Freshwater: a comedy by Virginia Woolf (1923 & 1935 Version) E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 51

Beschreibung

This carefully crafted ebook: "Freshwater: a comedy by Virginia Woolf (1923 & 1935 Version)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. In 1935 Woolf completed Freshwater, an absurdist drama based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Featuring such other eminences as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the painter George Frederick... Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Leseprobe

Virginia Wolf

Freshwater: a comedy by Virginia Woolf(1923 & 1935 Version)

e-artnow, 2013

ISBN 978-80-7484-364-8

Cover:      Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, 1870, Scanned from Colin Ford's Julia Margaret       Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius

Table of Contents

Freshwater—1923 Version

Freshwater—1935 Version

Act I.

Act II.

Act III.

Freshwater—1923 Version

Table of Contents

Dramatis Personae

charles henry hay cameron

mrs. julia cameron

g. p. watts

ellen terry

lord tennyson

mr. craig

mary magdalen

A drawing room at Dimbola, hung with photographs;charles cameron, a very old man with long white hair and beard, is sitting with a bath towel round his head,marymagdalen, the housemaid, is engaged in rubbing his hair, which has just been washed, and is of the utmost fineness.

mr. c. The sixth time in eight months! Whenever we start for India, Julia insists—[Heremary, who is combing, tugs his hair sharply.]—Ah! Ah! Ah!—Julia insists that I must have my head washed. Yet we never do start for India—I sometimes think we never shall start for India. At the last moment something happens—something always happens. And so we stay on and on, living this life of poetry, of photography, of frivolity, and I shall never see the land of my spiritual youth. I shall never learn the true nature of virtue from the fasting philosophers of Baluchistan. I shall never solve the great problem, or answer the Eternal Question. I am a captive in the hands of Circumstance—[marynow tugs his beard.] Ah! Oh! Oh!

mary Mr. Cameron, dear darling Mr. Cameron, do let me wash your beard. It’s the most beautiful beard in the whole Isle of Wight. Mrs. Cameron will never let you go to India—

[Entermrs. cameron, a brown-faced gipsylike-looking old woman, wearing a green shawl, fastened by an enormous cameo. She stops dead and raises her hand. ]

mrs. c. What a picture! What a composition! Truth sipping at the fount of inspiration! The soul taking flight from the body! Upward, girl, look upward! Fling your arms round his neck and look upward! [maryandmr. c.assume a pose.]

Let your head fall on your breast, Charles. The soul has left its mortal tenement. She wings her way—where are the wings, the angel’s wings, the turkey’s wings, Andrews gave me last Christmas?

mary They’re packed, ma’am.

mrs. c. Packed—why packed? Ah—I remember. We start for India at two thirty sharp, [marygoes on combing the beard.] Did you ever hear anything so provoking? I’ve only just time to finish my study of Sir Galahad watching the Holy Grail by moonlight. Cook was posed. The light superb. At the last moment up comes word that Galahad has to take the sheep to Yarmouth. It’s market day. Sheep! Market day! [With great scorn] Where I’m to find another Galahad heaven only knows! [She looks distractedly about the room, out of the window and soon.]

mr. c.[lying back with his eyes shut, whilemarywashes his beard] Loose your mind from the affairs of the present. Seek truth where truth lies hidden. Follow the everlasting will o’ the wisp—Magdalen, don’t tug my beard. Cast away your vain fineries. Let us be free like birds of the air. [Growing more and more excited, and speaking in a loud prophetic voice] At two thirty we start for India!

[The door opens as he says this and lord tennyson enters.]

lord t. So Emily told me. Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins, she said, and at two thirty they start for India.

mrs. c.[advancing upon him and speaking in a sepulchral voice] Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins but the coffins have not come. It’s that villain Ashwood again. This is the sixth time I have ordered the coffins and the coffins have not come. But without her coffins Julia Cameron will not start for India. For, Alfred [she stands before him, fixing him with her eyes], when we lie dead under the Southern Cross, my head will be raised upon a copy of In Memoriam. Maud lies upon my heart. In my right hand I hold the quill which wrote—under providence—“The Passing of Arthur.” In my left, the slipper which you threw at my head when I asked you to sit for my two hundredth study of Arthur saying farewell to Sir Bedivere. [She casts her eyes up and speaks in a deep ecstatic voice.] All is over, Alfred. All is ready. It is a deep Southern night. Orion glitters in the firmament. The scent of the tulip trees is wafted through the open window. The silence is only broken by the sobs of my faithful friends and the occasional howl of a solitary tiger. And then—what is this? What infamy is this? [She plucks at her wrist, picks something off it, and holds it towardstennyson.] An Ant! A White Ant! They are advancing in hordes from the jungle, Alfred. I hear the crepitation of their myriad feet. They will be upon me before dawn. They will eat the flesh off my bones. Alfred, they will devour Maud!

lord t.[greatly shocked] God bless my soul! The woman’s right. Devour Maud! It’s too disgusting! It must be stopped. Devour Maud indeed! My darling Maud! [He presses the book beneath his arm.] But what an awful fate! What a hideous prospect! Here are my two honoured old friends, setting sail, in less than three hours, for an unknown land where, whatever else may happen, they can never by any possible chance hear me read Maud again. But [he looks at his watch] what is the time? We have still two hours and twenty minutes. I have read it in less. Let us begin, [lord tennyson sits down by the window which opens into the garden and begins to read aloud.] I hate the dreadful hollow beneath the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

mrs. c.