[Vwoolf] typing and Daisy

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

1. I asked a bit back whether Virginia could type, and the one response I had to this was that she probably could not. This is from Stella McNichol's note on the text of Mr.s Dalloway in the 1992 Penguin edition. "Virginia Woolf's method of work was to write her novels by hand in notebooks, typing up each day's composition more or less without revision on the same day or the following one. If she then felt that further revision than could be made on the typescript was necessary she returned to the notebook and composed the passage afresh. The holograph drafts of Mrs. Dalloway show much revision of this kind."

2. Stuart suggests that Daisy Greville can be ignored, because her Daisy was a nickname. So was Steerforth's name for David Copperfield. And this discussion has brought back to me that in my secondary school one of the masters was nicknamed Daisy. He was clumsy, untidy, and not at all like the neat little flower - the nickname was ironic. Unless there is some information in the holograph drafts of the novel mentioned above, we have no way of knowing if Daisy in Mrs Dalloway is a given name or a nickname. But it is striking (I think) that a character whose darkness is repeatedly insisted upon should be given the name of a white flower (as if to exaggerate her darkness, Peter Walsh's photograph of her depicts "Daisy all in white, with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark").

Elisa Kay Sparks's comments on daisies in Woolf's work  (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/p/di.html__;!!KGKeukY!y_dzMcoZRXZR6wMW6IjlC0XCcXjZIkKWn-W1t9E2lAcXnRh6QzonGaVSIr5sNao2vfXR2gh7cz5I5VGC1Z7LSx5jqeiSllNSN8J2zd8$ ) are fascinating. She mentions "the oracular game played with the flower" - which if I recall aright involves pulling off the petals one at a time and saying "(s)he loves me, (s)he loves me not" following each dismemberment. The uncertainty certainly matches Peter Walsh's feelings about Daisy.

Jeremy H

Jeremy Hawthorn
Professor Emeritus
NTNU
7491 Trondheim
Norway

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