Those Darn Comps Love ’em or loath ’em, but some of us just can’t stop ourselves entering. “Is there a competition season?” someone once asked me and I feel as if there is, and it’s now – not sure why except that the National always closes on October 31st, this year a particularly loaded date,Read more ⟶
Tag: virginia woolf
A few thoughts from Virginia Woolf on praise and fame
Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary is proving a rich source of inspiration. On the subject of a writer’s insecurity, it’s refreshing to find the same things bothered her that do us all – is my writing any good, what will people make of it, how come so-and-so got more coverage/attention than me, and so on.Read more ⟶
Summer reading, thinking & waiting
After a couple of weeks of what’s felt like full-on socialising in our sunny garden, I’m enjoying a quiet day alone catching up, which means giving my blogs a little TLC. On the subject of which, I was delighted to come across this observation in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, in the entry for JanuaryRead more ⟶
Look what I found! Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Writer’s Diary’
… Fourth Impression (1965) with a foreword by Leonard Woolf. Hogarth Press! Original dust jacket bearing Vanessa Bell’s design! I found it at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area. It’s housed in a range of quirky buildings set back off the road in its own frontRead more ⟶
Charleston Festival
It’s an annual ritual shared with an old schoolfriend. Charleston (Literary) Festival, at the end of May, takes place in the farmhouse once lived in by the ‘Bloomsberries’ – Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes et al. Several hundred people are accommodated in a marquee in the garden, with between-sessions visits toRead more ⟶
River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941
The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed: reluctance adds to its appeal. And there: not so large as to burst pockets, several flints conspire their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better to slip in without fuss. From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down walked each day, as worn as the worstedRead more ⟶