Part 35 is now ready for spot PL!
Newgatenovelist wrote: ↑March 13th, 2023, 4:27 am
7.25-7.28
...but it was what [heard what was it] she knew them by all the same.
I have also made a correction to Part 22 (Chapter 3 of Time Passes). This is a rerecording of the paragraph right at the end, where Mrs. Ramsay's death is reported: 'Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.'
I'll try to explain. Also I still have the original version to revert to, if you think I have got it wrong.
Actually, the correction is prompted by the TLS review (first on the woolfonline list), who quotes the passage but adds 'surely with a slip in punctuation'). Though the slip is not explained, I remembered that I had a lot of difficulty getting that paragraph to make sense, and in fact I don't think I did get it to make sense. Looking over it again, I think that if the full stop after 'the night before he stretched his arms out' is read as if it were a comma, it starts to make sense. So, first, he stretched his arms out in the morning, then, because she had died 'the night before he stretched his arms out', his arms remained empty.
The reviewer is rather dismissive of the passage quoted and that whole section of the book. But I think it is one of most powerful passages, so it is worth trying to getting it right, or at least to make some kind of sense.
In fact, there are a few passages in the book where I had to mess about with the punctuation to get it to work and most of them involve commas. I'm not sure if commas were VW's strong point - which is not really a criticism because there are so many other strong points and it was experimental writing, after all!