[Vwoolf] Pargiters

Matthew Cheney mcheney at gmail.com
Wed Sep 9 12:40:04 EDT 2015


Hello,

It depends what you mean by "failure". In one sense, The Pargiters is by 
definition a failure, since Woolf considered it so and reconfigured her 
approach. On the other hand, from the time people started looking at the 
manuscripts, there's been a certain push to see The Pargiters as more 
radical than The Years, even as a lost opportunity or as evidence of 
Woolf's cowardice when revising. See, for instance, Grace Radin's study 
of the manuscript. Some of the early manuscript work on the book seems 
to me to show at least some underlying desire to rescue The Pargiters 
from The Years, but I tend to get defensive about The Years, which I 
think is among Woolf's great accomplishments and severely underappreciated.

The best source is probably Anna Snaith's edition of The Years for the 
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, which has an 
excellent, thorough introduction and a useful bibliography. (I think 
anything by Anna Snaith is worth reading on this topic or, for that 
matter, any other.) Also of some use to you may be Virginia Woolf's Late 
Cultural Criticism by Alice Wood. And perhaps relevant: "The Years: 
Mapping a Genre" by Stevens Amidon in The CEA Critic 71:3 (2009) 
pp.85-99 and "Virginia Woolf's The Years: Identity and Time in an 
Anti-Family Novel" by Liisa Saariluoma, Orbis Litterarum, 54:4 (1999) 
pp.276-300.

Best wishes,

Matt Cheney
University of New Hampshire

> Molly Patricia Hite <mailto:mph7 at cornell.edu>
> September 9, 2015 at 11:59 AM
> I have a quick question for the list. Does anyone know of any 
> published criticism that does /not/ accept that the “essay-novel” 
> /The Parroters /was, in itself, a failure?
>
> Thanks, Molly Hite
>
>
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