Listings for Reader:
Vita Sackville-West
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Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader
'I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for "Mrs Dalloway", but as I didn't want to write you the 'How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much' sort of letter, I thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader, which I am sorry to say I have now done.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
unknown : unknown
'I lay in an immense bed, with firelight flickering on the ceiling, and read a book by a theosophist.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Marcel Proust : Sodom et Gonorrhe
'The rest of the time I read Proust. As no one on board has ever heard of Proust, but has enough French to translate the title, I am looked at rather askance for the numerous volumes of Sodome et Gomorrhe which litter the decks.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Marcel Proust : unknown
'The parties of Proust gain in fantasy from being read in such circumstances, (I don't mean in the bath, but on deck;) they recede, achieve a perspective; they become historical almost, like Veronese banquets through which flit a few masked Longhi figures, and ruffled by the uneasy impish breeze of French Freud. I re-enter their company after struggling with the Persian irregular verbs.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Marcel Proust : unknown
'I meant to have written such a lot, but somehow I haven't; there's always a whale or a murder to look at, (a tortoise or a theorbo!) so I have written a few letters, - precious few, - and read a lot of Proust, and that's all.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Louis de Robert : Comment debuta Marcel Proust
'Have you read "Comment debuta Marcel Proust"? I cried over it. (By the way, that might be quite a good book to publish in translation; it's quite short.)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : unknown
'I shall have, however, to give up reading your works at dinner, for they are too disturbing. I can't explain, I'll have to explain verbally some day. Unless you can guess. How well you write, though, confound you. When I read you, I feel no one has ever written English prose before, - Knocked it about, put it in its place, made it into a servant.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway
'Last night I went to bed very early and read Mrs Dalloway. It was a very curious sensation: I thought you were in the room - But there was only Pippin, trying to burrow under my quilt, and the night noises outside, which are so familiar in one's own room; and the house was all quiet.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Benjamin Robert Haydon : Autobiography
'I lie in bed, and watch the fire on the ceiling, and hear the clock strike, and think how delicious it will be when you come to stay here - I read Haydon, and an excellent Cruickshank-ish book called Murder for Profit.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader
'then the old problem: what shall I read at dinner, propped open by a fork? decide finally on Virginia, grab the common reader, a pair of spectacles, a pencil, go in to dinner,'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
James Boswell : Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
' - I read Boswell's tour in the Hebrides and speculate agreeably on the probable difference between Boswell's conception of the Hebrides and yours - '
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Andre Gide : Memoirs
'I am reading Gide's memoirs, very disappointing I think, so far; I have found hardly anything that pleased me except the marble that had been dropped into the hole in the door. I read Jesting Pilate and liked it. I have tried Arabia Deserta for the fiftieth time, but can't manage it. Yet no doubt it is a more monumental work than Jesting Pilate.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
Henry Fielding : Tom Jones
' I've read a lot, Boswell, de Quincy, Tom Jones, Plutarch. One sits in the sun until the heat of it drives one indoors again.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
William Cowper : The Task, Part III (The Garden)
' What else? Yes, I have read Cowper: "The stable yields a stercoraceous heap...." It bears an unpleasant resemblance to The Land, doesn't it? But it has its good moments, "While fancy, like the finger of a clock, Runs the great circuit, and is still at home." I read Les faux-monnayeurs too. I remember you said you didn't like it. Yet I wonder you weren't interested by the method of springing decisive events on the reader, without the usual psychological preparation. I thought it gave a stange effect of real life. I liked it better than Si le grain ne meurt, in which I liked only the beginning of the 3rd third volume, about the French litterateurs;'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse
'But everything is blurred to a haze by your book of which I have just read the last words, and that is the only thing which seems real. I can only say that I am dazzled and bewitched. How did you do it? how did you walk along that razor-edge without falling? why did you say anything so silly as that I 'shouldn't like it'?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Helen Waddell : The Wandering Scholars
'I am reading a delicious book called The Wandering Scholars - I wish I knew Latin.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : The Sun and the Fish
'I can't tell you how much I like "The Sun and the Fish", (all the more because it is all about things we did together,) and I am ordering a copy of Time and Tide.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Serial / periodical
William Butler Yeats : Leda and the Swan
'I am grateful to you for having told me to buy Yeats' poems, they kept me happy in the train all the way. I like the one about Leda, How can those terrified vague fingers push That feathered glory from her loosening thighs?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Unknown
Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway
'I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for "Mrs Dalloway", but as I didn't want to write you the 'How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much' sort of letter, I thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader, which I am sorry to say I have now done.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : Orlando
'It seems to me the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read, - excelling even your own Lighthouse.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Manuscript: Codex
J.C. Squire : The Observer
'I shall never speak to Squire again. I never read anything like it for sheer idiocy.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Newspaper
Herbert Read : unknown
'I tried to read Read on poetry - Words words words, - and all polysyllabic. That isn't poetry; not even the explanation of it.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf : Orlando
'I came in just now, having been to Wertheim's to buy a pair of gloves for 4 marks, and meant to go on with my story of the bank clerk who loses his memory, but having stopped at the book shop on the way and bought Orlando in Tauchnitz I began to read, and so lost myself that the evening is already nearly gone. Do you know, I never read Orlando without tears pricking my eyes?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Arnold Zweig : The Case of Sergeant Grisha
'But I did read one that I liked: Sergeant Grisha.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Unknown
Rebecca West : Harriet Hume
'I say, has Rebecca West's book come your way? It is unreadable. It is a brew of Meredith, 'Orlando' and Amanda Ross.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Clifford Kitchin : Death of my Aunt
'By the way, Harold and I both like Clifford Kitchin's murder book, and I shall recommend it on Thursday, so tell Leonard to notice if it affects sales.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Harold Nicolson : Peacemaking
'Tell Leonard to read Harold's new book. It is more in his line than yours, being political, but I think you would be amused by some passages in his diary, which is the second half of the book. I have a great admiration for Harold, - quite unprejudiced. I like his lucid mind, and his ease of expression. He is like a person who knows how to use a scythe, - rhythmic, sharp, and sure.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf : Three Guineas
'In the meantime, let me say that I read you with delight, even though I wanted to exclaim, "Oh, BUT,Virginia..." on 50% of your pages.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
unknown : [Elizabethan lyrics]
'Now I have had my dinner, or rather Pippin has had most of my dinner, and it is dark and the house is silent, and the book of Elizabethan lyrics which I have been trying to read seems to be all about love-(blast it)-so I threw it across the room in anger because it made things worse.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Marcel Proust : unknown
'I am reading Proust, and dislike his mentality more and more. I get the sense of that flabby, diseased, asthmatic man, all frowsty in bed till evening, and preoccupied with such contemptible things - nothing but women and snobbery.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Vita Sackville-West : The Land
'Darling, do you know what I did last night after writing to you? I meant to finish my lecture, but fell to reading the Georgics (mine, not Virgil's), and really I thought they were rather good.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
William Wordsworth : unknown
'Oh dear, [...] that's what comes of living alone in the rain and reading Wordsworth.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
unknown : [nineteenth-century works]
'I have read so much of the 19th century lately that I can scarcely restrain myself from writing in that manner - whether in prose or poetry - and the more I read, the more I am convinced that I was born out of season: I should have lived in an age when seriousness and noble thoughts found an echo.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Unknown
Virginia Woolf : Orlando
'My own darling, I write to you in the middle of reading "Orlando", in such a turmoil of excitement and confusion that I scarcely know where (or who!) I am. It came this morning by the first post and I have been reading it ever since, and am now half-way through. Virginia sent it to me in a lovely leather binding - bless her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
unknown : [selections from a Greek Anthology]
'Of course I was much in love with you then, in a very young and (also) uninformed way; it was young and fresh like Greek poetry, (I have just been reading some translations from the Greek Anthology), but it was like a spring then, like the mountain springs we used to drink from in Persia; but now it is like a deep deep lake which can never dry up.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Book
Edmund Wilson : Through the Embassy Window; Harold Nicolson
'As I read the "New Yorker" article (getting more and more indignant) I thought, "This man, although he is saying some exceedingly foolish things, is a man of intelligence who also writes very well." '
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West Print: Newspaper
unknown : unknown
'Oh - a propos of that, I've been absolutely engaged by a book about Knole, in which Eddy is described as "author and musician" and I am described as "the wife of the Hon. Harold Nicolson C.M.G." '
