Letters of Virginia Woolf
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1888 – 1912 (Virginia Stephen)
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
Originally published in England as The Flight of Mind
The reason I read this book is quite simple: I love Virginia Woolf. I’m slowly making my way through everything she wrote, and I hadn’t read any of her personal writing before this book. I was originally going to start with her diaries, but the letters begin when she was younger so they seemed like a more logical place to start. Besides, I’ve been having difficulty finding copies of them, so I wanted to read at least the first volume while I had access to my university library.
There are 638 letters included in this volume. The first was written to her godfather when she was only six years old, and the last when she was thirty on the day before her wedding to Leonard Woolf. I would guess that the majority of letters in this collection were written to her older, close friend Violet Dickinson. Indeed, Virginia wrote to Violet so frequently for much of this period of her life, that it is possible to get a good sense of her day-to-day life from these letters.
What struck me the most from reading these letters was how Virginia’s voice spoke to me so clearly across the years. Even though these letters are old, and Virginia Woolf has since passed on, and the letters were not written for me in the first place, I feel as though I have become her correspondent in a very one-sided exchange. Reading her letters makes years separating the moment when she laid her words on paper with pen and ink, and the the day when I picked up a copy of this book, typeset and bound, collapse and fold up like a telescope. She can travel time to speak to me as though we were only separated by distance.
A true letter, so my theory runs, should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions. Let me explain that I began some minutes since to review a novel and made its faults, by a process common among minds of a certain order or disorder, the text for a soliloquy upon many matters of importance; the sky and the breeze were part of my theme. A telegram however, with its necessary knock and its flagrant yellow, and its curt phrase of vicious English — I know not which sense was most offended — hit me in the wing and I fell a heaped corpse on the earth. The sense, if that can be said to have sense which has so little sound, was to discredit the respectability of a house in Fitzroy Square. And there you see me in the mud.
- to Clive Bell, February 1907
The Rebel Angels
The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies
Book One in the Cornish Trilogy
I read this on the recommendation of a friend, who mentioned that the book is set at a Toronto university. This was one of the main draws for me, because I’m almost always interested in reading about scholarship, and academic intrigue. I’d enjoyed Fifth Business when I read it a few years ago, so I was familiar with Davies and already knew I liked his style. Besides, I always feel vaguely guilty for not reading more written by Canadian authors, and am trying to read more.
Until I was about two thirds of the way through the book, I probably couldn’t have told you what I thought the plot was, and once I did get to that point, the story took veered off in a completely unexpected direction. Basically though, the book deals with the interactions between several professors at this unnamed Toronto university, an old acquaintance many of them went to school with, and a graduate student they all teach.
One of my favourite things about this novel was the way Davies told the story alternating from the perspectives of the grad student Maria Magdelena Theotoky, and one of her teachers, professor and priest Simon Darcourt. I often rather dislike this, but I felt that in this case it was both well done, and that it added to the overall mood of the book. I liked that their narratives overlapped enough to demonstrate their different interpretations of the same events, and diverged enough to move the story along and keep things interesting. I also really enjoyed reading about the academic pursuits of all the various characters, and about the passion and mystery that came about as a result of their rather intense academic devotion.
Autumn, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives. In all my years as a student and later as a university teacher I have observed that university terms tend to begin on a fine day. As I walked down the avenue of maples that leads toward the University Bookstore I was as happy as I suppose it is in my nature to be; my nature tends toward happiness, or toward enthusiastic industry, which for me is the same thing.
Twilight
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
I’d been meaning to read this one for some time now, since I was feeling out of the YA loop. Then, one of my friends started raving about it, and there was finally a copy available at the library, and that was that.
I was immediately and thoroughly drawn into the book. I was completely absorbed by it, and couldn’t seem to read it quickly enough. In fact, I’m sure that I only skimmed some bits of it in an effort to find out what would happen all the faster.
I finished it quite some time ago and returned it to the library as there were holds on it, so I don’t have too much to say about it (which is really why I should write entries for books immediately upon finishing them) but I’m definitely interested to read the rest of the series. Reading this book recalled memories of reading when I was much younger.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“How long have you been seventeen?”
