[Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf is no Shakespeare

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I agree with Mark Scott.  I’m not especially interested in Woolfian adaptations: biofiction,* plays, ballets, operas, songs about sausage and haddock, Kabe Wilson, using the first 50 letters of “To the Lighthouse” to play Scrabble, etc.  But other people are.  What excitement on this list when Michael Cunningham published “The Hours”!  (I read the ch., "A Room at the Normandy: Mrs. Brown Meets Mrs. Dalloway in Southern California", in the “New Yorker” in 1998.)  And then the film . . . well, of course, plenty of discussion.

No, what I *really* like is Virginia Woolf’s own words in the order in which she wrote them.  I am now prepared to confess that I haven’t read everything she wrote that is available: I haven’t actually read “A Passionate Apprentice” from cover to cover.  I haven’t read most of the transcriptions of her drafts; I have still barely dipped into "The Waves: The two holograph drafts" (1976).  (If I were on “Desert Island Discs”, I would choose that as my book.  However wonderful a conventional book, wouldn’t one get tired of rereading it?)

I am, however, enthusiastic when a new bit of diary appears, such as “Carlyle’s House” (ed. David Bradshaw, 2003) or the Asheham Diary [1917-18] in the “Charleston Magazine” (9:Spr/Summer 1994).

And of course I’m delighted when I come across a new letter, unpublished or uncollected.  How thrilled people would be if some more texts of Shakespeare were found.  But, generally, other people don’t share my enthusiasm over these letters and have no interest when they are made available.

*Anyone read Gail Pass’s “Zoe’s Book” (1976)?  I haven’t.  I’ve read "The Shadow of the Moth: a novel of espionage with Virginia Woolf" (1983), which is set in London in 1917 (when reading it, I literally had no idea what was meant by this sentence: “’Sorry, sir,’ apologized the precinct captain” (p. 209)); "Layers of social, literary, and psychological realism [makes for] a highly imaginative spoof" (puff).  I tried reading “Mr Dalloway”, but couldn’t cope with the Americanisms and inaccuracies.

Stuart
(Day 321, aka “The Blitz Spirit” V1 Day)

“Duncan ... eases JMK’s passage into Bloomsbury Group” 
(p. 437b, index in vol. 1 of Skidelsky’s biography of Maynard Keynes) 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20210201/2dd92b6e/attachment.html>