\u27Dying to live\u27: remembering and forgetting May Sinclair”

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1019/thumbnail.jp

Virginia Woolf\u27s early novels: Finding a voice

On 26 July 1922, shortly after she finished writing her third novel, Jacob\u27s Room, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary her feeling that, in writing this novel, she had \u27found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in [her] own voice\u27 (D2, p. 186). Critics have often followed Woolf\u27s lead in regarding Jacob\u27s Room as a starting-point of some kind. Many monographs on Woolf discuss the novels that preceded Jacob\u27s Room (The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919)) only in passing, or not at all, and where they are given more sustained attention they are often dismissed as \u27apprentice efforts\u27. I Woolf\u27s comments appear to authorise developmental reading of her oeuvre, readings which assume that her early novel were attempts to work out who she was as a novelist before, in early middle age, she found her characteristic fictional voice.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1013/thumbnail.jp

The remains of several hearts

On 27 December 1910, Virginia Stephen ate some hearts at Saxon Sydney-Turner\u27s house in Brighton. Her account of the visit is both intense and dismissive. For a few hours, she glimpsed the contours and colours of lives that were profoundly different from her own. And then she went home. But fourteen years later, she remembered Mrs Turner and her own younger self when she sat down to describe what it means to be a writer. In this essay I ask: when in 1924 Virginia Woolf wrote the famous words that are the seed of this volume, what memories was she reviving? Who was she in December 1910? Why did she pick December, rather than the more obvious May (when George V ascended the throne), or November, when the first Post-Impressionist exhibition opened at the Grafton Galleries. There are only a few published surviving papers from December 19 10 - no diary, just a handful of letters; but if we read those letters carefully we see the young Virginia Stephen - not yet 30 years old - staging her own exclusions f ro m life through a series of witty and poignant vignettes, and transforming herself into a writer, one of those curious people who observe the lives of others and make them their own by writing them down. Virginia Stephen in December 1910 was struggling to re-create her self, a self that had been dissolved by depression for most of the previous year, and her letters from that month show her transforming the pain of feeling left out into a triumph. It was during that month that she started to imagine what it actually meant to be a writer, crafting imaginary, evanescent worlds from which, after the first wild moment of creation, she would forever be excluded.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1023/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to Mary Sinclair: A Modern Victorian

May Sinclair (1863-1946) was a bestselling novelist who was one of the first British women to go out to the Belgian front in 1914. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian draws on newly discovered manuscripts to tell the story of this woman whose emotional isolation bears witness to the great price Victorian women had to pay for their intellectual freedom.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1121/thumbnail.jp

Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text

At the end of a semester teaching an upper-level course called Lesbian Literatures, I always ask students to talk about which texts they recommend keeping the next time I teach the course. They mostly love Virginia Woolf\u27s Orlando; they usually dislike Radclyffe Hall\u27s The Well of Loneliness, but they see why it should be in the course; and, almost to a person, they tell me I should drop Passing. It\u27s not about lesbians, they complain; the lesbian interpretations we developed were far-fetched; the novel deals with racial passing, and not with passing as a heterosexual. In this essay, I explore several ways of teaching Passing in a course on lesbian literature and suggest some reasons for student dissatisfaction with it in such a context. Much of their resistance, I believe, grows out of their inexperience with and potential reluctance to accept the socially and culturally constructed nature of racial and sexual identities, or the ways in which such identities are mutually constitutive-what Kimberle Crenshaw has called intersectionality: In my Lesbian Literatures classroom, I encourage students to reflect on the historical and cultural contingency of identity categories and on the multivalence of literary writing. The ambiguous nature of much of the language of Passing encourages students to think about how their assumptions about the social and cultural configuration of race, sexuality, and gender shape not only the ways they read written and visual texts but also their own identities and their experience of the world around them. Perhaps it should go without saying that their resistance to reading Passing as a lesbian text has not deterred me from including it in the course. Rather, knowing how intensely students deny the novel\u27s engagement with lesbian erotic experience has allowed me to experiment with different ways of using the book to help them question their habits of reading and of analysis.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1009/thumbnail.jp

Freud’s theory of metaphor: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, nineteenth-century science and figurative language

At the beginning of the final lecture in Freud\u27s 1933 publication, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud declared summarily and triumphantly that psychoanalysis was a science. \u27As a specialist science, a branch of psychology ... it is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one.\u271 This was a view he continued to stress as his career drew to a close. In 1940, seven years after the lecture on the Weltanschauung, he noted that psychology was ca natural science like any other\u27, asking defiantly: (What else can it be?\u272https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1012/thumbnail.jp

Contagious Ectasy : May Sinclair\u27s War Journals

The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry, and the trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. The essays in this volume, by a number of leading critics in the field, considers some of the best-known, and some of the least-known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. Ranging from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and H.D. to Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts, the contributors challenge current thinking about women\u27s responses to the First World War and explore the differences between women writers of the period, thus questioning the very categorization of women\u27s writing.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1018/thumbnail.jp

Once a feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project has created a selection of texts central to our many and different experiences as feminists. I used to say that Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year was the story of my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965, when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor, had a child, and followed his career—which in the novel led Emma to Hereford for a summer season of plays

Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing