[Vwoolf] Have I gone too far?

Stuart N. Clarke stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com
Tue Oct 31 04:52:11 EDT 2017


‘They looked at the tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond-shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it.

“Barnes never gets them to grow like that,” Clara mused; she sighed.’ (“Jacob’s Room”, ch. XIII)

Leaving aside the London suburb and the fact that Mary Hutchinson’s maiden name was Barnes, I think the most obvious literary predecessor is Sir Barnes Newcome, the villain of Thackeray’s “The Newcomes”, which VW read from 23 January to 2 March 1897.

Can I read into Clara’s musing and sighing a feeling of resentment, a suggestion that Barnes isn’t trying, or even being wilfully uncooperative?

Stuart

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20171031/b0ac98b5/attachment.html>


More information about the Vwoolf mailing list