The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

Essays built around long-dead literary and political figures assume background most contemporary readers don't have, and those sections go opaque fast; one reader complains the book runs “about literary works that i've never even heard of.” Woolf's compressed, stream-of-consciousness style doesn't always cohere at short length the way it does across a novel, and one reader reports having to “re-read them 10 times and search for the explanation online” just to follow a piece. Because Leonard Woolf assembled the collection after her death from drafts and talks, some argue it shows: the book “never have been published had she herself edited it.” A harsher comparison lands on the French-language pieces specifically, dismissed as “the equivalent of A Haunted House And Other Short Stories in French.”