This might have been the week that I've been most nervous about - I mean, when did you last read - let alone teach - Night and Day? I don't even dare count the decades - in many (ok, read "most") ways it was like reading an entirely new text. And I have my very old collapsing Penguin, and my new Penguin edition - and one seems to proclaim it's about women/people/character, and the other - a brilliant choice of cover illustration - about place, and lighted windows ... Of course it's not easy to say what it's "about," nor to nail down its style, and the more we examined it, the more slippery it became. Also: silkworms - they provided a great diversion, as did the scene in the zoo. For me, it was all about (I mean, not entirely, but this was what grabbed my attention the most) how the atmosphere in a room can shift, completely, when someone comes in to it - or their feelings can shift when they enter a room. So we looked at Teresa Brennan on affect, since her book starts with exactly that sensation, but with the problems of explaining it. Slow, chronological Woolf: this is working well.
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