The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf Shorter Fiction

Levy (20th-century British and American literature, Western Connecticut State U.) examines the construction of lifeworlds of working and middle class women in Woolf's (1882-1941) critically neglected shorter fiction. From the earliest "Phyllis and Rosamond" (1906) to the final "The Watering Place" (1941), she says, women with varying degrees of material resources move through a sexualized and painterly landscape where much depends on fleeting yet intensely intimate encounters in rural and urban, public and private spaces. Her arrangement is chronological: enigmatically tight spaces before 1917, the poor and heavy feed upon the middle and upper classes 1917-22, heightened class consciousness 1922-26, and dismantling oscillations 1929-41. A final chapter looks at the expanding space of the Monks House Papers. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Heather Levy teaches twentieth-century British and American literature at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from Binghamton University. Her essays on Virginia Woolf have appeared in several peer reviewed publications including Modern Fiction Studies.