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Review: The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Posted in Alice Lowe, books, Sissinghurst, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, tagged book review, Stephanie Barron, The White Garden on Friday 16 October 2009| 2 Comments »

Many people consider mystery novels the perfect escape. Whether you dip into the genre regularly or infrequently, Woolfians may find it hard to resist a literary “whodunit” with Virginia Woolf at its center.

Stephanie Barron preceded this novel with a series of Jane Austen mysteries; she professes to enjoy making things up about real people, knowing they might not approve of her embellishments on their lives.

The White Garden revolves around the discovery of a new diary, believed to be in Woolf’s hand, but started the day after she was supposed to have drowned herself in the River Ouse. Intending to commit suicide that day, she goes instead to Sissinghurst, where she is comforted and cared for by Vita Sackville-West.

And there’s more, much more, including Woolf’s discovery of some nefarious wartime activities involving Maynard Keynes and others in the Bloomsbury circle, but it’s all too convoluted, and I wouldn’t want to give anything away.

And of course there’s the contemporary angle. The diary is found by an American garden designer, who is at Sissinghurst in order to duplicate the White Garden for her wealthy New York employer, while at the same time trying to uncover a hidden secret in her own family. A number of people become involved in the intrigue and with each other, including the Head Gardener at Sissinghurst, manuscript specialists at Sotheby’s, and a Woolf scholar at Oxford.

Barron reminds her readers that this is fiction, hoping that they will enjoy exploring the possibilities and forgive the license that she takes. There’s plenty of that, from the bald facts of Woolf’s death and the implausibility of the plot to some manipulation of the topography, so one has to suspend disbelief and just go with it. And in the process, you can soak up the atmosphere of Sissinghurst, Monks House and Charleston Farmhouse along with Oxford and Cambridge. You could do worse!

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Listening in on Woolf and West

Posted in recordings, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, tagged BBC, British Library, The Spoken Word: British Writers, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's voice on Tuesday 11 November 2008| 2 Comments »

Let’s all thank our lucky stars for the enlightened souls at the BBC who saved eight minutes of Virginia Woolf’s recorded voice. It is the only recording of her voice that has survived from the three broadcasts she did for the BBC in the 1930s.

Now Woolf’s voice, along with those of other great writers of the 20th century, can be heard in its entirety for the first time on a three-disc set of CDs produced by the British Library called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.”

The set features the voices of 30 British writers and includes many previously unpublished recordings. Another set, “The Spoken Word: American Writers,” features 27 authors from the U.S.

When Woolf’s recordings were made, people simply didn’t keep radio broadcasts, according to Richard Fairman of the British Library. “They went out on the air and that was it; they were lost forever,” Fairman told NPR‘s Melissa Block.

“The recording of Woolf is nothing like the interviews common on the radio today,” he said.

Hearing the voices of famous authors on CD is “not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it’s not bad,” he told the Telegraph.

You can listen to Woolf talk about “Craftsmanship” in the series “Words Fail Me,” which was broadcast on the BBC April 29, 1937, here.

On You Tube, you can watch a video featuring a record spinning on a turntable that gives us eight minutes of Vita Sackville-West reading from her prize-winning poem “The Land.” The recording was made by Columbia in 1931 for the International Education Society.

You can also search the British Library’s online archive of more than 1,500 sound recordings that it has made here.

Read more in brief about the British Library CD sets of famous authors in the London Review of Books, Time and the Telegraph.

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Watching from the front row on Woolf’s last day

Posted in Between the Acts, Monk's House, performance, river ouse, Virginia Woolf, Vita and Virginia, Vita Sackville-West, tagged Between the Acts, GroundWorks Dancetheater, Unfinished Dialogues on Friday 17 October 2008| Leave a Comment »

I went alone to the world premier of “Unpublished Dialogues.” Perhaps that was most fitting.

Virginia Woolf was, after all, alone when she died. And “Unpublished Dialogues” was based on the last day of her life.

The theater-dance piece premiered last month in a dark and cavernous old ice house that seemed a fitting space for conducting an artistic exploration of Woolf’s mind on the day of her death.

The building sits on a tipsy street that ends at railroad tracks. Inside, just as the name implies, the structure is as cool as a refrigerated case, even on a warm sunny afternoon in early fall.

The rough brick and concrete walls of the main space stretch up and up. On that day, they ended in rows of multi-colored lights strung above a stage set to resemble Woolf’s writing Lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex.

I sat in the front row, just inches from the low stage, ready to absorb the wordless drama about a woman who chose her words so well.

The stage was simply set, but each item was placed with special meaning. The wooden coat rack at stage left held the dark coat that Virginia would wear on her last walk. The small table at stage right held a framed photo of a couple that I imagined as Leonard and Virginia on their wedding day.

In the center was her famous writing table. I imagined that the notebook sitting there contained her draft of Between the Acts. When I noticed a walking stick leaning nearby, I wondered if Woolf had actually used one when she left for the River Ouse.

The performance itself froze me in my seat. I was mesmerized by its darkness and drama and lightness and euphoria all at once.

Two Virginias — the adult and her younger self — teased each other lightly and played cat and mouse with a pen. Two half-brothers struggled with the terrified young Virginia, who was consoled by her adult self.

Her lover Vita Sackville-West let down her long, flowing hair and romanced Virginia. Her nephew Julian Bell played at being a soldier then marched off to war as a real one. And Leonard Woolf was either there in the background or by her side, the steady companion.

When Virginia’s companions left her, and she pulled her coat off the rack and slipped it on, I felt new empathy for this brilliant woman who felt forced to take that final walk. I did not want her to go alone. (more…)

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Playing Virginia

Posted in The Party, Virginia Woolf, Vita and Virginia, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf blog on Monday 29 October 2007| 2 Comments »

Kathleen Chalfant is preparing to play Virginia Woolf in the Eileen Atkins play Vita and Virginia on Monday evenings in New York this fall. Patricia Elliott will appear opposite her as Vita Sackville-West.

But that is not the only Woolf-related role Chalfant will take on. She will also play a part in The Party, which is based on three Woolf stories.

Both bits of news come from an Oct. 27 story in the New York Times.

Chalfant has the experience and credentials to take on such hefty roles. She was nominated for a 1993 Tony Award for her featured performance in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. She also received critical acclaim and numerous awards for her performance in the off-Broadway play Wit.

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Victoria Glendinning talks about the other Woolf

Posted in 16th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, 17th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Anne Fernald, Blogging Woolf, Bloomsbury, books, Leonard Woolf, Leonard Woolf: A Biography, Victoria Glendenning, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf blog, tagged Anne Fernald on Saturday 18 August 2007| 1 Comment »

When Victoria Glendinning‘s Leonard Woolf: A Biography hit the bookshelves last September, opinions about the book formed quickly. And comments — both negative and positive — flew.

Anonymous reviewers posted brief but critical comments on the Amazon UK Web site. Glendinning’s husband, Kevin O’Sullivan, responded with his own glowing defense and signed the review with his own name. That generated more furor.

Comments on the Amazon U.S.A. Web site were overwhelmingly favorable. And other sites, such as Simon & Schuster’s, posted complimentary blurbs from reviews at large. John Gross wrote his own positive assessment for Commentary Magazine entitled “Mr. Virginia Woolf.”

At this year’s 17th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, I heard one or two negative remarks about the book, but Glendinning’s biography of Leonard wasn’t a topic of any of the conversations in which I was involved. I did wonder, though, what people found problematic.

Yesterday, Anne Fernald mentioned on her blog, Fernham, that she is reviewing the book for the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. She said she “found a lot to like” in Glendinning’s biography. I agree. I found sections helpful when I was looking for information about Leonard’s and Virginia’s wartime experiences.

The Whitbread-prize-winning biographer of Vita Sackville-West seems to have taken the furor in stride. At least that’s how it sounds in an interview conducted by Susan Johnson of the Sydney Morning Herald.

“`The whole thing was extraordinary but I suppose if you put your head above the parapet at all, there are some people who will decide they don’t like you, even if they don’t know anything about you,'” she says in the article published today.

She went on to explain that, “`Virginia Woolf has become so much more than she really was, you know, she’s become iconic and devotees almost worship her and impose upon her all sorts of attributes. They kind of feel they own her.

“`I’m the first to respect her work and I’m not trying to down Virginia but there’s this sort of cult … I gave a talk at a Virginia Woolf society in Birmingham before the book was published and at questions afterwards somebody asked if Woolf said something or thought something or other and I, in all innocence, asked, ‘Which Woolf are you talking about?’

“`There was this hoarse voice from the audience: ‘There is only one Woolf.’ And she did not mean Leonard,'” Glendinning told Johnson.

Glendinning has produced an impressive body of work. She is the award-winning author of Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West and Trollope, as well as Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, and Jonathan Swift. She has also written three novels: Flight, The Grown-Ups, and Electricity.