Those of us who make the pilgrimage to North Carolina each spring and fall have just wrapped another High Point Market and survived the tumult of stimuli that washes over us as we see what’s new in the home furnishings arena. As I was thinking about how I wanted to frame the choices I’ve made […]
Tag: Virginia Woolf
No one in the Bloomsbury Group stirs more curiosity for me than Virginia Woolf. Her passion for writing a beacon for me as I navigate my own life putting words on the page. This quote from one of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, illustrates why I felt an echo between the the protagonist Clarissa and another fictive character, Lady Edith in Downton Abbey, even though Edith’s trauma is situationally imposed whereas Clarissa Dalloway’s is self-imposed. The voice-over in the film based upon Woolf’s novel says, “She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
I mention this novel in the context of a post about how Julian Fellowes had Lady Edith declaring she had met Woolf and Lytton Strachey, a brilliant move given the year he was writing about was 1925, the year Woolf penned the novel. Any time I mention Virginia Woolf in posts, they are filed under this tag.
The Sensuous Delight of Place
Like Katherine Mansfield’s enigmatic stories, the book Place by Tara Bernerd feels like “a thread with a subtly woven texture embracing ecstatic feeling, sensuous delight.” The quote is from an essay by Angela Smith in a remarkable book titled The Modernist Party. Edited by Kate McLoughlin, the collection of literary explorations surveys the dinner party through […]
I Met Virginia Woolf in This Room
Who else is relieved that Lady Edith Crawley, played by Laura Carmichael, is finally finding happiness on Downton Abbey? Having binged on all of the episodes of the sixth and final season as I was flying to and from Paris last month, I was thrilled to see that Julian Fellowes showed her some good […]
Threads With a Soul
A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people —Mahatma Gandhi Soul is one of those words with as many connotations as there are people to consider it. Like truth and beauty, the concept of soul has been interpreted by many of history’s greatest writers and thinkers. Aristotle […]
Rooms of Their Own
A private place in which to write… As someone whose life is spent working with words for at least a part of every day, I find myself obsessively scouring the biographies I read for mentions of the rooms in which lauded writers made their magic. Descriptions of them exist more often than visuals do so […]