Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence…
Read MoreScholars exploring ideas of literary empathy are particularly interested in Lee’s work…
Read MoreThe biggest delight of my Conan Doyle sleuthing may well be a false clue, even if the facts are not in doubt…
Read MoreWho knew that William Bankes was an amateur of Thomas Love Peacock! Perhaps I should have…
Read MoreImportant as the soup is in To the Lighthouse it is never identified, never seen as “beautiful red soup” or “eternal” tomato soup…
Read MoreWhether or not The Trespasser helped Woolf shape Night and Day, there may be glints of Lawrence’s novel in To the Lighthouse…
Read MoreGeorge Meredith as caricatured by Max Beerbohm in Vanity Fair, September 1896 by Andre Gerard I hope that, like me, you enjoy reading other people’s letters, as this essay depends heavily on personal correspondence. By means of letters I want to make a case that the conception of Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse owes…
Read MoreIt is a truth too often accepted, that a modernist writer with Virginia Woolf’s feminist and elitist tendencies, had no use for Victorians in general and for Charles Dickens in particular.
Read MoreIn To the Lighthouse Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the stillborn marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily.
Read MoreThe Turn of the Screw fevered my imagination.
Wrenched from sleep by the rattle of
A dumpster diver’s overloaded cart
Congratulations to Andre Gerard of Vancouver, British Columbia, the winner of the inaugural Berfrois Poetry Prize!
Read MoreThe deeper one looks in To the Lighthouse the more one sees. The more one listens the more one hears. Homer, Shakespeare, Conrad and Forster are just some of the ancestral voices commenting on war.
Read MoreThe light’s gone out in Larkin.
With all his broody carkin,
He’s nothing but a farkin
After Macbeth, Heart of Darkness. After Heart of Darkness, Howards End. Only connect. Just as the Marlow name provides a connection to Heart of Darkness, the Bast name links To the Lighthouse with Howards End. Old Mrs. Bast’s name builds a powerful bridge by way of poor Leonard Bast.
Read More“The Horror! The Horror!” By gentle degrees, by looking at names and intertextual references to Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Howards End and The Odyssey, I want to make To the Lighthouse new again.
Read MoreOn May 31, two weeks after his death, and the day before Orlando was sent to the printer, Woolf noted his death as follows: “Gosse is dead, & I am half reconciled to him by their saying in the papers that he chose to risk a dangerous operation rather than be an invalid for life. This kind of vitality always gets me”.
Read MorePortrait of a Father and his Son, Gabriel Decker, 1850 by Andre Gerard Ever since Edmund Gosse published Father and Son in 1907, father memoirs have caused a kind of Linnean unease. Talking about Gosse’s book in The Development of English Biography (1927), Harold Nicholson said it is not “a conventional biography; still less is…
Read MoreTo write or speak on behalf of Ajens’ recent book, Cúmulo Lúcumo (Das Kapital, 2017), is already to allude to its secret vortex. Cúmulo is a book that we welcome and celebrate yet another feat of language that dwells in a threshold.
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