Dalloway Day 2023 correction

 

Woolf and Eliot

 Clarifying briefly, my observation yesterday that discussing good and bad writing takes us to more complex questions will, I’m sure, seem simplistic. Obviously, a large part of literary studies and other disciplines for that matter are “about” such complexities. The essay by T. S. Eliot I mentioned in fact implies some of these matters in terms of whether or not the critic/poet “of our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.” Virginia Woolf—and a great many people along with her and with Eliot—was asking herself some of the same questions. By 1927, when To the Lighthouse was published, these two Anglo-Modernist writers had developed rather different answers. However a longer commentary on this will have to wait as I am currently outside Barcelona and unable to consult the source books needed to do it proper justice. 

 

 

Dalloway Day 2023

 

I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.

 

More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,

 

One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.

 

And when we start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer. But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile one. Happy Dalloway Day!

Updates

 My LinkedIn profile has been updated. I've added some information to the About section and replaced references in the Publications section which was previously lost. Thanks to all for looking in !

#JacobsRoom100

It's well known by now that  2022 marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. 

The celebration continues of course and there is now a Twitter hashtag with information about a free online seminar of talks and readings in regard to Jacob’s Room on 26 and 27 October.

So the tag is above and I highly recommend Jacob’s Room to anyone who hasn't read it and has an interest in poetry in the wide sense of the word. I should add perhaps that I don't yet know the names of the people who will be speaking at the October gathering. I'll try to find out and post.

Virginia Woolf's poetic fiction

 

Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction (2)

 “That there is a poetic element in Virginia Woolf’s writing,” I wrote in June, to celebrate Dalloway Day 2022, “is hardly a new thought.” And I went on to speak of Woolf’s short fiction, citing different stories in Monday or Tuesday.

However I might more correctly have said poetic elements, given the fact that poetry employs different strategies. My citation, in the June post, of one story in Monday or Tuesday, “Kew Gardens,” brought out an ekphrastic description:

 From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

But of course description may be more or less ekphrastic and is only one sort of writing element, present in some, not perhaps all poetry. Others include rhythm, rhyme, metaphor, assonance. Metaphor is a constant in language use, so common that it’s difficult sometimes to say whether it is present or not.

 However 2022 also marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Obviously these three works utilize metaphor in various ways. But for the sake of space, and staying with Woolf for the time being, perhaps a look at the way Jacob’s Room makes a metaphor of the British Museum as if it were a mind or brain will be useful in celebration of the centenary. Woolf says, in section IX of the novel:

 Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, “Let me in! Let me in!”

 However we wish to classify writing like this, calling it poetry, calling it prose, or prose poetry, I think it calls for reading. For re-reading!

Virginia Woolf's poetic fiction

 

Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction

 I’m late with this in terms of Dalloway Day 2022 but it’s on a rather constant theme in writing, that of expression and form. It’s from a longer piece in preparation.

 That there is a poetic element in Woolf’s prose writing is hardly a new thought. But I think some of her short fiction contains some particularly interesting examples of this literary feature.

Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short fiction Woolf published in her lifetime. Her experimental fiction in that book is generally seen as avant-texte for the novels. One story in the collection, “Kew Gardens” (begun 1917, published 12 May1919), contains sustained sections of poetic writing about Nature. The beginning:

 From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

Thus we find a space in which natural things grow, an organic space touched it seems by a miniature spectrum of three primary colors. As the passage continues, the colors are spoken of as “lights” and we are told “the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” […]

 And thus my beginning. More information later. Happy Dalloway Day to all !

Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #BreakTheBias

 

Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #breakthebias

The writing of Virginia Woolf was bound to touch on the effects of war. She lived through both the first and second world war as well as the Boer war. As a pacifist, Woolf wrote against war and other violent situations, including, obviously, gender violence. In Mrs Dalloway, as I have written before, there is a basic duality established between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway that reminds us of the suffering we’re currently seeing in world conflicts, not only in Ukraine. In the novel one protagonist is privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed, of penurious means. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way is one way of coming to understandings of the ideas running through the book. And as always in Woolf there is highly careful planning behind the writing. But two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned the book.

 Repetition of some of these words sets the novel to navigate around truth versus insane truth… At the same time the writing establishes doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Smith, the character, representative of so many people trapped in wars, may or may not be insane. But obviously the insanity of war makes up a great part of the writer’s societal indictment. But underlying the text is a fascinating use of suggestion woven in through the aforementioned series of key words or ideas as the personal perspectives of the book’s characters become clear through their thoughts and conversations. 

Given the world situation today, let us hope we can grow less violent and definitely break the bias!

Lighthouse

 Lighthouse

Wednesday will mark the celebration of the fourth annual Dalloway Day (“the third Wednesday in June.”) And as restrictions due to the Covid 19 pandemic begin to be lifted, we recall that Virginia Woolf, who gave us Mrs Dalloway and so much more, lived through the 1918 influenza pandemic. Indeed, the eponymous character of Woolf’s novel is portrayed as having suffered from that illness.

 However, I have titled this post “Lighthouse” thinking of Woolf’s fourth novel, the book she published two years after Mrs Dalloway. After all, the literary “day” honoring her 1925 novel also honors her fuller achievement, rather as Bloomsday honors more than James Joyce’s Ulysses. And—as many already know—the third Wednesday in June this year happens to fall on the 16^th, the annual date of Bloomsday.

So, definitely, let us continue to celebrate! And as the author of To the Lighthouse notes in the essay “On Re-reading Novels,” recall that,

[o]ur observations [from previous readings] … can now come out and range themselves according to the directions we have received. [….] On a second reading we are able to use our observations from the start, and they are much more precise, but they are still controlled by these moments of understanding.

World Book Day 2021

 

 Running words through your fingers, as Book Day takes the torch from Earth Day:

“Another sort of reading matches better with the morning hours. This is not the time for foraging and rummaging, for half-closed eyes and gliding voyages. We want something that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it, and yet sheltering as in a clear gem the flame which burns now so high and now sinks so low in our own hearts. We want what is timeless and contemporary. But one might exhaust all images, and run words through one’s fingers like water and yet not say why it is that on such a morning one wakes with a desire for poetry.” Virginia Woolf, from her essay “Reading.”

Happy World Book Day to All!

Bloomsday and Dalloway Day

Today is Bloomsday, celebrating the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. As it happens, however, tomorrow will mark the third occasion of the similar celebration of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. So the close relation between these two writers grows.

The two books just named have long been linked together, and for a variety of reasons.

Woolf’s novel is a double parody: its hypotexts are Homer’s Odyssey as well as Joyce’s Ulysses.* In the 1919 essay “Modern Novels” (later published as “Modern Fiction”) Woolf praises Joyce’s writing, although with reservations. Offered the chance to publish Ulysses, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press declined (on the grounds that to do so was beyond the technical means of their small company, although the true reason involved the high risk of being sued for publishing indecent material.

Much ink has flowed on these topics and to some extent there is a kind of polarization between those who believe that Woolf admired Joyce’s writing and those who believe the opposite. There is obviously a deeper vein here, however, that of censorship, despised by both of these Modernist writers. In any case it seems to me important that there is now a Dalloway Day as well as a Bloomsday. By way of celebration of both, I would like to quote something from A History of Reading, whose author, Alberto Manguel, tells us of an observation by Spinoza:

 It often happens [Spinoza wrote] that in different books we read histories in themselves similar but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed of the authors. I remember once to have read in some book that a man named Orlando Furioso used to ride a kind of winged monster through the air, fly over any country he liked, kill unaided vast numbers of men and giants, and other such fancies which from the point of view of reason are obviously absurd. I read a very similar story, in Ovid, of Perseus, and also, in the books of Judges and Kings, of Samson, who alone and unarmed killed thousands of men, and of Elijah, who flew through the air and at last went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, with fiery horses. All these stories are alike, but we judge them very differently. The first one sought to amuse, the second had a political object, the third a religious one.**

Not that I think people will read less as internet and other technological novelties continue to grow. Only that it does seem good to point out that different types of text serve different purposes.

*My source on this is Molly Hoff’s “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2 (Summer 1999), pp. 186-209.

**Manguel, A History of Reading, Chapter One.

Pride month and Dalloway Day

Pride month and Dalloway Day

In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway the lead protagonist Clarissa Dalloway is described by a previous suitor, Peter Walsh, as “the perfect hostess.” It is, as I think most readers of the book would agree, an apt description, for throughout the fictional day in June Woolf created, Clarissa’s is the character whose openness to celebration drives the social element and expresses lamentation for the death of “that young man”—her vision of Septimus Smith, the person who symbolizes so many war dead. The fact that the novel, in typical lyrical fashion, takes place in summer appears to me as another of its important life positive features. Obviously the tragic aspect of death is called up—in relation both to war horrors and to the symbolic individual portrayed there as dying—but the social importance of creating peace takes precedence. Hence, one might add, the emphasis on the party that Clarissa aims for at the outset of the book and hosts at its conclusion. Polyphonic novels (almost all novels to some extent, but especially satiric ones) stress celebration by invoking what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “carnival”, the discourse of everyday life and especially the life of the popular festival as opposed to that of officialdom, especially dictatorial officialdom.

But Dalloway Day as a single day coincides with June, the beginning of summer and now the month when many of the world’s cities celebrate gay pride or just pride in loving as one chooses, that hard won right which Modernist art and the art of today work to present and preserve. 

So, happy Dalloway Day to all and happy pride years! May we continue to present and preserve in peace….!

Related to Dalloway Day

I wrote, on or about 12 May, that I wanted to encourage people to participate in this year’s Dalloway Day by writing, drawing, making music, in order to promote the achievements of Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues.  Since that time I’ve found, through the writer Gretchen Gerzina, that Swann Auction Galleries, a company specializing in rare and antiquarian books, has a number of publications by Woolf, many of these first editions. So it seems to me good to mention this for the purpose not only of adding book collecting to my short list of activities related to Dalloway Day but also to call attention to ways in which adaptations of one kind of poetry—in the ample sense of the word—can spur work in other kinds. Woolf’s comment that “painting and writing have much to tell each other” has been cited so often that I almost hesitate to repeat it here. However, oft quoted and perhaps obvious as it may be, it serves as an indication of the way different disciplines influence each other. In this regard, and in the context of examining acculturation in general, I think people will be interested in looking at the Swann website. Once there, you’ll find the options of searching different catalogs or searching the site itself. To date I’ve only searched on “Woolf” (without the quotes) and a few other twentieth-century artists. But the site is obviously very full and I think the results are pretty interesting in a variety of ways.

The Swann website: / https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=2511+++++145+&refno=++758511&saletype=

/

Gretchen Gerzina posted the address of the Swann Galleries website on the Listserv of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her own website is at / https://www.gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html

  /

Dalloway Day 2019

Dalloway Day 2019

It may seem a bit early to talk about this but the second ever Dalloway Day will be on Wednesday, 19 June 2019. This is an event that is already being discussed on the web, so I mention it here. After all, it takes some time for people to prepare their participation. The theme this year is queering, specifically—although ambiguously, in what I take to be a Woolfian way—queering Dalloway.

Last year I posted a short text on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway for the first Dalloway Day and I intend to write something this June as well. But just now I simply wanted to encourage people to participate, writing, drawing, making music, doing theatricals in order to promote the achievements of Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues. A good deal of information is available at Paula Maggio’s blog,  Blogging Woolf.* Hopefully this year’s celebration will be even bigger than the first!

* For example,  https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/

Reading Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway also, should be included in the talk I’m working on. People who have read the novel will no doubt remember the basic duality the author sets up between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. One protagonist privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way may give us leads into understanding the ideas running through the book. A close reading reveals pretty quickly how carefully it is planned and written. Two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned to write the book.

In Virginia Woolf ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. (Pace U P, 1996), Helen M. Wussow tells us that in planning notes dated October 16, 1922 Woolf wrote: 'Suppose it to be connected in this way: Sanity & insanity. Mrs D. seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth' (Wussow, 412). Shakespeare and others had of course dealt with similar ideas. In any event, during the noonday visit Septimus Smith makes to one of his doctors, Dr Bradshaw, Septimus is depicted as thinking himself privy to what he assumes is the fact that, in literature (and perhaps in culture generally) '[t]he secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair’ (75).*

The novel thus navigates around truth versus insane truth… Doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—is created about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Obviously the insanity of war is part of her societal indictment. One of the things I personally find fascinating is the use Virginia Woolf makes of suggestion through a series of key words or ideas as she sets up the viewpoints of her characters in her ‘novel of consciousness’. Finally, reading these texts today in some of the terms she establishes provides a lot of information on metafictional strategies and the craft of creating ‘a good story’…

 *Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000.

Reading notes

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf in preparation for a get together with friends to talk about Woolf’s work—and Lee’s, for all that, for the bio, Virginia Woolf, A Life, is an incredible achievement. Lee is tremendously thorough and she writes so well. But aside from that it is a true work of love, not only of the life of its subject but of the collective life of “dear Reader”. Philo-sophy in its widest sense.

Here, for example, is an aspect of Woolf through Lee,

Painting overlaps with remembering in To the Lighthouse, and Virginia Woolf—like Lily Briscoe redoing her painting in the Ramsays’ house and garden—spent a lifetime making her own ‘views’ of St Ives [Wales] [….] When [Woolf] comes to [inventing] Mrs Ramsay […] she has given herself plenty of practice:

For the great plateful of blue water was before her, the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

When Virginia Woolf describes Talland House [in St Ives] in her memoirs she does it like a picture: she says it looked ‘like a child’s drawing of a house, remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing that ran round the roof, again, like something that a child draws’.

Lee’s comments, I should add, come from the second chapter of her book, titled ‘Houses.’ The main theme at that point is to look into ways in which Woolf remembered her rich and very active childhood and ways in which she wrote about those experiences. An interesting reading, I think, for those in search of green sand dunes and platefuls of blue water.

Dalloway Day

In keeping with today’s first ever Dalloway Day, honouring Virginia Woolf and her work, I offer a short text below. This is adapted from a section of my article “On Not Knowing Text”: Towards Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” originally published in Left Out: Texts and Ur-Texts (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2009). Extensive thanks to the IDEA Editorial Board and the Reading Committee for all their help. They are named here https://idea-udl.org/recent-books-by-idea-members-ouvrages-recentes-didea/ and also here https://jsbak.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lo-front_matter.pdf

Happy Dalloway Day!

Mrs Dalloway has often been considered to be a parody of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both books have lead protagonists that, like Odysseus, travel in single-day time frames.* As Ralph Freedman noted, Mrs Dalloway is “an ‘anti-novel’ in the true sense of the term because its portrayal of the act of knowledge subverts the conventionally accepted qualities of the novel which are focused on the intercourse between men [sic] and worlds.”**

We find, for example, Einstein and Mendelian theory named early in the novel (page 24)*** in conjunction with an airplane being watched by a crowd of people—“a symbol” the novel tells us “of man’s (sic) soul.”

Woolf’s use of allusions and quotations in Mrs Dalloway (Modernism loved intertextuality) is already well developed in her short story collection Monday or Tuesday (1919). And she refers to the development of her experimental techniques in a 1920 diary entry: “Conceive,” the Diary invites its implied readers, “Mark on the Wall, K[ew] G[ardens] and Unwritten Novel (sic) taking hands and dancing in unity.” And later in the same entry Woolf notes: “I must still grope and experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light” (Diary II, 14).

Woolf is apparently referring here to the use of parody or intertextuality, clearly seeking some novelistic gain in depth or texture. In “Kew Gardens” for example we find an emphasis on the microcosm/macrocosm duality as fragments from the conversations of different characters are presented while the external narrative voice of the story ekphrastically registers changes in the intensity of the natural daylight, sometimes through the imagined perception of a snail.

Woolf’s modern attitudes toward science and nature were influenced not only by people like Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell but also by such publications as The Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement, as Michael Whitworth has noted.**** The other two stories mentioned above similarly play with perception/cognition. And while it is true that none of the devices used in these avant-textes is new, Woolf’s handling of them demonstrates an extremely high technical ability.

As this ability grew, similar invocations of scientific understandings of luminance and color perception like that found in “Kew Gardens” would continue to be used. Both Mrs Dalloway and pre-textual “Kew Gardens” mark major literary turning points.

*See Molly Hoff, “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2, Summer 1999.

**Freedman, R. The Lyrical Novel… Princeton UP, 1971.

***Woolf, V. Mrs Dalloway. London, Penguin, 1969.

****Whitworth, M.H.  In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2000, 146-63.

In advance of Dalloway Day

Paula Maggio and many other readers of Virginia Woolf's vast palimpsest have been talking about the coming premiere of Dalloway Day, an international celebration of the British author's work which will be held annually.

One of Paula's recent posts may be found here

https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com//06/16/woolf-walking-writing-in-london-in-advance-of-dallowayday/

Given what the works of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group stand for, I just wanted to voice my approval of the creation of the Day and commend the ongoing work byWoolfians to promote Bloomsbury's contribution to Modernist arts and sciences.

Wednesday, 20 June 2018 marks the first occasion, and I'll post again then. Meanwhile ... Advance Happy Dalloway Day to all!

Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks

It will no doubt be recalled that this year marks another e-first (if I may so….) in that Google Doodles honored Virginia Woolf’s achievements on the occasion of her 136^th birthday. So in the context of new publishing technologies that achievement gets bigger.

And this new event is now followed by free online access to Brenda Silver’s great contribution to Woolf scholarship, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton UP, 1983). As Paula Maggio notes on Blogging Woolf, this new availability is “in multiple digital formats.”

Well worth a look for interested readers……. The link:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/publishing/books/silver-virginia-1983/

 Diaries and/or  : Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path

Last January, based on information from Paula Maggio’s weblog “Blogging Woolf”, I posted a brief comment about Barbara Lounsberry’s book Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read soon after it appeared. In today’s e-age of letter writing plus, where Facebook, DeviantArt, App.net and a long etc make it easy to get all ten fingers working, it is perhaps easy to lose sight of the advantages of re-considering Virginia Woolf’s diary reading. But on reflection, what do I read? And why. One specific reason why is clearly that constant flow between theory and practice in writing. What this comes down to I believe is authority—or if one prefers, authorship. And perhaps it is a simple step from authoring to mentoring, or self-mentoring. There are many names for the type of writing being referred to here. In keeping with the Woolfian reference, we speak of diary, but also of journal. Many of us feel we are writing autobiographies (sometimes even in our fictions). Where this leaves a person in relation to the e-age is debatable, but as is well known, it is being debated in many places—to the extent even of wondering how far away we are technologically from simply thinking our pieces onto the page while we put our fingers to other tasks. As part of our theorizing and doing, in any case, Lounsberry’s new book follows on from Becoming Woolf. The title is indicative of the far reaching nature of the overall project: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read (U P of Florida). Thus, moving into Woolf’s middle period, her reading of 13 more diaries is discussed. Virginia Woolf’s influences are thus seen to have included the diaries (or journals or life writings—should some e-term be preferred?) of Beatrice Webb, Anton Chekhov, Stendhal, Katherine Mansfield and others. Names to conjure with… In all events I think this book will be a welcome addition for those of us interested in such intertextual and/or intermedial comparisons.

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…