Worman is one of the most illuminating scholars working on Greek tragedy today … The book exemplifies what classical reception can pull off at its best ... As the first installment of the Bloomsbury series Classical Receptions in Twentieth Century Writing, it sets a high bar for the rest of the series … A critical triumph without the cultural triumphalism.

Classics for All

Innovative and suggestive in approach.

The Classical Review

Both a passionate companion piece to Woolf's writings, and a formidable study of Greek tragedy and its radical validity. Worman is an inspiring classicist, and a remarkable close reader of modern literature ... She has an extraordinary eye for detail, a superb sensibility for fleshing out what might be lost in the pace of narrative praxis and reading action, a riveting gift for creating connections between texts, concepts, moments in time and in the history of stories. Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy is written to feel like a live delivery, an in vivo presentation at a thriving, throbbing, distinctly vocal convention. It has remarkable intimacy and directness.

Bookanista

This welcome volume explores how Woolf's interactions with Greek tragedy contributed to the formation of what Worman (classics and comparative literature, Barnard and Columbia) terms a 'tragic aesthetics' in her novels and selected essays, particularly those of the 1920s and 1930s. A specialist in Greek drama, Worman focuses on Woolf's engagement with representations of gender in the tragedies as the author shaped her evolving aesthetics of loss as a modernist and feminist writing in an era of late British imperialism and postwar recovery … Summing Up: Recommended.

CHOICE

This is an arresting and much-needed work; it is an imaginative, innovative analysis of the ways in which Greek tragedy informed Woolf's sociopolitical imagination and textual aesthetics. Even more importantly, through its insightful analysis of the ways in which the figures of Electra and Antigone influenced Woolf's work, this study reveals (even if obliquely) the manifold ways in which classical Greek texts can still inform fruitful avenues of contemporary resistance to the multiple injustices still perpetrated predominantly against women.

Contemporary Women's Writing

Nancy Worman offers a feisty feminist account of Virginia Woolf's tragic aesthetics, revolving around “her sense that patriarchy makes tragedies of all women's lives.” With classical expertise and critical sophistication, Worman illuminates how the gendered dynamics of Greek tragedy are played out in Woolf's essays and novels, in the embodiment of fierce tragic heroines like Electra and Antigone and in the interplay of choral voices. This fascinating book teaches us new ways to read Virginia Woolf through Greek tragedy, and Greek tragedy through Virginia Woolf-with a renewed sense of urgency for contemporary readers.

Yopie Prins, Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, USA