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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

A Round of Visits

June 10, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

A Round of Visits first appeared in the English Review in April-May 1910. It was the last completed short story Henry James ever produced. Like other tales he wrote around that time, it deals with the issue of returning to his native America after a long period of living in Europe. James had left the ‘old’ traditional New York of the 1870s, and he was rather taken aback by the ‘new’ America he found on revisiting twenty-five years later.

New York in 1909

A Round of Visits – critical commentary

New American money

This is a story about new American wealth and the modern mega-city. James paints a picture of a cold and hostile New York – a place of bad weather, an influenza outbreak, and streets filled with a strange mixture of emptiness and vehicles which emit horrible screeching noises.

Montieth has lost money. His capital has been accumulated under the supposedly honorable circumstances of ‘old’ New York society. But he has lingered too long in Europe, and the money has been snatched up by a representative of the new, speculative venture capitalists who make money out of other people’s money – in Bloodgood’s case, by absconding with it.

Mrs Folliott has also lost money – but Montieth suspects she has plenty more (as he has). The implication is that American capitalism has been in a boom period. And Winch too has ‘splendidly improved’. Montieth is impressed with his sumptuous accommodation. But it turns out to be wealth accumulated corruptly – in the same way as Bloodgood has done.

James wasn’t exactly short of money himself (his grandfather had been one of the first US millionaires), but he was surprised by the huge fortunes that had been accumulated by American capitalists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century whilst he had been away in Europe.

His reflections on these recent American developments are not very positive, and it is significant that within a few years (and as an act of solidarity during war time with the country he had made his home) he took out English citizenship in 1915.

Structure

In his study of the tales, Henry James: a study of the short fiction, Richard A. Hocks offers an extended and in-depth analysis of James’s irony in this story, and in particular the manner in which the structure of the narrative supports the reversals of expectation that take place:

The formal integrity, too, of A Round of Visits is another illustration of just how much James by the end had furthered the development of American short fiction as a work of art in the course of his career. The seven divisions of the tale are halved by the transitional fourth section (in which no visit occurs), providing a structural balance between the first and final three segments. The first three, moreover, are unified by a repetitive pattern of expectation and rebuff in the encounters with the hotel doctor, Mrs Folliott, and Mrs Ash. The transitional section, with Montieth again outside in the street, has him deciding to reverse his search for sympathy and follow the supposed ‘will of Providence’. The last three sections, in Winch’s apartment, trace the reversal and twistings of Montieth’s expectations and judgements with results even more drastically unexpected than those accumulated in the first three sections.

A Round of Visits – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

A Round of Visits – Digireads reprint – Amazon UK

A Round of Visits – eBook at Project Gutenberg

A Round of Visits – read the story on line

The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

A Round of Visits – plot summary

Part I. Mark Montieth arrives in New York amidst a snowstorm after an absence of ten years living in Paris. He discovers that his old friend Phil Bloodgood has absconded with all the proceeds of money left in trust to him. Montieth falls ill with flu for a few days, then decides to leave his hotel.

Part II. However, he meets Mrs Folliott, who has also lost money entrusted to Bloodgood. Thinking she might offer a sympathetic ear, Montieth actually becomes bored by her complaints about her own loss, and he is glad to accept an invitation to a lunch party. There he meets a pretty young woman who encourages him to visit an old friend Newton Winch, who is also ill with flu.

Part III. Montieth goes to visit Mrs Ash, an old friend from his days in Paris, hoping she will give him a sympathetic ear. But she oppresses him with a non-stop account of the separation from her husband, who is carrying on with Mrs Folliott.

Part IV. He wanders in a rather bleak and hostile New York evening and reflects charitably upon the egoism of other people – then decides to visit his old friend who is sick.

Part V. Newton Winch turns out to be a sophisticated, successful, and very welcoming. Montieth is struck and very impressed by the enormous improvement in his appearance and behaviour.

Part VI. Winch is entirely sympathetic to Montieth’s financial loss and heaps criticism on Bloodgood, but Montieth expresses a certain sympathy for him, and says he would even like to meet him.

Part VII. Winch takes a passionate interest in his friend’s plight, and implores him to keep ‘talking to him’, and by his nervousness gives Montieth reason to think that something is wrong. It transpires that Winch has been guilty of the same sort of pecuniary fraudulent dealing as Bloodgood, and is waiting any moment to be arrested. There is a theatrical knock at the door. Montieth goes to answer it, and whilst he is there, Winch shoots himself.

Principal characters

Mark Montieth	an American bachelor
Phil Bloodgood	his handsome third cousin and former classmate and close friend
Mrs Folliott	an American society woman
Mrs Florence Ash	an American society woman, Montieth’s friend in Paris
Mr Newton Winch	a rich American old friend of Montieth’s

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
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A Scandal in Bohemia

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, web links, and further reading

A Scandal in Bohemia was first published in July 1891 in The Strand Magazine with illustrations by Sydney Paget. As a stand-out character and detective hero, Sherlock Holmes had first appeared in Conan Doyle’s earlier novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) – but it wasn’t until the monthly stories appeared that the fictional character began to seize the public’s imagination. This effect was amplified by the publication in America in 1892 of these thirteen monthly episodes as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This began a popularity for the figure of Holmes which continues to this day. There have been any number of radio, stage, and film adaptations of the stories, and there is currently a very successful television series in which the stories are transposed into present day settings.

A Scandal in Bohemia – critical commentary

Mise en scene

The setting, characters, and historical context of the story are all convincingly realistic. The story is set in a London that is thoroughly recognisable. Holmes lives in Baker Street in Marylebone, and Irene Adler in St John’s Wood. Many other places are mentioned – Edgware Road, Regent Street, and Charing Cross – and because they actually exist they help to establish realistic setting. Generations of tourists have walked up and down Baker Street searching for 221B – which is an invention on Conan Doyle’s part.

Watson gives an exact date at the start of the story – 20th March 1888. The king is from Bohemia, which was a separate state as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire during the nineteenth century – and still exists as part of the Czech Republic. He arrives in a ‘brougham’ – a Victorian horse carriage; and the driver is paid ‘half a guinea’. These details correspond to the historical picture we have of the world around that time and therefore make the background to the story seem credible.

The story is populated by a married doctor plus his friend and former flat-mate, an amateur detective. The other characters include a foreign aristocrat and an opera singer. Although Sherlock Holmes has unusually developed skills and Kings are not exactly commonplace, these characters form part of a world which seems reasonable, not unlike our own. They help to make the fictional world Conan Doyle offers us realistic.

The story begins in the streets of London, then continues to Holmes’ first floor apartment with its bachelor accoutrements of cigars and drinks cabinet. It moves on to the mews where servants are working, then a church in the Edgware Road and the avenue where Briony Lodge is situated. It reaches its climax inside the drawing room of the ‘bijou villa’ from which Irene Adler has recently decamped, and it ends as Watson and Holmes take to the streets of London again. All of these locations help to create a perfectly credible milieu.

The construction of character

The principal point of interest in the Sherlock Holmes stories and the reason that they have been so popular is the character of Holmes himself. The complete character study of Holmes can be best constructed from details about him which are scattered throughout the stories. However, from A Scandal in Bohemia alone we learn that he has an international reputation as a detective and is well known amongst European royalty. He has acute powers of observation and an ability to interpret visual data (see below). He is a master of disguise, and is able to transform his demeanour and actions into those of the person he is imitating.

In addition, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of society backed up by an archive of information on crime he keeps on index cards. He alternates between periods of lassitude which he spends in brooding reflection, and periods of dynamic activity in pursuit of his client’s problems.

Watson describes him as a man who ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul’ – which tells us that he is radically independent. He also has a ‘cold, precise, admirably balanced mind’. He is an intellectual, one who sneers at ‘the softer passions’ – which is what makes his admiration for Irene Adler such an exception. He is also given to offering witty, epigrammatic apercus such as “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing she values most … A married woman grabs at her baby – an unmarried one reaches for her jewel box”.

Holmes is philosophical, brilliant, charismatic, benevolent and enigmatic. At the end of the story he shows a lofty disregard for the King by ignoring his handshake, and his non-materialistic values are revealed when he chooses the photo over the proffered emerald and gold ring.

One rather surprising detail we learn about him is that he is a cocaine addict – what we might today call ‘an occasional user’. Fortunately, this does not seem to hamper his powers as a detective, but it does reinforce the idea that he a social ‘outsider’. We learn in a later story that he also plays the violin. All of this adds up to making him a fascinating and complex individual. If we add to this picture his lean, angular appearance, the deerstalker hat, and the meerschaum pipe, it is not surprising that he has become an iconic figure in popular culture.

Deduction or induction?

But of course the most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he able to combine acute observation with profound intelligence and an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modeled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

Holmes analyses the watermarks of the paper on which the King has written his introductory note, and works out from the abbreviations that the paper has been produced in Bohemia. Then he goes on to look at the message itself and observes that though the writing is in English, it uses a distinctively German syntax – with a verb at the end of the sentence.

Amongst critics there is often disagreement on the question of Holmes’ methods of detection. He observes very small details of a person’s physical appearance or clothing, and from these details arrives at a general understanding of their occupation, their habits, or their recent movements. This method of detection illustrates his acute powers of observation and often reveals his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics – such as being able to recognise the ashes of different brands of cigar.

In Watson’s narrative, he calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ – “I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction.” Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning. Holmes notices on Watson’s finger the marks of silver nitrate, which was originally used as a disinfectant and to cauterise wounds. From this he reasons that Watson has probably resumed his former occupation as a doctor.

Deductive reasoning works the other way round – and is known as ‘top down’ logic. This starts from a general principle then works down to a specific instance. All men are mortal; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was mortal. Another term for this process is ‘inference’. This is a minor issue – and many people accept and use the term ‘deduction’ for both forms of reasoning.

Close reading

Close reading is not a skill that can be acquired in just a few minutes. It requires detailed attention to language, wide literary experience, and concentrated reflection on the technical minutiae of texts. These strands of analysis need to be brought together many times over. The skill also involves consideration of a text in at four levels – linguistic, semantic, structural, and cultural. That is – the words of a text in their grammatical sense; what the words mean in the context of the story; what links they might have with the overall structure of the work; and the broader meanings of the text in terms of cultural history.

In one sense close reading is quite like the analytic method used by Sherlock Holmes himself. It squeezes the maximum amount of meaning out of quite small observations. For instance what follows is a close reading of the opening sentence of the story: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman’. And in fact my observations will focus on just two words in the sentence ‘is’ and ‘the‘.

Linguistic. The use of the present tense – ‘she is’ – strikes an interesting note here. Most fiction is narrated in the past tense, but the present tense is sometimes used to give a sense of immediacy and urgency. This effect is reinforced here by the brevity and directness of the sentence. It starts the story on a bright note.

Semantic. The term ‘is’ also suggests something else here – that the high regard and rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler has originated in the past but is still going on in the fictional present of the story. This is reinforced by the addition of the adverb ‘always’. Yet we learn from Watson at the end of the paragraph that she is the late Irene Adler. It is not clear if this means she is dead or that the episode recorded in the story simply took place in the past. Either way, the fact remains that she continues to have an influence on him

Structural. The opening sentence of the story is rather neatly echoed by the sentence with which it ends: ‘When he speaks of Irene Adler … it is always under the honourable title of the woman. This small structural link using repetition introduces an element of symmetry or pattern into the narrative, making it coherent and satisfying. It is an indication that the story is well designed.

Cultural. At the end of the Victorian and the beginning of the Edwardian period there were a number of male writers who produced work which featured a woman who is idealised, inaccessible, mysterious, and often either beautiful or cruel – or both. One thinks of Rider Haggard’s She (1886-87) or many of the stories of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.

This was a period in which women were becoming more socially and personally assertive – claiming the right to own property and the right to vote for instance. Holmes’ reverence for Irene Adler – a talented, enterprising, and clever woman – reflects this broader historical development, all in just two words – ‘the woman’.

A Scandal in Bohemia – study resources

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

Sherlock Holmes – 1939 classic DVD box set – Amazon UK

Sherlock – 2014 DVD box set – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia – explanatory notes

gasogene	a soda syphon
vizard	a half mask covering just the eyes
cabinet photograph	small portrait, which replaced the visiting card
John Hare	a famous English actor-manager
iodoform	antiseptic compound of iodine

A Scandal in Bohemia – plot summaries

Short summary

Sherlock Holmes, a famous detective, is commissioned by the King of Bohemia to retrieve a potentially compromising photograph from Irene Adler, his former mistress. Holmes sets out in disguise to search her house but is sidetracked when he becomes caught up as a witness at her wedding. Later he returns and tricks her into revealing the hiding place. When he goes back next day however she has left a note saying she perceived his ruse and has emigrated, taking the photograph with her.

Long summary

Doctor Watson calls on his old flat mate in Baker Street, London. Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective with amazing powers of observation. They are visited by the hereditary King of Bohemia who is about to be married but is being blackmailed by Irene Adler, an opera singer with whom he has had an affair. She is threatening to reveal a compromising photograph.

Next day Watson visits Holmes who has been making a reconnaissance of Adler’s house whilst in disguise. Holmes learns that Adler has an admirer Godfrey Norton who is a lawyer. Norton and Adler leave the house hurriedly and Holmes follows them to a church, where he is pressed into acting as a witness to their marriage.

Holmes plans to make an illegal entry into the house the same night, and enlists Watson’s help. Disguised as a clergyman, he is at the house when a pre-arranged fight breaks out in the street. He dashes to protect Adler, and appears to be badly injured. He is taken into the house to recover, where he signals to Watson, who throws a smoke bomb into the house and raises the cry of ‘Fire!’. Ten minutes later, as they leave, Holmes explains how Adler revealed the hiding place of the photo.

Next morning the King accompanies them to Adler’s house, but she has already left England, never to return. She has left a letter for Holmes explaining that she recognised him and his methods, and she has retained the photo as a guarantee against any future action from the King.

A Scandal in Bohemia – further reading

Biography

John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: John Murray, 1949.

Michael Coren, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

John L/ Lellenberg, The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008.

Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1966.

Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle – His Life and Work, London: Methuen, 1943.

Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle, London: Whizzard Press, 1979.

Criticism

Don Richard Cox, Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Ungar, 1985.

Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1983.

Trevor Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies, London: Duckworth, 1969.

Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, London: John Murray, 1962.

Howard Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, Caroll & Graf Publishers, 1983.

Harold Orel (ed), Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Hall & Co, 1992.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, London: Faber, 1972.

Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective, London: Harper Collins, 1969.

Jaqueline A. Yaffe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Boston: Twayne, 1967.

A Scandal in Bohemia – web links

Sherlock Holmes at Wikipedia
Comprehensive biographical notes on the detective, extracted from all the stories and novels.

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
An active literary and social society with special events, a journal, meetings, newsletter, and shop.

Discovering Sherlock Holmes
Repository at Stanford University – includes facsimile reproductions of stories from the original Strand Magazine

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A Silver Dish

August 9, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

A Silver Dish (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. The story was first published in The New Yorker for 25 September, 1978. The four other stories in the collection are Cousins, What Kind of Day Did You Have?, Him with his Foot in his Mouth, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

A Silver Dish – commentary

This story is essentially one of ethnic and religious allegiance. Woody Selbst, like many of Saul Bellows’ other protagonists, is the son of Jewish immigrants to America. His father Morris is a non-believing Jew, and his mother is a Christian convert who has brought up her son Woodrow in an environment of evangelical proselytising.

Woody appears to be religiously neutral—he respects his mother and is very sceptical about his father, who is a gambler, a womaniser, and a completely improvident parent. His father even cheats Woody out of his hard-earned part time savings in order to desert the family, and believes he is offering Woody a useful lesson in life—to trust nobody.

Pushing this dubious behaviour even further, his father pressures Woody into asking for financial support from his philanthropic sponsor the pious Mrs Skoglund. Despite his father’s tales of needing to repay for someone else’s misdeeds, Woody knows full well that his father is probably going to use the money to settle his own gambling debts—yet he assists him in this fraudulent enterprise.

The story reaches its emotional climax when his father steals a silver dish from Mrs Skoglund while they are in her house asking for financial assistance. Woody is shocked by his father’s outrageous anti-social behaviour, and the two of them become locked in an Oedipal fight on the floor.

His father claims to have replaced the silver dish before they leave the house, but Woody is quite right – his father lies to him, steals the silver dish and pawns it. As a result of this theft Woody is expelled from the seminary where he is a student as Mrs Skoglund’s protégé.

Nevertheless, when his father is later dying, Woody visits the hospital and climbs into the bed where his father is in his death throes—to hold him and prevent him pulling out the needles that are helping to keep him alive. It is his father to whom he gives his final allegiance – not his mother and the Christian fundamentalism she represents.

Father and son

Throughout the story Woody appears to be in conflict with his father. The improvident Morris deserts his family when Woody is young, and he sets up an irregular relationship with Halina, a Polish woman. He virtually steals from his own son, lies to him, and drags him into the hugely embarrassing episode of the stolen dish. At each stage he rationalises his bad behaviour as valuable (negative) lessons in life for his son.

And yet Woody’s life turns out to be a close parallel to that of his father. Following the theft of the bowl, Woody lies to the people at the mission: ‘He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs Skoglund’s property. The missing object – he didn’t even know what it was – had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up’. And as an adult in the narrative present of the story, Woody also has an ex-wife and a mistress, just like his father. He is also a risk-taker – smuggling hashish back through customs after his African holiday.

Religion

In religious terms the story is one of Woody’s choice between Christianity and Judaism. Christianity is the institutional religion of the country in which he lives – America. Judaism is the religion of his family’s cultural heritage as recent immigrants. This split is also echoed in his own family. His mother is a Christian convert, whilst his father is a non-believing Jew.

Woody has even been educated and converted to Christianity as a child – and bears witness in the services he attends. But it is significant that he is paid, bribed to do so. ‘He was often sent by Aunt Rebecca to get up and tell a churchful of Scandinavians that he, a Jewish lad, accepted Jesus Christ. For this she paid him fifty cents.’ Even more significant is that the goal of the mission is to convert Jews – as it has done in his own case.

In the narrative present of the story Woody is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning in his apartment above his office, surrounded by the clamour of church bells: ‘the Ukrainian, Roman Catholic, Greek, Russian, African Methodist churches’. These are all branches of Christian belief, and it is against this summons to church attendance and Christian belief that he makes his final decision:

It wouldn’t conclude as Mrs Skoglund, bribing him to round up Jews and hasten the Second Coming, imagined it, but in another way. This was his clumsy intuition.

Moreover, his choice is made explicitly between the two religious options represented by his parents. Despite his mother’s virtues, and despite his father’s shortcomings, it is his father’s influence to which Woody gives his allegiance:

He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China. It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.

A Silver Dish – resources

A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish – plot synopsis

Woodrow (Woody) Selbst is a sixty year old Chicago building tile contractor with an ex-wife and a mistress. He has recently buried his father Morris. As a boy Woody was educated partly as a Christian, and his mother is an evangelical proselyte.

Surrounded by the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning, Woody confronts his grief in recollections of his youth during the Depression. His father deserted the family, and even cheated Woody out of his part-time savings to fund the escape.

Woody recalls a winter snowstorm when his father insists on visiting the devout Mrs Skoglund, Woody’s patroness, to scrounge some money from her. Woody is reluctant and sceptical when Morris gives Mrs Skoglund a hard luck story about his business, claiming that he is trustworthy. Mrs Skoglund leaves them whilst she seeks guidance in prayer.

Whilst she is absent Morris steals a silver dish from her display cabinet. Woody is mortified with embarrassment and tries to retrieve the dish. The two of them scuffle and fall to the floor. Mrs Skoglund returns and gives them a cheque. Morris tells Woody he has replaced the dish.

A few days later it is revealed that he was lying, and Woody is expelled from the seminary in disgrace. His father has pawned the dish, and many years later confesses that he spent the money betting on horses. He also claims that he did his son a favour in separating him from Christian zealots.

As an adult Woody looks after his mother and his invalid sisters. His final recollection is his father’s death in hospital, when he climbs into Morris’s bed and holds him whilst he is dying.

A Silver Dish – characters

Woodrow (Woody) Selbst	a Chicago building tile contractor
Morris Selbst	Woody’s improvident father
Mrs Selbst	Woody’s mother, an evangelical Christian
Halina	Morris’s Polish mistress
Mrs Aase Skoglund	Woody’s Swedish benefactor, a widow

More on Saul Bellow
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Twentieth century literature

A Simple Melody

December 23, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Simple Melody was probably written around 1925 and is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925).

John Crome 1768-1821

A Simple Melody – critical commentary

The narrative is presented almost entirely from George Carslake’s point of view, with no authorial comment to cast any interpretive light on how his character might be viewed. Certainly, like all the other guests who feature in these Mrs Dalloway’s Party sketches, he is locked into his own thoughts in an entirely solipsistic manner. He doesn’t engage with any of the other guests at all – except in his imagination.

And even though he comes close to serious topics for reflection, such as the nature of religious belief, his musings are on the whole completely banal, escapist, and trivial. He is searching for over-simplified explanations of social phenomena which he finds threatening.

One of the most interesting secondary aspects of the story is that it features cameo appearances of characters from the other short sketches in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence.

Prickett Ellis, the middle-aged solicitor from The Man who Loved his Kind, appears as ‘that angry looking chap with the toothbrush moustache’, and as he glances round the room, George Carslake sees Mabel Waring, the central figure from The New Dress:

Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. She looked agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated.

We know from that story that Mabel Waring feels her new yellow dress is a fashion choice disaster which has resulted in her social humiliation, yet Carslake thinks of it as ‘pretty’, which confirms that her agitation is a self-induced sense of insecurity.

Similarly, he spots Stuart Elton, the protagonist of Happiness, another character who is self-absorbed, disatends to the people around him, and is alienated by his own egoism. Yet George Carslake sees him quite differently:

Mr Carslake saw him [Stuart Elton] standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands and looking at it in a very strange way … For underneath, though people seeing him casually would never believe it, Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with quite undistinguished people, like himself …

This poses an interpretive problem. The separate story Happiness establishes Stuart Elton as vain, rude, and emotionally costive. So – do we take George Carslake’s reading of him as accurate? – or does it reflect a limitation in Carslake’s understanding of other people?

The possible solution to this conundrum is to recognise that there is always a potential mismatch between what people think about themselves and how they are perceived by others.

A Simple Melody – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody – story synopsis

George Carslake, a bachelor barrister, is in the company of Miss Merewether at Clarissa Dalloway’s party, and is comforting himself by regarding a genre painting of a heath on the wall. He fantasises about walking back to Norwich with Queen Mary and some of the people at the party, his thoughts rambling inconsequently over what they might talk about. He generalises about religious belief and seems to be searching for a sense of communication in order to escape his feelings of emptiness and isolation.

To the other guests he appears to be alert and gracefully composed, but in fact his thoughts are riven with uncertainties, and whilst he is physically present in the drawing room, his mind is elsewhere – walking back to Norwich. He wants to comfort himself with the idea that all people are essentially the same, but he cannot escape the realisation that all social interaction reveals differences.

A Simple Melody – characters

George Carslake	a bachelor barrister
Miss Merewether	a guest at Mrs Dalloway’s party

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

A Smile of Fortune

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a harbour tale

A Smile of Fortune is one of Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known long stories. He was essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set largely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance).

He is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He’s also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him.

He arrives at an island in the Indian Ocean to take on a cargo of sugar, but is also given an open invitation by his ship’s owners to do trade with a local merchant.

The trader turns out to have a brother, and the two of them have diametrically opposed characters: one is socially well respected, but is a brute; the other is a social outcast who wishes to ingratiate himself with the unnamed narrator.

For reasons he himself cannot fully understand, the captain opts for the outcast and allows himself to be drawn into his domestic life whilst waiting for his ship to be made ready. The principal attraction for this delay is a mysterious young woman, who might be the trader’s daughter, with whom the young captain becomes romantically obsessed.

The trader meanwhile is encouraging the captain’s attentions, whilst trying to lure him into a speculative commercial venture. It’s as if the young man is being lured and tempted on two fronts – the erotic and the pecuniary.

In typically modernist fashion, this conflict reaches an unexpected and ambiguous resolution which despite the captain’s commercial profit leads to his resigning his commission and heading back home.

Formally, it’s a long short story, rather than a novella such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line with which it is frequently collected. And in terms of achievement, it seems to me to fall between the level of those excellent longer tales and the often embarrassingly bad short stories which Conrad turned out at the height of his commercial success.

It’s a story full of symbols and half-concealed inferences which is crying out for (at least) Freudian analysis, and can certainly be added to the list of lesser-known tales which deserve interpretive attention from anyone who admires Conrad’s achievement.

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Joseph Conrad, A Smile of Fortune, London: Hesperus Press, 2007, pp.79, ISBN 184391428X

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

A Study in Scarlet

August 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, further reading

A Study in Scarlet (1888) marks the first ever appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes, the now world-famous detective. It was Arthur Conan Doyle’s first book to be published – for which he received the meagre sum of £25 for all UK rights. The novel first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and was then republished as a single volume by Ward Lock & Co in July 1888.

A Study in Scarlet – commentary

Structure

The first part of A Study in Scarlet follows what I have called elsewhere the classic Sherlock Holmes formula. First we are introduced to the racy and enigmatic figure of Holmes himself. He is part-Bohemian, a violin player who relaxes with cocaine, and a freelance consultant detective who outwits Scotland Yard.

Then we are given a demonstration of his amazing powers of observation and clinical analysis. The story is related from the point of view of his colleague Dr John Watson. Next, someone (or a message) arrives at 221B Baker Street with details of a crime that has stumped the police.

Holmes then works out the solution to this problem by a combination of logic, closely observed details, his encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and a process of ratiocination. He then sets out in a series of detective-like escapades to prove that his theory is correct.

It is important to note that the mystery is solved via a process of thinking, the logic of which is usually revealed later. The adventures of pursuing criminals or witnesses are only necessary to prove that his theory is correct.

That is exactly the structure of Part 1 of the narrative of A Study in Scarlet. We are introduced to Holmes; he demonstrates his skills; he is presented with almost a locked-room conundrum – a murdered body in an empty house. He then solves the crime and delivers the culprit in handcuffs.

But in this, his first published work, Conan Doyle was presenting his new hero-sleuth via the form of a novel. This is a literary genre that normally requires more substance than the Sherlock Holmes formula provides. So in Part 2, Conan Doyle switches to what is essentially the ‘back story’ that has led to the crimes being committed.

This switch requires not only a change of location and time – from urban London boroughs to the plains of Utah earlier in the century. It is also a change in narrative mode from John Watson’s first person account to an impersonal third-person history of events. This is done without any subsequent explanation of how these two parts of the narrative are related.

The new topics covered in Part 2 introduce a catastrophic rift in the coherence of A Study in Scarlet, from which the novel never really recovers. We are introduced to scene settings of what was then the American ‘Frontier’ which might have been lifted straight out of a Fenimore Cooper novel. There are lengthy explanations for the strange beliefs and behaviour of the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints). The story-line also includes internal rivalries amongst the religious settlers which will explain later complexities in the plot.

This back story is simply too long-winded and complex, the timescale too regressive, and the introduction of significant new characters too disruptive to produce a satisfying whole. The novel could easily have been rescued by eliminating all the back story of Part 2, and simply following the arrest of Jefferson Hope with the explication Holmes gives in the final chapter of the novel.

It seems that Conan Doyle was aware of this weakness, for at a later date he described his own production as ‘having much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition by Euclid’. Certainly he did not make the same mistake again when introducing Holmes as a character in the novel-length work The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). This work maintains its unity of characters, theme, location, and dramatic continuity.

The explanation

Most stories featuring Sherlock Holmes turn on his ability to interpret small details of evidence overlooked by others – particularly his rivals Lestrade and Gregson of the Yard. He deals with the first set of clues in A Study in Scarlet plausibly enough. The dead body in an empty room and the writing in blood on the wall provide him with clues that the muderer was tall, strong, that the blood was the murderer’s, that poison was involved, and that the word ‘RACHE’ on the wall is German.

These are all typical elements in a Holmes story. But Conan Doyle, perhaps because he was tackling a novel or perhaps because this was Holmes’s first fictional appearance, pushes these analytic processes to a level which strains credulity. We are asked to believe that Holmes can recognise and discriminate amongst the footprints of several people who have walked across a muddy pathway – not once in the same direction, but more than once in both directions.

Jefferson Hope (the murderer), Enoch Drebber (the victim), constable John Rance, and his colleague Murcher all trample across the path leading to the empty house on the night of the murder. But we are asked to believe that Holmes is able to accurately work out the sequence of their comings and goings, as well as similar movements of Hope’s horse-drawn cab.

These analyses are simply not credible – even making allowances for what is essentially a work of popular fiction. Some of the later Holmes stories have similar weaknesses, but they are piled on to an unacceptable degree in A Study in Scarlet. Together with the structural flaw examined above, they render the novel an interesting first attempt or a flawed prototype for the successful shorter fictions that were to follow.

Deduction or induction?

The most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he is able to combine acute observation with an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modelled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

In Watson’s narrative, Doyle sometimes calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ and other times ‘analysis’. Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term ‘deduction’ in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning.

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be … There are few people however, who, if you told them the result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.

A Study in Scarlet – study resources

The best current editions of the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a biographical chronology of Conan Doyle, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Conan Doyle – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – plot summary

Part 1

1. Dr John Watson has retired injured from the army. He is introduced to Sherlock Holmes with a view to their sharing lodgings. Holmes is a mercurial character who dabbles in scientific experiments.

2. Holmes has a patchy grasp of general knowledge but a profound understanding of forensic science and anatomy. He has written papers on the philosophy of deduction and works as a freelance consultant detective.

3. Holmes is summoned by letter to assist in an unsolved murder in Brixton. He examines the dead body in an empty room whilst Scotland Yard detectives Lestrade and Gregson theorise about an explanation. There is rivalry between Holmes and the detectives – and between each other.

4. Holmes delivers to Watson a working explanation of the crime, devised from a minute examination of the room and its contents. They interview the policeman who discovered the body, who confirms Holmes’ description of the potential murderer.

5. Holmes advertises for the owner of a woman’s ring found at the crime scene. It is answered by an old woman who then gives them the slip when pursued.

6. The newspapers give a variety of accounts of the crime. Gregson arrives at Baker Street claiming he has arrested the murderer – the son of the murdered man’s landlady. His rival Lestrade arrives to announce the murder of Drebber’s secretary, Stargerson.

7. Lestrade describes tracking down Stargerson and finding him murdered. Holmes claims from the details now established that he has a complete answer to the mystery. He tests this by poisoning a dog. He is challenged by Lestrade and Gregson to reveal his findings, and when a cab driver is summoned, Holmes pronounces him the murderer – Jefferson Hope.

Part 2

1. Many years earlier, John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy are lost in the wilderness of Utah, USA. They are dying of thirst and starvation, but are eventually rescued by a caravan of Mormons.

2. Brigham Young establishes the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City. After many years Ferrier becomes a successful and rich farmer. Lucy is courted by Jefferson Hope, a hunter and frontiersman.

3. Brigham Young insists that because she is still single, Lucy should marry one of the Four Elders. Ferrier is given a month to decide.

4. Elders Drebber and Stargerson menace Ferrier with their claims for Lucy. With only two days left, Jefferson Hope arrives and rescues Ferrier and Lucy. They set off for Carson City in Nevada.

5. When Hope goes hunting for food, he returns to find that Ferrier has been killed and Lucy abducted by the Mormons. Returning to Salt Lake City, Hope learns that Stargerson shot Ferrier and Lucy has been forcibly married to Drebber.

When Lucy dies a month later, Hope seizes her wedding ring and begins a long pursuit of Drebber and Stargerson, seeking vengeance.

6. Watson then reports the confession of the captured Hope. He followed the two Elders to London and stalked them as a cab driver. He takes Drebber as a drunken passenger and presents him with a box of pills, some of which are poisoned. Drebber takes one and dies. Hope then goes to Stangerson’s hotel and after a struggle stabs him in the heart.

7. Hope dies in prison. Holmes explains to Watson how he analysed details of the case. Lestrade and Gregson get all the credit for solving the crime.

A Study in Scarlet – characters

Dr John Watson	a retired army medical officer
Sherlock Holmes	a freelance consultant detective
Lestrade	a Scotland Yard detective
Tobias Gregson	a Scotland Yard detective
Enoch Drebber	a Mormon Elder who marries Lucy
Joseph Stargerson	a Mormon Elder, Drebber’s ‘secretary’
Jefferson Hope	an American frontiersman and hunter
John Ferrier	a frontiersman who becomes a rich farmer
Lucy Ferrier	his adopted daughter

More Sherlock Holmes
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

A Summing Up

March 11, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Summing Up is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story was first published in A Haunted House (1944) and then later reprinted with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1973.

houses in Westminster

A Summing Up – critical commentary

Like all the other stories in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence, this is principally a study in social alienation, egoism, and the life of the imagination. It is yet another example of people interacting politely in what appears on the surface to be a civilized manner, whilst the narrative reveals the emotional and intellectual chasms that separate them.

Bertram Pritchard is an almost comic study of the crashing bore, even though he is ‘an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath.’

Written down what he said would be incredible — not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.

Sasha Latham on the other hand is ‘tall [and] handsome’ but inwardly feels lacking in confidence. Disattending to her fellow guest, she retreats into a series of imaginative speculations concerning the nature and the history of society.

There is no overt criticism of Pritchard, only deeply ironic counterpoint. Sasha Latham even manages to feel sympathetic towards him as she searches through a jumble of memories and sense impressions for some sort of meaningful insight.

And she finds it – very briefly – in the vision of a tree she sees in the garden. She also realises that the revelation might come by accident, and it does as she feels that the human soul ‘is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloft on that tree’ – before the revelation is shattered both by Pritchard guiding her back to what he sees as their social duty in the house, and by the inarticulate shriek she hears from the city that surrounds them.

A Summing Up – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

A Summing Up – story synopsis

Bertram Pritchard and Sasha Latham are guests at an evening party given by Clarissa Dalloway in central London. They stroll together in the small garden in the shadow of Westminster. He is a civil servant and a complete bore: she is uncertain about herself, but the story is articulated largely from her point of view.

Because Bertram Pritchard is a non-stop talker about trivialities, she stops listening to him and thinks instead of how there is now a civilized society where once there were swamps. She admires the courage and the sophistication of other people to succeed in society – even Bertram Pritchard.

They look over the garden wall, and she becomes conscious of the fact that they are in the middle of a busy city. Then they sit and talk to people she doesn’t actually know, and her thoughts drift back to fragments of what she learned at school. She wonders which of her impressions of the world are the most accurate. She has a visionary experience that the human soul is single and unattached. But at that precise moment an inarticulate cry sounds from within the city, and her vision escapes into the night.

A Summing Up – characters

Bertram Pritchard	an ‘esteemed’ civil servant and bore
Mrs Sasha Latham	a guest at the party
Clarissa Dalloway	a society hostess

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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