Listings for Reader:
Antonia White
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Florence MacCunn : Sir Walter Scott's Friends
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair. Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
David Herbert Lawrence : [Letters]
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair. Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
David Herbert Lawrence : [works]
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair. Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Thomas Carlyle : [unknown]
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair. Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
J. Soames : [article on Lawrence in 'Life and Letters]
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages, meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair. Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Serial / periodical
Thomas Carlyle : [Works]
'I am reading Carlyle as usual. What a man! ... When I read men like C., I pant along happily at their skirts, thinking myself safe and then, not even knowing I'm there, [they] cuff me with a great fist of a phrase that sends me sprawling ... Reading C. one feels that [italics] nothing [end italics] is worth writing, least of all own tiny things. No one ever had less [italics] message [end italics] than I have and that my duty in times like these is hardly to 'chirrup' on a quiet bough...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Jane Welsh : [letters to Carlyle]
'I have been in bed 9 days now and still must not get up. My one enjoyment is in reading the letters of Carlyle and Jane Welsh before their marriage... She begins in the smartest, pertest, Jane Welsh way, but gradually the other Jane begins to break through, passionate, melancholy, impatient, fun-loving - fame-hungry almost - and nervous. But she seems to care for him only as a friend - the idea of marriage is disgusting to her. She is very like me; they had not met for months, had only two hours, and she wasted it all by forcing a quarrel she did not want. And her "arch enemy" was headache.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Jane Welsh : [letters to Carlyle]
'Still in bed. Have finished the love letters and left my pair on the brink of marriage... [She] is as lively and hare-brained a rattle as anyone could wish... She nearly killed herself by going out hatless in an east wind so as not to upset the dressing of her hair; another time she fell off a wall "trying to hide her ankles" from Dr Fyffe. Yet another time in her zeal for study she sewed the bodices to the skirts of her frocks so that she could dress in ten minutes.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Leo Tolstoy : Anna Karenina
'I am re-reading "Anna Karenina" with great pleasure and only wish I could attempt a book on a scale like that. So many groups of distinct, yet intertwining lives, all so broad yet so sharp in detail.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [MSS by or about Carlyle]
'A week in Edinburgh looking up Carlyle MSS before Christmas'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
Harriet Martineau : [works]
'At present sunk deep in Harriet Martineau: very much attracted in spite of her complacent priggishness and self-righteousness. A very [italics] true [end italics] nature there; honest and unflinching and courageous. One gets nourished by the oddest people...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Jane Welsh : [letters to Carlyle]
'The more I go into Jane, the more, in a way, she repels me. The Love-Letters, read for the 3rd time, show [italics] him [end italics] in a far better light. She is maddening with her archness and her flirtations and her sham high-browism and her "wee wee Cicero". But it is interesting to see how awful young girls are.; novelists, except Tolstoy, never se it...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Santayana : Reason in Common Sense
'[included in diary entry] SANTAYANA ('Reason in Common Sense') "There may well be intense consciousness in the total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams, in madness and may be found for all we know, in the depths of universal nature".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
John Keats : [Letters]
'[included in diary entry] [italics] Keats [end italics] (Letter to Geo and Thos Keats Dec 28 1817) "negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". this quality goes to make "a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously". I do not think I have any 'creative' genius. What I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to [italics] recgnise [end italics] things.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
John Keats : [Letters]
'I rarely take a book about with me now and Keats' letters have lasted me nearly two months'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Field : [book on child psychology]
'Reading (except the Field book on child psychology...) too indigestible. Even H[umphrey] J[ennings]'s innocuous [italics] Little town in France [end italics] began by being sweet but sat heavily on my belly.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Humphrey Jennings : Little town in France
'Reading (except the Field book on child psychology...) too indigestible. Even H[umphrey] J[ennings]'s innocuous [italics] Little town in France [end italics] began by being sweet but sat heavily on my belly.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Unknown
Marcel Proust : [works]
'Remember with great pleasure weeks recovering from abortion in 1924 and for once holding my life in suspension, not wanting anything, not even concerned with the future, but perfectly happy reading Proust...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Tom Hopkinson : [diary notebook]
'I have read Tom's [note]book. I had no right to perhaps, without telling him but he has read mine and I did. It gave me a real shock - perhaps because it so confirmed my own picture of what happened and which he so strenuously denied [...] Of course it is painful to me to read of all his natural, happy ecstasy over Frances, because it shows me so clearly what I have missed in him'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
Peter Warlock : [letters]
'For days I've been trying to copy out that passage - pages from Heseltine [Peter Warlock, the composer]'s letters: the book is on my table: I have the time. Why can't I do it?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Francis Thompson : [poems]
'On my First Communion day, November 21st 1914, I felt nothing at the actual receiving of the sacrament but in reading Francis Thompson's poems that day (my mother had bought them for me not knowing what she was giving me) I found something terrible, sweet and transforming which really did make me draw breath and pant after it...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
David Herbert Lawrence : Captain's Doll, The
'Read [italics] The Captain's Doll [end italics] [D.H. Lawrence] again (about the 8th time I think) and like it better than ever. Odd how again, though, the woman is more real than the man. The man is a mouthpiece for the right ideas but he doesn't quite [italics] exist [end italics]. Hannele exists yet the doll is oddly more alive than the Captain.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
John Woolman : Journal of John Woolman
'[a young Quaker] has made me read Woolman's journal which I found very genuine and moving but not so [italics] bouleversant [italics] as to convert me to the Friends. Can one talk of spirituality as being "provincial"? Or is that just my old Catholic snobbery?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Charlotte d'Erlanger : [unknown]
'[she thinks her own writing] was almost always imitation of what I had read. I realised the immense difference between Charlotte's work and my own. Charlotte [d'Erlanger], I think was a born writer: forceful, economical and with a real eye. The [italics] quality [end italics] of her work showed through all the ignorance of childhood.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White
Rainer Maria Rilke : Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The
'I have just been reading the record of a dangerous voyage, [italics] Malte Laurids Brigg [end italics]. Yet Rilke returned safely. I have seen a photo of him in a black coat and a watch chain standing in the gateway of a German castle. Where have I been from which there was any danger of not returning? Even from insanity I came back to find a name, a latchkey, a home, identifying friends. In writing I hug the shore all the time. Rilke's book hs affected me profoundly; given me the sense of being out of my depth, of a dazzling interconnection between two worlds in which one simultaneously moves. It has left me sensitised like a watch that has been too near a magnet. The effect was so violent that I had to lie down at intervals while I was reading it; I was shaking as if in a high fever.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Rainer Maria Rilke : Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The
'It is strange that in poetry, when I was eleven, I had what I can only call my first revelation from which I emerged dazed, unable to fit the two worlds together. It has happened again now with the Rilke book'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [poetry]
'It is strange that in poetry, when I was eleven, I had what I can only call my first revelation from which I emerged dazed, unable to fit the two worlds together. It has happened again now with the Rilke book'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : ['trash']
'At the moment, in a sense, "art" means nothing whatever to me. I cannot read (except trash) look at pictures, listen to music.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Rainer Maria Rilke : [works]
'When I read Rilke I seem to understand her ['Roberta's] death... she really had carried it about with her, nourished it, achieved it' [alluding to story about Rilke's death on p.70]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : ['lives of painters']
'I read voraciously the lives of painters and the journals of poets. I am nourished and nourished but I bring forth nothing'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : ['journals of poets']
'I read voraciously the lives of painters and the journals of poets. I am nourished and nourished but I bring forth nothing'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Eric Siepmann : [notebook]
'[in journal entry] from E.O. S[iepmann]'s notebook Free spirit liable to possession or obsession... Debauchery is the most frozen isolation to which man can condemn himself...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
Tom Hopkinson : I have been Drowned
'Every day I become more aware of the extraordinary interpenetration of people's lives. I think of the share Emily had in Djuna's book ['Nightwood'], of the share Emily will have in mine if I can write it, of the small share I have in hers and may have in Siepmann's, of the way I saw something in Tom's drowning story ['I have been Drowned'] of which he was unaware and which Emily brought to flower so that now he has written a quite extraordinary story, beyond anything he has done before and which gave me the same feeling of strangeness, delight, almost awe that Emily's two last poems, "Melville" and "The Creation" gave me'.
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White
Djuna Barnes : Nightwood
'Every day I become more aware of the extraordinary interpenetration of people's lives. I think of the share Emily had in Djuna's book ['Nightwood'], of the share Emily will have in mine if I can write it, of the small share I have in hers and may have in Siepmann's, of the way I saw something in Tom's drowning story ['I have been Drowned'] of which he was unaware and which Emily brought to flower so that now he has written a quite extraordinary story, beyond anything he has done before and which gave me the same feeling of strangeness, delight, almost awe that Emily's two last poems, "Melville" and "The Creation" gave me'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Emily : [poems entitled 'Melville' and 'The Creation']
'Every day I become more aware of the extraordinary interpenetration of people's lives. I think of the share Emily had in Djuna's book ['Nightwood'], of the share Emily will have in mine if I can write it, of the small share I have in hers and may have in Siepmann's, of the way I saw something in Tom's drowning story ['I have been Drowned'] of which he was unaware and which Emily brought to flower so that now he has written a quite extraordinary story, beyond anything he has done before and which gave me the same feeling of strangeness, delight, almost awe that Emily's two last poems, "Melville" and "The Creation" gave me'.
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White
Fyodor Dostoevsky : Brothers Karamazov, The
'Reading the Father Zossima chapter ['The Brothers Karamazov'] I felt the confessor-saint fulfilled exactly the same function as the psycho-analyst. The psycho-analyst cuts a poor and shabby figure beside the saint but he is the best substitute an age of non-faith can produce.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Frances Grigson : [letters to Tom Hopkinson]
'By reading Frances' letters to Tom I have learnt a great deal about Frances and a great deal about Tom. They are not very agreeable things'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Letter
Hoare : [article on Rimbaud]
'Up to dinner, talking to Emily, practising the piano, playing with the children, reading Hoare's admirable article on Rimbaud the day had gone well... Eric has promised me some money for new clothes. Now the planning of them has become a nightmare. I want the clothes very badly. But looking through the pages of [italics] Vogue [end italics] has filled me with numb despair.' [because it is so hard to choose]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Unknown
[n/a] : Vogue
'Up to dinner, talking to Emily, practising the piano, playing with the children, reading Hoare's admirable article on Rimbaud the day had gone well... Eric has promised me some money for new clothes. Now the planning of them has become a nightmare. I want the clothes very badly. But looking through the pages of [italics] Vogue [end italics] has filled me with numb despair.' [because it is so hard to choose]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Serial / periodical
Emily Coleman : Tigron, The
'I love Emily and am too much afraid of hurting her. Her book ['The Tigron' - unpublished] is so very personal to her. she seems to wants us and the world to judge it, not as a thing in itself but "think what this woman must have been through to write it..." I love a great deal of the book but I am not happy about it as a whole.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
William Wordsworth : [Poems]
'When she [Emily Coleman] reads and loves anything she makes it part of her, underlining with a peculiar heaviness... If you borrow Emily's Wordsworth you will read not Wordsworth but Emily's Wordsworth. She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she flings herself upon and passionately possess a work...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Andre Breton : Nadja
'I am surprised to find that though suspicious of surrealist dogma I like some of their work, notably and unexpectedly [Andre] Bretons's [italics] Nadja [end italics]. Attracted back to my old adolescent love [of] the magical.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Basil Nicholson : Business is Business
'Heaven knows there is enough infantile cruelty in his [Basil Nicholson's] book'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Charles Darwin : Voyage of the Beagle, The
'My chief pleasure at the moment is Darwin's [italics] Voyage of the Beagle [end italics]... it is so fresh, so clear, so solid, so modest, so alive. When I read a book like that I am full of admiration yet I feel so humiiated and despairing too...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Charles Darwin : Voyage of the Beagle, The
'Reading Darwin's [book] I wish I had loved objective things and looked at them when I was a child instead of feeding always on books and fancy'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Gustave Flaubert : Bouvard et Pecuchet
'The clerk who cashes my cheques at the bank is quite a bright, intelligent-looking boy. To-day I had a copy of [italics] Bouvard et Pecuchet [end italics]. He looked at it with curiosity then said "I expect you think I'm rude, looking like that. But I used to read a lot of those sorts of books once" "What sort of books?" "Oh, yellow books like that. I picked up a lot in a booksellers. But mine were much bigger than that" "What were they?" "Oh I don't remember their names or what they were about" "Do you remember the authors?" "Can't say I do. I seem to remember one was some sort of a Japanese story" "And they were in French?" "Oh yes, in French of course".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Laura Riding : [unknown]
'Her [Laura Riding's] talent I cannot judge, having seen too little. Much of what I have seen seems a nervous and complacent exhibitionism; her criticism shrewd but patronising, some of the poems really deep and fine... There may be a good deal of the suppressed or unsuppressed Lesbian in her'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Unknown
Katherine Mansfield : [letters]
'I feel a curious kinship with, dislike of, yet pity for Katherine Mansfield, whose letters I am reading again. I see all my weaknesses in her, admire her for her frantic attempts to be honest and deal with them. I can now read her, feeling her equal not an awestruck inferior as I used to. I know all she knew.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Christine Botting : [diary]
'Down here with my mother I feel that nothing can be so preposterous, so undignified as "love". I have been reading her ludicrous, pathetic, nauseating diary about herself and Oswald Norton. "Cleopatra had a famous wriggle last night. Julia ull-ully". The sexual act is not indecent but almost any verbal description of it is. Interspersed with all this are prayers, recriminations, schoolgirl ravings, a kind of complacent self reproach.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
Antonia White : [diary]
'I read one of the green volumes of notes [diary] to him [Ian] (Sept to Nov 1937). It interested him very much, said it articulated a great many of his own feelings. At first he was very enthusiastic, then suddenly clouded over and was obviously feeling cold and contempotuous towards me'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Codex, green notebook
George Eliot [pseud.] : Mill on the Floss, The
'I am so much enjoying [italics] The Mill on the Floss [end italics] but would so much like to earn the right to read it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Mill on the Floss, The
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Middlemarch
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [a life of George Eliot]
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
David Herbert Lawrence : Captain's Doll, The
'D.H. Lawrence draws so heavily on his own life - yet how often the best and freest part of his writing is his invention - like the wife in "The Captain's Doll".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Antonia White : [diary notebooks]
'I have been reading again the notes I made this time last year about Basil. Somehow more truth and less distortion gets into these notebooks than into anything else.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Codex, notebook
John Forster : Life of Charles Dickens, The
'I have just begun Forster's Life of Dickens again. I did not finish it before. I think that will start me off for the autumn. I want a fact book not a fiction book. There are some wonderful things in it. When Dickens finally left the blacking factory he so much hated, he wept. "With a relief so strange that it was like oppression, I went home".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Tom Hopkinson : Man Below, The
'While admiring Tom's book ['The Man Below', 1939] I have great pleasure in finding its weaknesses and though I cannot help admitting there are passages in it far beyond my own powers, I feel resentful of this and that in some way such passages must be due to my influence or to Tom's having stolen them from me. Yet even in his earliest, crudest work... there are indications of such descriptive powers.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Unknown
Leo Tolstoy : War and Peace
'I had hoped to have a clear head here - to get on with German, Italian, etc. and to read some history. But I have been so heavy and tired all the time that I can only manage snatches of [italics] War and Peace [end italics] and [italics] Sherlock Holmes [end italics]. I am supposed to have done a detailed criticism of Emily's book - I have skimmed through it but that is all.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Arthur Conan Doyle : [Sherlock Holmes Stories]
'I had hoped to have a clear head here - to get on with German, Italian, etc. and to read some history. But I have been so heavy and tired all the time that I can only manage snatches of [italics] War and Peace [end italics] and [italics] Sherlock Holmes [end italics]. I am supposed to have done a detailed criticism of Emily's book - I have skimmed through it but that is all.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Emily Coleman : [unknown]
'I had hoped to have a clear head here - to get on with German, Italian, etc. and to read some history. But I have been so heavy and tired all the time that I can only manage snatches of [italics] War and Peace [end italics] and [italics] Sherlock Holmes [end italics]. I am supposed to have done a detailed criticism of Emily's book - I have skimmed through it but that is all.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White
[n/a] : New Statesman, The
'I think I am not [italics] serious [end italics] enough! Sometimes when I look through the [italics] New Statesman [end italics] ... I see all the lists of books on social, economic, ethical, historical, philosophical subjects I feel... that I am a useless frivolous creature'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Serial / periodical
George Eliot : [unknown]
'I have been struck by finding the same thought within a few days in two very different places - in George Eliot and in an American magazine. That is the idea of a person's horror at a crime coming not from the crime but from the fact that [italics] they [end italics] have committed it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[n/a] : [an American magazine]
'I have been struck by finding the same thought within a few days in two very different places - in George Eliot and in an American magazine. That is the idea of a person's horror at a crime coming not from the crime but from the fact that [italics] they [end italics] have committed it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Serial / periodical
George Sand : [letters to and from Flaubert]
'Reading George Sand's and Flaubert's letters. Her warmth, geniality, tolerance compared to his anxiety, narrowness, fear of life. They really cared for each other. She is like the man, he like the woman'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Virginia Woolf : Jacob's Room
'I was idly looking at [italics] Jacob's Room [end italics] tonight. It exasperated yet charmed me. Here was an attempt to relate day and night. She [Virginia Woolf] lays her little strands side by side instead of working them into a patern. But perhaps it is because there is no solid structure underneath that it leaves me with this curious empty and dissatisfied feeling. In the last book it is beaten out so thin that it is threadbare.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Julien Green : [unknown]
'In the fog the safest guide is a blind man. This is a [italics] sortes [end italics] from Julien Green to whose journal I turn for some light' [she hopes Green's methods will aid her in her writer's block]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Tyrrell : [Jesuit writings]
'There is a peculiar flavour about Catholic writings which I still find repellent. [George] Tyrell is the only modern one with whom I feel in sympathy and he was condemned by the Church.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [Catholic texts]
'There is a peculiar flavour about Catholic writings which I still find repellent. [George] Tyrell is the only modern one with whom I feel in sympathy and he was condemned by the Church.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Antonia White : [diaries]
'After a long time, I felt impelled to read through this book again in the hopes of finding some clues.' [AW has fallen for a young man, after a long time feeling 'immune' to sex]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Codex, notebook
Antonia White : [diaries]
'It's the old thing which came up so clearly in analysis as I see reading through these notes - the [italics] keeping something inside '[end italics].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Manuscript: Codex, notebook
[unknown] : [unknown]
'Dreamy and compulsive lately: cram myself with reading, put off all activities'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [unknown]
[symptoms of depression include] 'Outward signs: maniacal reading, either pure escapism or... the search for the magic word.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[n/a] : [Gospels]
'One is driven back to the Gospels and one does not know how to interpret them' [writing of her desire to understand the nature of Catholicism]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
[unknown] : [writings about religion, Church History, etc]
'The more I read of theology, Church History, apologetics, philosophy, scripture interpretation, the more hopelessly at sea I find myself. I feel on firm ground with Walter H[ylton] and Dame Julian [of Norwich] and in the prayers of the Church.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Walter Hylton : Scala Perfectionis, or Ladder of Perfection
'The more I read of theology, Church History, apologetics, philosophy, scripture interpretation, the more hopelessly at sea I find myself. I feel on firm ground with Walter H[ylton] and Dame Julian [of Norwich] and in the prayers of the Church.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Julian of Norwich : Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love
'The more I read of theology, Church History, apologetics, philosophy, scripture interpretation, the more hopelessly at sea I find myself. I feel on firm ground with Walter H[ylton] and Dame Julian [of Norwich] and in the prayers of the Church.'
