Mrs Johnstone Quotes

The world looks very different to me now at twenty. I have outgrown my early opinions and ideals with my short dresses, just as Mrs. Walton said we would. Now the critics can say 'Thou waitest till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

You’re Mrs. Dering Johnstone!” “Goodness! How did you guess?” Bel had not guessed. She had known quite definitely the moment she saw Mrs. Dering Johnstone that this was Louise’s cousin’s wife, for Louise had said that James’s wife, Rhoda, was perfectly beautiful—just like an angel—with wonderful golden hair. There could not be two people in Drumburly to fit this description, so obviously this was she.

No more was said. Mrs. Dunne had dropped her poison and was quite content. Mrs. Johnstone might pretend to be dense, but she was not as dense as all that, and even if the poison did not work very quickly its effect would not be entirely lost. Someday something might happen and Mrs. Johnstone would remember what she had said. Mrs. Dunne hated the Bells. Nothing would please her better than to see the Bells discredited, to watch them packing up and leaving Mureth. If she could accomplish that she would be happy, or so she thought. She hated all the Bell family, but Daisy was the worst, for Daisy was not only young and pretty, she was clever too. Daisy had discovered Mrs. Dunne’s vulnerable points and enjoyed pricking her where the pricks would hurt… and Mrs. Dunne, who liked hurting other people and making them squirm, disliked being hurt herself. It is curious but true that those who make a habit of saying unkind things are often the most easily hurt and offended when their victims retaliate.