Listings for Reader:
Virginia Stephen
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Christopher Marlowe : Doctor Faustus
Virginia Stephen to Thoby Stephen, 2 November 1901: 'I have been reading Marlow [sic], and I was so much more impressed by him than I should be, that I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightnt be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers -- though I still feel a little oppressed by his -- greatness I suppose [...] I read Dr Faustus, and Edward II -- I thought them very near the great man -- with more humanity I should say -- not all on such a grand tragic scale [comments further on points of comparison and contrast between Shakespeare and Marlowe].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Christopher Marlowe : Edward II
Virginia Stephen to Thoby Stephen, 2 November 1901: 'I have been reading Marlow [sic], and I was so much more impressed by him than I should be, that I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightnt be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers -- though I still feel a little oppressed by his -- greatness I suppose [...] I read Dr Faustus, and Edward II -- I thought them very near the great man -- with more humanity I should say -- not all on such a grand tragic scale [comments further on points of comparison and contrast between Shakespeare and Marlowe].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
William Shakespeare : Cymbeline
Virginia Stephen to Thoby Stephen, 2 November 1901: 'I have been reading Marlow [sic], and I was so much more impressed by him than I should be, that I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightnt be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers -- though I still feel a little oppressed by his -- greatness I suppose [...] I read Dr Faustus, and Edward II -- I thought them very near the great man -- with more humanity I should say -- not all on such a grand tragic scale [comments further on points of comparison and contrast between Shakespeare and Marlowe].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
: eighteenth-century texts
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 1 October 1905: 'We have had visitors for the last 4 weeks [...] I have written quite a lot [...] Also I have read a good deal, mostly 18th century'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Walter Savage Landor : Pericles and Aspasia
'[Virginia Stephen] was reading Walter Savage Landor's Pericles and Aspasia (1836), and writing, as was her habit during this time [Spring 1906], a description of her surroundings (unpublished).'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Ernest Renan : Cahiers de Jeunesse
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906: 'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] I think it a virtue in the French language that it submits to prose, whereas English curls and knots and breaks off in short spasms of rage. Also I am reading my dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy, and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It is a beautiful edition.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Christina Rossetti : poems
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906: 'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] Also I am reading my dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy, and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It is a beautiful edition.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
John Keats : poems
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906: 'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] Also I am reading my dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy, and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It is a beautiful edition.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
John Keats : poems
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, ?30 December 1906: 'I have been reading Keats most of the day. I think he is about the greatest of all [...] I like cool Greek Gods, and amber skies, and shadow like running water, and all his great palpable words -- symbols for immaterial things.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Henry James : The American Scene
Virginia Stephen to Clive Bell, 18 August 1907: 'I am reading Henry James on America; and feel myself as one embalmed in a block of smooth amber: it is not unpleasant, very tranquil, as a twilight shore -- but such is not the stuff of genius: no, it should be a swift stream.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
G. E. Moore : Principia Ethica
Virginia Stephen to Clive Bell, 19 August 1908: 'I split my head over Moore every night, feeling ideas travelling to the remotest part of my brain, and setting up a feeble disturbance, hardly to be called thought. It is almost a physical feeling, as though some little coil of brain unvisited by any blood so far, and pale as wax, had got a little life into it at last, but had not strength to keep it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Thomas Love Peacock : unknown
Wednesday 15 February 1922: 'Of my reading I will now try to make some note. 'First Peacock; Nightmare Abbey, & Crotchet Castle. Both are so much better than I remember. Doubtless, Peacock is a taste acquired in maturity. When I was young, reading him in a railway carriage in Greece, sitting opposite Thoby [Woolf, reader's brother], I remember, who pleased me immensely by approving my remark that Meredith had got his women from Peacock [...] And now more than anything I want beautiful prose [...] And I enjoy satire more. I like the scepticism of his mind more [...] And then they're so short; & I read them in little yellowish perfectly appropriate first editions. 'The masterly Scott has me by the hair once more. Old Mortality. I'm in the middle; & have to put up with some dull sermons; but I doubt he can be dull, because everything is so much in keeping [goes on to comment further on text]'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
unknown : '18th Century prose'
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Richard Hakluyt : unknown
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Prosper Merimee : unknown
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Thomas Carlyle : unknown
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Walter Scott : Letters
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
J. G. Lockhart : Life of Walter Scott
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Edward Gibbon : unknown
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
unknown : biographical works
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Percy Bysshe Shelley : unknown
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Richard Hakluyt : unknown
Sunday 8 December 1929: 'It was the Elizabethan prose writers I loved first & most wildly, stirred by Hakluyt, which father lugged home [from library] for me [...] He must have been 65; I 15 or 16, then; & why I dont know, but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventurers, & no doubt practised their style in my copy books. I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe [...] & I also wrote a history of Women; & a history of my own family -- all very longwinded & El[izabe]than in style.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
William Cowper : unknown
Saturday 7 September 1935: 'A heavenly quiet morning reading Alfieri by the open window & not smoking [...] I've stopped 2 days now The Years [novel in progress]:& feel the power to settle, calmly & firmly on books coming back at once. John Bailey's life, come today, makes me doubt though -- what? Everything [...] I've only just glanced & got the smell of Lit. dinner. Lit. Sup, Lit this that & the other -- & the one remark to the effect that Virginia Woolf, of all people, has been given Cowper by Desmond [MacCarthy], & likes it! I, who read Cowper when I was 15 -- d----d nonsense.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Leo Tolstoy : War and Peace
Thursday 22 March 1940: 'I read Tolstoy at Breakfast -- Goldenweiser, that I translated with Kot in 1923 & have almost forgotten. Always the same reality -- like touching an exposed electric wire. Even so imperfectly conveyed -- his rugged short cut mind -- to me the most, not sympathetic, but inspiring, rousing, genius in the raw [...] I remember that was my feeling about W. & Peace, read in bed at Twickenham. Old [Sir George] Savage [doctor] picked it up. "Splendid stuff!" & Jean [Thomas, owner of nursing home] tried to admire what was a revelation to me. Its directness, its reality. Yet he's against photographic realism.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
William Shakespeare : Cymbeline
'I have been reading Marlow, and I was so much more impressed by him than I thought I should be, that I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightn't be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers-though I still feel a little oppressed by his-greatness I suppose. I shall want a lecture when I see you; to clear up some points about the Plays. I mean about the characters. Why aren't they more human? Imogen and Posthumous and Cymbeline-I find them beyond me-Is this my feminine weakness in the upper region?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Christopher Marlowe : Dr Faustus
'Tomorrow I go on to Ben Jonson, but I shan't like him as much as Marlow. I read Dr Faustus...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Christopher Marlowe : Edward II
'Tomorrow I go on to Ben Jonson, but I shan't like him as much as Marlow. I read Dr Faustus, and Edward II...'
