Representing Nation and Nature: Woolf, Kelly, White

Abstract

In a chapter titled Three around Farnham’ in The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams draws an exquisite map of three versions of rural society represented in the works of William Cobbett, Jane Austen, and Gilbert White, who lived near Farnham almost in the same era. The present essay focuses on the interrelation or figurative encounter of three writers, beyond time and genre, in a particular local space of the Hampshire village of Selborne: Gilbert White (a clergyman-naturalist of the eighteenth century), Mary Kelly (an amateur pageant writer of the interwar period) and Virginia Woolf.

This essay is mainly based on my paper read at the 11th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in Bangor, Wales on 14 June 2001 and partly on my presentation at Symposium ‘Globalization, Nationalism, Englishness: Looking through Woolf’s Works’ at the 22nd Annual Conference of the Virginia Woolf Society of Japan on 19 October 2002. I gratefully acknowledge here several comments from members of the International Virginia Woolf Society and those of the VWSJ. I thank Gilbert White’s House and The Oates Museum in Selborne for permission to reproduce a photograph of Mary Kelly’s pageant. I also thank Derek Edwards, Mavis Coulson, Alastair Langlands, and Natalie Mees in Selborne for interviews and cooperation in my research. My gratitude also goes to my colleagues at Osaka University, especially Prof. Stephen Boyd, who helped me with advice on English expressions in my earlier draft and to Waltraud Ernst at University of Southampton, who told me about David Elliston Allen’s works on natural history. Above all, my special thanks are due to the edditors of this book, Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth, who read my draft with care and gave me comments and advice that helped me greatly.