Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
6 - The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
Summary
In England the atmosphere is naturally aqueous, and as if there weren't enough outside, we drench ourselves with tea and coffee at least four times a day. It's atmosphere that makes English literature unlike any other – clouds, sunsets, fogs, exhalations, miasmas … the element of water is supplied chiefly by the memoir writers. Look what great swollen books they are! … Dropiscal.
observes Ann, in ‘A Talk About Memoirs’ that Woolf wrote for the New Statesman in the spring of 1920 (Essays iii, 181). Weather, that topic so popular with the inhabitants of a damp northern island (or so it is said), leads directly into a wider aesthetic question: to what extent does climate determine art? More than thirty years later, the critic and art historian Nikolaus Pevsner would address that question in the course of considering The Englishness of English Art (1956). His book was partly a belated response to Roger Fry's dismissive Reflections on English Painting, published in 1934 (the year of his death). Pevsner was a European who had chosen to be English. Fry was an Englishman who had chosen to be European, and in chapter seven of her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf recalled his impatience with the inhabitants of ‘Birds Custard Island’, with their narrow views and misplaced enthusiasm for their weather:
How much they missed … how little they allowed themselves to enjoy life. It was the English passion for morality, he supposed, and also the English climate. The light, he pointed out, was full of vapour. Nothing was clear. There was no structure in the hills, no meaning in the lines of the landscape; all was smug, pretty and small. Of course the English were incurably literary. They liked the association of things, not things in themselves.
(RF, 131)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Virginia Woolf , pp. 96 - 112Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006