Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Content
- Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf
- “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in The Waves
- “The Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism
- Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Them
- “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf's Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach
- Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf
- The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
- Crowding Clarissa's Garden
- The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew
- The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather's One of Ours
- Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing
- “This, I fancy, must be the sea”: Thalassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's Writing
- Wild Swimming
- The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob's Room and Orlando
- The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One's Own in Nature and Art
- “The Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
- Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels
- “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare's Clothing?
- “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf's Life and Work
- Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
- Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in Cornwall, 1905
- “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes
- Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and Exploring the Self Through Nature
- Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer
- “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in The Years
- Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy
- “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf
- Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion in Woolf's Narration
- “To give the moment whole”: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)unity in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
- Spengler's The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats
- Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf's Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Crowding Clarissa's Garden
- Frontmatter
- Table of Content
- Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf
- “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in The Waves
- “The Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism
- Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Them
- “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf's Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach
- Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf
- The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
- Crowding Clarissa's Garden
- The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew
- The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather's One of Ours
- Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing
- “This, I fancy, must be the sea”: Thalassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's Writing
- Wild Swimming
- The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob's Room and Orlando
- The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One's Own in Nature and Art
- “The Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
- Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels
- “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare's Clothing?
- “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf's Life and Work
- Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
- Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in Cornwall, 1905
- “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes
- Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and Exploring the Self Through Nature
- Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer
- “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in The Years
- Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy
- “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf
- Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion in Woolf's Narration
- “To give the moment whole”: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)unity in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
- Spengler's The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats
- Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf's Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Summary
Clarissa's “plunge” into London on the first page of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) offers a rallying point for critics intent on establishing Woolf as a writer of the modern city, the subject of last year's conference. “I love walking in London,” Clarissa says in the opening pages; “Really it's better than walking in the country” (MD 6). But Clarissa's opening “plunge,” of course, echoes an earlier “plunge” through the French windows “at Bourton into the open air” when she was eighteen (3). By allowing the image of that childhood garden to dominate the opening pages of her novel, Woolf shows readers the real contours of the walks that take place in Mrs. Dalloway. The choice of London walks over country ones is a red herring; for Clarissa, walking is simply inextricable from memories of country life. Although Morris Beja offered a fantastic sketch of “The London of Mrs. Dalloway” in the Spring 1977 Virginia Woolf Miscellany, London is not the only, or even the primary, terrain of the novel. Beneath the cityscape lies a prior, natural landscape that resonates throughout Mrs. Dalloway. As the curious phrase “plunged at Bourton into the open air” makes clear, Bourton, for Clarissa, is the outdoors, and it is the grounds of her childhood home, which Clarissa remembers so vividly, that underlie the motorcars and shops of Mrs. Dalloway's London.
But here we should pause to consider Clarissa's hesitation. She does, of course, eventually sally forth into London, but Woolf does not make that movement explicit in the novel, as she does in the earlier “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). Whereas in the short story we watch as Clarissa “stepped out into the street” (CSF 152), in the novel the memories of Bourton replace that action. And in those memories Woolf draws us back to a moment in which Clarissa paused on the edge of that natural space. As Deborah Guth observes in “‘What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Fiction as Self–Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway,” “Woolf portrays Clarissa's sense of plunging with such intensity that the reader, momentarily lost in the syntax of the phrase, almost overlooks the fact that immediately after this she is still standing at the window, looking and just looking” (25).
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- Virginia Woolf and the Natural World , pp. 78 - 83Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011