[Vwoolf] did Woolf read the Gita?

Jane deGay J.deGay at leedstrinity.ac.uk
Thu Mar 1 11:51:12 EST 2018


Julie Kane explores various aspects of Woolf's interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, including her connections with India, in ‘Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf’. Twentieth Century Literature, 41:4, 1995, pp. 328–49. She discusses the importance of the Gita within modernism, though without making specific connections to Woolf.


Jane Marcus discusses Woolf and India in 'Britannia Rules the Waves' in K.R. Lawrence (ed.) Decolonizing Tradition (Urbana: U of Chicago P, 1992).


Best wishes

Jane



________________________________
From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+j.degay=leedstrinity.ac.uk at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Anne-Marie Lindsey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Sent: 01 March 2018 15:09
To: Anne Fernald; Harish Trivedi
Cc: Virginia Woolf
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] did Woolf read the Gita?

I wonder if one might follow the American Transcendentalists backwards to find Thoreau’s sources back to Europe, as he most definitely read the Gita and often, and then see if those European sources could be traced forward to the Woolfs and their connections. The reason I think this might work is that Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore at 15-16 West (Street? Avenue?) Boston, while it existed, was the main source for foreign-language books for most of the Transcendentalists. I am not particularly interested in them, but the Peabody sisters fascinate me, as does Margaret Fuller. Of course, the tricky part here may be the long period of time between Elizabeth Peabody’s book buying and the Woolfs’ book buying. Cambridge might provide the link, however, because I have this notion that German philosophy is at the root. I cannot quite place this idea, but have a strong feeling that it came from either the Peabody sisters’ biography or the Fuller biography I read, which I read in quick succession, and which were written by same author, Megan Marshall. I hope this provides some clues or new avenues of inquiry.

Anne-Marie Lindsey

Anne-Marie Lindsey
Library Science and Information Management
iSchool at Syracuse University

On Mar 1, 2018, 2:15 AM -0500, Harish Trivedi via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>, wrote:
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<mailto: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<mailto: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



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