...A Gap of Sky In life there's many obstacles to overcome. The difficult transition from childhood to adulthood brings along some of these obstacles and it's often young people who make the wrong choices when choosing how to live their lives. Being young is more or less about providing a background for your personality and that's why the youth is such a vital part of life. But being young is not always as easy as it sounds. Even though freedom is within reach, responsibility and expectations are breathing young people in the neck reminding you of the pressure that comes with it. Instead of choosing the right path that brings them the best, more and more young people feel a massive pressure when undergoing the transition from child to adult. This pressure often result in frequent use of drugs and alcohol to escape from the harsh reality.This is the case in the short story “A Gap of Sky” by Anna Hope from 2008 that deals with the issues of drugs, freedom and pressure. The story is set in todays London and starts in medias res when the story's main character, Ellie, wakes up. Ellie seems tired, worn out from last night and you understand that she has a hard time getting out of bed. The first sentence describe the darkness around her: “It is dark, but the wrong dark. Something is wrong with the dark” (p. 1, l. 1) Her room is probably dark because the curtains block the sunlight. The wrong dark may symbolize Ellie's state of mind. Her unconsciousness tells her that something is...
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...Analysis and interpretation of “A gap of sky” by Anna Hope “A Gap of Sky” is a short story by Anna Hope. The story is about the young girl Ellie who lives in London and attend UCL. She lives a wild life with parties and drugs and therefore she cannot concentrate on her studies. She has not got anyone to hold on to and no parents to guide her. The city distracts her with all its options and temptations. There is always new and exciting things around the corner but you must focus on the important things and not choose to follow all your impulses – life is too short for that. The main themes in the story are developing and identity. Ellie finds out that it is important to keep up on her studies and take care of her body, by staying clean of drugs. Ellie is the main character in the story. She attends University College London, but she does not take her studies very serious. The text says: “It was their fault she was doing this bloody course in the first place.” So it seems like her parents have forced her to go there. She does not care much about her education. She is very close to expulsion. “She remembers the letter, the stomach-lurching letter. If this lack of application continues we will have no choice but to reconsider your place on the course.” She most likely skips classes and papers and parties instead. In the beginning she wakes up after a party. It is Monday afternoon which means that she had been partying all Sunday night. She cannot remember last night clearly because...
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... A Y VIRGINIA WOOLF IN IRELAND: A SHORT VOYAGE OUT by Kathryn Laing o, it wouldnt do living in Ireland, in spite of the rocks & the desolate bays. It would lower the pulse of the heart: & all one’s mind wd. run out in talk” (Diary 4: 216)–so Woolf declared in her diary during her one and only journey around Ireland in May 1934. For her descriptions of the landscape and the people she met (mainly the Anglo-Irish gentry) are as ambivalent as her now infamous reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But Woolf’s response to Ireland, and more particularly to Irish writing is only part of the story. As a contemporary, how was Woolf read in Ireland, if she was read at all, and what, if any, impact has she had on Irish writing? For the contemplation of “Virginia Woolf in Ireland,” both as a traveler and a reader of Irish culture, politics and literature, and as someone to be read through her various publications, provokes a proliferation of research possibilities about both writer and country. In this essay I wish to sketch out a preliminary map of these possibilities, showing some of the potentially complex and intriguing routes that require further exploration, in relation to Woolf studies, in particular the European Reception of Woolf, and in relation to Ireland and its own literary history. So the paper is divided into three sections: briefly, Virginia Woolf literally in Ireland, reading Virginia Woolf in Ireland from the 1920s on, and three Irish women reading Woolf–Elizabeth Bowen...
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...A People Suppressed The suppression of women has occurred since the beginning of the century. There have always been women who have expressed their feelings on the matter in many different forms. Two such women are Virginia Woolf and Louise Erdrich. They use their cultures and time periods to show the ways in which women are suppressed, as well as, a silver lining for women to become empowered. These authors express their views through their literature, especially in their most well-known works, Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) and Love Medicine (Erdrich). The women in their novels are suppressed in multiple ways. The characters are emotionally, physically, and sexually, and within their marriages. In Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the main character Clarissa Dalloway is a suppressed middle class wife, who enjoys throwing parties for guests. Clarissa is suppressed internally or emotionally by her time period and culture. She lives her life according what is and isn’t appropriate. Virginia Woolf wrote her novel with an emphasis on description, however in her writing she doesn’t go into much detail on certain incidents. Such incidents are those of intimate nature. Woolf writes these scenes with barely any description compared to the rest of the book. One such scene is that of Clarissa kissing another woman named Sally, when she was a young girl. The absence of depiction of detail on the matter shows the sexual suppression of women. “In her novels, sexual passion becomes masculine property...
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...Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen, in 1882. She suffered immensely as a child from a series of emotional shocks (these are included in the biography of Virginia Woolf). However, she overcame these incredible personal damages and became a major British novelist, essayist and critic. Woolf also belonged to an elite group that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Woolf pioneered in incorporating feminism in her writings. “Virginia Woolf’s journalistic and polemical writings show that she made a significant contribution to the development of feminist thought” (Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer had done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she wrote prolifically. Along with many novels, she wrote essays, critiques and many volumes of her personal journals have been published. She is one of the most extraordinary and influential female writers throughout history. Virginia Woolf is an influential author because of her unique style, incorporations of symbolism and use of similes and metaphors in her literature, specifically in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from...
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...of smoking. The bad news is that non- smokers who breathe in second- hand smoke face a increased risk of getting lung cancer or heart disease. He also says that no matter how much ban smoking is taking place, that there will still be smokers and a lot of early deaths in the coming years. The good news of smoking which Sir Richard Peto points out that the situation of smoking is better than it use to be. Text two “Is this the end of English literature?” by a British novelist and biographer, A.N. Wilson has a negative respond to ban smoking and that ban smoking has effects on the English literature. Wilson also says that he does not know a writher who does not smoke, and he points out great writhers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf etc. Wilson also writes that smoking is a creative phases which is not allowed in restaurants, pubs and...
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...against the tide of nature. However ever in the middle of death there is true beauty even in the unlikely of creatures. In two essays the most unsuspecting characters take on death in a different perspective from the way we as group sees it. In the story "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels” both touch on such insignificant creatures and the dynamic between life and death. While we cower at the face of death the moth and the weasel face death in a more valiant way. Both of these creatures that we do not even give a second thought in our day to day lives, live and die with more appreciation, and it is admirable. In “The Death of the Moth” and “Living Like Weasels” the speakers show the smallest of creatures living with strength even as they face death and how they reflect life in their small presence. It is comparable that we as a group lives with the same vigor as the moth, but once being on the brink of death is thrown into the mix we pale in comparison. Despite the moth’s insignificance to the day to day life, Woolf describes his energetic zeal and he zips around the small space with fascination “one could not help watching him.” Although Woolf watches with fascination in this little creature, she also sees his persistence from one area of the window to another as pathetic,...
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...To the Lighthouse Woolf, Virginia Published: 1927 Categorie(s): Fiction Source: http://gutenberg.net.au 1 About Woolf: Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. 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". Also available on Feedbooks for Woolf: • Mrs. Dalloway (1925) • A Haunted House (1921) • The Waves (1931) • Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923) • Between the Acts (1941) • The New Dress (1927) • The Mark on the Wall (1917) • The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938) • The Years (1937) • An Unwritten Novel (1920) Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70. Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes. 2 Part 1 The Window 3 Chapter 1 "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition...
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...in any of the arts that are primarily subject to aesthetic criteria. Artists such as Stephen Dedalus from James Joyces’ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lily Briscoe from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are both equally affected by how society interprets their art. These two characters embody their author’s perspectives on what it means to grow and be a true artist. At the same time they receive contrasting messages from the society around them, which in turn affects how they view their own art. Stephen and Lily as artists receive vastly different treatment from society, Stephen is confident whereas Lily is clearly not. Lily looks up to Mrs. Ramsey, but Mrs. Ramsey does not take Lily seriously and Lily knows that. “With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously” (Woolf 17). According to the people around her, Lily has one role in society and that is to get married and take care of her husband and her household. No one in Lily’s life seems to encourage her the way that the people in Stephen’s life encouraged him. Mr. Tansley is Lily’s biggest critic and a firm nonbeliever “whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…” (Woolf 48). Lily recounts these comments made to her and they recur in her thoughts throughout the novel and clearly weigh heavily on her. Lily is constantly reminded of her duty to stop...
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...“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy–blossom which the commonest yellow–underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay–coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning, mid–September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the treetops were a tremendously exciting experience. The same energy which inspired the...
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...two Modern writers depiction of urban life ‘Why do I dramatise London so perpetually’ Woolf wondered in the final months of her life. This essay will seek to examine Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land to observe their perpetual fascination with expressing metropolis as a vision of modernity. It will attempt to scrutinize the overwhelming nature of urban life, urban life’s effect on humanity, metropolis being the forefront of society, and also the depiction of a single urban consciousness. Through examining these depictions of urban life, this essay aims to observe the effects rapid urbanisation had on the modern movement and its respective authors. Woolf presents Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness as a vessel to voice the overwhelming nature of urban life and the problem of anxiety experienced in modern metropolis. Immediately in the first paragraph Clarissa’s anxieties are voiced as she embarks to the city to prepare for her party. Clarissa’s consciousness jumps to her memory of a ‘girl of eighteen’ and the solemn and ‘feeling that something awful was about to happen’. The contrast to her feeling of excitement to a feeling of anxiety is stark. The protagonist begins by exclaiming ‘how fresh how calm’ and then to experiencing feeling threatened as her attention reverts from the natural to the ‘uproar of the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans… she loved; life; London’. Woolf plunges the reader into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, where the protagonist experiences...
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...Final Critical Essay | Mrs. Dalloway: Perceptions of One’s Life | Brittney Davey | In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf involves two main characters whose personalities and life styles are on complete opposite’s sides of the spectrum, which do not know one another but are linked through the concept of different ways each person views the world they live in. Clarissa Dalloway is a high-class, wealthy woman who cares about what others think of her so she indulges herself in parties to be commonly liked, yet struggles with her internal thoughts and memories to the outside world. Septimus Warren Smith is a man who survived the war with severe post-traumatic stress from witnessing many tragic events including watching his friend Evans die from an invasion. Through each of these individuals experiences, and what they both have been through – tragic or sane – they have perceived the world differently, therefore, they both have one view of the world. These two characters were most important in the sense of perception of two different worlds because not every life is the same, many people grow up in a terrifying neighbourhood, whereas others grow up in a wealthy secure home, others witness death and others never break a bone in their body. It depends on how and where you were raised, what background you came from, what hobbies interests you, which group of friends you fall into, every step can lead to a different life, but it is the independent persons choice on which...
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...Sam Schmidt 10/8/15 A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own is based on a series of lectures she gave to a college audience back in the late 1920’s. The six chapters within the essay focus on three main concepts, women, fiction, and facts. Virginia Woolf argues financial freedom, independence, and original thoughts will not only allow women to write, but to live a lifestyle of their own. In Chapter three, on page 48, Virginia Woolf says, “Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say”. This statement emphasizes the theme that Virginia Woolf references throughout the essay; women were treated unequally in society (during this time in age) and thus didn’t have the freedom, time, or money to compose the type of writings men were capable of. After re-reading the first part of the phrase again, “Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare...
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...Q3: Characterization in To the Lighthouse is presented in terms of multiple perspectives. Elaborate on this statement demonstrating the influence of this method of presenting on characterization in the novel and significance of the modernist style of writing which emphasizes the alternation between consciousnesses of character. To the Lighthouse is considered as one of Virginia Woolf most famous novels. The story deals with the Ramsay family experiences while staying at their home in Cornwall. In To the Lighthouse novel, the main concern is within Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts and emotions. The narrator in the novel introduces to us a very different world than the one we’re living in: the world inside somebody else’s head. Woolf chose to write this novel in a very strange and complex way using unfamiliar techniques. This unique technique of writing was achieved with the use of the multiple perspective and the stream of consciousness techniques. Each character in the novel is presented through multiple perspectives. Thus, the readers cannot decide on a single interpretation or agree on the same analysis for each character. Mrs. Ramsay. For example, is a charmingly good woman with good personality, yet she is concerned with the other characters’ lives and ends up interfering in them a lot. She also cares for everybody, considering her own thoughts and ignoring others’, and this is clear when she advises Lily to marry William Banke, an old friend of the Ramsay family. This shows...
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...many more ways in which Cunningham induces the aura of Woolf’s novel; however, the main similarity, which can be seen, is the stream of consciousness form of narrative, which encompasses the length of one day. With this opening scene being repeated in both novels we see our “Clarissas” plunge into the city to buy flowers. Virginia Woolf is known for being a modernist novelist in the same way that Michael Cunningham is known for his postmodern writing. If you have read Mrs. Woolf’s novel you are immediately meant with a striking de ja vu, in the opening scenes of “the Hours”, only to be meat with a striking difference: The Hours is based around the lives of three different women, in comparison to Mrs. Woolf’s novel. One can argue that the story of Virginia in “the Hours” is a retelling of Mrs. Woolf’s writing process, while the story of Laura is an example of the reception of Mrs. Woolf’s novel, and the Clarrissa is a modernised retelling of Mrs. Dalloway’s day. This addition augments the novel, because it focuses the reader’s response on several aspects of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway’s perfect party is what the whole novel focuses on when it was written by Woolf, however by dissecting the novel and removing the party Cunningham adds a completely new twist to the story and instead adds new points that have arisen in “our time”. He does this through retelling the story and focusing on New York in the late 20th century, and even adds another layer by showing us Los Angeles in 1949...
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