Mrs Dalloway turns 100 — here's why Virginia Woolf's novel is a masterpiece
I first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a teenager and remember a feeling of being borne along by a stream of shimmering beauty, although my understanding was limited. I have returned to the novel many times since and its emotional resonance has changed with each reading.
The novel — published in May 1925 by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, and celebrating its centenary this year — opens with the line 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself' and gives us Clarissa, walking in London on a morning in June and planning her party. What began as a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (in which Clarissa buys gloves, not flowers), became Woolf's modernist masterpiece and a radical reinvention of the writing of
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BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
National Library of Wales is missing 2,200 items
About 2,200 items are missing at the National Library of Wales - an increase of 84% in two the archives and manuscripts missing are deeds of 13th Century Powis Castle, and "rolls" and "pedigree" documents from Gwrych Castle in Abergele, Conwy county, which twice hosted ITV's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!Among missing books are the history of the national library building itself in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, by Daniel Huws, and books by George Bernard Shaw and Virginia library is creating a new "collection care" department and is currently recruiting a head of the department, as well as a head of unique collections. The number unaccounted for is significantly higher than the 1,200 items that were missing when BBC Wales gained figures through a Freedom of Information request in September 2023. A spokesperson said the increase is due to "new stock checking processes".The library is a legal deposit library, which means it is entitled to a copy of every print publication in Britain and Ireland, and no items are allowed to be taken from the the 2,206 missing items, the request under the latest Freedom of Information Act by BBC Wales showed that:1,708 books and magazines are missing, some since 1999 393 maps, some since 193982 in the "archives and manuscripts" category, some since 1978 21 "screen and sound" items, some since 2019two items in the "pictures and photographs" category, one since 2009 and the other since 2023Missing archives include papers of J Glyn Davies whose songs for children include Cerddi Huw Puw (1923), which are based on sailors' songs he had heard during his have been described as bearing "the marks of a genius".Also missing are papers relating to Chirk Castle near Wrexham, the construction of which began around 1295 during the reign of Edward sound recordings include the satirical song "Carlo" by Dafydd Iwan which was written for the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969, and a recording by Treorchy Male journals include issues of the library's own journal, Welsh History Review, Flintshire Historical Society, Gwent Local History and The Carmarthen books cover topics from Owain Glyndŵr, the last native-born Welshman to claim the title Prince of Wales, to a biography of Keir Hardie, the first parliamentary leader of the Labour 1818 edition of 'The Pleasures of Imagination' by Mark Akenside is missing, as is Lady Charlotte Schreiber's journals (1911), the "confidences" of a collector of ceramics and antiques.A book by Phil Thompson and Tommy Smith called "Do That Again Son, and I'll Break Your Legs: Football's Hardmen" is also not accounted maps include a malt whisky map of Scotland, and several maps relating to Gogerddan, the principal estate of the old county of Cardiganshire in the 17th century. The library's head of communications, Rhodri ap Dyfrig, said that staff had "introduced new stock checking processes for published collections and therefore we fully expected that there would be an increase in the items recorded as not being in their correct location".He added: "The thorough process of monitoring of misplaced items takes place continuously and these checks are a normal and integral part of maintaining standards and good practice in the library sector."Due to this constant monitoring and work, the data we provide is a snapshot of a specific period in time, and this figure fluctuates regularly as items are found and relocated."The library carries out an annual audit of items worth more than £10,000 and no missing items that cross that threshold were found over the last library's collections include seven million books and newspapers, 1.5 million maps and 950,000 photographs located across 160 miles of Welsh government said: "The care and management of its collections is a matter for the National Library. "In doing so, it meets the Archive Service Accreditation – the UK-wide standard for archive services."
Scotsman
21-05-2025
- Scotsman
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss review: 'feels somehow fabricated'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This is a terribly accomplished novel, and I am unsure if that is a compliment or a criticism. It has an affecting core scenario, some extremely engaging writing, some very interesting observations; and yet I found it, at some gut level, manufactured, or as if it had palpable designs on eliciting a particular response. Moss has written eight other novels, and is much admired by novelists whose opinion I respect, and yet this felt somehow fabricated. It has the kind of realism that makes you mistake a Blaschka glass flower for the real thing. Ripeness has one central character but two distinct modes. In the present day and the third person, Edith is living in rural Ireland, divorced but in a happy and uncomplicated relationship with a German Marxist potter. A friend of Edith's is contacted by a possible step-sibling, and this triggers first-person recollections of her unusual gap year in the 1960s, away from her father's Derbyshire farm, when before going to Oxford she was in Italy, attending the final weeks of her glamorous, ballet dancer sister Lydia's unwanted pregnancy. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sarah Moss The reader is, of course, supposed to see the visible seams stitching the stories together. There is an element of intrigue in that the first person reminiscence is addressed to an initially nebulous 'you': 'I should be clear that I'm not the one you want either. You shouldn't get your hopes up. We'll come to that'. The reader is, in effect, reading a private correspondence (and the identity of the addressee is not exactly difficult to discern). The rise of personal computers even means that the 'letter' is not at the credulity-stretching length of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Likewise, the third person sections slip effortlessly into close focus, internal monologue; as if the whole novel is an intrusion of sorts. Moss's previous works have a feature (not quite a formula) of setting political events against the personal. The Fell had the lockdown, Summerwater had Brexit amongst other apocalypses, Ghost Wall had Iron Age re-enactment alongside un-pretend toxic masculinity and The Tidal Zone featured an NHS in crisis paralleled to the post-war rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. This time, the ideas of home, belonging and inheritance are sufficiently baggy to have debates about 'good' (Ukrainian, white) refugees versus African ones alongside the intimate details of adoption, empty nests and disconnection. I am always uncertain if such neat matrices of meaning arise naturally from a narrative, or are trimmed and stapled to fit. Indeed, I am increasingly sceptical about the 'aboutness' of novels. The ballet, and to a lesser extent the pottery, offer a lexicon of terms and a stock of images that can be co-opted for symbolism. The idea, for example, of the 'kinesphere' – 'the space claimed by bodily movement' – is a readymade image to be translated onto various poses, postures, intimacies, indignities and distances. The title is again semantically fully loaded. It is literal in the figs, 'which I only knew dried and chopped in suet puddings' (a choice little piece of characterisation), to the metaphor for pregnancy as well as the cusp-y nature of the younger self, through to a sense of late life fulfilment. It appears within the text in a strange (and extremely clever) aside. Moss/Edith has noted the curious parallel of Hamlet's 'the readiness is all' and Edgar in King Lear's 'Ripeness is all' – prefaced by 'men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither', appropriately enough. Much could be said about this, but isn't. Edith says she 'managed to get into my Oxford entrance exam, my idea that Lear is a darker play than Hamlet'. Ye-e-e-e-es: but it's hardly an original idea that Lear is darker than Hamlet. Samuels Johnson and Taylor Coleridge would agree. Are we supposed to read this ironically, as evidence of Edith's naivety and unearned superiority? But it is, with the limits of the novel, written by the elderly Edith: is she concurring? Unaware? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There are many memorable, shrewd notes: a marble bathroom is 'a room carved out of Stilton cheese', Edith chafes at A-level Italian including terms for 'nuclear deterrent' but not nappy, a child's 'sea-anemone mouth'. Young Edith brims with Eliot, Brontë, Milton and Hopkins in a convincing way, although the Older Edith talking about her friends 'Dearbhla from the Samaritans, and… Clare from a short-lived Dante reading group, Clare who was from the North via Modern Language at Cambridge' seems almost parodic. More seriously, there is a backstory about Edith's errant mother, who avoided the Holocaust and ends up on a kibbutz, which may have broad links to bohemianism, identity, duty versus free-spiritedness, but smacks of being the kind of thing that tends to occur in novels. Towards the end, Edith muses that 'Wouldn't it have saved the Third Reich some work, to be able to pull us all from a spreadsheet?' It's a throwaway line except IBM/Dehomag did precisely that. The patina of ballet references have a similar feel, and many of the ways in which they are deployed – weightlessness, elegance, pain – are handled more full-heartedly in a novel like Amélie Nothomb's The Book of Proper Names. Although there is much to appreciate here, it would be remiss not to warn the reader that it ends rather bathetically.
North Wales Chronicle
15-05-2025
- North Wales Chronicle
Garden design exhibition at V&A Dundee aims to inspire ‘joyful future'
Garden Futures: Designing With Nature will be on show at the design museum from Saturday until January 25. The exhibition explores the impact of garden design, including kitchen gardens and the popularity of allotments, as well as looking at artists such as William Morris. It includes a scent trail which features the fragrances of rose, jasmine and narcissus. More than 400 objects are on display in the exhibition, which 'digs up surprising stories of gardens through time, including creating sanctuaries and empowering communities and individuals to find peace and hope in times of adversity', according to curators. It explores international themes, including Persian garden paradises to the sustainable Oban Seaweed Gardens in Argyll and Bute, huge vertical gardens in Milan flourishing in giant concrete apartment blocks, and a garden in China inspired by video games. The exhibition also includes Dior menswear inspired by the garden at Charleston in Sussex which was a retreat in the early 20th century for the writers and creatives known as the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, and was the home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Work by garden designer Piet Oudolf and Arabella Lennox-Boyd, who designed the landscape at Maggie's cancer centre in Dundee, is also on display. Leonie Bell, director of V&A Dundee, said: 'We are delighted to be opening Garden Futures: Designing With Nature as gardens and gardeners across Scotland are hitting their seasonal stride. 'Gardens are both everyday and extraordinary – they mean something different to everyone. These designed spaces reflect the times we live in and express our relationship with nature. Some are productive spaces for work, rest and play, while others represent profound spiritual, cultural and political ideas. 'This vibrant exhibition blooms with design stories of gardens from Scotland and around the world, unearthing different approaches to creating the 'perfect' garden. 'Garden Futures looks back to early earthly ideas of paradise and considers how gardening can cultivate a greener, fairer and more joyful future for humans and nature alike. 'Whether you're a seasoned gardener or you've never grown anything in your life, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking experience, providing moments of sanctuary and creative inspiration within its stunning design. 'We look forward to welcoming visitors who we hope will come away with a renewed sense of what a garden can mean, or a new-found curiosity about gardening and growing.'
