Annotating Woolf

Annotating Woolf, a conference, will be held in London, UK, on 9 April of this year. Hosted by the Institute of English Studies (UL) for the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, the event deals with the theme of editing Woolf’s writings. This seems to me interesting for various reasons, among them the fact that readers naturally “edit” as they read. And then also while the internet is making more and more texts available, one is not always sure which edition of a given text is put online. So with the aim of sharing, I send this conference link http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/VirginiaWoolf2016

 Coincidentally with this, I happened to be browsing in Moments of Being in search of a reference on the importance if being able to get away from city life and enjoy the out of doors—especially perhaps for children. Yes, it is true that Woolf was fortunate in being able to live something of a Brahmin childhood. Not everyone is so lucky, clearly, but an important part of this is the fact that she offers readers a good deal that brings some of that good fortune within the reach of others. In any event, the passage I happened to be seeking is this (occurring toward the end of the “A Sketch of the Past” section of MoB):

… in retrospect, probably nothing that we had as children was quite so important to us as our summer in Cornwall. To go away to the end of England; to have our own house, our own garden—to have that bay, that sea, and the mount: Clody and Halestown bog; Carbis Bay; Lelant; Zennor, Trevail, the Gurnard’s Head; to hear the waves breaking that first night behind the yellow blind; to sail in the lugger; to dig in the sands; to scramble over the rocks and see the anemones flourishing their antennae in the pools; now and then to find a small fish flapping there… (From page 128 of the paperback version published in 1978 by Triad Grafton, edited with notes by Jeanne Schulkind)

Now, I confess that this is limited nature description. But it gives a bit of a view of Woolf’s poetic memory at work—also scrunched by weblog space limits. However, a chance occurrence, a footnote on the facing page of MoB, broke into my search for more nature description. I’ll mark its location with an asterisk. Woolf writes:

The market place was a jagged cobbled open place; the Church was a granite church—of what age, I do not know.* It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shell fish, oysters or mussels, all crowded together. (129)

An interesting way of speaking of crowding, it occurred. Then again, I think the footnote the asterisk leads to generates a different sort of interest—perhaps also implying a kind of crowding. There, Jeanne Schulkind tells us: “p. 16 of the ms continues: ‘There were none of those rows of respectable professional houses, with carved doors, & brass window long window panes with brass lined blinds.’” And so I found myself trying to work out variations on the text, rearranging mentally those cancelations… Wondering what the new editions of Moments of Being will hold…