This essay exploring the literary world of Ottoline Morrell is included in my most recent book The Modern Salonnière. The 34 other essays in the book…
View More Ottoline Morrell Gets LitTag: 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…
View More The Sensuous Delight of PlaceI 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…
View More I Met Virginia Woolf in This RoomThreads 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…
View More Threads With a SoulRooms 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…
View More Rooms of Their Own