By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Virginia Woolf wrote just nine novels, but she also left a number of volumes of non-fiction, an important volume of short stories, and an unusual work of biography, among countless essays and reviews. But what are Woolf’s best books?
A short biography of Arnold Bennett, author of Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger
1. His first name was actually Enoch. Born in 1867 in Hanley, Staffordshire (part of the famous ‘Potteries’ and now a district of Stoke-on-Trent), Enoch Arnold Bennett was named after his father, a solicitor. Enoch Junior was sent to the school at Newcastle-under-Lyme (‘Oldcastle’ in his fiction), but he only became a successful writer after he had left his hometown in the Potteries. However, he would write about them in much of his fiction. It is an odd fact in the life of Arnold Bennett that he could not perhaps have written so well about his homeland of North Staffordshire if he had remained there. Would James Joyce have been able to write Ulysses if he’d remained in Dublin?
Fun Ezra Pound facts, including his unusual middle name and his even weirder fashion sense
1. Ezra Pound’s middle name was Loomis. Or rather, one of his middle names. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in Idaho in 1885; a childhood friend was Hilda Doolittle, who would become known as an imagist poet under the initials ‘H. D.’ (the initialism was Pound’s own PR idea) and, later, as a novelist. Pound even asked Doolittle to marry him in 1907; she declined (as he was reportedly seeing two other women at the time, it’s not hard to see why!).
Pound would be the driving force behind the literary movement known as imagism in the years 1913-15, and would also contribute to modernist poetry himself with a number of famous poems, among them the two-line imagist masterpiece ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and the very long poem The Cantos (Pound’s life’s work, and over 800 pages in full). The Cantos is a vast work, described by Hugh Kenner as the chronicle of Pound’s own life, and written over a period of nearly half a century. (It was described by Pound, in an early draft, as a ‘rag-bag’.)
We’ve written about T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) before, in this previous post on his importance as a modern poet. In this follow-up post, we’ve put together ten of Hulme’s shortest and sweetest poems – most of which were written in around 1908-9 when Hulme was in his mid-twenties.
‘Stream of consciousness’. You may have heard the term, but where did it come from, and what does it mean? The answers are perhaps surprising, and lead us to a forgotten modernist writer whom Virginia Woolf, among others, praised.