Category: literary criticism
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Lillian Hartley and Sylvia Moon on Red Tree, White Tree by Wendy Berg
What impressed me most was Berg’s refusal to reduce the Arthurian stories to either naïve fantasy or dry symbolism.
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A Ghost Addresses Mrs Cherry Clinton
This is not a warning. It is a blessing disguised as discomfort.
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“Echoes in the Cave: A Letter Exchange on Forster, Faith, and Fissures from the correspondence of Lillian Hartley and Sylvia Moon
I knew it was from you the moment I saw the cover. Only you would think to tuck existential despair between the poetry shelves — or was that Edward’s mischief? He does so love a theatrical gesture.
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December 25th: Morning Tea, A Postcard, and The Portrait of a Lady
Sylvia blamed the cat. We haven’t had a cat in years.
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The Door Has Always Been Open
I tried the Virginia Woolf route. Everyone else seemed to find some holy map between her pages — Sylvia and Lillian, with their candlelit arguments and mystical comparisons. But for me?
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Sunset, Memory, and Other Silly Things
Let’s get one thing clear: I don’t like Woolf. I didn’t like her at school, and I haven’t warmed to her in exile. The only thing that ever lingered was Orlando — not because I admired it, but because it annoyed me so thoroughly that it stuck.
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A Room of One’s Own — and Nowhere to Go
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argued that creative power needs space and independence to flourish. But she also said — and I’ve always remembered this — that even if Shakespeare’s sister had been born with talent, the world would not have let her survive it. Not then.
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A Lighthouse Seen from Exile: Veronica on Woolf, Stillness, and the Spaces Between
Maybe the lighthouse isn’t a destination.
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Storm in a Teacup, or the Weight of a Day? Sylvia and Lillian Read Mrs Dalloway
“One woman worrying about gloves and seating plans, a man flinging himself out the window. Sounds like a waste of a day.”
