Who would anticipate that the Chronicle of Higher Education would take a look at three of the 20th century's most significant fiction writers? Nonetheless, it is so. Carlin Romano wonders if Jean Rhys and Flannery O'Connor might not be on their way to the kind of literary legend embodied by Virginia Woolf.
Romano compares the "peculiar status" of Woolf, which found her, a leading modernist writer of Bloomsbury, on the cover of a 1937 issue of TIME, incarnated in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, portrayed on the National Portrait Gallery's most popular bestselling postcard, rendered in at least three rock group band names, and subject of many kinds of biographies.
"Is such universal celebrity about to strike O'Connor and Rhys?" Romano asks, citing the new biographies of these two writers, which have been finding quite wide-ranging and populist attention in periodicals and universities. He goes on to wonder how the "push and pull" on their legacies will play out. Who will embrace them as role models?
Related: I am drowning in love for Virginia Woolf while reading Mrs. Dalloway. I've always liked her writing, much enjoying A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, some of her short stories and To the Lighthouse. But I love Mrs. Dalloway. Mad infatuation. Oh Virginia, how I love growing closer to you.
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