Let's throw a little birthday celebration for Virginia Woolf here in the Sunday Salon this January 25. The lovely image you see above comes from the January/February issue of The Atlantic where the new book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants is reviewed. This book is an interesting look at both domestic life and class issues among the Bloomsbury set. As a special birthday present to you, I will mail out a copy of this new book to a winner randomly drawn at the end of the day from the comments on this post. You just need to comment with your favorite Woolf novel or a Woolf novel you have always meant to read. You can even pick the edition you would like - US version on the left and UK version on the right.
What are some of your favorite words from Virginia Woolf? Some of mine shared here:
"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."
"That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now."
"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." (Orlando)
"For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life." (Mrs. Dalloway)
"...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made." (To the Lighthouse)
As for me today, I have some librarian fun stuff to attend to but will leave a little time to read through Woolf's diaries a bit as well as attempt to finish up Pat Barker's most excellent
Life Class.
