5,124 research outputs found
Enter The Aunts: The 1990 George Eliot Reading by Gabriel Woolf
No full textI believe it was Henry James who wrote that any artistic performance requires \u27the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion.\u27 The quality of Gabriel Woolf\u27 s performance in ENTER THE AUNTS fulfilled the requirements of Henry James as well as the expectations of the audience, and the artistry touched the heights.
A mind had certainly been present in choosing the programme, which provided a perfect blend of George Eliot and The Others. The bickering aunts from The Mill on the Floss seem to be everyone\u27s favourites. George Eliot no doubt drew on her memories of her own maternal aunts for these contentious characters who have their important place in her artistic scheme. The comic dialogue flows naturally and conveys some necessary matter to our understanding, and Gabriel\u27 s disputing voices add yet another dimension.
Oliver Wendell Holmes\u27 Aunt Tabitha must have learned her manners in the same school as Aunt Glegg, and Saki\u27s little boy in The Lumber Room would, no doubt, have grown into one of those detestable men of whom Aunt Tabitha disapproved. All the humour was skillfully drawn from these and other shorter pieces for our enjoyment. Gabriel Woolf moves with perfect ease from grave to gay and back again, and his varying voices range from old to young of either sex without faltering.
It is hard to choose a highlight from such an excellent programme. The encounter between Aunt Glegg and Bob Jakin is one of my favourites, but, if pressed, I think I must settle on In the Prison from Adam Bede.
The performer\u27s concentration here was so intense that I found myself holding my breath in sympathy, with tears ready to start. It was a truly remarkable interpretation of a superbly written emotional scene, based, as we know, on the actual experience of one of George Eliot\u27s real aunts
How, Twenty Years Ago, The George Eliot Fellowship Found Gabriel Woolf
No full textStarting a new friendship is often a very chanoey business and none more so than the friendship which developed between The George Eliot Fellowship and one of its staunchest supporters, Gabriel Woolf. Gabriel\u27s recent 20th visit to Warwickshire to present his ann\J.al programme of Readings has reminded us how much of a fluke our finding him really was.
In 1969 the Fellowship planned to mark the 150th anniversary of George Eliot\u27s birth with a week of celebrations in Nuneaton. We were then a very small society with a very inexperienced committee but, nothing daunted, we hoped to put the George Eliot Country on the literary map. Looking back after twenty years it is clear that our celebrations had a distinctly homespun look about them, and yet they were all immensely successful. One of the major events of the week was to be the opening of a special exhibition of George Eliot memorabilia in Nuneaton Museum, hopefully by an eminent person. The week was fast approaching and no-one had been found to perform the opening. It seemed that a golden opportunity to make this particular mark was going to be lost.
One evening, quite late, the Fellowship secretary was taking a bath and was listening to the radio. Into the steamy atmosphere floated a beautiful voice reading, in the BBC Radio series \u27A Book at Bedtime\u27, Middlemarch. I cannot now believe that I had not earlier heard other episodes of the serialised reading; it was, after all, in an unprecedented 45 episodes, and I was in the first flush of my long term of office and up to my eyebrows in George Eliot\u27s anniversary. Perhaps my desperation had now reached such a state that I decided there and then to invite this actor with a wonderful voice to open our exhibition. After all, I thought to myself, although this is just a job of work to an actor he must have some feeling for the novel if he can read it so well and so sensitively. He may know little or nothing of its author. So desperate was I that this seemed not very significant. He would have to do! I was clutching at the proverbial straw, and the straw turned out to be Gabriel Woolf.
In response to my invitation, Gabriel Woolf phoned me from London to accept with great pleasure. I was astonished to discover that not only did he love Middlemarch he also loved George Eliot and knew a great deal about her. Indeed, he had been commissioned by the BBC to write a radio portrait of her to mark the same 150th anniversary. The actor who \u27would do\u27 was an authority on the novelist and a devotee beyond our wildest hopes. We could not have chosen anyone more suitable for the occasion for, when he performed the opening ceremony in June 1969, he told his audience how he had fallen in love with George Eliot at first paragraph. To get some local colour for his radio portrait he stayed in the area for a few days and the friendship was sealed
The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf
No full textThis thesis investigates the construction of identity in relation to an other. It considers three
writers who, working at moments when the nature of selfhood was an urgent issue, conduct
profound and original enquiries into the question of self- construction, and seeks both to
reassess their contributions to this debate, and, in bringing their preoccupations and methods
to bear upon each other, to open up new ways of approaching and reading their work.
Considering a range of socio-cultural and religious forms of otherness -- the cannibal, the
witch, the Jew, the aristocrat, the woman, the divine -- it embraces material from a number of
important modem critical fields, and suggests how these topics might be combined to offer a
coherent statement about the enduring issue of s elf- fashioning.
The thesis seeks to map out a trajectory of decreasing investment in external communities,
and an increasing perception of the self as a source and agent in the construction of identity.
Looking in turn at the work of Montaigne, Proust and Woolf, it argues that where the Essais
construct complex orders which appropriate the other to reinforce the identity of the self,
Proust and Woolf increasingly, although gradually, and by no means always successfully,
attempt to negotiate a less precisely- engaged relationship between other and self, and to
assign the other a less constitutive role in the realization and expression of identity. The
thesis also considers more briefly contexts in which this trajectory is reversed. To the extent
that they examine modernist subjectivity, Proust and Woolf articulate an anxiety about the
separation of self and world which leads to an attempted recuperation of the integrated orders
depicted by Montaigne
Gwendolen\u27s Story From DANIEL DERONDA
No full textIn 1902, the essayist, Leslie Stephen, wrote that Daniel Deronda was \u27two stories put side by side\u27 and the \u27Gwendolen Story\u27 taken by itself was a \u27masterly piece of social satire\u27. In his biography of George Eliot, Gordon Haight makes a general reference to \u27Gwendolen\u27s story\u27 as part of the whole narrative of Daniel Deronda including the Jewish portion. He showed some disdain towards \u27careless readers\u27 who thought the Jewish elements could be separated from the story of Gwendolen.
George Eliot herself, writing to Barbara Bodichon, seemed displeased with readers who \u27cut the book up into scraps and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there\u27. The character Daniel is central to the novel in holding together the strands of the narrative.
Gabriel Woolf originally separated the Gwendolen strand of the novel for his serial reading for the BBC Woman\u27s Hour programme. There is also a stage adaptation, as well as this tape recording, for the two voices of Rosalind Shanks and Gabriel Woolf.
I listened to this recording in the company of two others who had not read George Eliot\u27s Daniel Deronda. All of us felt that great concentration was needed to grasp the story, but we responded readily to the dramatic dialogue between the two voices. Those who had not read the novel were puzzled by the beginning and the flashbacks. We agreed that, before listening, it was essential to read the synopsis of the novel on the tape notes. The careful reader of the novel receives some help from the author when she reads the mottoes which begin each chapter. The motto at the beginning of Chapter 1 makes it quite clear that we are plunging into the middle of things
Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche
No full textIn his article Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche Gabriel V. Rupp analyzes texts drawn from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of change characterized by an explosive set of dramatic, historically unique, and complicated transformations in society and technology. Rupp argues that in Virginia Woolf\u27s Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce\u27s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche\u27s last three strangely beautiful but mad letters (Kaufmann), these writers\u27 self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of self while also exposing certain limits inherent in such a chaotic, polyvocal, and schizophrenic conception of consciousness. By applying Niels Bohr\u27s complementarity as a potential reframing of those limits, Rupp suggests that a form of ethical subjectivity, i.e., self enlightenment, can be recovered in the texts analyzed
Review of The Warwichshire Pen
No full textBeing born in Warwickshire, it seems, confers distinction upon those who write. I can make this statement without giving myself airs, since I was born in another county, and, according to Gabriel Woolf, merely to dwell in Warwickshire is no guarantee of excellence.
Shaking the local dust from his feet with a grand dramatic gesture, so to speak, Gabriel Woolf began his programme with extracts from Henry V on the vastly fields of France , whither we had been puffed by the breath of Shakespeare\u27s contemporary, Michael Dray ton. Back in Warwickshire, a contrast followed from the early pen of George Eliot, quietly dramatising a conversation between neighbors, from Scenes of Clerical Life, which gave us a taste of the local dialect.
The spice of the programme was its variety: favourite sonnets by Shakespeare and Drayton were followed by fishy poems of Rupert Brooke; then we entered the sphere of childhood with an hilarious sticky poem by Paul Jennings full of hard staccato sounds. Children of Michael Drayton Middle School, Hartshill provided up-to-the minute poems with their Warwickshire biros. What a treat it must have been for those at Nuneaton who heard their own jolly verses read by such a gifted performer! A little lame dialogue from the minor pen of Angela Brazil kept us giggling, with the black stockinged ones kicking up their legs in the gym; and Maggie and Tom, fishing happily in the Round Pool near The Mill on the Floss, after the shameful episode of the neglected rabbits, brought the first part to a close in a haze of golden sunshine
Rememorações e figurações do pai na escrita de Virginia Woolf
No full textThis article investigates how Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) writes about fatherhood throughout her work, understanding that the author weaves a pattern of human relationships which sometimes uses life, sometimes death, as the raw material for the construction of a vital community—making the positive encounter with difference an indispensable element for this construction (BRAIDOTTI, 2011). Therefore, I explore Woolf’s recordings of her family life found in the text A Sketch of the Past (1976) in order to discover how the author textually rebuilds her memories, constantly flirting with her fictional writing strategies. These are the scenes that will rearticulate Woolf’s biographical father in her memory to rearrange figurations of fatherhood throughout her work.Este artigo investiga a escrita da paternidade na obra de Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) entendendo que a autora costura uma malha de relações humanas que ora fazem da vida, ora da morte, matérias primas para a construção de uma comunidade vital – tornando indispensável para essa construção de um coletivo o encontro positivo com a diferença (BRAIDOTTI, 2011). Recupero, portanto, os relatos de Woolf sobre sua vida familiar no texto “Um Esboço do Passado” (1976) para explorar como a autora constrói textualmente suas memórias, sempre flertando com recursos de sua escrita ficcional. Serão essas cenas que rearticularão o pai biográfico na memória de Woolf de modo a redimensionar as figurações da paternidade em sua obra
Gabriel Ajak Lat
No full textabstract: Gabriel was ten years old when he left his village.
“Lost Boys Found” is an ongoing, interdisciplinary project that is collecting, recording and archiving the oral histories of the Lost Boys/Girls of Sudan. The collection is a work-in-progress, seeking to record the oral history of as many Lost Boys/Girls as are willing, and will be used in a future book.Age: 27Region: Bahr al GhazalThis picture and bio was donated to the Lost Boys Found project from The Arizona Lost Boys Cente
Tea and Sprouts
No full textDoes the Englishman eat and drink only to stay alive? Using evidence provided by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Lewis Carroll and the poetic ponderings of mighty and minor poets, Gabriel Woolf took a Iighthearted look into the English cornucopia, trying to determine whether it contained any more than our national beverage TEA and a vegetable he clearly does not savour himself - SPROUTS! Are the English the only people daft enough to eat sprouts, he clearly wondered - and we still don\u27t know, for no evidence has appeared which proves them to be part of any European, American or Oriental menu.
With the theme of food and drink, the programme was, inevitably, fairly light-hearted, although the death. (in which lack of food and drink played no small part) of Jo, the crossing-sweeper in \u27Bleak House\u27 was poignant and moving. But other tears - of laughter - were shed at Jerome K. Jerome\u27s hilarious contretemps with an unassailable can of pineapple.
Someone was heard to say that there was not enough George Eliot; indeed, only two passages - the much loved piece about Mr. Edward Freely\u27s new but corrupting shop in \u27Brother Jacob\u27 and the Harvest Supper in \u27Adam Bede\u27 - but these took a larger slice of the nearly two-hour programme than any of the other writers
George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast to The Immortal Memory- 1989
No full textOur invitation to Gabriel Woolf to propose the Toast on this annual occasion was given so that we could say thank you to him for 20 years of work on our behalf in promoting George Eliot in his own unique way. In proposing the Toast, he began by telling us about his own introduction to George Eliot. He was doing his National Service in the R.A.F. and was particularly lonely in an alien situation with people with whom he had little or nothing in common. He remembers vividly taking Romola down from an R.A.F. library shelf and being instantly captured by the measured style of the writing. He described it as \u27love at first paragraph\u27. He spoke of a holiday in France when he was still alone and where he spent many days on a beach, his only company being Adam Bede and Middlemarch.
In his radio work over many years he read many of George Eliot\u27s novels, adapted for the medium by himself, and he was once very amused when a lady told him how much she had enjoyed his reading of Silas Marner - probably the only George Eliot novel he had never read there! He thought he had given a lot of pleasure by the books he had not read, even though some people appear to remember them clearly! But the one that made all his radio work worthwhile was Middlemarch, read in 50 episodes, again in his own adaptation.
The thing which clearly impressed Gabriel about the novels, apart from the style that first caught his eye, was the remarkable way George Eliot listened to and remembered the way people spoke and the things they said. He reminded us, with passages from the novels (and, as always, beautifully read and interpreting the characters in his own unique way), of Lizbeth Bede and her grudging praise of Dinah\u27 s efforts with the porridge, Ye might ha\u27 made the porridge worse. I can ate it wi\u27out it\u27s tunin\u27 my stomach .
He was sure Mary Ann Evans had suffered from aunts at Griff House - Heyday! said Aunt Glegg with loud emphasis. Do little boys and gells come into a room without taking notice 0\u27 their uncles and aunts? That wasn\u27t the way when I was a little gell. Aunt Glegg took their hands, hurting them with her large rings and going on to criticise the way they stood and the way they looked
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