To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Woolf's legacy hasn't really done her justice. She's a fantastic linguist, shrewd humanist and powerfully articulate intellectual. Her stream-of-consciousness writing darts from one character to another in the turn of a page, or even in the same sentence; it's in the same style as Mrs Dalloway (masterpiece), but remains somehow more difficult; it might also be more ambitious. A success on all accounts, at any rate. Fans of Robert Altman's cinematic aesthetic (roaming, flexible, casual though disciplined and always omniscent camera) would like Woolf's literariness.
If your point concerns critical/scholarly acclaim, I think Woolf has been given her due. Perhaps her talents as an essayist and literary critic are still undervalued, but her fiction has the respect it deserves. A little late in coming, but nowadays anyone even remotely au fait with 20th century literature has Woolf pegged as a key figure: a seminal modernist and one of the most inventive, lyrical and evocative prose stylists of her generation, or indeed of any other.
If your point concerns popularity, I agree without really sharing your grievance. Her work is demanding to read (especially for novices), and moreover her work is incredibly difficult to adapt to more popular mediums like television and film. Hers is a style that is almost impossible to translate to the screen. It is telling that only a few intrepid souls have tried, and perhaps even more telling that none of their efforts achieved any kind of commercial/popular success. So it seems entirely to be expected that Woolf does not occupy the pride of place in the popular-cultural imagination that someone like Jane Austen does.
All that said, it now strikes me that you wrote ‘legacy’ and not ‘reputation’, so perhaps you intended another point entirely. Apologies if that is so.
The Altman/Woolf comparison is interesting. I’m a huge fan of both but a connection has never occurred to me before, nor have I heard one made by anyone else. It’s perhaps something I should ponder more before commenting, but my first thought is to disagree. Altman and Woolf are very different in a key respect: Altman trusts so much to the intuition or inference of the viewer. Woolf’s style almost drowns the reader in detail. The dramatic power in Altman’s best films depends so much on what he doesn’t make explicitly clear. Woolf’s best work does the opposite of this; it puts you inside the head of its characters in a way that leaves little to the imagination. The art is in how incredibly poetic, sensitive and vivid the prose is. There are maybe a few similarities - the focus on character over story; the sensitivity to quiet suffering; the effortless shifts in focus - but, for me, the aforementioned difference trumps all that. Put another way, I don’t think fans of one would necessarily enjoy the other. Still, food for thought...
