![]() ![]() In his wife Sofia’s diary, she wrote, “Today Lyovushka (Leo) asked me for some fashion magazines regarding Anna’s ball gown.” Highly critical of the Westernized nobility in Russia, it is difficult to imagine that Tolstoy undertook this research just to provide credible detail for the entertainment of the upper class. There is evidence that Tolstoy did quite a bit of research to supply detail for his novel, Anna Karenina. ![]() By probing parallels between the two novels, and by questioning how Woolf’s ideas about motherhood compare to Tolstoy’s, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel as a vehicle to challenge ideas of motherhood in popular culture. On the motherhood front, Woolf accepts, expands, and sometimes contradicts many of Tolstoy's ideas. ![]() ![]() In both novels, a Grimms’ fairy tale is used to deepen characterization and to explore thematic concerns. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, and the characterization of Mrs. Unsurprisingly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby illustrating and putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. Measuring books against each other, she suggests, is a way of questioning society and of recalibrating our standard of values. Among other things, she asks “And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator?” In effect, what she is doing is to ask readers to use their reading as an anthropological tool. In “How Should One Read a Book?” (1927), the first of three essay versions of this talk, Woolf suggests comparing Clarissa Harlowe to Anna Karenina. While writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf took time out to give a talk to a group of Hayes Court schoolgirls. ![]()
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