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Comparative Critical Studies 3, 3, pp.

291323

BCLA 2006

Time Passes Virginia Woolfs Virgilian Passage to the Future Past Masterpieces: A la recherche du temps perdu and To the Lighthouse
margaret tudeau-clayton
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When we speak of literary liation [...] it is not so much the mere game of tracing inuences which is involved as the implied denition of the artists status1 see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come2

In How Should One Read a Book?, an essay that she drafted as she worked on To the Lighthouse in 19251926, Virginia Woolf recommends that readers juxtapose and compare texts from different historical moments, that, for instance, they read Shakespeares King Lear and Aeschyluss Agamemnon side by side.3 As writer as well as reader she had made this very comparison of King Lear and Agamemnon in another essay, entitled On Not Knowing Greek (1925), in which she also juxtaposes Sophocles, rst with Jane Austen, then with Marcel Proust.4 Jane Austen is in turn described, in yet another piece from this period, as a writer who would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust, had she lived longer.5 As in this instance, such comparative juxtapositions serve to bring out a common quality, as she puts it in How Should One Read, and so to afrm what she calls, in How It Strikes a Contemporary (1925), the continuity and calm that remain despite the storm the literary and cultural as well as socio-political turbulences that accompany the passage of time.6 Woolfs practice of such comparative reading was encouraged by daily habits of reading and writing. A work list in her journal entry for January 7, 1923, for instance, starts with the writing of Mrs Dalloway, a review article and the Greek chapter (for The Common Reader), 291

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then goes on to name the Greek authors that she plans to read for this chapter, which she juxtaposes with perhaps, another vol of Proust a juxtaposition which translates into the comparison of Sophocles and Proust in the chapter On Not Knowing Greek.7 In this essay I want to explore how what I call, following Richard Aldington, literary liations to the old and the new are juxtaposed in To the Lighthouse.8 Specically, the gure of the greatest modern novelist, as Woolf describes Marcel Proust in April 1927,9 the year of the publication of To the Lighthouse, is juxtaposed with a gure of ancient classical culture, though this is not a Greek author, as in the essays and journal entries cited above, but the Latin author Virgil. There are distinctive features to these liations that I will look at from within an overview of Woolfs relation to each gure, principally because of these features, but also because critical discussion of these relations is either non-existent (Virgil) or restricted in scope (Proust).10 The liations are, however, also connected, in particular through the gure of the contemplative poet and reader Augustus Carmichael who, at the opening of the second part of To the Lighthouse, Time Passes, is reading Virgil, while, in the third part, The Lighthouse, he is reading a French novel.11 Whether or not the novel is Prousts, readers are invited to recall the earlier evocation of the contemporary French masterpiece at the close of the rst part, The Window (discussed below). Virgil and Proust are, moreover, brought together at the conclusion of the novel by a trope of comparison that also includes To the Lighthouse itself. For Carmichaels French novel is here compared to a trident, a gure which alludes not only, self-consciously, to the tripartite form of Woolfs novel, as Randall Stevenson has suggested,12 but more generally to an aesthetic form or shape (to use Woolfs preferred word) which is shared by the new and the old. As we shall see, it is likely that Woolf knew of the original tripartite conception of Prousts novel, as of course she knew of the tripartite structure of James Joyces Ulysses (which she was reading as she started Proust in 1922). Her own tripartite structure is, at the same time, consciously aligned with old analogous tripartite generic sequences Shakespearean as well as Virgilian as I shall show. Generalised through the gure of the trident, tripartite shape then represents a common quality that survives the discontinuities of the passage of time, an instance of what remains through and beyond historical and cultural particularity. As these preliminary observations suggest, the liations to Proust

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and Virgil are connected, at a more general level, through their relation to the question of cultural survival. In the case of Proust this question might be formulated in terms of the culinary discourse through which, as I will consider in detail later, the novel rst signals its liation: what is the recipe for the modern masterpiece of ction that will at once take the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things the modern mind and bear the seeds of an enduring existence?13 It is a question posed by Woolf in a number of essays of this period, notably in the tellingly titled Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927) from which the quotation is taken. Recalling To the Lighthouse in details as well as more generally, this essay, like others of the period, participates in the novels future-oriented project the seemingly impossible, contradictory project of combining rupture with continuity, the historically particular with the permanent and universal in order to achieve what Woolf calls, in another essay of 1927, the authority of a masterpiece.14 In this discussion of the ction of E. M. Forster, she identies the key to this authority and so to enduring cultural existence as the power of combination the single vision in which oppositions are combined, here contradictory generic modes with their respective perspectives on reality: the lyrical mode with its aspiration to the symbolic and universal on the one hand, and the narrative mode with its commitment rather to particular local actuality on the other. According to Woolf, Forster has failed to achieve this combination where Proust has succeeded. It is of course precisely such a combination that she herself has just attempted in her own novel To the Lighthouse. As in the essay on Forster, Prousts writing is recurrently cited by Woolf as exemplary of the recipe or paradigm for the enduring modern masterpiece against which English contemporary writing, including her own, is measured. The recipe his masterpiece exemplies is, moreover, consistently represented, as here, in terms of a successful combination of heterogeneous, contradictory ingredients. This is what we nd, for instance, in a journal entry on the achievement of Proust, which is echoed in the description, in The Lighthouse, of the ideal model to which Lily Briscoe aspires for her painting. As I will explore later, the echo underscores the close parallel between Lilys painting and Woolfs own writing, and the implied aspiration of Woolfs novel to the status of a work not merely of ction, but of art. This is stressed in the closing performative I have had my vision (226), which refers at once to Woolfs novel and to Lilys painting. It is in its combination

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in a single vision, on the one hand, of heterogeneous generic modes and heterogeneous liations to the old and new and, on the other, of the personal and particular with the impersonal and general that To the Lighthouse aspires to the condition of art. It is then its character as art that justies what I take to be its implicit claim to a place alongside Prousts masterpiece as its English equivalent. According to Woolf, in a 1927 review of E. M. Forsters Aspects of the Novel, there has been no such equivalent to date precisely because in England, unlike France and Russia, a novel is not a work of art; hence [t]here are no English novels to stand beside War and Peace, the Brothers Karamazov and A la recherche du temps perdu.15 Aspiring to ll this vacancy, To the Lighthouse seeks more generally to contribute to the development of English ction as art. However, as Woolf indicates in her review of Forster, such an aspiration requires not only that writers modify their practice, but also that English critics and readers modify their cultural assumptions in order to generate an afrmative response to the titular question, Is Fiction an Art? It is, moreover, only in this collective production of ction as art that the seeds of a genuinely enduring existence lie. The character of the artistic masterpiece, cultural survival, and English and French cultural particularity are all evoked in the scenes at the climax of The Window in which the liation to Proust is rst signalled: the scene of the family dinner party and the scene of reading which follows. Here the question of survival, which is thematised throughout the novel in relation to painting as well as writing, acquires particular prominence through the gure of the anguished academic, Mr Ramsay. Prompted by a question raised during dinner in relation to the ction of Walter Scott how long do you think itll last? (116) which, in the self-obsessed manner of anguished academics, he applies to his own work, Ramsay takes up one of Scotts novels and reects on Scott and Balzac and, more generally, on the English novel and the French novel (131). Reading comparatively, as Woolf habitually does, and as she recommends in her essays that her readers should do, precisely in order to make the critical judgement implied in the question,16 the gure of Mr Ramsay embodies, even as it ironises, the concern with cultural status and survival that is expressed not only in Woolfs essays of the period, but also in her journal where it carries a more personal inection. It is a concern that, as we shall see, is tied up with the particular comparison that the scene of the family dinner party has just invited readers to draw between the contemporary counterparts to Balzac and Scott Proust and Woolf. For this scene evokes

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the opening scene of the second volume of Prousts novel, A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs (1919), which likewise centres on a family dinner party. This volume had been awarded the Prix Goncourt in December 1919, while the particular scene had been singled out for praise by Richard Aldington, who describes it as that amazing dinner with M. Norpois in the rst English critical essay on Proust, which appeared in The English Review of June 1920, where it was almost certainly read by Woolf.17 Loaded as the scene is with associations of achieved recognition, Woolfs choice of it to advertise her liation with Proust clearly signals her desire that To the Lighthouse receive the same recognition, all the more so given the focus of Aldingtons essay, which is precisely literary liation and, what is more, literary liation as a measure of artistic status (see my rst epigraph). Artistic status is, moreover, thematised in the two scenes themselves, as Woolf foregrounds. Most prominently, both scenes feature the presentation of a dish of Buf en Daube which is celebrated as a masterpiece, notably by a distinguished male guest (Mr Bankes/ M. Norpois) for whom, in each case, the meal has been especially prepared by the family cook (Mildred/Franoise). In both scenes, too, the culinary masterpiece is brought into a play of relations with other, traditionally higher, forms of visual and verbal art, including the narrative itself. Woolf underscores the liation through the gure of Mrs Ramsay who comments, in partial explanation of the culinary triumph, [i]t is a French recipe of my grandmothers (109). A narrative inconsistency since, as Hermione Lee points out, Mrs Ramsay has earlier been described as descended from an Italian house (13), this registers the pressure to advertise what is implicitly more important than narrative consistency, namely the liation with the writing of Marcel Proust. Through the trope of the French recipe Woolf acknowledges the exemplary status of his writing, as she does more explicitly in her essays, letters and journal entries of the period, even as she draws attention to its cultural specicity and the difference as well as likeness with her own novel which follows the same, or nearly the same, recipe. It is, however, a liation that, as we shall see, is accompanied by what I have called anxious desire a complex of contradictory feelings that characterises from the outset Woolfs relation to Proust, who was not only a contemporary and so a potential rival, but a contemporary who, by the time of his premature death in 1922, had achieved widespread recognition, in England as well as France, as Woolf had not (yet).

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No such anxious desire haunts the liation with the serene classic Virgil,18 the gure of the old who is named twice in the opening sections of the novels second part, Time Passes, in another scene of reading, which takes place on the evening of the same day as the scene of reading which closes The Window a local instance of Woolfs combination of (formal) rupture with (temporal and thematic) continuity. Indeed, Time Passes opens with an utterance from Mr Bankes, Well, we must wait for the future to show (137), which, unconnected to any prior utterance, foregrounds the future orientation of the concern with cultural survival which is common to both scenes of reading and their respective literary liations. Specically, the scene of reading which describes Augustus Carmichael as the one who stays awake (137), reading Virgil by candlelight past midnight (139), suggests a scene of vigil, a holding out against oblivion. Absent from the holograph draft, the scene furnishes a ground of cultural authority the name of Virgil for what was the most innovatory (ground-breaking) and intractable part of the novel for Woolf. At the same time it advertises continuity through and despite the discontinuities formal and literary as well as socio-political that Time Passes represents (in both senses). This effect of continuity is reinforced, if more discreetly, through the common qualities that are emphasized in the nal version between Time Passes and the relevant Virgilian poem, which is not the Eclogues as critics have usually assumed,19 but the Georgics, specically Georgics I. As we shall see, the Georgics were particularly appreciated by Woolf, who had already evoked them in Jacobs Room (1922). Like Virgils Georgics I, Time Passes presents a lyrical meditation on degeneration and renewal in human history and nature and a celebration of redemptive labour.20 Woolf is, however, ambivalent, as Virgil is not, about the agents of this redemptive labour, as, we might add, she is less expansively generous than Proust in the celebration of her artistcook. As Hermione Lee maintains, Woolfs ambivalence towards her working class gures needs to be understood in relation to her mixed feelings about the General Strike of May 1926, in the gloom of which, as she herself later commented, she wrote Time Passes.21 Following Lee I shall argue that the Virgilian vision of redemptive labour is shadowed by a vision of an emergent socio-cultural post world war (one) order which poses a threat to the continuity of a literary tradition as well as to an aesthetic ideal, which Virgil and his Georgics represent. The threat is, however, dispelled by a reassertion of the redemptive

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cultural work of art the production of continuity in time which is the meaning of tradition. The importance of liations with the literary tradition and their close association with artistic form are underscored, not insignicantly, in Woolfs Notes on D. H. Lawrence.22 Once again comparing the English writer with Proust, Woolf comments that Lawrence echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past, and this lack of tradition affects him immensely [...] one feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or for its effect on the architecture of the sentence.23 Filiations with the literary tradition and aesthetic form are here mutually implicated critical criteria that Lawrence fails to satisfy while Proust succeeds. Prousts writing is thus, Woolf implies, likely to endure as a future past masterpiece even as it performs a redemptive function for a collective (Western European) cultural memory or literary tradition. In To the Lighthouse, which aspires to the same cultural status, the past redeemed for the future is similarly not just personal and individual but also collective and general. Indeed, as her evocation of Virgils Georgics in Jacobs Room illustrates, personal memories are inextricably tied up for Woolf with the collective, since, as she puts it elsewhere, literature [...] reads us24 and we are, individually and collectively, what we read. Afrming this by weaving literary liations to the old and new into an autobiographical narrative, the novel carries the collective memory of an ideal of aesthetic form as well as of particular literary monuments, together with personal memories, through the discontinuities and threat of oblivion of the passage of time.

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This is the song I Virgil made, while Caesar was conquering and making laws. Lovely!25

Virginia Woolfs quarrel was not, as she writes in Modern Fiction (1925), with the classics, neither the classics of the English tradition Jane Austen and Henry Fielding still less the classics of ancient, pagan Greek and Latin cultures.26 Though Greek was the source of most pleasure,27 she also enjoyed Latin which, if without the vitality of my dear old Greeks, has a charm [...] which haunts one.28 It is the reading of Virgil, in particular his stately and melodious Georgics, that draws this comment in a journal entry of February 16, 1905, which goes on to recall a prior scene of reading: that little bit of Virgil with

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T[hoby] (her brother) that she had read the previous summer and that had brought a sense of harmony into her disturbed mind (following a severe bout of mental illness and a suicide attempt). Virgil and his Georgics are thus associated from an early date at once with the relation to her brother and with the haunting and healing power the charm of the art of poetry. These associations return in Jacobs Room (1922), the novel that she wrote in memory of her brother (who died in 1906), where she poignantly evokes the gure of Virgil and his Georgics to mediate an imagined shared consciousness of sister (authorial narrator) and brother (protagonist) a healing (re)union of minds.29 If associated in particular with her brother, the reading of Virgil was also associated with her father and his erce, formal (and in retrospect slightly comical) rigour: recalling in later years a scene of family reading, Woolf describes how he jumped at a false quantity when we read Virgil with him.30 But her reading of Virgil was also shared with women friends. In a letter of 1898 she invites Emma Vaughan to join her Virgil reading class, while in 1906 she writes to Violet Dickinson that she is reading a Greek play, and Virgil and Shakespeare.31 Here she is already cultivating the habit of reading authors alongside each other, anticipating the method of comparative criticism that she will recommend and practice in her essays and thematise in To the Lighthouse. The practice of comparison is indeed already a habit, as we can see from the most specic early reference to Virgil in one of her unpublished notebooks, dated July 28, 1908, where she records her reading of and response to the fourth book of Virgils Georgics. For she compares Virgils exquisite delicacy of description to Popes in The Rape of the Lock and likens the gure of Cyrene to Miltons gure of Sabrina in Comus. Though not frequently named, Virgil remains important for Woolf. This much is indicated in a journal entry of March 21, 1940, where she plans several articles (none apparently written), including one on the Latin poet. In an essay of the same year (rst given as a paper in May), Virgil is, moreover, named as one of a pantheon of immortals alongside Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Dante in a closing exhortation to common readers that they read both old and new in order at once to preserve and to create, and so to bring about the new, more egalitarian post (second world) war order, which will no longer be dominated by a male elite.32 Recommending as she does elsewhere that readers compare old and new in order to make a critical judgement, Woolf is here optimistic about the capacity of the literary monuments of Western European

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culture to survive a radical restructuring of the socio-political context of reception in England. This is in (perhaps deliberate) contrast to the vision in Time Passes of a new post (rst world) war order which poses a threat to their survival. Time Passes, that is, is without the condence exhibited by the essay in the inherent value of aesthetic form and its sufciency to guarantee cultural survival. If not necessarily sufcient, aesthetic form, or shape, is for Woolf a necessary condition if contemporary English ction is to survive its historical moment. In essays of the 1920s she repeatedly laments the deciencies of modern writing in this respect its lack of aesthetic shape and its consequent failure to meet the conditions of survival. Her quarrel was indeed not only with those moderns who turned out the conventional thirty-two chapters of bourgeois realism,33 but also with those who had made the break with bourgeois realism in order to record the changes [...] typical of the modern mind, but who, in the process, had lost qualities crucial to an enduring existence34: the poets capacity to transcend the particular and the personal, to generalise as the authors of past masterpieces had done,35 and to preserve their sense of aesthetic shape. Thus, to cite just one instance, [t]here is no shape to the apparitions in Miss Sterns A Deputy was King, which is concocted like [t]hree quarters of the novels today of experience without the shaping discipline of form.36 By contrast, all writers whose books survive have known how to master the fragmentary impressions of experience: they have mastered their perceptions, hardened them and changed them into the fabric of their art.37 Thus, though we want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, we further require that the modern writer shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms.38 The question of and quest for shape recur in To the Lighthouse, which thus thematises what is a general concern in the essays and a particular concern in the journal where Woolf records her struggles to impose shape, especially on the second part of the novel. In The Window Mr Ramsay, having read through a novel by Scott, could not remember the whole shape of the thing (130), which, for him, is crucial to critical judgement, as it is for Woolf, who recommends, in How Should One Read that readers suspend judgement until the book takes on a denite shape.39 In the novel it is with the two female artist gures Mrs Ramsay and Lily that the aspiration to shape is particularly associated. In The Window Mrs Ramsay conceives of her

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essential self as a wedge-shaped core of darkness (69), delights in a curved shape against a round shape in a dish of fruit (118), and, most memorably, nds the essence of life shaped in the classical form of the Shakespearean sonnet (132). For Lily, in The Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay achieved shape in the midst of chaos, making of the moment something permanent (176), as Lily tries to do in her painting. Mrs Ramsay also represents the shape of Lilys artistic aspiration in The Lighthouse (195) and in The Window, where Lily perceives her as an august shape; the shape of a dome (58, my emphasis) a shape which links her to the gure of Augustus Carmichael as Ill consider shortly a perception which is then translated into a triangular purple shape on her canvas. In its triadic character this shape anticipates the wedge shape Mrs Ramsay conceives as her essence, while both translate as geometric gures the triadic character of the novel in which they appear. More particularly, Lily thinks of her painting in terms of a relation between masses on the right and left with a problematic middle where she fears the unity of the whole might be broken (60, my emphasis), and which preoccupies her throughout The Window (92, 94, 101, 111) and The Lighthouse (161, 191), when she tackles the painting for a second time. For Woolf it is similarly the middle passage of To the Lighthouse that, as she notes in her journal, she sees as the problem in her tripartite conception: this impersonal thing [...] the passage of time, and the consequent break of unity in my design (July 20, 1925, my emphasis); I cannot make it out here is the most difcult abstract piece of writing I have to give an empty house, no peoples characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless, with nothing to cling to; well I rush at it and at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense? is it brilliance? (April 30, 1926). For Woolf it is at such moments of doubt that the modern writer needs to turn to past masterpieces; when vacillating from extreme to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic about contemporary writing it is time, she writes, to accept the advice of the critics by consulting the masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them, impelled [...] by some imperious need to anchor our instability upon their security.40 Vacillating and insecure as she tackles her own attempt at ground-breaking contemporary writing, Woolf reaches, whether literally or mentally, for the Latin poet she associates with a (paternal) formal discipline, and specically for the poem that she associates with the healing harmony of aesthetic form. Lovely is the closing comment in her notebook entry on Georgics IV,

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which follows her compressed rendering of the seven line epilogue with which Virgil summarises and frames the four books as a single poem: This is the song I Virgil made, while Caesar was conquering and making laws.41 Woolfs compressed version foregrounds the contrastive juxtaposition of the making of poetry and the making of war, a juxtaposition that she introduces into the nal version of Time Passes through the gure of Augustus Carmichael, who produces a volume of poetry during the war and who is associated with Virgil both by the act of reading and by his rst name, which evokes at once the classicist aesthetic and the gure of Virgils imperial patron. As Woolfs outline suggests, it is specically with Virgils Georgics I that Time Passes shares a crucial structuring opposition The gradual dissolution of everything [] contrasted with the permanence of [...] Sun, moon & stars, as she puts it here.42 Woolf and Virgil, that is, both set the permanence of natural elements and cycles against the tendency, in nature as in human history, to degeneration and destruction. Both, moreover, use the imagery of war to represent natures destructive tendency, a likeness that is underscored in the nal version of To the Lighthouse by Woolfs introduction, at the point where it is particularly striking (sections 67), of the gure of Augustus Carmichael and the poetry he produces during the war. Virgil and his carefully nished Georgics thus furnish a cultural landmark for Woolf as she works to give shape to writing in which, as she puts it in a letter of May 15, 1926, she feels all over the place.43 This function is indicated in the nal version by the naming of Virgil in two descriptions of the scene of reading at the close of each of the rst two sections. Marking the close of each section, the name of Virgil at the same time frames what comes between, which is a drastically curtailed version of the description of the descent into oblivion of the rst night with its interrogation How long would they endure? (138). At one level a response, the reiterated name of Virgil serves as a metonymy of cultural survival even as it marks the cutting out excision as well as frame which aesthetic shape requires.44 This cutting out is at once visually represented and complicated by the square brackets which are employed here, for the rst time, to enclose the second description of the scene of reading: [Here Mr Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was past midnight.] (139). Used here as they are throughout the nal version of Time Passes (they dont appear in the holograph MS) to bracket cut out singular events of linear history, the brackets signal the perilous dependence

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of Virgils cultural survival on particular readers and writers in time, that is, on the very singularity of linear history that is cut out by the imperatives of the lyrical mode to generality and aesthetic shape as well as by the afrmations of continuity with Virgils writing. Woolf thus combines without resolving the contradictory aspirations of her project. Cut out by square brackets, the singular events of linear history appear as punctual interruptions to the recurring natural cycles of night and day, and The Seasons (Woolfs outline). These cycles counterpoint not only the (bracketed) singular events, but also the linear sequence of the ten numbered sections which correspond to the passage of ten years only at this numerical level. Linear temporal structures and linear history are thus subordinated to recurrent natural cycles as they are in Georgics I, which is without singular event until the very close, when the death of Julius Caesar and the civil wars are invoked (Georgics I, lines 466497). These events have, moreover, been anticipated by earlier descriptions of the recurring natural phenomena of storms in terms of war (proelia; agmen [Georgics I, lines 318, 322]), and so take on general signicance as illustrations of the tendency in human society to degenerate into destruction, like and with nature. Human and natural violence war and storms are brought together by Woolf too, notably in her central section 7 when she describes the universe [] battling and the chaos and tumult of night (147); tumult (not in the MS) may be an echo of Virgil who uses tumultus (line 464) of the wars predicted by the signs of nature (line 439), or what Woolf (like Fairclough in his translation) calls tokens (145) in section 6, where she too describes natures signs of war. To foreground the likeness she inserts at the end of this section the event of the publication of a volume of poetry by Augustus Carmichael, which is a success because the war had [...] revived interest in poetry (146). Serving here to introduce the Virgilian juxtaposition of poetry and war, Augustus Carmichael is a more general gure in the nal version of Time Passes. Details of a personal history which feature in the MS have been again cut out, so that, like Lily, we know the outline not the detail (211), just as Woolfs novelist of the future will give the outline rather than the detail as poetry does.45 Though viewed like most of her characters from several different and contradictory perspectives, Augustus Carmichael is perceived by Mrs Ramsay as well as by Lily from this poetic perspective as a monumental and contemplative brooding gure (105), convinced of the ineffectiveness of action, the

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supremacy of thought (213). Like Virgil writing poetry while war is waged, he assumes at moments the appearance of a Virgilian vatic poet: chanting poetry in a long white robe (120) with religious seriousness at the close of the dinner scene in The Window, and spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind [...] surveying [...] their nal destiny at the close of The Lighthouse (225). Like the name of Virgil marking closure, he is associated with the incantation and the mystery that poetry represents, and exhibits the aloof perspective of the poetic mode46 [t]here was an aloofness about him (211). This perspective is what Woolfs novelist of the future will need to capture, just as Woolf herself seeks to do in To the Lighthouse, notably in this part in which, as she comments in her journal, the novels lyric portions are collected (September 5, 1926).47 Augustus Carmichael is not, however, the only gure associated with the perspective and aesthetic character of the poetic mode that Virgil and his Georgics represent. As I mentioned earlier, Mrs Ramsay in The Window wore to Lilys eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome (58, my emphasis). This explicit link to the gure of Augustus Carmichael is then underscored in the nal version by a description of them united in a shared appreciation of a dish of fruit (105106). They are linked too by the gure of the asphodel, the ower of pagan classical culture which is associated with immortality in the English literary tradition (Milton, Pope), and which is mentioned in connection with them both in the nal version (34, 225; only Mrs Ramsay in the MS). For Mr Bankes, who makes this connection in The Window, the immortal beauty of Mrs Ramsay is explicitly Greek (34), while for Lily in The Lighthouse one would be thinking of Greek temples when listening to her speak (212). The maternal gure thus acquires a more general signicance as a gure of the beauty of this world (42), the to kalon of ancient culture, the loss of which is imagined in Time Passes when of course the death of Mrs Ramsay is narrated.48 The imagined loss is, however, dispelled at the close of Time Passes by the return of the voice of the beauty of this world (154), an echo of the earlier description of Mrs Ramsay that invites readers to imagine with Augustus Carmichael, who also returns at this close that it looked [...] much as it used to look years ago (155), that it looked, in other words, as if the individual and collective traumas of the passage of time had not been or, we might say, as if they had been cut out. In Time Passes the threat of loss is represented by the gures of the energy of labour (139), which Virgil celebrates as the human

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force that conquers the degenerative tendency in nature: labor omnia vicit (Georgics I, line 145). The Virgilian opposition of human labour to natural degeneration is complicated, that is, by the alignment of the gures of human labour George Best and Mrs McNab with the tendency toward degeneration and destruction that they work against. The survival of Virgil and of the aesthetic ideal that the Georgics represent is thus, ironically, threatened by the gures of human labour that the poem idealises and celebrates. Whether or not she was conscious of the irony (as I suspect she was), Woolf assimilates the work of her labourers to the Virgilian ideal of redemptive labour by introducing into the nal version of Time Passes a biblical echo of Christs dying words, it was nished, to mark the end of the labour within and cutting and digging without (153). More particularly, the shape that George Best acquires in the nal version is suggestive of the Virgilian poem. Details have again been cut out to leave the sparsest of outlines to this gure that Woolf names George, having hesitated between Fred and George in the MS. It is a choice suggestive of the title of Virgils poem, which, like the name, is derived from the Greek for farmer, as Woolf surely knew. The son of Mrs McNabs fellow worker, Mrs Best, George caught the rats and cut the grass (152; only the latter in the MS), working to control the growth of unproductive vegetation and the invasion by rodent animals which Virgil species as instances of natures degenerative tendency requiring a farmers attention.49 To this is added the time-honoured instrument of agricultural labour, the scythe (Georgics I, line 348), with which George is twice observed by his mother, the verbal repetition suggesting the rhythm of his work: George scything the grass [...] her son scything (153). Marking time by this rhythmic repetition, George is shadowed by another scythe-wielding gure, Time itself: nothing gainst times scythe can make defence.50 This is reinforced in the nal version, where he is introduced earlier than in the MS, in a sentence immediately following a description of the pool of Time and the oblivion from which Mrs McNab and Mrs Best rescued various objects, including the Waverley novels around which the question of cultural survival had turned in The Window (152). As a double agent, associated at once with redemptive labour and with the oblivion of time against which such labour works, George Best functions, then, as an ambivalent gure who should be seen in relation to Woolfs mixed feelings about the working class at the time of the General Strike in May 1926.51 In this connection it is worth recalling

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that the sickle near relative of the scythe and likewise associated with time/death had recently acquired a historically specic signicance as the emblem of agricultural labour in the ensign of the Russian revolution. A fear of revolutionary erasure is indeed suggested in the sentence which follows the afrmation of the achievement of the work of redemptive labour: it was nished (153). Denying the status of nal word to this afrmation, the next sentence represents the radical erasure the oblivion of the pool of Time as an imagined condition, the as if of the negative underside of the forces of labour, which is itself erased by the return of that which they have threatened to erase: And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half heard melody, that intermittent music [...] the voice of the beauty of the world (154, my emphasis). This voice returns with Augustus Carmichael and Lily (not in the MS), who are agents of a different redemptive work, the redemptive cultural work of art. The threat represented by the gures of redemptive labour is signalled too in the nal version of the character of Mrs McNab. Again a more general gure (though more individualised than George Best), Mrs McNab is associated with the natural forces of degeneration and destruction that she works against: destructive (breaking the veil of silence [142]), invasive and ungainly (she broke in and lurched about [145]), she is repeatedly characterised through the privative sufx: witless, the voice of witlessness (142), aimlessly smiling (143). The last phrase is echoed two sections later in the description of the universe [...] battling [...] in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself (147). Later described as wantoning on (153), Mrs McNab is thus associated with the arbitrary, undirected and uncontrolled negative energy of the natural forces that her labour works to contain. Her labour is itself described as a negation, a force working [...] something not inspired to go about its work with dignied ritual and solemn chanting (151). This description recalls the solemn close of the dinner scene when Augustus Carmichael, holding his table napkin so that it looked like a long white robe, [...] stood chanting (120).52 With her own working class culture of popular theatre, the music hall, public houses and gossip (142143), Mrs McNab represents a threat of negation to the classical culture and aesthetic ideal that Virgil and his Georgics stand for and that are associated with Augustus Carmichael and Mrs Ramsay. This is underscored by a description of Mrs McNab akimbo in front of the looking glass (147), which follows

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a description, in terms of the traditional (Platonic) trope of the mirror, of a rupture of continuity in an idea of beauty brought about by the war: It was difcult [...] to continue, [...] to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within, [...] the mirror was broken (146). The threat, however, is, as I have remarked, cancelled, or cut out, by the return of the beauty of the world together with the gures of Augustus Carmichael and Lily Briscoe at the close of Time Passes. In The Lighthouse it is rather the redemptive work of art that is celebrated through the gure of Lily whose thoughts recall the threat of the forces of negation How aimless it was, how chaotic (160) especially in relation to her art, which is set against them: A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos (164). More precisely, Lily returns to the painting she had started before the passage of time and works out a nal shape for it even as she recovers the memory of Mrs Ramsay, who represents this shape: in the midst of chaos there was shape (176). This recovery in aesthetic shape at once of the maternal gure and of the beauty of the world suggests that the echo that we nd at the close of The Lighthouse of the biblical phrase used in Time Passes to mark the close of the work of redemptive labour carries not only a complementary but also a contrastive, even oppositional thrust. It was nished (226), the novels penultimate sentence, marks the completion of the work of art (painting/novel), which is singular and punctual, like the act of redemptive labour, but which opposes the threat of negation that the gures of labour carry. What is nished, specically, is at once the triangular [...] shape of Lilys painting and the tripartite structure of the novel. The continuity of these aesthetic forms with ancient pagan culture and its beauty is underscored by the nal description of Augustus Carmichael as a pagan god with a trident/novel in his hand (225). The trauma of the loss of this beauty the beauty of the world and of the maternal gure which embodies it is thus cut out cancelled/healed by the redemptive nature of Lilys/Woolfs work of art. Continuity is also asserted through the alignment of the tripartite structure of the novel with the tripartite structures of the Virgilian and Shakespearean generic sequences to which Woolfs sequence of parts corresponds53: The Window to pastoral and comedy (especially in the combination of marriage and feasting at its close); Time Passes to georgic and history; and The Lighthouse to epic and tragedy. This last correspondence is suggested not only through the epic motif of the symbolic journey and the gure of Mr Ramsay as a self-cast epic

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hero, but also through recurring echoes of the opening scene of King Lear. With his distraught, wild gaze and his imperious need (160), his sudden roars of ill-temper (167), Mr Ramsay looked like a king in exile who, slightly comic in his histrionic self-dramatisations, would have ung himself tragically back into the bitter waters of despair had his children said no and, for Lily, this was tragedy [] children coerced (162163). Recalling Cordelia, Lily could say nothing (166), as later his children would say nothing (178), in particular his daughter Cam, who said nothing (184, 185).54 Echoing Shakespearean tragedy here, as it echoes a Shakespearean sonnet in The Window and as it echoes Virgil in Time Passes, the novel once again combines personal and particular memories with the collective and general (and who has not glimpsed their father in King Lear?). It thus carries these classics along with the tripartite shape that they illustrate into the future, performing the redemptive work for particular texts as well as for an aesthetic shape that the close of the novel afrms. Moreover, the identication of the trident that Augustus Carmichael holds in his hand, not as a poem by Virgil, nor as a play or sonnet by Shakespeare, but as a French novel, invites comparison with the modern masterpiece that earlier textual echoes have already evoked and that does similar redemptive work: Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu. Indeed, as Delattre pointed out, Prousts novel was immediately assimilated into the heart of the English literary tradition by Scott Moncrieffs translation (which appeared from 1922), the title of which Remembrance of Things Past echoes a Shakespearean sonnet, just as Woolfs novel does, in the scene of reading which comes between the Proustian dinner scene in The Window and the scene of Augustus Carmichaels reading of Virgil in Time Passes.55

3
My great adventure is really Proust.

This brings us back to Marcel Proust, who is rst mentioned by Woolf in a journal entry for April 18, 1918, where she summarises a conversation with Roger Fry, an early enthusiast for Proust who later became as erce a critic.56 Occasionally, she writes, he read a quotation from a book by Proust; (whose name Ive forgotten). This book was of course the rst and at this point only volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, Du ct de chez Swann, which had been published by Bernard Grasset in 1913 with an advertisement for two further volumes.57 Whether

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from this or from the conversation with Fry, it is likely then that Woolf knew of the original tripartite conception of Prousts project.58 She does not, however, start reading it for herself, and when she writes to Fry in France, telling him about the recent publication of Night and Day in November 1919, she adds: Does Proust come out of it well? Ah, but then he writes French. Please bring him back for me to read.59 The second volume, A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs, had been out since June 1919; in December it would receive the Prix Goncourt, a formal public recognition of cultural status which Woolf perhaps anticipates here and which later haunts the advertised liation in To the Lighthouse. Whether or not Fry brought the second volume back from France as she asked him to, Woolf still does not begin to read Proust, although, as she records in her journal, she discusses him with Fry again in December 1921, explicitly in the context of future masterpieces: Roger always sees masterpieces ahead of him & I see great novels (December 18). She records too that she is reading Hardy (who will be paired with Proust as a great writer of masterpieces in an essay of 192660) and her expectation that [t]his at least is going to be rst rate. This is exactly the critical idiom of Mr Ramsay (130), who will embody and ironise Woolfs ongoing authorial anxiety about cultural status and survival, an anxiety with which the response to Proust is tied up. For if she talks about Proust, Woolf still does not read him. A letter to E. M. Forster in the following January (1922) underscores how anxious apprehension is stronger than desire.
Every one is reading Proust.61 I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but Im shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.62

The threat of taking on the widely acknowledged contemporary masterpiece is here represented as death by drowning, an overwhelming of the self in a denitive annihilation the psychic equivalent of the cultural erasure imagined in Time Passes, which is also gured as drowning, as we saw above. When she nally takes the plunge (a word used of reading in To the Lighthouse [206]), the experience is couched in the not so very different terms of the little death of sexual rapture. Writing to Fry again in May 1922 she propose[s] to sink all day into the second volume, which, perhaps, he had brought back from France after all,

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and goes on to describe the experience in a self-conscious dramatisation of the encounter that, temporarily, releases her and her writing from the disabling paralysis that the desire for fusional likeness to write like that induces:
Proust titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensication that he procures theres something sexual in it that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I cant write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession.63

Blocked by the obsession she does not persevere with Proust over the summer and it is only in October 1922 that she records in her journal that she now begin[s] Proust (October 4). This marks the beginning of the most intense period of the relationship (19221927), although she continues to read and refer to Proust, if more sporadically, until 1937 by which time his writing will have become, like Virgils, assimilated into the vast textual archive of her memory on which she draws to speak her mind for her.64 Writing to Fry again in October 1922 Woolf is still absolute in her enthusiasm, but she begins to mediate the great adventure, as she calls it, in a more impersonal discourse that resembles the language of her essays on modern ction.
My great adventure is really Proust. Well what remains to be written after that? [] How, at last, has someone solidied what has always escaped and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? [...] perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.65

We might compare this with what she writes about Arnold Bennetts novels in Modern Fiction (1925), the second revised version of Modern Novels (1919): Life escapes [] this, the essential thing, [...] refuses to be contained in the obligatory thirty-two chapters of the bourgeois realist novel, and it is precisely the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.66 Her critical writing on modern ction thus develops in tandem with her writing on Proust, who, from this point on, is consistently presented, in her more private writing (journal, letters) as well as in her essays, as the epitome of the modern master who has achieved the seemingly impossible task of combining apparently contradictory qualities here perfect serenity and intense vitality in writing that will survive and endure.67

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In the reading programme recorded in her journal Proust is juxtaposed both with the classics of literature, whether ancient (Homer, Sophocles) or more recent (Stendhal), and with his modern contemporaries (Joyce, Forster). These juxtapositions translate into comparisons, in letters as well as essays, where we also nd other comparisons; in a letter to a friend in 1925, for instance, she recommends Proust over Dickens for zest,68 while in an essay of the same year she describes Jane Austen as a forerunner to Proust.69 Such comparisons tacitly afrm the continuity of Proust with the classics of the literary tradition, a continuity that, as we saw earlier, Woolf nds lacking in D. H. Lawrence. For Woolf this continuity is as crucial to the authority of a masterpiece as the single vision that she nds in Proust and Hardy, but not in E. M. Forster. Hardy is indeed the one English modern that she judges Prousts equal.70 At the same time she draws comparisons in her journal between Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu and her own writing, especially her two experimental novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, comparisons that are coloured by the complex of personal feelings that I have called anxious desire. As she records, she is working intermittently on Mrs Dalloway when she begins to read Proust alongside Joyces Ulysses in October 1922.71 Though it is with Joyces Ulysses that Mrs Dalloway is usually taken by critics to engage, as in many respects it surely does, the indications from her journal are that the comparisons she draws are rather with Proust.72 When, for instance, she returns to her ction after yet another pause, in February 1923, she asks herself if the next lap will be inuenced by Proust?, and having assuaged the implicit anxiety by reminding herself once again of his linguistic and cultural difference, goes on: yet his command of every resource is so extravagant that one can hardly fail to prot, & must not inch through cowardice (February 10). Flinch, however, is precisely what she does when she comes to revise Mrs Dalloway in the autumn of 1924. For she cannot read Proust, although it is Proust who could say what [she] mean[s] when she is trying to describe a party of the upper classes, perhaps with the scene at the conclusion of Mrs Dalloway in mind: One sees groups; gets wholes; general impressions: from the many things being combined. No doubt Proust could say what I mean that great writer whom I cannot read when Im correcting, so persuasive is he (November 18). As in the essays, Prousts consummate skill lies in the fusion into a whole of multiple, disparate impressions. This very skill is, however, here perceived as

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a threat to authorial autonomy. This is signalled when Woolf goes on to represent the effect of Prousts persuasiveness as slipping along on borrowed skates, a striking image of being carried by the idiom of another which echoes the previous diary entry: I am going to skate rapidly over Mrs D (November 1). Whether conscious or not, the echo underscores her anxiety about the loss of authorial autonomy that the desire to write like that induces. The threat is such that it inhibits her own writing, and again she prefers not to read in order to be able to write.73 Just how closely anxiety about her own writing is tied up with desire for likeness to Prousts is signalled by the context of the passage from the journal entry for April 8, 1925, which is echoed in the description of Lilys ideal model for her painting in The Lighthouse. For the passage, which describes Prousts achievement, is, to use Woolfs own word, embedded in reections on her own writing in relation to it. Pondering whether she has achieved something with Mrs Dalloway, she comes to the severe conclusion, nothing [] compared with Proust in whom I am embedded now, adding: And he will I suppose both inuence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. What brings pleasure, security even, for Woolf the reader a sense of being held by Prousts writing (embedded) brings disabling anxiety for Woolf the writer. This scene of authorial anxiety as she is about to begin To the Lighthouse (which is rst mentioned in the journal on May 14, 1925) is recalled through the gure of Lily Briscoe, Woolfs alter ego in the novel, who suffers from the same anguish of self-doubt even as she aspires to the same goal as Woolf. As the explicit echo underlines, this goal is an aesthetic one, common to modern painting and modern writing, and consists in the combination of contradictory and heterogeneous qualities.
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out those buttery shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterys bloom. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterys wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. (186)

Changes in the nal version, notably the introduction of feathery and evanescent and the gure of the butterys wing, suggest conscious recollection, possibly even a return to the passage in the journal and its associated scene of reading. Recalling her own mediation of Prousts writing rather than the writing itself, Woolf avoids the disabling anxiety

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of the scene of reading even as she recalls it through the gure of Lily, whose anxiety is heightened through its association with the desire for the maternal gure which Lily, like Woolf, seeks to recover in her art. If the anxious desire of Woolfs relation to Proust is associated via the gure of Lily with the past-oriented emotional trauma at the origin of her art the loss of the maternal gure it is associated through the gure of Mr Ramsay with the future-oriented aspiration to elevated cultural status and survival in the scenes at the close of The Window that I have already discussed. Woolfs aspiration to this status the status of a masterpiece is indicated not only, as I suggested, by the Proustian scene that she evokes, but also by journal entries during the period of the gestation of To the Lighthouse (April through August 1925). For what Woolf calls the fate of a book (May 17) in relation to Mrs Dalloway and the temperature chart of a book (May 4) in relation to The Common Reader are measured here by meticulously recorded sales gures and the comments of reviewers, friends and acquaintances and attended by reections on her changing cultural status: suppose I might become one of the interesting I will not say great but interesting novelists?, she muses on April 20; my friends are enthusiastic [...] ready to acclaim me successful, arrived, triumphant with this book (Mrs Dalloway) (June 16); Clive and others [...] say it is a masterpiece (June 18). Again, while immersed in the writing of To the Lighthouse in February 1926, she records satisfaction at her progress never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely, a comment that is immediately followed by her reaction to a published comment of Middleton Murrys that she will not be read in 10 years time: Well, tonight I get a new edition of the V[oyage] O[ut] from Harcourt Brace this was published 11 years ago (February 8). As I mentioned earlier, Woolfs concern with cultural status and survival is also expressed in essays of the period where she underscores how crucial it is not only that writers introduce enduring aesthetic qualities into their work, but also that readers and critics begin to take ction seriously, as they do in France. It is not, however, only their ction that the French take seriously, but also their cooking, whereas [w]hat passes for cookery in England is an abomination (109).74 This comment follows the reference to the French recipe through which, as I also pointed out, Woolf advertises the intertextual relationship between her dinner scene and the opening of A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs. More specically, the product of this recipe Mildreds Buf en Daube is described as a masterpiece (87), that is, as a culinary

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work of art, notably at its moment of presentation when, like Proust, Woolf insists on the attention bestowed upon the dish by its creator: [t]he cook had spent three days over that dish, and the maid removes the cover with a little ourish in anticipation of the triumph which Mr Bankes then announces (109). The phrase Mildreds masterpiece, which is an addition to the nal version, echoes an earlier description of the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo (35) which hangs on the wall of the Ramsays holiday home. Proust is more direct, comparing his cook, Franoise, with the Renaissance artist and sculptor at every stage of the preparation of her culinary uvre.75 Caught up in the throes of creation the day before the dinner, she is likened in her pursuit of the best ingredients to Michelangelo passant huit mois dans les montagnes de Carrare choisir les blocs de marbre les plus parfaits pour le monument de Jules II. Sustained over several lines here, the comparison is reiterated when the dish is presented at table: Le buf froid aux carottes t son apparition, couch par le Michel-Ange de notre cuisine sur dnormes cristaux de gele pareils des blocs de quartz transparent (29). Woolf too hints at parallels when the contents of Mildreds dish are described, through the eyes of Mrs Ramsay, as a confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and bay leaves and wine (109). Suggesting a still life painting rather than sculptured gures, Woolfs description evokes (again) a blending of heterogeneous colours and textures, whereas Prousts description, which is without colour, evokes rather masses blocks of marble, muscular male bodies, cuts of meat, chunks of gele and the contrasting qualities of softness and hardness. Both, however, invite comparisons at once with traditionally higher forms of visual art, represented in both cases by Michelangelo, and with their own writing. Indeed, if both Proust and Woolf recurrently draw parallels between their writing and the art of painting,76 Proust also draws a direct and specic comparison between his writing and the art of cooking in a letter to a hostess, Cline Cotton, in which he expresses, if playfully, the desire to succeed in his uvre as she has succeeded in hers, the Buf Mode (much like Buf en Daube) that he has enjoyed: que mon style soit aussi brillant, aussi clair, aussi solide que votre gele que mes ides soient aussi savoureuses que vos carottes et aussi nourrisantes et fraches que votre viande.77 Within these scenes, writing and the narrative are brought into relation with the culinary masterpiece through the ironic contrast between its achieved repose and the unachieved intellectual and artistic aspirations of the protagonists whose subjectivities are explored. Again

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Proust is more explicit than Woolf. Immediately after the extended comparison of Franoise with Michelangelo the narrator contrasts her state the burning conviction of the great creative artist (la brlante certitude des grands crateurs) with his own anxious uncertainty as a young chercheur in his aspirations to beauty (le beau), here represented by the gure of the actress Berma in her performance in Phdre, which he has attended the very day of the dinner with M. Norpois.78 The performance has been a disappointment; his feelings and opinions are complex and vacillating and he is clearly still thinking of the actress when later in the evening Franoise is congratulated on her success and he likens her straightforward response to that of a true artist (5556). Franoises success stands in ironic contrast, too, with another formative event: the devastation of the narrators young self at the dismissive response of M. Norpois to his rst literary effort and the long critique of his model, Bergotte, which follows. As absolute in his condemnation of Bergotte as he is in his praise of Franoise he calls her a chef de tout premier ordre (29) M. Norpois takes Bergotte to task for an insubstantial formalism and dismisses him as having failed to produce a masterpiece (chef-duvre) that will be valued and preserved (45). Through this ironic contrast Proust reects self-consciously on the character of the artistic/literary masterpiece, as does Woolf who draws similar if less explicit contrasts. It is indeed in these contrasts between the achieved repose of the culinary masterpiece and the unachieved aspirations of the protagonists that the central structural likeness between the scenes lies. It is a likeness that brings out the common quality of the narratives as self-conscious narratives of quest for a specically modern subjectivity and for corresponding aesthetic forms which will nevertheless endure as future past masterpieces/chefs-duvre that is, as romances oriented to the future as well as to the past, as their respective titles signal: To the Lighthouse and A la recherche du temps perdu. This future orientation of Woolfs novel nds expression, as we have seen, through the gure of Mr Ramsay whose restless self-centred anxiety about cultural survival how long do you think itll last? (116) furnishes a particularly sharp contrast with the perfect triumph (114) of Mildreds masterpiece. There is contrast, too, with Lily Briscoe who suffers self-doubt in her artistic aspirations, haunted as she is by the cultural prejudice [w]omen cant write, women cant paint (94). Charles Tansley, who voices this prejudice, himself suffers from a sense that nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in scraps and

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fragments (98). Most prominently, Mrs Ramsay restlessly searches for meaning and shape throughout the scene, as she does throughout the rst part of the novel, a quest which is taken up by Lily in the third part and which reects an authorial quest, like the quest of Prousts young protagonist. Unlike Prousts protagonist, however (but like Lily at the end of the novel), Mrs Ramsay nally nds what she is looking for: as she serves the Buf en Daube, she experiences a moment of repose and security as well as a certainty that [t]his would remain (114). Using round brackets to suggest analogy as well as simultaneity, Woolf juxtaposes Mrs Ramsays peering into the depths of the earthenware pot and nding an especially tender piece of meat for Mr Bankes with her discovery of this moment of eternity. Like the perfect triumph of the Buf en Daube, there is triumph in this achieved moment of being, as there is at the close of The Window when Mrs Ramsay is described as having triumphed again (134). There are no such moments of closural triumph in the Proustian scene as there are no such afrmations of survival this would remain which Woolfs readers are called upon to acknowledge in relation both to the moment and to the novel in which it appears. Woolf, that is, insists, as Proust does not, on the redemptive function of her own writing, which invests the ephemeral, if perfect, event of Mildreds masterpiece with the enduring character of a work of art. Her very explicitness, however, suggests again an anxiety about the achievement of the desired effect, the achievement, that is, of an enduring future past masterpiece which would remain, like Prousts chef-duvre. *** [M]asterpieces are not single and solitary births79 Woolf writes in A Room of Ones Own (1929), her next major piece of writing, which in many ways grows out of To the Lighthouse. She thus reiterates the collective character of the masterpiece which the novel both thematises (79) and exemplies through its advertised liations to forerunners, as Woolf calls them here. Through these liations and through its character as redemptive art emblematised in the gure of tripartite form To the Lighthouse lays claim to the status of a future past masterpiece even as it afrms continuity through the individual and collective traumas of the passage of time that it cuts out. The novel thus carries the collective as well as individual past into its own future when it will have become assimilated into the collective cultural archive on which readers draw, individually and collectively, to shape, and heal, their lives.

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As we have seen, it is literary liations that are the measure of cultural status for Richard Aldington, whose essay on Proust the rst to appear in English has its own tacitly advertised liation, namely with T. S. Eliots seminal essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Published the previous year (1919), Eliots essay famously calls for the subordination of authorial particularity to the ideal total order of the tradition of Western European literature and for the new to be consequently judged according to its relations to the old.80 Following Eliot, Aldington treats Proust as something of a test case, tracing liations to various, principally French, past masters, to conclude: Perhaps one of the most useful things proved by his books is that a mind steeped in tradition [...] has nevertheless created one of the most original novels of the time.81 For Woolf this would, I imagine, have been an ideal reception for To the Lighthouse. With a mind similarly steeped in tradition, she recommends, as she practices, comparative critical reading of the new and the old. In the novel this is thematised through the gure of Mr Ramsay and exemplied through the juxtaposed literary liations to the old (Virgil and Shakespeare) and the new (Proust). In its combination of these liations as well as in its mixing of heterogeneous generic modes the novel nds its originality as a new species such as books [...] are always breeding [...] from unexpected matches among themselves.82 Taken from the version of How One Should Read that she wrote as she worked on To the Lighthouse one is tempted to see this as a portrait of the novel, the language of biology lending a Darwinian touch to its concern with cultural survival. The new species which will last is here a product of textual cross-breeding, unexpected couplings, which is one way of describing the combination of the liations to Virgil and Proust, especially given the gender associations each gure carried for Woolf, which indeed suggest a sublimated Freudian family romance. For while Virgil was associated, as we have seen, with the male side of the family, Proust was rather associated with the female, maternal (French) side. Indeed, in A Room of Ones Own Proust is described as perhaps a little too much of a woman in Woolfs elaboration of her notion of the androgynous mind, which we might see here as a reworking of the recipe of the modern masterpiece as a combination of heterogeneous elements, coloured by the novels combination of liations to (the male) Virgil and (the female) Proust.83 The recipe is, however, complicated in A Room of Ones Own by a new ingredient which the novel only touches on, namely the material

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contingencies of production and reception and the resulting absence from the literary tradition of womens voices. In what may be a conscious response to Eliot, Woolf shows how the tradition the very tradition with which her novel advertises its afliation is not so much given as made. The selection of the future past masterpiece is thus exposed as a function not only of an intrinsic aesthetic value, but also of the contingencies of a history which is his-story, and so of gender politics. Unlike natural selection, that is, cultural selection depends on collective human will, and in particular a will to change the conditions of production and reception for female authors. Precisely such a will was expressed by the group of women who in 1904 set up the Prix Femina as a corrective to the perceived sexist bias of the Prix Goncourt.84 In 1928 Woolf received the Prix Femina (pour livre tranger) for To the Lighthouse, nine years after Proust had received the Prix Goncourt for A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs, the volume with which To the Lighthouse signals its liation. There is then a political as well as poetic justice to this act of public recognition, all the more so given that, for French women writers of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf has stood en tte de toutes les liations.85 NOTES
1 Richard Aldington, The Approach to Marcel Proust, in Richard Aldington, Literary Studies and Reviews (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924), pp. 171180 (p. 171), rst published in The English Review in June 1920. Woolf refers to the journal and to Richard Aldington in her journal. See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 19771984), II, pp. 183, 185, 325326. (Subsequent references giving the date of the journal entry will be to this edition.) Woolf corresponds with Aldington too, if briey, in 1922 and 1926. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson, 6 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 19751980), II, pp. 570571, 577, 592593; III, pp. 233235. Subsequent references to the letters will give the volume and page number of this edition. 2 The closing sentence of the later version of How it Strikes a Contemporary (1925) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie, 4 (of 6 planned) vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 19861994), IV, pp. 233242 (p. 241). Unless otherwise stated, references, giving volume and page numbers, will be to this edition of the essays. 3 How Should One Read a Book?, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 111 (p. 10). 4 Essays IV, pp. 3853. Woolf cites the trio Lear, or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu (sic) in A Room of Ones Own as examples of the achievement of the writers highest vocation to communicate reality. Virginia Woolf, A Room of

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Ones Own, Three Guineas, edited by Michle Barrett (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 99. Subsequent references will be to this edition. Jane Austen (1925), Essays IV, pp. 146157 (p. 155). Collected Essays II, p. 10; Essays IV, pp. 233242 (p. 241). For other instances of how Woolfs reading and writing inltrate each other, as Hermione Lee puts it, see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), p. 413 and Virginia Woolfs Reading Notebooks, edited by Brenda R. Silver (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). The quoted phrase comes from The Leaning Tower (1940), in Collected Essays II, pp. 162181 (p. 181), discussed further below. For Richard Aldington see epigraph and n. 1. Letters III, p. 365. In 1932 Floris Delattre published a critical study of the novels in which he underscores Woolfs shared thematic preoccupations with Proust whom he describes as a signicant inuence; Floris Delattre, Le Roman Psychologique de Virginia Woolf (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932), pp. 142159. Subsequently there has been one short piece, largely anecdotal in character though touching on shared themes: George Painter, Proust and Virgina Woolf, Adam: An International Review (1972), pp. 1723; and three pieces by Cheryl Mares: Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painters Perspective, Comparative Literature 41 (1989), pp. 327359; Woolfs Reading of Proust, in Reading Proust Now, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Eugne Nicole (New York, Bern, Frankfurt etc: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 185195; The Burning Ground of the Present: Woolf and Her Contemporaries, in Virginia Woolf and The Essay, edited by Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubinoi (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1997), pp. 119136. The last two largely rehearse points made in the rst, which is the most substantial and which focuses on their respective views on painting (and writing). As Mares indicates, various studies of Woolf have touched on aspects of the relation to Proust. Just prior to publication my attention was drawn to an interesting and original analysis of differences as well as likenesses between To the Lighthouse and the rst volume of Prousts work Swanns Way (in the translation by Scott Moncrieff which the author argues Woolf used): Elizabeth Andrews McArthur, Following Swanns Way: To the Lighthouse, Comparative Literature 56:4 (Fall 2004), pp. 331346. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 137, 166. Subsequent references, given in the text, will be to this edition. Randall Stevenson and Jane Goldman, But what? Elegy?: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs Ramsay, The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996), pp. 173186 (p. 177). Poetry, Fiction and the Future, Essays IV, pp. 428441 (pp. 436, 439). The Novels of E. M. Forster, Essays IV, pp. 491502 (p. 494). Is Fiction an Art?, Essays IV, pp. 457465 (p. 463). For instance, in The Leaning Tower and How it Strikes a Contemporary (referenced above). Aldington, The Approach to Marcel Proust, p. 176. serene is the word Woolf uses of the air of accomplishment of the classics in Modern Novels (1919). Essays III, p. 31.

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19 See, for instance, Stevenson and Goldman, But what? Elegy?, p. 183, citing Steve Davies, Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), pp. 121122; To the Lighthouse, edited by McNichol, p. 251. 20 Gary B. Miles, Virgils Georgics: A New Interpretation (University of California Press, 1980), p. 61; Patrick Wilkinson, Virgils Georgics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 55. 21 Letters III, p. 374. 22 Notes on D. H. Lawrence, in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), pp. 7982. 23 Ibid., p. 82. 24 Essays IV, p. 62. 25 Unpublished notebook, VS Greek and Latin Studies. Monks House papers, University of Sussex Library, Special Collections, A.21, p. 61. My thanks to The Society of Authors for permission to quote this material. See too Virginia Woolfs Reading Notebooks, p. 168. The lines are quoted, if misleadingly, in Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf. A Writers Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 85. 26 Essays IV, pp. 157165 (p. 158). 27 See, for instance, Letters I, p. 35 and Essays II, pp. 114119. 28 A Passionate Apprentice: The early journals of Virginia Woolf (18971909), edited by Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), p. 238. 29 Describing what the protagonist (Jacob/Thoby) saw on a trip to Italy, Woolf writes: there were trees laced together with vines as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks. Virgils bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Virginia Woolf, Jacobs Room, edited by Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 185. Editors have failed to comment that the rst image here attractively renders ulmisque adiungere vites (Georgics I, line 2) from Virgils opening description of the topics he will treat, including the care of vines, which, as Woolf reiterates, are trained between elms (see Georgics II, lines 358361 and lines 367370). The reference to Virgils bees alludes to Georgics IV, which Woolf summarises with comments in an early notebook (discussed below). All references to Virgil are taken from: Virgil, edited and translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, repr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1974). 30 A Sketch of the Past in Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: The University Press, 1976), p. 86. 31 Letters I, pp. 20, 215. 32 The Leaning Tower, Collected Essays II, pp. 162181 (p. 181). 33 Modern Fiction, Essays IV, p. 160. 34 Poetry, Fiction and the Future, Essays IV, pp. 436, 439. 35 How it Strikes a Contemporary, Essays IV, p. 240. Compare her argument in Poetry, Fiction and the Future that the future novelists effort will be to generalise rather than to split up (Essays IV, p. 439). This has been changed in the later version to his effort will be to generalize and split up (Collected Essays II, p. 228, my emphasis), which may be another indication that To the Lighthouse is

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at the back of her descriptions of the novel of the future since she writes in her journal: I think I might do something in To the Lighthouse to split up emotions more completely. (July 30, 1925, my emphasis). Life and the Novelist, Essays IV, pp. 400406 (pp. 403, 401) How it Strikes a Contemporary, Essays IV, pp. 236237; Life and the Novelist, Essays IV, p. 401. The Tunnel, Essays III, pp. 11, 12. Essays IV, p. 397. How It Strikes a Contemporary, Essays IV, p. 239. Compare Georgics IV, lines 559566. As Susan Dick points out there is no precise indication of the date of composition of this outline, which she puts in an appendix. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse. The original holograph draft, edited by Susan Dick (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982), Appendix B. Future references to the MS will be to this edition. Elsewhere she suggests a date around April 30, 1926; Susan Dick, The Restless Searcher: A discussion of the Evolution of Time Passes in To The Lighthouse, English Studies in Canada 5.3 (1979), pp. 311329. Letters III, p. 262. The Georgics is described as perhaps the most carefully nished production of Roman literature in Faircloughs brief biographical introduction to his Loeb translation, which Woolf may have used as it was rst published in 1916; Virgil, edited and translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, I, p. x. In an essay of 1917 Woolf describes the Loeb library as a gift of freedom to amateur readers of the classics, like herself. Essays II, p. 114. Compare the novels self-conscious opening scene of cutting out pictures (7). Poetry, Fiction and the Future, Essays IV, p. 435. Ibid., pp. 436, 438. The other gure associated with Augustus Carmichael is Thomas de Quincey, as others have remarked; in the essay Impassioned Prose which Woolf worked on at the same time as To The Lighthouse, she discusses de Quinceys writing in terms, again, of the relation between poetry and prose suggesting that De Quincey has opened up the possibilities of prose ction by his powers of description as a reective writer who draw[s] a little apart, see[s] people in groups, as outlines and they become at once memorable and full of beauty; Essays IV, pp. 361369 (p. 367). This obviously calls for comparison with the gure of Augustus Carmichael and with the discussion of the aesthetics of future ction in Poetry, Fiction and the Future. Compare Woolfs later recollections of her mother, ltered perhaps through the novels prior mediation: I think I accepted her beauty as the natural quality that a mother she seemed typical, universal, yet our own in particular had by virtue of being our mother... (A Sketch of the Past, p. 82). The loss of the classical ideal of beauty is lamented too by Woolfs fellow modernist Ezra Pound: We see to kalon/Decreed in the Market place. Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Ezra Pound Selected Poems 19081959 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 98106. Georgics I, lines 151159, 181186. Woolfs description of the degeneration of the house and garden (150) with its invasive thistle, rats and toads is particularly suggestive of these passages; one possible Virgilian modication in the

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nal version is the addition of the toads, in an amusingly self-reexive image: Toads had nosed their way in (150) (cf. inventusque cavis bufo [Georgics I, line 184]). William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12. As in Time Passes it is specically beauty that is the object of the wastes of time (lines 910), as it is in sonnet 60 (nothing stands but for [Timess] scythe to mow); the image of Time and his scythe recur in sonnets 100 and 123. Mrs Ramsay is reading sonnet 98 in the nal version of The Window (see further below). All references are taken from Shakespeares Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). See Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 536; Kate Flint, Virginia Woolf and the General Strike, Essays in Criticism 36 (1986), 319334; Flint notes Woolfs positive response to an essay by Clive Bell (dedicated to her) in which the revolutionary coal-miner is described as a threat to civilisation (pp. 324325). Interestingly, Mrs McNab is described as chanting in the MS, a word which would invite perception of likeness rather than of opposition. Critics discussions of Mrs McNab (apart from those by Flint and Lee) have suffered from wishful thinking, notably in the gloom of political correctness; see, for instances, Dick The Restless Searcher, pp. 320323; Stevenson and Goldman, But what? Elegy?, pp. 185186. For a brief discussion of the Virgilian generic sequence as the model for the Shakespearean, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and early modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4. Susan Dick notes how the word nothing resonates throughout the novel (Dick, The Restless Searcher, p. 319), as it does throughout King Lear. As one of the journals readers pointed out, Cam recalls too the epic female gure of Camilla. Delattre, Le Roman Psychologique, p. 145; recall too Woolfs linking of Proust with Shakespeare (and specically Lear) as well as with Jane Austen, discussed above. Mares, Reading Proust, p. 328. A. Feuillerat, Comment Marcel Proust a compos son roman (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972 [rst published in 1934]), Appendix I A. The project notoriously expands so that in 1919 when volume 2 is published by NRF (Nouvelle Revue Franaise [Gallimard]) the complete work is announced as in 5 volumes; when Sodome et Gomorrhe is published in 1922 the total has expanded to 10 volumes, as Woolf mentions in a letter to a friend in 1925 (Letters III, p. 166). See Feuillerat, Comment Marcel Proust a compos son roman, pp. 1517. Letters II, p. 396. Essays IV, p. 333. This is scarcely an exaggeration as far as the educated elite is concerned. See Delattre, Le Roman Psychologique, pp. 143146, and R. Gibson, Proust et la critique anglo-saxonne, in Etudes proustiennes IV, Cahiers Marcel Proust N.S. 11 (Gallimard: Nouvelle Revue Franaise, 1982), 1149, especially, pp. 2628. Letters II, p. 499 Letters II, p. 525. On Being Ill, Essays IV, pp. 317329 (p. 318). In a letter to a friend in March

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1937 Woolf attempts to account for her feelings: I think Proust explains it, but I cant remember where. Something I mean about the soul, how its elements are united differently by different stimulants; shaken together like those scraps of colour in a funnel that we played with as children. (Letters VI, p. 112) The precise reference here has not been identied. As early as 1923 Woolf singles out the nine volumes of Proust as the preeminent example of ction which makes us more aware of ourselves as individuals (Essays III, p. 369; nine here is presumably a slip for ten). Letters II, pp. 565566. Essays IV, pp. 159160. This is not to say that she never makes critical comments; in a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1934, for instance, she comments I dont think society is quite so omnipresent as P. makes out (Letters V, p. 297); more formally in Phases of Fiction (1929), she comments on the strain upon the mind of Prousts obliquity. Collected Essays II, pp. 56102 (pp. 8384). Letters III, p. 166. Essays IV, p. 155. Essays IV, p. 333. Cf. Mares, The Burning Ground of the Present, passim. Having left off Mrs Dalloway on August 22, 1922, she next writes that Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book (October 14, 1922), ten days after recording her beginning on Proust (quoted above, p. 309). The fresh impulse in October 1922 may indeed have come from the reading of Proust since, as she later recalls in the journal, it was the invention of Mrs Dalloways memories that renewed her desire to write the book (June 18, 1925). What is more she describes this invention in terms of a tunnelling process into caves behind her characters (October 15, 1923; August 30, 1923), images which are echoed, consciously or unconsciously, in an essay of 1925 in which she describes the experience of reading a scene in Proust in terms of tunnelling into the cave of darkness of the protagonists emotions. Essays IV, pp. 243247 (p. 244). The effect gured in the image of borrowed skates is illustrated by the passage in praise of Proust in Pictures (1925), the essay cited in the previous note. For not only does Woolfs language echo Prousts but her sentences have a Proustian sinuosity, like many of her sentences in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf may be thinking of this moment in To the Lighthouse when she illustrates the point that the French take their ction seriously with Flaubert will spend a month looking for a phrase to describe a cabbage (Essays IV, p. 463), an exaggeration worthy of Mrs Ramsay who illustrates the abomination of English cooking with [i]t is putting cabbages in water (p. 109). Marcel Proust, A lombre des jeunes lle en eurs, edited by Pierre-Louis Rey (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 17. References, given in the text, will be to this edition. See Mares, Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painters Perspective, passim. Letter to Cline Cotton, July 12, 1909, as quoted by Rey, p. 522. Proust, A lombre des jeunes lles, p. 17. Woolf, A Room of Ones Own, p. 59. Tradition and the Individual Talent, in T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920), repr. (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 4759. The essay rst appeared in The Egoist in 1919.

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Aldington, The Approach to Marcel Proust, p. 180. Essays IV, p. 390. Woolf, A Room of Ones Own, p. 93. See Sylvie Ducas, Le prix Femina: la conscration littraire au fminin, Recherches fministes 16:1 (2003), 139. 85 Ducas, Le prix Femina, p. 25.

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