OH, whoops, meant to make that 1-1, sorry.
Woolf: 3
Solzhenitsyn: 3
Come on, Woolf! :D
One of the best writers of the last century, one of the best at experimental and psychological English fiction in the 20th century, one of the most important feminist figures period, and I'd still argue for her as the greatest female writer in the English language...
Jane Austen has been more important and the Brontes more popular...
But word for word, I'd take Woolf ANY day.
To the Lighthouse is a Top 20 novel for the last century...
But the work of hers I actually love the most is "The Waves."
6 characters, all distinctly different, and based on famous writers and people in her own life (including E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and herself), and yet those six characters and their personalities may also be seen as 6 sides of Woolf's own personality, or show the different ways that both personality traits and defining features overlap.
Told mostly from the point of view of the six characters essentially monologuing to the camera, as it were, one after the other in turn...
In a way, it's both of and ahead of her time...there's some Brechtian or Beckett-esque essence in that kind of approach, and yet it still ties back to past traditions as well...after all, Dostoyevsky's narrator in "Notes from the Underground" narrates the whole way like that, with asides and an almost stream of consciousness approach at times.
It was ahead of her time, it's STILL ahead of its time, I honestly wish more novels would try and follow up on her approach...the way description and psychology fuse is incredible...and given the fact she based these characters on real people, including one--Rhoda--on herself, it's fascinating to see how she saw these friends and real, very famous authors...and herself.
Not to spoil anything, but her foresight was eerily good, for good and for bad.
)
Tesla Opens Their Patents
)
)
)