[Vwoolf] "Jacob's Room": Crux #1

[Emily Kopley]

Hi All, I wrote this reply to Stuart's Crux #1 off-list, but maybe it's of
interest to the listserv so here it is:

***
Hi Stuart,

A thought to support "prefigures": in the holograph draft, VW originally
had "lamp" and then crossed it out for "lights" (on p. 269 of Bishop, draft
2.273). To me this suggests that VW is thinking of the language herself,
not echoing Grey, because if she were intending an allusion she would have
kept "lamp" to make the connection firmer.

Another thought: VW has extraordinary praise for Grey in *Diary 1*, pp.
200-201 (12 Oct. 1918): "Grey himself struck me as a solid straightforward
English Squire . . . with the kind of open air honour & sagacity which one
feels to some extent in a man like Waller. He said nothing but what one has
read & agreed with about a League of Nations, but he said it simply, & for
a 'great statesman ' to have sense & human feeling & no bombast does
produce an odd sense of wonder & humility in me, as if human nature were
worth something after all." So, if VW knew Grey's 1925 phrase from
word-of-mouth before 1925 (indeed 1922), *here, *one guesses, would be the
place she would record it. So, more reason to think she did not know it.

By the way, the only mention by Woolf that I find of Grey's interlocutor,
J. A. Spender, is *D1* 157, very much in passing.

All good luck to you and David on your continued quest,
Emily
***

And best to all,
Emily

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:17 PM, Jean Mills <millsj7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps follow JA Spender as a point of contact? He was supposedly the
> person to whom Grey uttered the lines and as one of "the most influential
> political journalist of his day" (D1 n11, 157), perhaps he posited some
> version of or the spirit of the lines either in print or in conversation
> that could be connected to VW. She was definitely aware that they were
> "caballing" in the hallway. Or perhaps it's none of these and can be
> attributed to the fact that sometimes the ideas are just in the air.
>
> Jean
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 11, 2015, at 11:43 AM, Ado Haberer <adolphe at haberer.fr> wrote:
>
> No footnote in Edward L. Bishop's Shakespeare Head Press edition which I
> used when I translated JR.  Interesting to note, however, that in ch. XIII
> "Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward Grey."
> With best wishes
> Ado Haberer
>
> Envoyé de mon iPhone
>
> Le 11 mai 2015 à 15:54, Stuart N. Clarke <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>
> a écrit :
>
>  I am helping David Bradshaw edit JR for Cambridge University Press, and
> we have noticed several mysteries in the text.
>
> Towards the end of ch. XII:
>
> “Now it was dark. Now it one after another lights were extinguished. Now
> great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks.”
>
> The second sentence sounds like Sir Edward Grey’s ‘The lamps are going
> out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’.
>
> Unfortunately, this appeared in his autobiography in 1925! “It was his
> only memorable saying, widely quoted and anthologized subsequently” (ODNB).
> Would it have been known about when VW was writing JR? If so, where? If
> not, we shall probably have to follow Sue Roe and Vara Neverow, and say
> that the sentence “prefigures” or “anticipates” Grey’s reminiscence in 1925.
>
> Any answers gratefully received.
>
> Stuart
>
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-- 
Dr. Emily Kopley
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
McGill University, Department of English
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