Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired 'A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery

by Virginia Woolf

John Halifax,

You derive from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of the countryside.

Marryat,

Ballantyne,

Mayne...

William Allingham’s

George Eliot

docs

does

The Revolution, of course, is the most powerful instrument for dramatising human life that has ever existed; but Miss Johnston has trusted too implicitly to the services which such external violence can render an artist who is, as it seems, in need of ideas.

‘Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe. Et tout renaît.’

hut

but

The House of Shadows,

Madame Récamier,

bounds

hounds (?)

people.!

people. I

Indeed, the suspicion will suggest itself that a great number of these stories were meant to be read swiftly in a train, and to preserve them in a book is to imprison them unkindly.

‘qu’aucun fantôme n’erre ici la nuit, traînant ses chaînes et murmurant ses plaintes?’

That no ghost wanders here at night, dragging his chains and murmuring his complaints?'

‘In keinem Lande verändern sich die Zustände so wenig wie in England,’

In no country do conditions change as little as in England

‘une veille lady, sèche, propre, anguleuse, qui ferme les yeux dès qu’elle ouvre la bouche et la bouche dès qu’elle ouvre les yeux’,’

A waking lady, dry, clean, angular, who closes her eyes as soon as she opens her mouth and her mouth as soon as she opens her eyes'

‘J’en doute, car malins et moqueurs, nous avons à l’excès le sentiment du ridicule, et nous hésitons toujours à publier une conviction forte.’

I doubt it, because smart and mocking, we have an excessive feeling of ridicule, and we always hesitate to publish a strong conviction

‘discrets petits squares silencieux … qui ont gardé ce je ne sais quoi d’intime, d’humain, de personnel, qui fait le charme des habitations anglaises’;

‘Ist doch London der Inbegriff aller Widersprüche’;

‘frischen lebhaften Streit der Geister’

[Louise de La Vallière et la jeunesse de Louis XIV. D’Après des Documents Inédits

‘se reposant des grands travaux de Chambord ou de Blois’

‘un charmant pavillon’,

‘Ad Principem ut ad Ignem Amor indissolutus.’

‘Au Prince, comme au feu de l’autel, amour indissoluble.’

‘Tenez vous droites, levez la tête’

‘les os du cimetière des Innocents’;

‘esprit vif, délicat, enjoué’.

‘cet agrément qui précède d’ordinaire les grandes passions’,

‘peu d’esprit’.

‘J’ai perdu presque tout ce qui peut plaire,’

‘Cependant, ne vous trompez pas, vous ne trouverez jamais ailleurs ce que vous trouvez en moi.’

saitsfy

satisfy

‘comme une damnée’.

But surely it is time that someone should sing the praises of express trains. Their comfort, to begin with, sets the mind free, and their speed is the speed of lyric poetry, inarticulate as yet, sweeping rhythm through the brain, regularly, like the wash of great waves. Little fragments of print, picked up by an effort from the book you read, become gigantic, enfolding the earth and disclosing the truth of the scene. The towns you see then are tragic, like the faces of people turned towards you in deep emotion, and the fields with their cottages have profound significance; you imagine the rooms astir and hear the cinders falling on the hearth and the little animals rustling and pausing in the woods.

Villers Cotterets.

‘Ils ne sont pas de notre monde’

“Cela mange comme quatre, et cela n’est plus bon à rien”.’

Yet there is reason to be grateful when any one will write very simply, both for the sake of the things that are said, and because the writer reveals so much of her own character in her words.

Little family jokes are used frequently, and go to support the half-ludicrous images of themselves which children start in the nursery and continue in private when they are grown up. ‘Yesterday I made a dirt pudding in the garden, wherein to plant some slips of currant. The unbusinesslike manner in which the process was gone through affords every prospect of complete failure. We have visited the Z. Gardens. Lizards are in strong force, tortoises active, alligators looking up. The weasel-headed armadillo, as usual, evaded us.’ There is nothing profound in it, but it was the same mind that conceived the fantasies of Goblin Market.

The time had come, it is plain, which must come to all people who are too scrupulous to burn their letters, when it was necessary to decide what should be done with them. Were they to be tied up and put away, or burnt, or printed? Different reasons must determine; but we cannot pretend that Mrs Blake’s solution—of publication—seems to us in this case entirely the right one.

the more we see the less we can label, and both praise and blame become strangely irrelevant.

Self is a foundation of sand

The object of Mrs Cust has been to select four narratives from the old German chronicles, relating the adventures of German noblemen, little known to fame, and by ‘suppressing or compressing their more “prolixious and Teutonic” divagations to render them agreeable reading’.

Queen Elizabeth Woodville

Artnide

Ariadne (?)

She establishes the connection by conceiving that there is a power outside ourselves, which is, as Plato has it in the Symposium, ‘the essence of beauty’.