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Posts Tagged ‘To the Lighthouse’

Lawrence and the Machine … and Woolf

Posted in books, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , on Thursday 16 May 2013| Leave a Comment »

lawrence and machineJesse Blair is an editorial assistant for Killing the Angel, the new Woolf-inspired literary journal, so it’s no surprise that she inserts a dialogue about Woolf to introduce the characters in her novella, Lawrence and the Machine.

Lawrence responds to an ad for a room in a house near the New England university where he studies accounting and is taken into the living room to meet its eccentric inhabitants, self-professed intellectuals, in the midst of a discussion about Virginia Woolf:

“I don’t care what you say. The Voyage Out was Woolf’s most groundbreaking work.”

“Are you high?”

“Not anymore.”

“Every Virginia Woolf scholar worth her salt knows that Mrs. Dalloway is her epic success.”

“To the Lighthouse.”

“Oh, please. How clichéd. Your literary opinions embarrass you and your sweet little library degree.”

“The scholars agree! To the Lighthouse revolutionized the modern novel. The Voyage Out was by far Woolf’s least brilliant novel.”

“According to you. Have you ever had an original thought, or do you just read the criticism of others to develop your theories?”

And so it goes, until they notice Lawrence and someone asks his opinion of Woolf’s greatest masterpiece. Lawrence: “Woolf, Woolf … I strained to recall syllabi from my one or two undergraduate literature classes, to no avail. ‘Well…’ I finally improvised. ‘They were all pretty good, weren’t they?’

The story veers off from there into some pretty bizarre territory, well beyond talk, and while Woolf doesn’t make any more appearances, I think she would have approved of the proceedings.

Summer’s coming–here’s one to take to the beach and read in a single outing (but don’t forget the sunscreen).

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“I now” and “I then”

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , on Thursday 27 September 2012| Leave a Comment »

I finally came to the top of the queue at the San Diego Public Library for Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? Review after review has mentioned her frequent references to Woolf, which was what piqued my interest, and indeed Woolf  is a constant companion, serving as one of Bechdel’s navigators throughout her story.

She starts right out with an epigraph from Woolf—“For nothing was simply one thing” (from To the Lighthouse). Bechdel is writing about her mother, and she comes back again and again to Lighthouse and its representations of Mrs. Ramsay as Woolf’s mother, recollections from Woolf’s own childhood that are transposed into the fiction, and Woolf’s avowal that she was able to put her mother to rest after writing this novel.

As a writer of memoir in the form of personal essays, I’ve been exploring the whole topic of memoir as distinct from autobiography. An autobiography is usually a somewhat straightforward history of one’s life, starting at the beginning or even before. Sometimes generations before. Autobiography doesn’t interest me a whole lot—it often feels puffed up and self-serving. It doesn’t have the objective (or not-so-objective) distance of a biography or the personal investment and reflection of memoir.

Woolf elaborated on this in “A Sketch of the Past,” her own thought-to-be-unfinished memoir, by distinguishing between what she called “I now” and “I then.” When I write memoir in a personal essay, I’m the person, now, looking back and writing this essay, and I’m the person, then, about whom I’m writing, the one having those experiences. But something in the story being told has to resonate for “I now,” or why would it pop into my mind at a prompt and why would I bother writing about it? In the course of writing, one revisits memories with new eyes, more analytically perhaps, and takes something away from them that is then reflected back in the memoir: what does this mean to me now?

Next month I will be joining a memoir read and critique group led by Tom Larson, a San Diego writer, teacher, and author of The Memoir and the Memoirist.  In his book, Larson devotes several pages to Woolf, calling “Sketch” “the gauntlet to this generation of memoir writers.”

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Woolf sightings: To the Lighthouse — in print, in film, on stage

Posted in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Friday 10 August 2012| Leave a Comment »

It’s summer, and the livin’ is easy, so maybe that’s why To The Lighthouse is in the limelight in this week’s Woolf sightings.

First, several blog posts (2-4) discuss The Guardian article that includes Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse among the top 10 most difficult books. Second, a New Yorker blog post (6) mistakenly includes the assertion that Woolf’s novel is among “literature’s great unmade movies,” ignoring the 1983 made-for-TV movie directed by Colin Gregg. Third, the novel inspires the theme of a theatre festival for British young people (15).

  1. Tucsonans share picks for summer reads, Arizona Daily Star
    A good summer getaway.” Karen Falkenstrom, director, Odaiko Sonora, Japanese drumming ensemble. • What she’s reading: “The Voyage Out” by Virginia Woolf. “Woolf is a master of well-wrought descriptive language and has an extraordinary sensitivity for …
  2. 10 hardest books should push us, The Periscope Post
    I’ve read three – Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, which I have been re-reading intermittently this year; Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of A Tub, although it was a fair while ago; and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, the inclusion of which has caused …
  3. The world’s most difficult books: how many have you read?, The Guardian (blog)
    Nightwood by Djuna Barnes; A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift; The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson; Finnegans Wake by James Joyce; Being and…
  4. The Top 10 Most Difficult Books, Publishers Weekly
    To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even …
  5. Book News: Drinking Poetically, Programming in Verse, New Yorker (blog)
    Reviving the dwindling reputation of Thomas Browne, a Renaissance author who inspired Melville, Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf. A recipe for the “particularly insidious punch” Robert Penn Warren made to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday.
  6. Literature’s Great Unmade Movies, New Yorker(blog)
    Jane Smiley selected Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”—surely a challenge to any filmmaker. She saw Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as stars. For John Updike, “La Princesse de Clèves” by Mme. De Lafayette, offered “a succession of moonlit scenes” in …

    To the Lighthouse, 1983 movie directed by Colin Gregg

  7. 3 Amazing Literary Pilgrimages (PHOTOS), Huffington Post (blog)
    Did Clarissa Dalloway kiss Sally Seton, smelling the fresh flowers and green summer grass, in the same garden where Virginia Woolf sat, writing her story? Unfortunately, to humanity’s and to my own great dismay, we may never ask Mrs. Woolf this …
  8. Walking Tour of London’s Literary Pubs, Travel Agent
    Neither was a famous drinker, but it was in the company of Charles Dickens andVirginia Woolf that the capital’s first literary pub crawl set out from the Writers and Artists Bar in the basement of the Fitzroy Tavern (16 Charlotte Street, W1), in …
  9. Blu-ray Review: ‘Orlando’ (rerelease), Cine-Vue
    Released on Blu-ray for the very first time courtesy of UK distributor Artificial Eye, Sally Potter’s lavish 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s century-spanning novel Orlando marked the arrival of British actress Tilda Swinton onto the international …
  10. Competition: Win Sally Potter’s re-released ‘Orlando’ on Blu-ray, Cine-Vue
    Potter’s dazzling adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel is the tale of the apparently immortal Orlando, who begins an epic quest for love and freedom in the court of Elizabeth I as a man and completes the search 400 years later as a woman. This journey …
  11. Motherhood Does Not Make Every Woman a Better Writer (Or a Better Person …, xoJane
    But to project what-ifs onto women like Jane Austen — or Virginia Woolf, or Charlotte or Emily Brontë, or any number of women authors from history who dared sacrifice motherhood for writing — and then to suggest that the experience of biological …
  12. Reviving Thomas Browne, an Expert on Oblivion, New York Times
    Virginia Woolf said he paved the way for all psychological novelists, and Borges, who translated him, once described himself as just another word for Browne (and for Kafka and Chesterton). Browne was a reverent Christian who professed to care more …
  13. The Heroine in the Drawing Room, Wall Street Journal
    If a woman wrote the same text, it would just be…a domestic novel.” Virginia Woolfwrote much the same in “A Room of One’s Own”: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the …
  14. Heads Up: ‘NW’, The Independent
    Insider knowledge Smith took inspiration from another great female novelist who hymned our capital:Virginia Woolf. At BookExpo America Smith said in an interview that Woolf “kept her going”, as a “good example of a forward-thinking and yet consistently …
  15. Porthleven hosts international youth theatre festival, This is The West Country
    The theme of lighthouses was chosen because of its versatility and the fact it had been inspirational to many artists such as Virginia Woolf, whose classic novel ‘The Lighthouse’ was based on the lighthouse in Godrevy. Mrs Parish said: “’Lighthouses’ [as a …
  16. DVD Review: The Forsyte Saga Collection, Blogcritics.org (blog)
    Writing at a time when new ideas about what literature ought to do were changing and writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were looking to these new horizons, Galsworthy’s work seemed to many to be looking in the wrong direction. He was behind the …
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Read intro to new edition of To the Lighthouse

Posted in books, To the Lighthouse, tagged , on Tuesday 17 May 2011| Leave a Comment »

Granta, the British magazine of new writing,  has published online Helen Dunmore’s introduction to a new paperback edition of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, which is part of the Orange Inheritance Collection.

In the following quote, Dunmore captures one reason why I love Woolf so much. Her introduction includes many more.

Each time I return to To The Lighthouse I’m struck by something that I haven’t noticed before: a flash of description, a moment of double-edged intimacy between two characters, a touch of sensory experience so immediate that it brings a shiver.

Online access to the To the Lighthouse introduction is available in conjunction with Granta’s new summer issue, The F Word.

Thanks to Mark Hussey for the news.

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Make time for Woolf in Winter by reading The Waves

Posted in 21st century Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Online discussions, Orlando, The Waves, To the Lighthouse, tagged , , , , , on Friday 19 February 2010| Leave a Comment »

When I first read about Woolf in Winter, I planned to reread all four novels and participate in all the discussions. I regret that I have failed in my mission.

If you are in the same predicament, links to the online discussions we missed are below.

But please note that we still have a chance to redeem ourselves — albeit with one of the most challenging of Virginia Woolf’s novels, The Waves. The online discussion begins a week from today, on Friday, Feb. 23. You can join Clare and other Woolf readers at Kiss a Cloud.

I plan to put Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins aside for the moment and ride The Waves for the next week. Won’t you join us?

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