Author: Anne Dromache

Sussex blooming…

not as royal, but better cultivated!

Diving in and out of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and biography anew, I have been attentive to her intense relationship with place. The homes of her childhood and younger years are never far away; returning as fragmented memories, misplaced, reimagined and memorialised in her writing – think about the Stephen family’s “Talland House” and childhood summers in St.Ives and the Ramsay’s summer house on the Isle of Skye in To the Lighthouse. Or the walks she took and places she went as related in many a diary entry, then reimagined and true to the time in the city as seen through the eyes of Mrs. Dalloway or any Pargiter.

Charleston, West Firle, in East Sussex. Antiquary -CC BY-SA 4.0

And for Woolf, Sussex is a very special place. Here, at the time of her marriage in 1912, she found in “Asheham House” near Beddingham sanctuary from the distractions of London, but still near to “Charleston Farmhouse”, the Firle home of Vanessa and her complicated family and their seemingly endlessly brilliant string of guests. Distractions it seem had a way of following her, and were perhaps never quite as unwelcome as often would have it!

The modest Monk’s House – Oliver Mallinson Lewis, Oxford, United Kingdom CC BY-SA 2.0

Later, in 1919, she and Leonard purchased “Monk’s House” in the village of Rodmell which would remain until her death her (their) constant retreat. The walks, the garden, the weather, the famous “writing shed” – that room of her own, all the visiting and being visited upon; as much as the profound inner life and intellectual musings – and the gossip! – it is the every day, often the mundane, as lived in her rural sanctuary that bring her diaries to vivid life, just as flowers come to bloom.

Cover, First edition, 1944.

By the way, Asheham is no more, but an afterlife was granted it by grateful Woolfs – the romantic Leonard getting the better of the cerebral self in an autobiographical aside and a spirited Virginia imagining a ghostly couple bound for eternity in a short story entitled A Haunted House, first published by Hogarth in Monday or Tuesday in 1922, and later in a collection published by Leonard in 1944. Who was this ghostly pair? Perhaps the shades of their very selves, the Woolfs, viewed from a distant future; forever young, forever in this place.

continue reading

More from Mecklenburgh Square

Certainly a most talked about publication in the UK at the moment! Further to my previous post, BBC Radio 3 has also given Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (amongst other things woman, classical & academic) consideration on their Free Thinking program  or the “Goddesses of Academia” episode of their Arts & Ideas podcast.

And, yes, the Jane Harrison, Hope Mirrlees relationship which I remarked upon does indeed come up, as does her modernist poem “Paris” printed by the Hogarth Press in 1919. The British Library has digitized a first edition for all to see, and what a delight it is. Literary wise – why has Mirrlees been forgot? (perhaps because she forsook poetry for “the novel” and other interests) – and in terms of handwork – the Woolfs had only been doing this stuff for a couple of years (they bought a printing press in 1917) for goodness sake!

Interesting, is that Mirrlees’ poem spans just one day in Paris, portraying the vast, ever-changing cityscape and the tempo of a new modernity, all set against the dark shadows still cast by war and an uneasy peace. The much better known “one dayers” are a few years away – Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1925.

Five Women & Mecklenburgh Square

Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).

For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.

Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College (Augustus John)

Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.

Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.

Reading Homer’s “The Odyssey”

My reading project

As a special project in this new year 2020, I intend to embark upon a personal and concentrated reading of Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2018 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey”, and will regularly write some posts to accompany my progress. Whether I can be as industrious as Penelope during her long tormented wait for Odysseus’ return is debatable!

To avoid the complication of having a separate blog, I’ll categorise and number in brackets each post (as in the header above) pertaining to my readings; collated, together with other related material, they will then be accessible as My Odyssey Reading from the main menu.

Page numbers, Book titles and other references will be cited from my hardback first edition copy: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson, First Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2018

My copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey“

writer and translator

Before getting to the book and the really very substantial introductory pages therein, firstly an introduction to the writer, poet, composer, and all the plurals of the same, that we call simply Homer, and his, her, their most recent translator Emily Wilson.

Marble bust of Homer, British Museum, London.

Whilst legends persist (the blind bard for instance) and are certainly not without interest, whether there was this one Homer to whom can be attributed the epic works of The Iliad and The Odyssey is debatable. I very much like the idea of differentiating between a historical Homer and the poet Homer, which is probably not a terribly original thought but it seems to me a bit like the way of, for instance, approaching the historical Jesus alongside he explained through the lens of Christian dogma. Also, it may be that in a literary sense, identification is better explained through the more generalised “Homeric Question”; answered also with many a dissenting voice but all with the emphasis on Homer as an oral tradition.

Unlike Homer, Emily Wilson is absolutely one real person and has a website and can speak for herself, but briefly: Wilson is a British classicist born into the right family to therefore be educated at the right places to now be Professor of Classics at University of Pennsylvania, celebrated overnight it seems with the publication of her translation and she is, loathe that I am to mention it, since the Summer a recipient of one of these so-called genius grants. None of which I begrudge her, and mercifully, though she may sound a twee bit posh, I don’t think she would hang high the “genius” label! Following is a really interesting lecture she gave in September at Columbia University, focusing on her Odyssey translation, but with more generalised remarks on her method of work.

Also, I think Emily Wilson would have appreciated this review by Gregory Hays in The New York Times with its imperative on the nuance that she brings to her translation, and this is a nice magazine piece also in the Times. Together they say something about the person as scholar and translator, and the very special art of translation. Further links I will add to the sidebar menu.

In the coming days I will post some thoughts on Wilson’s introductory and translator notes – interesting enough in themselves I must say. I am really quite excited about this (Winter!) reading project; in itself an odyssey of sorts. My only encounter in any meaningful way with classics has come in recent years via Gregory Nagy’s edX course The Ancient Greek Hero (which may be caught in a new iteration) and the private reading and study that it encouraged, so the best I can do here is present the observations of an everyman, -woman.

Famously, The Odyssey has 24 books or scrolls, but my ambitions do not stretch to writing systematically on every one of those, instead I’ll condense the purely narrative and concentrate on more thematic aspects that I find to be particularly thought-provoking.

Literary Calendar 2020

The Guardian’s 2020 literary calendar

Always awaited by me with anticipation, The Guardian‘s annual literary calendar; including anniversaries, adaptations, and of course new book releases – from which I have chosen just some that I am particularly looking forward to.

  • Square Haunting by Francesca Wade (Faber) (Jan.)
  • The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Hamish Hamilton) (Feb.)
  • Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Picador) (Feb.)
  • Here We Are by Graham Swift (Scribner) (Feb.)
  • The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate) (March)
  • A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (Faber) (March)
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder) (March)
  • The Death of Comrade President by Alain Mabanckou (Serpent’s Tail) (March)
  • Summer by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) (July)
  • How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak NF (Wellcome) (July)
  • The Mission House by Carys Davies (Granta) (Aug.)
  • The Gun, the Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley, NF history (Profile) (Aug.)
  • Trio by William Boyd (Viking) (Oct.)
  • Snow by John Banville (Faber) (Oct.)
  • Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee, NF biography (Faber) (Oct.)
  • The Mark of Cain by Margaret MacMillan, NF Reith Lectures (Profile) (Oct.)

Fiction 2020

Alex Preston from The Observer bemoans the mediocre year just gone, but offers good cheer for the year to come. Here are some of his suggestions that particularly interest me:

  • The long awaited and highly anticipated finale to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March) – under strict embargo!
  • Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) by Maggie O’Farrell – “an […] imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway.”
  • Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, February), by Colum McCann “…ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics… If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster.”
  • Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). “Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.”
  • “…the final part of Ali Smith’s era-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July)”
  • Kate Grenville’s  A Room Made of Leaves (Text, July) (“..which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River” says Preston – let us hope!)

A very nice start I would say. Preston’s preview in its entirety can be found here on The Guardian site.