[Vwoolf] Woolf and memory

[Jeannette Smyth]

Fascinating question. 
I would throw out her last novel Between the Acts, as addressing history as memory. (As almost all of her novels are history or eulogy,  "memory" -- recherche de temps perdu, as you stipulate -- arguably can be the subject of everything she wrote.)
And, On Being Ill, an essay she wrote on the caves of thought one wanders when ill, is as her biographer Hermione Lee points out, extremely provocative.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/dec/18/classics.virginiawoolf
Woolf wrote, in a letter to Ethel Smyth (#2254: 10/16/30) that everything she wrote about arose from within her mental illness, specifically, the second half of the 1915-1917 breakdown, in which she lay in bed at Hogarth House and "thus sketched, I think, all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew and others, not in substance but in idea)". If that stream of consciousness she seems to be describing can be called memory, then, yes.

Thank you.
Jeannette Smyth 

On Oct 9, 2012, at 8:35 PM, Sally Greene wrote:

> A friend asks, Did Virginia Woolf have anything to say about historical memory, or issues of memory, say, the way Proust thought about memory (or the way we do today when engaging in "memory studies")? I said I would ask the highest possible authority. 
> 
> So . . . anyone?
> 
> Thanks,
> Sally
> 
> -- 
> Sally Greene
> 
> Associate Director    |    UNC Center for the Study of the American South
> http://uncsouth.org   |    (919) 962-0553
> 
> Papers on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/author=1095473
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf

Jeannette Smyth
jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
1522 San Patricio Ave. SW
Albuquerque, N.M. 87104



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20121010/24421db7/attachment.html>