In the first of our seasonal round-ups, we look back at Stephen Marche on the agonies of the writing life; and Nat Segnit dives into Adam Gopnik's survey of mastery.

'On writing and failure: Or, the peculiar perseverance required to

endure the life of a writer', by Stephen Marche

'The real work: On the mystery of mastery', by Adam Gopnik

Produced by Charlotte Pardy

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This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.

Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness

‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’

Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality

‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’

Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity

‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’

John Bayley on Woolf and writing

‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’

Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.

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