Virginia Woolf Flashcards
Hermione Lee
Like Mr R, Leslie Stephen demanded his wife’s attention
Mr and Mrs Ramsay
Mrs Ramsay senses that he needs sympathy and pours ‘a rain of energy’ into the air
‘into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy.’
‘the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.’
‘for though she had not said word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him’
A Room of One’s Own
‘Jane Austen looked at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely proper for her own use’
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
‘The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it except through eclecticism’
the ocean
‘the winds and waves disported themselves […] until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself’
‘the sea tosses itself and breaks itself […] bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul’
fragmentation
‘it seems impossible […] that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth’
death in To The Lighthouse
‘[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]’
‘[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them, Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]’
Professions for Women
‘she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others’
Overview
‘The Window’ - interactions between the Ramsays and their guests
Charles Tansley, Lily Briscoe, William Bankes, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle
‘Time Passes’ - war breaks out, Mrs McNab and Lily Briscoe return to the house
‘To The Lighthouse’ - the Ramsays finally reach the lighthouse and Lily finishes her painting
one very short chapter between tow much longer ones
Lily
‘She could not show him what she wished to make of it’
not sure how to paint Mrs R and James
‘There it was - her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempts at something’
‘Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision’
The Dinner Party
‘at the moment, her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water’
‘it had become, she knew, giving it one last look over her shoulder, already the past’
Time Passes
‘Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference’
‘there was plaster fallen in the hall, the rain-pipe had blocked over the study window and let the water in’
Susan Sellers
‘Conceived as a partial memorial to her dead parents, and addressing the social and political chasms opened up by the Great War and its dead, To the Lighthouse may be understood broadly as elegiac in mood’
Modern Fiction
‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss’
