Here is an except from a book review I recently read in the New York Times. I'm delighted to discover this quote by Virginia Woolf that perfectly explains my issues with modern writing (I have highlighted it below). I'll write more later when I have time.
From the article "To See You Again" by Paul Gray, a book review of Margaret Drabble's "The Sea Lady."
"The Sea Lady” is a waterlogged, ramshackle contraption that fascinates even as it annoys. Drabble’s longtime readers won’t be surprised by the novel’s tactics. After all, the most important entry in her long bibliography may be her sympathetic biography of Arnold Bennett, one of the Edwardian novelists — along with John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells — denounced by Virginia Woolf. (“They have given us a house,” Woolf declared, arguing that their concentration on external description, on the workings of society, failed to convey the inner lives of their characters, “in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”)
