between him and one of Woolf’s essays, “The Modern Essay”, in which Woolf defines what an essay should be. Klaus gives an account of how when he first read this particular essay as an undergrad, he had the same view of the essay that most might have: “They were about literature and therefore couldn’t be literature. So, it didn’t seem especially important to hear what she had to about the modern essay” (Klaus 28). However, years later in his career he found himself once again face-to-face with this particular essay, and upon reading it again Woolf’s reference to the essay as something that should provide pleasure stood out to him, for it hadn’t occurred to him just how much joy he had in fact gotten out of the all the essays he had read thus far in his life (Klaus 29). This pattern of walking away from this particular Woolf essay and coming back to it continued on for some years, Klaus finding something new each time he re-read it. At the end of his account, going back to that essay one more time, he picked up on that defining feature of Woolf, a feature that he noticed Woolf even say was needed to produce an essay, and that feature was an idea (Klaus 34).

                  A third to express thoughts on Woolf is Elena Fillmon, who describes the topics that Woolf wrote about in her essays as being “presented in an original, sensitive and lucid way, and filtered by her unique personality” (Fillmon 26). Once again we see another commenting on how Woolf’s essays are writings to be thought about, to be experienced. Fillmon also notes how important style was to Woolf: “every single page emphasis the art of description, the minuteness of analysis, the beauty of the adjective and the originality of expression” (Fillmon 28). 

                 Woolf was to use a multitude of elements to create her images, and it’s her emphasis on style that made writing come alive. I think a good way to sum up what all three of these individuals have said is that Woolf’s writing isn't just words and sentences, it is stylistic elements that create life; is life.