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Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison

Abstract:
In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) one of the markers of cultural difference between the protagonist and the gypsies she meets in Turkey is linguistic: they have no word for ‘beautiful’, and when Orlando wishes to remark the beauty of a sunset, she has to point and to say, in their language, ‘good to eat.’ In a recent edition of the novel, I suggested that Woolf’s source for the idea may have been Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, my annotation does not tell the entire story. The classicist and anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison notes in her Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), that in at least two languages, Hebrew and what she calls ‘Mexican’, the word for ‘good’ meant ‘good to eat’.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1093/notesj/gjw253

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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
HUMS
Department:
English Faculty
Role:
Author


Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Journal:
Notes and Queries More from this journal
Volume:
64
Issue:
1
Pages:
164–165
Publication date:
2017-02-01
Acceptance date:
2016-06-27
DOI:
EISSN:
1471-6941
ISSN:
0029-3970


Keywords:
Pubs id:
pubs:631897
UUID:
uuid:c2e30a98-8a0b-4de5-b683-1659a2ec649e
Local pid:
pubs:631897
Source identifiers:
631897
Deposit date:
2016-07-05

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