Granite and Rainbow: Collected Essays

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958. First American Edition Stated . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 5 1/2" x 8. Bell, Vanessa - Jacket Design. 239 Pages. Blue cloth with silver lettering to spine and silver decoration to front board. Very minor and barely noticeable wear to the pointed corners. Very tight book with no marks or stamps.Interior text is faultless. Dust jacket, a Vanessa Bell creation, is light blue with unclipped price $3.75. No creases or tears to jacket but there is some evidence of age-tanning to edges and spine area. The publication of Granite and Rainbow brings to light twenty-seven of her essays on the art of fiction and the art of biography. Among them are some of her most eloquent and incisive pieces. Here we read her concept of what the novel of the future could be, of the function of criticism, of the role of the novelist involved in and yet detached from life. She gives a remarkably astute portrait of the early Hemingway, critical estimates of George Meredith, Henry James, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many others. Virginia Woolf said that the art of biography fuses the hard and solid granite of truth with the elusive beauty of a rainbow. This demand for precision and imagination was in all her own work, as it is in this book. Virginia Woolf, author of novels, biographies, literary criticism, and essays, died in England in I94I. Many of the essays in this new book were published anonymously in British and American journals and have only recently (1958) been discovered. -- From Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf. Scans available.