[Vwoolf] the four great Victorians?

[Steve Posin]

Certainly George Eliot  or perhaps   Eliz Gaskell  or Wilkie Collins?  Steve Posin 415-921-3649 h415-596-8125 c   

     On Monday, February 16, 2015 7:15 PM, Anne Fernald <fernald at fordham.edu> wrote:
   
 

 A facebook friend asks whom Orlando refers to when mentioning the four great writers of the Victorian age. I realize I don't know, nor do I really understand the paragraph. How do you read this? 
As a reference to four novelists (she's just had volumes and volumes delivered) (e.g. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and....who? Hardy)? Or as a joke about the way we name an era's greats with certainty? Or....? It seems almost certainly NOT to be the four women of A Room of One's Own (Austen, Brontë, Brontë, Eliot)....
"Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons--all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion." 

-- 
Anne E. FernaldMrs. Dalloway, now available from Cambridge UP
Director of Writing/Composition at Lincoln Center,
Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies
Fordham University
113 W 60th St.
New York NY 10023

212/636-7613
fernald at fordham.edu


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