The London Scene E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Take a stroll through London with Virginia Woolf as your guide in this beautifully illustrated book. Virginia Woolf relished any opportunity for a stroll around London. She found great pleasure in observing the city and its people - noticing the subtle details that others often miss. In this collection of stunning essays, Woolf gives us an intimate tour of her beloved hometown. We venture through unfamiliar pockets of London and revisit its most famous landmarks; we smell the salty air of the East End docks and hear the echoing sounds inside the Houses of Parliament; Woolf transports us to the bustle of Oxford Street and the more peaceful moments on Hampstead Heath. Originally published bi-monthly in 1931 by Good Housekeeping, the essays in The London Scene exhibit Virginia Woolf at the height of her literary powers and present an unparalleled and meditative portrait of an extraordinary metropolis - capturing the London of the 1930s and also the eternal city we recognise today. 'While it might not list the hottest restaurants and the newest boutique hotels, The London Scene gives us an amalgam of intelligence and beauty that few, if any, guidebooks provide.' - Francine Prose '1930s London comes alive in these six evocative essays . . . a discerning, affectionate tour of her beloved city.' - Washington Post

Leseprobe

‘While it might not list the hottest restaurants and the newest boutique hotels, The London Scene gives us an amalgam of intelligence and beauty that few, if any, guidebooks provide.’ – Francine Prose

‘1930s London comes alive in these six evocative essays … a discerning, affectionate tour of [Woolf’s] beloved city.’ – Washington Post

‘London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. …To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.’

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction by Hermione LeeThe Docks of LondonOxford Street TideGreat Men’s HousesAbbeys and Cathedrals‘This is the House of Commons’Portrait of a LondonerAbout the AuthorCopyright

INTRODUCTION

by Hermione Lee

VIRGINIA WOOLF was a Londoner who wrote and thought and walked about the city all her life. It is a subject and setting for many of her novels, especially Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and The Years. As a child growing up in Kensington, she watched the city with excitement and fear. As a young woman in the 1900s, recovering from breakdown and starting to write, solitary ‘street-haunting’ in Bloomsbury was a symbol to her of the new century’s freedoms. When she and Leonard Woolf got married in 1912, they lived for a while just off Fleet Street, under the shadow of St Paul’s, relishing the noise and energy of City life. When, in 1924, she returned to London, after several years of illness and quiet retirement in Richmond, to the house in Tavistock Square where the Woolfs would live and work until the war, she was ecstatic: ‘London thou art a jewel of jewels…music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach’.(1)Her excitement filled the novel she was writing, Mrs Dalloway – a celebration of ‘life, London, this moment in June’, and of the glittering shimmer of post-war party-going, but in a city haunted by the war and its dead.