By Nava Atlas | On January 21, 2015 | Updated April 28, 2025 | Comments (2)
Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) might have lived the ideal writing life were it not for her lifelong struggle with mental illness. But this wasn’t the only source of anguish.
Surrounded by brilliant intellectuals in the Bloomsbury circle, she was also nurtured and protected by her husband, Leonard Woolf.
Yet she was relentlessly self-critical, restless, and rarely satisfied with her literary efforts. Perhaps that was what drove her to greatness, on the other hand. Read More→
By Robert van Gelder | On January 20, 2015 | Updated March 14, 2023 | Comments (4)
The following 1940 interview with Pearl S. Buck is excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946: Pearl Buck says that in American life she has found a limitless reservoir of material for writing.
She never “became Chinese,” she always knew that she was American, yet her discovery of this country has had a certain Columbian freshness. (Photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The Good Earth was, in a way, “a pot-boiler,” written on “borrowed money and it had to be written at the time it was because I needed oh, a lot of money. Not just needed it. Had to have it.” Read More→
By Robert van Gelder | On January 20, 2015 | Updated September 16, 2022 | Comments (0)
Excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946, an interview conducted with Porter in 1940: Katherine Anne Porter stated with evident surprise that her papers are now in order and in her own house.
Formerly she traveled a great deal with a suitcase for personal effects and a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and notes. “Always I was up to my chin in paper.”
Now she has burned numerous short stories and four novels that she decided not to publish. But the material that she kept to work over is enough to occupy her well into her eighties. There are notes for novels, for a biography of Cotton Mather, and for some forty short stories.
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By Nava Atlas | On January 18, 2015 | Updated December 28, 2023 | Comments (0)
James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798 – 1874), a nephew of Jane Austen’s, first published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869. Its second edition in 1871 was much expanded to include more letters and biographical material.
At this point in time, Jane Austen’s reputation was waning somewhat, and this publication is credited for having helped to revive her reputation.
In the narrative, Austen-Leigh describes the difficulties experienced by Austen’s family to secure publication for her early works. Indeed, during Jane’s lifetime, her successes were solid yet modest, and much of her work was published under the generic nom de plume “A Lady.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 17, 2015 | Updated July 23, 2026 | Comments (0)
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