More specifically concerning: virginia woolf
Moriae Encomium
13 March 2003, around 17.42.
Now I pretend to read. I raise my book, till it almost covers my eyes. But I cannot read in the presence of horse-dealers and plumbers. I have no power to ingratiate myself. I do not admire that man; he does not admire me. Let me at least be honest. Let me denounce this piffling, […]
the end of English letters
15 April 2003, around 8.10.
April 9 [1937]: VirginiaWoolf’s The Years and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pine to See the Peep Show read at once—what with rain and fairies and walloping bells at Oxford and Missie dying of love for Teacher with a dash of beans and fish with the lower middle class—impress one again with the constipation of English […]
Passing strange
9 May 2003, around 8.05.
A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious mind might have used seclusion and solitude to perfect its powers. Tennyson asked no better than to live with books in the heart of the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and secular and satirical. She was no scholar. Books were to her not an end […]
‘could it be J— H— herself?’
9 September 2003, around 13.27.
Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928 Independent lecturer in London, later a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Jane Harrison was author of (among other things): Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion (1903) and Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). She is also one of the few women mentioned in the who’s […]
family albums
28 January 2006, around 14.03.
cricket, criticism, & Clytaemnestra
notes on reading: social
13 February 2006, around 12.44.
19th century London & medieval Iceland
Citation (44)
22 November 2011, around 8.12.
a writer’s notebook…
on biography (2)
9 February 2012, around 11.41.
Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996. I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land. —Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte […]
sketchy
25 December 2013, around 6.05.
Richard Kennedy’s sketch of the Hogarth Press; there is also a larger version
Crambe repetita (34)
15 January 2015, around 5.17.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Four Figures: Beau Brummell’ from The Second Common Reader.
qui lætificat iuventutem meam
26 May 2018, around 18.28.
In Joyce’s Voices Hugh Kenner does many appealing things. The chapter on ‘the Uncle Charles Principle’ – the narrator’s adoption of a character’s verbal tics to provide a savor of the character’s worldview – is a masterful piece of criticism, presented with aphoristic aplomb. It is a style, surefooted and strong and cavalierly sophisticated, to […]
28.ix.2020
28 September 2020, around 19.44.
Life is always in excess of the stories we tell about it – to others, to ourselves. Always the awkward relation is a sign of more to come; the stories which don’t fit; the lives lived in parallel universes, intersecting, overlapping, together and apart. A real life includes conflict, anger, mistakes; it spills over into […]