Edward Mendelson shares a July 25 piece he wrote for The Times Literary Supplement on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931). Titled “Breaking The Waves: How Virginia Woolf Righted ‘one chapter gone wrong’,” the essay explores how the various corrected proofs of her manuscript fail to solve the textual mystery of what she calls the “chapter gone wrong.”
As Mendelson writes: “Woolf’s revision to the chapter gone wrong occurs in the middle of a paragraph where Bernard remembers a visit he tried to make to Rhoda and Louis when they were lovers sharing a flat. He begins by imagining Rhoda’s awkwardness with the tea-kettle and staring out over the slate roofs. As he arrives at the door, fantasizing about Rhoda, the unrevised text reads:
She paned the curtain to look at the night. ‘Away!’ she said. ‘The moor is dark beneath the moon’ (I knocked and waited) and then perhaps told him some story, for instance, of women in Holborn wearing false noses – she had seen them. How lovely is the privacy of those to whom the world has given so much strife! I waited. Louis perhaps poured out milk in a saucer for the cat; Louis, whose bony hands shut like the sides of a dock closing themselves with a slow anguish of effort upon an enormous tumult of waters, who knew what has been said by the Egyptian, the Indian, by men with high cheek-bones and solitaries in hair shirts! Then taking a fine nib and dipping it in red ink, proceeds to rule straight lines for this infinitely various, vagulous, uncharted and unsounded life. I rang; I waited. And Rhoda flings wide the window and cries ‘Away! The moor is dark beneath the moon. The gathering winds will call the darkness soon.’ I knocked: I waited; there was no answer.”
Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His new book, The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway, will be published in September, along with his new edition of Mrs. Dalloway.
Proposals for papers should be no more than 250 words and should specify if you wish to participate in a panel or as part of the roundtable. Please note that there will be only three slots available for the roundtable, so proposers are encouraged to also submit a proposal for a traditional panel paper.
Follow the guidelines below and at this link. Then submit your proposal via email and complete the following form by midnight Aug. 30.
If you have further questions, send them via email to mrsdallowaysymposium@st-andrews.ac.uk
Conference goers enjoy the fine weather at Charleston before the banquet for the 34th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, held July 4-8 at King’s College London and the University of Sussex.
Not in the home’s dining room, where every surface is decorated and everyone from Virginia and Leonard Woolf to Roger Fry to Maynard Keynes to Desmond and Molly MacCarthy to T.S. Eliot to Jean Renoir once shared meals and drinks.
That room, with a large round table painted by Vanessa Bell, seats six and would be exceedingly small for the 150 of us who attended the traditional banquet celebrating the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Dissidence.
Gathering in the Hay Barn
Instead, on July 7 we gathered at long tables, beautifully set, in the nearby Hay Barn. I could hardly imagine a more magical, charming site for a meal with so many Woolfians.
We had piled onto buses and rode the 11 miles from the University of Sussex conference site to Charleston, the longtime home of Vanessa and Clive Bell that hosted frequent guests from the Bloomsbury group and beyond.
Our tour of the house and the garden ended with a cocktail reception in the garden before a dinner of boeuf en daube or a vegetarian option in the Hay Barn, located across a short gravel path from the house.
I was also curious about her memories. As the daughter of Quentin Bell, the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf, who died 14 years before she was born — she had many to share.
Nicholson recalled that the children slept in the attic (now off limits to visitors) when they stayed at Charleston, and she described the atmosphere of the home as “uninhibited and sort of liberated.”
She remembered wearing a mauve dress at the age of five as Vanessa and Duncan Grant painted her portrait, earning a six-pence bribe to sit for them. She owns the painting by Grant but laments the fact that Vanessa’s portrait has never been located.
Nicholson spoke of visiting Monk’s House while Leonard Woolf was alive, and she emphasized his thoughtfulness. When talking to him, “he stopped to think of what he’d say, then he would say it.”
Over the years, Charleston fell into disrepair, and when an effort was made to save it, the Charleston Trust was formed. That work began at Nicholson’s kitchen table, with notes taken on the backs of envelopes. Since 2018, she has served as the president of the Charleston Trust, and Charleston is an internationally renowned museum.
Today, she said, she is “thrilled, amazed and delighted” that the Bloomsbury summer home survives.
It even smells the same. The treasure I grew up with hasn’t changed. I think Vanessa would also recognize that her spirit is still alive here.
Here are some photos from our once-in-a-lifetime evening at Charleston.
Gathering in the Charleston garden for cocktails before dinner.
Long tables, beautifully set, filled the Hay Barn for the conference banquet at Charleston as Vara Neverow, one of the traditional Woolf Players, reads a passage from Woolf’s work.
Banquet goers filled the Hay Barn at Charleston
Jane Goldman of Scotland and Davi Pino of Brazil are engrossed in conversation at the banquet.
Artists Kabe Wilson of England and Ane Thon Knutsen of Norway
Cecilia Servatius of Austria and AnneMarie Bantzinger of the Netherlands
Conference organizers Anna Snaith, Helen Tyson, and Clara Jones react with surprise and glee as they open their thank you gifts presented by Amy Smith, vice president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
Conference organizers Anna Snaith, Helen Tyson, and Clara Jones happily show off their thank you gifts presented by Amy Smith, vice president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. They received first American editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, The Years, and The Captain’s Death Bed, and Other Essays.
Read more posts about the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Dissidence
Woolf readers at one of the exhibit and bookseller tables at the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.
Roughly 350 scholars from around the globe have gathered at the University of Sussex for the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. And coming from the United States, this year’s topic could not be more timely: Woolf and Dissidence.
As an American living under the destructive regime now ruling my country, I hoped that I and my compatriots would be greeted with empathy and understanding by those we met at this conference in England.
I was not disappointed. I and others from the U.S. have been embraced more warmly than ever by the students, common readers and scholars from around the world who have arrived in Falmer, the English town on the outskirts of Brighton, where the University of Sussex is located.
The universal question
Time for talk during a conference break.
Whether from Turkey, Korea, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Canada or the UK, our fellow humans and Woolfians share our disappointment in the country I call my home.
And they almost universally ask the question we Americans have been asking ourselves since last November: “How did this happen?”
Sadly, we have no definitive answer. All we can offer are conjectures, theories, and speculations.
Dangerous words
Notice how I am writing here. I am choosing my words carefully. I am not saying exactly what I mean. Instead, I am offering hints. Instead, I am writing in a kind of code.
Why? I am afraid. Not so afraid that I will be silent, because, as Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.”
But afraid enough to edit myself, to avoid publishing words on the web that might bring attention from the thought police. After all, I would like to get back into the country of my birth.
Clarissa Dalloway’s dangerous world
Which brings me to one of the best things I heard at the conference so far: Fordham University Professor Anne Fernald’s keynote presentation titled “Dangerous Days: A Century with Clarissa Dalloway.”
In it, she talked about the dangers we face in our current political climate and the dangers Clarissa faced in Woolf’s 1925 novel. Clarissa lost her sister at a young age. She lived through the Great War. She survived the influenza pandemic.
Woolf describes Clarissa’s feelings this way:
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always has the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. (MD 8)
I now understand that quote. And I recognize — once again — that Woolf’s words always apply.
Anne Fernald gives her keynote address, “Dangerous Days: A Century with Clarissa Dalloway.”
We are not always able to see original Bloomsbury art in person, but yesterday I got a look at several pieces exhibited at the Tate Britain.
Bell, Grant, Gertler
They include paintings by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister; Duncan Grant, Bell’s friend and lover who lived with her at Charleston; and Mark Gertler, who became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group through his patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell.
I share them with you here.
Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, 1912. An oft-visited beach in Dorset by Bell and her family. Bell uses bold colors and simple shapes, rather than emphasizing the subjects. It is likely that the figures in the foreground are Vanessa’s son Julian and his nanny.
Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Based on the theme “London on Holiday,” this painting was part of the decoration for the dining room at the Borough Polytechnic.
Duncan Grant, Head of Eve, 1913. In this head of the biblical figure of Eve, grant fuses Byzantine and early Italian style with the styles of Matisse and Picasso.
Duncan Grant, Film of Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1974. This is a digital film version of a scroll painting Grant composed in 1941. The music of Bach was meant to accompany it.
Mark Gertler, The Artist’s Brother Harry Holding an Apple, 1913.
Mark Gertler, Merry-Go-Round, 1916. Gertler, a pacifist, painted this during WWI while living in London as a conscientious objector. The fairground ride is transformed from something pleasurable into a metaphor for the relentless military machine that traps both soldiers and civilians.
