The set includes the German-born French photographer’s portraits of noted authors, including Virginia Woolf. Among the photos is one said to picture Woolf’s writing desk. This is not the same desk photo posted on Flikr by Renaud Camus that I wrote about two years ago.
Freund‘s book Gisele Freund, Photographer, published in the United States in 1985, includes 205 black and white and color photographs that document her 50-year career. Now out of print, it includes photo documentation of the popularity of Hitler among German students in the 1930s and the Depression in England.
It also includes portraits of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valery, Colette, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, , Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. Many photos are accompanied by Freund’s personal notes and reminiscences.
Next I prowled for some non-fiction related to Woolf. There were shelves and shelves full of Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, but not a single volume devoted to Woolf. Nor were there any Woolf letters, diaries or biographies.
Feeling a bit desperate, I paused in front of the cookbooks. And for a moment, I got excited. I thought I had a Woolf sighting in my grip.
The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages That Feature Them was in front of me. It must include Boeuf en Daube, I thought.
With much anticipation, I flipped to the index. Again, I was disappointed. Woolf, Virginia was not listed.
In an attempt at recovery from my dismay, I turned to Amazon. Here are the cookbooks I found that include dear Virginia in one way or another:
Literary Feasts: Recipes from the Classics of Literature by Barbara Scrafford includes a section on To the Lighthouse.
The Book Club Cookbook by Judy Gelman, Vicki Levy Krupp includes a recipe for Britta’s Crab Casserole from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
It’s no surprise that Virginia Woolf would be mentioned in three books reviewed in the July 25 issue of The New York Times Book Review—all are about Woolf’s contemporaries and the milieu of her times. What it does, however, is reinforce how ubiquitous Woolf continues to be, a benchmark, if you will, of her times.
The front page has side by side reviews of new biographies of Somerset Maugham and E.M. Forster. In The Secret Lives of Somerset Maughamby Selina Hastings, Maugham comes across as a despicable character, cheering his ex-wife’s death and sacrificing friends and foes alike to his fiction according to the review.
Woolf noted Maugham’s pillorying of his supposedly close friend Hugh Walpole in his novel Cakes and Ale, “palpably exposed as the hypocritical booming thick-skinned popular novelist.” Woolf once described Maugham as having “a look of suffering & malignity & meanness & suspicion;” it would appear that Maugham’s life, according to this biography, gives credence to Woolf’s unsparing but often insightful observations.
Colm Toibin calls Wendy Moffatt’s work, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster, “a well-written, intelligent and perceptive biography ” that portrays the writer as “sensitive, sensuous and kind, an artist who possessed a keen, plain sort of wisdom and lightness of touch that make him, to this day, an immensely influential novelist, almost a prophet.”
The biography dispels the idea said to have been held by some of Forster’s friends, including Virginia Woolf, that his life was drab and unhappy because of his closeted sexuality and his mother’s domination. Woolf and Forster had their differences, but they admired and respected each other’s work.
“Reading of how that most high-minded of couples, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, celebrated the end of wartime deprivation by munching three bars of chocolate apiece doesn’t quite bring home the mass suffering caused by the rationing laws.”
Perhaps not, but having presented at the recent Woolf Conference a paper on Virginia Woolf’s enjoyment of food and citing those very chocolate bars, I think that it does add a dimension to this portrait of an era.
Thanks to kind friends who know what I like, I had two copies. That meant I was able to sneak in a dose of therapy whether I was upstairs or down, reading in bed or ensconced in my favorite chair.
And I found myself applying the wise words contained within — whether they were Woolf’s own or Simons’ interpretation of them — to my daily life.
When I felt annoyed by my husband, I remembered Simons’ discussion of the wisdom of Mrs. Ramsay, for example.
Now Simons has an interesting post on the Psychology Today blog about the benefits storytelling has for therapy. As she puts it, both literature and psychology must “try to organize the mess of human emotion and motivation into a narrative” and both “[w]riters and therapists need to be good storytellers, because they have to build stories that organize emotion.”
In her piece, she credits several writers, including Woolf, for giving her “new images or narratives to live by.” In the case of Woolf, Simons says the author helped reframe her feminist thinking and stand her ground as a strong woman.
Perhaps it is this ability to help us think differently about some aspect of our daily lives that has helped Woolf earn her iconic status.
Time is running out to see “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections” exhibit. The largest collection of Bloomsbury art to have been shown in the states for almost a decade, the exhibit will be in the U.S. through Sept. 26.
