TY - CHAP
T1 - Woolf, rooks, and rural England
AU - Blyth, Ian
N1 - The Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf was hosted by the University of Birmingham on 22-25 June 2006. Entitled Woolfian Boundaries, it aimed to explore Woolf’s work from perspectives ‘beyond the boundary’ of her own positions and attitudes, taking her coolness towards the provinces and ‘prejudice’ against the regional novel (Letters 6: 381) as the starting- point for considering her writing in the light of its own ‘limits,’ self-declared and otherwise. From the approximately 140 papers delivered at the conference by delegates from eighteen countries, the editors have chosen 26 for the present volume, ranging from Woolf’s connections with the ‘Birmingham School’ of novelists in the 1930s to her interests in environmentalism, portraiture, photography, and the media, and her endlessly fascinating relationship with the writings of her contemporaries and predecessors.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) are an integral part of the English rural landscape. As Mark Cocker has observed, their ‘very presence . . . is directly attributable to our own activities: without agriculture such birds of open country would not be here at all’ (Birds Britannica, 2005, ix). Woolf refers a number of times in her letters and diary to the antics of the rooks at Rodmell; in Three Guineas, she writes of ‘some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree.’ What is more, it appears to have gone unnoticed that rooks feature in every one of her novels. They are there as a fertile source of imagery: consider the courtroom and opera house scenes in The Years, where first Eleanor and then Kitty compare the people present to ‘rooks swooping in a field, rising and falling’; or the Rev. Streatfield in Between the Acts, looking like ‘a rook [who] had hopped unseen to a prominent bald branch.’ They also have significant cameos: think of Ralph Denham’s pet rook in Night and Day; or Joseph and Mary in To the Lighthouse; or the rooks ‘whirling and wheeling’ overhead as Orlando races towards her first meeting with Shelmerdine. With reference to the work of earlier nature writers, such as Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson, this paper situates Woolf’s writing on rooks within the wider context of her well-informed but often overlooked writing on English rural life.
AB - Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) are an integral part of the English rural landscape. As Mark Cocker has observed, their ‘very presence . . . is directly attributable to our own activities: without agriculture such birds of open country would not be here at all’ (Birds Britannica, 2005, ix). Woolf refers a number of times in her letters and diary to the antics of the rooks at Rodmell; in Three Guineas, she writes of ‘some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree.’ What is more, it appears to have gone unnoticed that rooks feature in every one of her novels. They are there as a fertile source of imagery: consider the courtroom and opera house scenes in The Years, where first Eleanor and then Kitty compare the people present to ‘rooks swooping in a field, rising and falling’; or the Rev. Streatfield in Between the Acts, looking like ‘a rook [who] had hopped unseen to a prominent bald branch.’ They also have significant cameos: think of Ralph Denham’s pet rook in Night and Day; or Joseph and Mary in To the Lighthouse; or the rooks ‘whirling and wheeling’ overhead as Orlando races towards her first meeting with Shelmerdine. With reference to the work of earlier nature writers, such as Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson, this paper situates Woolf’s writing on rooks within the wider context of her well-informed but often overlooked writing on English rural life.
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SP - 80
EP - 85
BT - Woolfian Boundaries
A2 - Burrels, Anna
A2 - Ellis, Steve
A2 - Parsons, Deborah
A2 - Simpson, Kathryn
PB - Clemson University Press
CY - Clemson
ER -