[Vwoolf] did Woolf read the Gita?

[Harish Trivedi]

A very quick scroll- through of the Washington SU Catalog has yielded the
following broadly relevant titles.

Radhakrishnan, S. An Idealist View of Life, Being the Hibbert Lectures for
1929. London: Allen & Unwin, 1932. LW—annotations.

Tattvabhushan, Sitanath. Sankaracharya: His Life and Teachings. Trans. by
Sita Nath Dutta. 3d ed. Calcutta: Society for the Resuscitation of Indian
Literature, 1899.


I also looked for but did not find the following:

The Ten Principal Upanishads Put into English by Shree *Purohit* Swami and
W. B. Yeats. Faber and Faber, London 1937.

Though some passages in "Times Passes" and in *The Waves* may broadly
remind some (mainly Indian?) readers of Indian scriptures, especially the
Upanishads, I do not get the sense that VW had actually read any of them,
to say nothing of such reading being reflected in her own writings.

However, I do dimly recall finding in the Monks House Papers at the Sussex
U Library (in 1972 or thereabouts) a fan letter to VW upon the publication
of *The Waves* saying that the novel reminded this reader of the
upanishads, and as I recall, it wasn't an Indian correspondent who wrote
that. In my view, such vague remembrances are no more than impressionist
"mnemonic irrelevancies" in IA Richards' phrase.

But if Ruth does turn up closer parallels between VW's works and the Indian
scriptures -- and much of her previous work in many fields is full of her
being able to substantiate tenuous-seeming connections! -- that would open
a new window of interpretation.

Finally, could anyone please help me find the chapter and verse for an
obiter dictum by VW that I have cherished for long which goes something
like: "Both India and Italy exercise the superfluous imagination."  My
supervisor Frank Bradbrook used to say that VW sent her characters off to
India to get them out of the way for a while or to die.  And of course
there aren't too many of those either.

All best.


Harish Trivedi



On 28 February 2018 at 23:17, Anne Fernald via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
wrote:

> The first place I always go for questions like this is to the Washington
> State University catalog of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's library
> <http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.htm>.
> That's a reliable, but not entirely complete, clue.
>
> No Bhagavad Gita there. The books on India are agricultural and political,
> so, as intriguing a suggestion as this is, I don't immediately see strong
> evidence for the speculation.
>
> Others may have found clues elsewhere, however.
>
> A
>
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 12:40 PM, Eileen Barrett via Vwoolf <
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>
>> My friend Ruth Vanita asked if anyone on the Woolf list might have the
>> answer. Here's her question:
>>
>> Where can I find a thoroughgoing report on Woolf's reading/library? I
>> want to find out whether she had read the Gita. Given that it had been
>> translated and circulated for so long before her time, and so many writers,
>> including Eliot and Yeats, were immersed in it, it seems likely that she
>> did. But I'd like to be sure, and also to find out which translation she
>> read if she did.
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Eileen
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Eileen Barrett, Ph.D.
>> MB 2583
>> Professor and Graduate Coordinator
>> Department of English
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>
>
> --
> Anne E. Fernald <http://www.fordham.edu/info/24101/anne_fernald>
> Acting Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences
> Professor of English and Women's Studies
> fernald at fordham.edu
>
> Rose Hill: Cunniffe 211
> 718-817-3034
>
> Lincoln Center: Martino Hall 422
> 212-636-7613
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