WOOLFIAN NEWS UPDATES

From The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain: (click for the VWSGB website only) two items of great interest as follows: 

1)    An excellent  review of Stuart Clarke's ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, Volume 5: 1929-1932 (published by Hogarth Press)  by Claire Harman (published by The Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 2009).    GO TO:

 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6518501.ece

(This URL needs to be underlined for it to work).

2)    The book, VIRGINIA WOOLF and VANESSA BELL,  by Susan Sellers.   Susan will be interviewed TODAY by Leonard Lopate on WNYC scheduled for 1.40 pm local time.   It can be heard 'live on': (click), then click on the  'listen live' FM option on the left side of the screen.

The interview will be posted as a podcast shortly after it airs which will be 'available' at:  (click available).

Impressions of TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

2)  Ghost, Air, Nothingness

Media:  Multicolour woodcut

Image Size:  6" x 8 1/2"

Monoprint

To quote from TTL:  "Oh, Mrs. Ramsay!  she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again.  It seemed so safe thinking of her.   Lily Briscoe.

Virginia Woolf, in the role of painter, Lily Briscoe.   To the uninitiated, the animal in the foreground is a Goat, a family nickname.   

I have just replaced the former photocopy with a better one and, in the process, have lost two comments.  I regret because comments and replies do help to clarify the novel for those who are not familiar with Virginia Woolf's autobiographical approach. 

A PLATE called LEDA

In answer to a call by Elizabeth Wix to show favourite plates, I cannot resist bringing this one out again, published early in March this year, when I first began blogging.  

This is a pottery plate made by Quentin Bell.  Quite by chance I found it in a store in Cambridge, UK, in 2001.   

It shows a satirical hand drawn portrait of Lydia Lopokova, who married John Maynard Keynes in 1925, much to the surprise of Venessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.   They apparently thought her 'a goose, intellectually much inferior to Maynard and themselves'.   Bloomsbury gave them a hard time.     Hence, the title LEDA, and whatever else you might want to read into it.   Quentin's humour invariably infiltrated much of his prolific work as a lecturer, writer, artist and sculptor.

The love affaire between this unlikely couple - Lydia, one of the greatest dancers in Diaghilev's Russian ballet and Maynard, the famous British economist -  is recorded in LYDIA & MAYNARD, The letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, edited by Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, published by Andre Deutsch Limited, 1989.  It is a good read.  

Impressions of TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

 1)    *SEA AND SKY     

         

         A series of multicolour woodcuts

Image size:   10 1/2" x 14 1/2"

Edition:  State 1/5

Date: 1982

One of a series of prints inspired by the novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.    

Each print is a multicolored woodcut - a  print in which many shapes and colors are superimposed - incorporating a variety of images described in particular pages of the novel. 

 "In the midst of chaos there is shape": in Woolf's fictional world the novel is reshaped to reflect the multifaceted and many layers of a woman's family life.    This is not a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end in the traditional sense!   

Woolf creates a form that explores the inner lives of her subjects -  a new 'autobiographical' form.    Thus,  instead of printing a traditional illustration of the described scene, I am overprinting objects that the author is describing at particular moments in time.  In the final process of printing, I look for the shape and rhythm that defines a sense of the whole experience.  It is as if one is looking through time instead of at a linear sense of time.    

This novel was published in 1927, long before modern digital photography techniques were developed that now enables us to see and capture pictures within pictures, instead of capturing one beautiful picture that says it all.   

 

 In this series, begun in 1982, it shows how I began to think about making painterly prints.   Just as Lily Briscoe, the artist in the novel, is attempting to paint Mrs. Ramsay throughout the story, Virginia Woolf is, in fact, 'painting' with words a memory of her childhood summers in Cornwall.  The novel is in three parts - what was then in, THE WINDOW,  a long interlude of TIME PASSES, then, what is now, THE LIGHTHOUSE, (in the time frame of the story).    

For this series, a Harvest Book paperback edition of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.  was used (Copyright 1955 by Leonard Woolf).

 *The title of the print:  to suggest a sense of the random flow of thought before it takes shape,   reflecting the ambience of the moment.

LIGHT SUMMER READING - Mystery REVIEW UPDATE

Ms. Magazine has called this one  "... an imaginiative spoof"

My opinion - SHAME ON MS.   

Published by Penguin Books in 1983, this is an unlikely novel of espionage with Virginia Woolf, PI investigator, uncovering an intrigue that may determine the course of World War 1.  Virginia and her Bloomsbury friends, including well known biographical characterizations of time, place, scenes and dialogue, are dubiously reinvented by the authors who disclaim their spoof as historical fact.  

UPDATE  June 1, 2009.

Have just finished re-reading this novel some 25 years later.  I now consider it one of the worst parodies I have ever read,  both of the portrayal of Virginia Woolf,  her life and friends, and of the mystery novel genre itself.   No wonder societies like the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain were founded in 1998, a non-profit organisation, which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and discussion of her works.  Its quarterly Bulletin  keeps members abreast of the influence Virginia Woolf continues to have in the arts and literature around the world.       

  An Anonymous comment/inquiry has been asked about Stephanie Barron's new novel 'THE WHITE GARDEN: A novel of Virginia Woolf", thought to be published in the fall - actually, September 29.  Barron is the author of the Jane Austen Mystery stories;  it is likely that this, also, may be added to your light summer reading list.     More to come in answer to this inquiry.  

RARE BLOOMSBURY GROUP VOICES - a new recording

News from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

The BBC Library announces that this  2 CD set, with booklet, will be available September 1, 2009.   Price: 15.15 pounds sterling.  Click here to:  Check out the purchase details.

SISSINGHURST GARDEN - UPDATES

See comments at the very end!

1)  THE NICOLSON FAMILY, UPDATE -  according t0 

commenter Flo, who has watched the BBC4TV 8-part series

already.

2) PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE, UPDATE -  following a

 comment by Bee Drunken.

With the reminder, OH TO BE, a short poem by my friend, Rinkly Rimes, blogging in Australia today, I recalled that I had shot these photographs (selected formal views of Sissinghurst Garden) in 1976c.  It was early spring,  so that the 'design'  (bones of the garden) was clearly marked before the abundance of flowers would soften the precisely close cut hedges containing as many as ten smaller gardens within the whole.

The Vestal Virgin,  guardian of the four larger beds of flowers in the White Garden, is now housed in the Library.  The statue is a lead casting from the walnut original by Rosandic.

                                                 

 Vita wrote a little poem for her -

How slender, simple, shy, divinely chaste,

 She wilting stood,

Her suppleness at pause, by leisure graced,

In robes archiac by the chiseled woo'd,

That smoothly flowed around her waist,

And all her figured traced,

And at her feet in fluid ripples broke.

Thought to be A. R. Powys's wall, dividing Vita's flowers from the vegetables.  Powys was an indefatigable garden designer/advisor to the Nicolsons.  Vita did not share Gertrude Jekyll's fashion for mixing vegetables and flowers.  Jekyll was a famed garden restorer at the time. 

UPDATE:  Since posting this information, I have learned from blogger Flo that Adam and wife, Sarah,  are moving back to Sissinghurst to plant a vegetable garden, according to Parts 1 and 2 of a BBC planned series on Sissinghurst.  To see comment, click where indicated below.  My reply follows.    

In front of the Priest's House, quartered beds edged in box, each of which hold different kinds of white flower.  

The Moat Walk

A partial view of the Rondel, on the right, showing how Harold adjusted the classical device of a circle within a square.  Closely clipped dark yew hedges make up the Rondel circle.

 

       Sissinghurst, a property of the National Trust since 1967, was created in the 1930s by Vita Sackville West and Sir Harold Nicolson.  They had two sons, Benedict and Nigel. Vita died in 1962 in a room at Priest's House overlooking the White Garden.  When Harold died in 1968, their son, Sir Nigel Nicolson lived on in Sissinghurst until 2004, when he died. 

       

      THEN AND NOW - like watching our own children and grandchildren, inherit or refuse, the fruits of parental interests!  

      Today, it is the home of Nigel's daughter, writer Juliet Nicolson, her two daughters, and her long time partner Charles Anson.  She has two other daughters from an earlier marriage who live in London and visit.

      Benedict, CBE CVO, was Editor of the renowned Burlington Magazine.  It is said he refused to be involved with his family interests* preferring to be an art historian.    He died, suddenly, in London in 1978.  He left a daughter, Vanessa, who (last known in 1990) lives in a cottage near the Castle.  

      Juliet, Adam and Rebecca Nicolson, Vita and Harold's grandchildren, continue to be involved in the publishing industry.  I hear that, currently, there are plans, albeit controversial, to add a vegetable garden to supply the very popular restaurant.  An estimated 180,000 visitors from all over the world pay to see the gardens each year.  

       *SISSINGHURST, Portrait of a Garden, by Jane Brown, with forward by Nigel Nicolson, colour photographs by John Miller, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 1990.  Not only does it discuss the making of the garden, it also alludes to the trials and tribulations of the families involved and why the garden became the property of the National Trust.

    For those who love gardens, this book is something to drool over, if you can't visit the garden itself.    Sissinghurst is always on my agenda to revisit when I go to see my family in Kent.