Category: Media & Journalism

Virginia Woolf’s Birthday

Celebrating the 138th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Woolf (born 25th January, 1882)! Would she be flattered or embarrassed at the attention posterity has granted her? Who knows, but …

Woolf has been an interesting part of my reading life for some years now, but in recent times I have been thinking about her more than ever. And re-thinking her contribution to literature and her legacy, and discovering aspects to her life and her writing that were previously unbeknownst to me. The following 2014 video featuring her biographer Hermione Lee, is therefore a find and a treat on this day.

Lee focuses in her lecture on how Woolf’s shifting, slanting representation of fragmented time in her fiction, encapsulated as it is in memory, is often framed with some temporal precision – dates and seasons are important. An obvious example is Mrs. Dalloway; set on a Wednesday in mid-June 1923, and perhaps less obvious; the time span suggested in Night and Day where a Sunday evening in October must be 1911, and winter turns to spring. And actual historical events are indicative; Lee refers for instance to the mention of a general election and suffrage bill in The Voyage Out, dating the narrative to 1910.

Given my familiarity with her diaries, and the continued scrutiny I apply to them, I recognised well Woolf’s preoccupation with questions of mortality, her own and that of others, her predilection to relate her present with specific dates in days gone (often the deaths of the near and dear, family and friends), and how these memories found their way into her literary works. And I was always amused by her simple arithmetical doodlings, which I interpreted as resulting from a weakness in mental arithmetic but may well have been Woolf’s idiosyncratic way of measuring time gone (and remaining); of balancing her book of life.

Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, Hermione Lee, University of London, 2014

This video has inspired even more thought – I swear every time I am about to move on to other things, something else relating to the Woolf comes my way! Virginia Woolf may not have thought much of H.G. Wells, but she was as interested in the vagaries and possibilities of time travel as he – just in another, less mechanical, more mysterious manner. When I think about how, in much of Woolf’s writing, time ebbs and flows and overlaps and turns back on itself, I wonder whether it is not Woolf’s non-mechanical approach that better captures the essence of relative time, and that in some ways is more compatible to the precepts of modern science. [I remind myself here to look into a certain French philosopher called Henri Bergson – mentioned in response to a question in the last minutes of the video.]

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.

Clarissa’s other party

Doing some podcast catching up over Christmas, I particularly liked an episode of “The Essay” from BBC Radio 3 in which Bernardine Evarista imagines another ending to Mrs. Dalloway.

From BBC Radio 3 “The Essay”

In fact, several things Evarista says in her (audio) essay interest me. Firstly, “To the Lighthouse” was her first encounter with Virginia Woolf, but that contrary to my immediate delight on reading this book many years ago, she as a girl of colour yearning to discover something of herself in the books she read, was left cold by the very white, very English world of the Ramsays, and so concluded Woolf had nothing to say to her. A lot later then came Mrs. Dalloway into the life of the the mature writer Evarista, comfortable now in her skin and in her person, she sees the fearless experimentalist writer that also does “skin”; differently, inhabiting the skin of her characters. Evarista it seems can at last appreciate the unique genius of Woolf. (And, in this audio, speak beautifully on it.)

Thinking of Mrs. Dalloway not so long ago, I too used the expression “a day in the life of” , but Evarista cleverly takes our shared expression one step further; turning it around and adding “…or a life in a day”, thereby getting to the very essence of the novel; unmasking the shallow exterior to reveal the history and complexity of an inner life, and not just that of Clarissa Dalloway, for all the characters carry the baggage that a life brings; strewn as it is with regrets, dissatisfactions, repressions, be they emotional, sexual or matters of practical predicament.

Bernadine Evarista’s ending is a reimagining of the character of Lady Rossiter – Sally – Clarissa’s intimate friend of youth, such that, instead of bowing to the restrictions of convention and society, Sally leads still the spirited, free life so promised in that rebellious girl long ago.

The reality of writing

novelist, poeT, playwright: Writers ALL

A very interesting event at the British Library, organised by BBC Radio in conjunction with the Royal Society of Literature, in which some very fine contemporary British voices – Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham – discuss the complexities that arise at the intersection of art with real life events.

It is interesting how they all see their literary forms as a reflective and often non-deliberative response that is essentially different from that of journalism or reportage in that it creates the space to explore nuance and ambiguity and place it beyond the specificity of time; creating context and texture that questions and enhances the everyday experience.

To take the analogy (of the intersection, which I think is mine) further; as at the road intersection, collisions have a way of occurring irrespective of rules and intentions.

I should say that this was, in the first instance, broadcast on Radio 3 in their Free Thinking programme, but it is also embedded in a really excellent podcast called Arts & Ideas available on the website or also at Apple.

Liberalism and poverty

It has come to my attention that the second part of Marilynne Robinson’s recent lecture (embedded in my previous post) is now in essay (long) form, and as “Is Poverty Necessary?” the cover title of the June edition of Harper’s Magazine. Maybe you are lucky enough to get the one free piece a month – or even luckier and be a subscriber.

Now should you have listened to these lectures, you may agree that they really are quite dense in subject matter and meaning; especially the second part which harks back to the roots of classical economics at the beginning of industrialisation and the accompanying (and colliding) emerging political theories of liberalism, capitalism, marxism …I dare say I forgot some other “ism”s! In this respect I am very grateful to have some written words for guidance and more stringent study – at leisure if not pleasure.

Also, a podcast of a discussion with the editor of the piece (who is also the executive editor of Harper’s Magazine), Christopher Beha, is enlightening and presumably available to all.

A more than liberal serving of Robinson

On February 5 and 6 2019, Marilynne Robinson delivered the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lecture on American Civilization and Government entitled “Liberalism and American Tradition” at the New York Public Library in which she investigates the roots of liberal thought in America. Before I lose track of them, here is the library’s introduction followed by the embedded lectures.

Marilynne Robinson is one of the most celebrated American writers—she won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was awarded a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, …She recently delivered the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures on American Civilization and Government lecture on American Civilization and Government titled “Liberalism and American Tradition,” which traces the origins of liberalism. The biennial lecture series is presented by the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at NYPL.  

The New York Public Library
Part One: Part Two:

My name is Jesmyn Ward…

The English book club I frequent in the middle of Germany somewhere, will be reading Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones after Easter. Following is a little video from The New York Times in 2013 after the publication of another work Men We Reaped, a memoir and, if you will, a real life counter-point to her fiction.

Much more on the wonderful Jesmyn Ward to come.