[Vwoolf] missionary string bags

[Stuart N. Clarke]

“A pretty hat in a teashop - how fashion revives the eye!”
D5, 8 March 1941

(I don’t think I remember string bags.)

Stuart

From: Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf 
Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2023 9:59 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 
Subject: [Vwoolf] missionary string bags

I came across this Woolf reference in Patricia Moye’s detective novel Who Saw Her Die? (1970). “In the morning, Emmy went off to the Rue du Rivoli. Although, with her slender packet of travellers’ cheques, she could do no 
I came across this Woolf reference in Patricia Moye’s detective novel Who Saw Her Die? (1970).

 

“In the morning, Emmy went off to the Rue du Rivoli. Although, with her slender packet of travellers’ cheques, she could do no more than lick the windows of the shops - as the French put it so vividly - still she was adamant that this was an admirable way to spend a couple of hours. ‘I don’t need to buy anything,’ she she explained to Henry. ‘I just look. It gives me a whole new feeling about fashion. As Virginia Woolf said, it refreshes the eye.’”

 

Google located  the following from “Taylors and Edgeworths” in The Common Reader:

 

“And so back and so forwards, he paces eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there he sits in his Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and making - it is his great consolation - string bags for missionaries. And then? Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is exquisitely refreshing to the eyes.”

 

It’s not a very satisfactory match. Is there a better Woolf source?

 

As is often the case, I learned something while searching; that “missionary bag” is a standard term. “Missionary string bag” less so; Google does give some hits, although the accompanying pictures are not of string bags.

 

Now that plastic carrier bags are frowned on or banned, the string bags I remember from the 1950s in the UK may make a modest come-back.

 

Jeremy H

 

 

Professor Emeritus
Department of Language and Literature
NTNU
7491 Trondheim
Norway

 



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