Sharing the eternal charm of London

"The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life"
by Virginia Woolf,
introduction by Francine Prose
Ecco, 96 pp., $16.95

"Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newsletter"
by Virginia Woolf and
Vanessa Bell, with Thoby Stephen
foreword by Hermione Lee,
edited by Gill Lowe
Hesperus Press, 300 pp., $24.95

"He who is tired of London, is tired of life," wrote Samuel Johnson, and Virginia Woolf, in her vivid writings of the city she loved, echoes his sentiment. Readers of Woolf know the London of her fiction, particularly in "Mrs. Dalloway," in which the city blooms like a flower on a moment in June. Now, in the slim volume "The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life," we meet Woolf's own London, and the experience is like taking a walk with a miraculously erudite companion.

In 1931, the British edition of Good Housekeeping asked Woolf to write six bi-monthly articles about London. It was the year Woolf published "The Waves," her great experimental novel, and four years after "Mrs. Dalloway." Her literary fame was long established, and Francine Prose, in an introduction to "The London Scene," notes that the author complained about the tedium of correcting the essays.

But all six sparkle with the voice of one who understands the great pleasure of familiarity. As one who lived most of her life in the city (with occasional forays to country homes or quick trips abroad), she is not discovering London anew but sharing something long beloved, in her trademark exquisite prose.

With Woolf, we walk down the bustling thoroughfare of Oxford Street, "this river of turning wheels," watching shoppers and sellers and thieves alike reveling in the cheap plentitude of merchandise, and the crowds who seem to create a faster-paced world. "The press of people passing," she writes, "seems to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions faster than elsewhere."

In St. Paul's Cathedral, walking us between the pillars and tombstones, Woolf shows us how the light "is neither daylight nor lamplight, but an ambiguous element something between the two." And in a touching chapter titled "Great Men's Houses," Woolf describes how a house — Keats' — can be entirely infused with the presence of someone long gone, but that just outside the windows, life ("the far-off rattle of wheels, the bark of dogs fetching and carrying sticks from the pond") goes on. After reading this book, I became seized with the desire to go to London again; when I do, "The London Scene" will be in my suitcase.

Aficionados of the author may also be interested in another new piece of Woolfiana. "Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newsletter," edited by Gill Lowe, is a collection of childhood writings from Woolf and her siblings Vanessa and Thoby, written in the form of a house newspaper from 1891 (when Virginia was 9) to 1895. Though its chronicling of visitors, stray dogs and nursery society is at times entertaining, it's not always possible to discern Woolf's voice (the three siblings shared writing duties, without attribution). Ultimately, "Hyde Park Gate News" may be more valuable as a snippet of a typical Victorian childhood than as a portrait of a writer as a young girl.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic for The Seattle Times: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com