Virginia Woolf

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when

Excerpt:

"The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy."

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity. Woolf addresses what she sees as the arrival of modernism, with the much cited phrase "that on or about December 1910 human character changed", referring to Roger Fry's exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. She argued that this in turn led to a change in human relations, and thence to change

Woolf's first distinctly modernist novel follows an aloof yet beloved young man from his childhood through his student days to his too-early death during World War I.

Annotated and with an introduction by Vara Neverow