L2L The Death of the Moth (ft. Carol Andrews)

“The Death of the Moth” and “If Shakespeare Had a Sister”

Virginia Woolf

Despite her troubled life, English writer Virginia Woolf has become an icon of modern literature, from her fantastic and acute novels to her essays about the times she saw. An ardent champion of social justice and an early feminist, she understood both the social strictures of her time and the rebellion against them. She is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and she continues to influence readers and writers today. A collection of her essays and short stories was published in 1942, a year after her tragic suicide, including “The Death of the Moth” — in which she (in some ways comparably to E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” discussed two episodes ago) experiments with time, narrative, and images of life and death. She is a master of the stream-of-consciousness technique and also what it means to be a woman rooted in certain places and eras. For example, her earlier “If Shakespeare Had a Sister” (1929) collapses the world we know and the world of her imagination. This week, Leigh and P. T. chat about her life and essays with Dr. Carol Andrews, associate professor emerita of literature. If you didn’t see the play, Martha is quite afraid of Virginia Woolf!