Henry Oliver in Liberties:
Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as Penelope Fitzgerald said, Woolf’s techniques were taken as far as they could go. She had the genius to exhaust a whole line of artistic inquiry, and many have felt exhausted by her.
And she was personally unlikeable: racist, snobbish, uncharitable, snide, a malicious gossip. Perhaps her feminism rankled readers, but that her nastiness has put off a great many more is surely undeniable. This is the Virginia Woolf we think we know: hard to read, easy to hate. That is the image of her which has calcified in popular imagination. But the image of her is an artifact we have created, and the women, her books, and her world are stranger to contemporary readers than they have been to any previous ones.
More here.
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