flâneur

the puddle and the tree – we have scarcely broken into our hoard

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In January 1906 Virginia Woolf went to a dance and sat in a dim corner reading Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. As the gay dancers turned and floated about her she had her nose in a book, gripped by one of the greatest of all Victorian poems about death and monumental grief. Death is a cataclysm that can prove resistant to language. This is the case in life. It is also the case (to a lesser extent) in The Waves. Rhoda, Susan, Jinny, Louis, Bernard and Neville are largely dumbfounded when the news about Percival arrives. Death evokes an enormous silence, as if a stone has dropped out of the sky. What is there to say? Nothing. Woolf encountered death very early in her life. Her mother Julia Stephen died of rheumatic fever in 1895 when she was in her 40s and Virginia was only 13. Two years later her half-sister Stella succumbed to an illness contracted on her honeymoon. But the death that really haunts the writing of The Waves is that of her beloved older brother Thoby who died of typhoid

In January 1906 Virginia Woolf went to a dance and sat in a dim corner reading Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. As the gay dancers turned and floated about her she had her nose in a book, gripped by one of the greatest of all Victorian poems about death and monumental grief. Death is a cataclysm that can prove resistant to language. This is the case in life. It is also the case (to a lesser extent) in The Waves . Rhoda, Susan, Jinny, Louis, Bernard and Neville are largely dumbfounded when the news about Percival arrives. Death evokes an enormous silence, as if a stone has dropped out of the sky. What

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