"No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Atheists from EnglandNovelists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandShort story writers from EnglandFeminists from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. 24
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done…"
"At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And…"
"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough …"
"An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing …"
"I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then…"
"Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as …"
"Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are f…"
"The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so pa…"
"For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not…"
"One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil."