* This moment of June * #VirginiaWoolf’s #MrsDalloway will be - TopicsExpress



          

* This moment of June * #VirginiaWoolf’s #MrsDalloway will be the subject of BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time on Thursday 3 July, 9am and repeated 9.30pm BST (bbc.in/1nGHpmE). For those unfamiliar with the programme, Wikipedia describes it as: ‘a live BBC radio discussion series exploring the history of ideas, presented by Melvyn Bragg since 15 October 1998. It is one of BBC Radio 4’s most successful discussion programmes, acknowledged to have “transformed the landscape for serious ideas at peak listening time”. As of 5 June 2014, 644 episodes have been aired and the series attracts a weekly audience above two million’ (bit.ly/TzKhZt). There’s no information about the guests who will be discussing the novel, but the BBC website says: ‘Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. First published in 1925, it charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prosperous member of London society, as she prepares to throw a party. Celebrated for its innovative narrative technique and distillation of many of the preoccupations of 1920s Britain, the novel is often seen as a landmark of twentieth-century fiction.’ If you miss the morning or evening episodes, you will be able to download the episode afterwards (bbc.in/1ixNLaC). This is a good excuse (if any were needed) to air a bit of Mrs Dalloway itself. Enjoy! ***************************** Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’ – was that it? – ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’ – was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished--how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages. She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 09:57:04 +0000

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