the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Click check box to select all entries on this page:

Joris Karl Huysmans : Les Soeurs Vatards

'A more recent influence was Huysmans' "Les Soeurs Vatards", a novel about artisan life in a lace-maker's atelier in Paris, which he read with great admiration in March 1907, and which he admired for its uncompromising realism . . .'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett      Print: Book

Joris Karl Huysmans : A Rebours

Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 July 1902: '[italics]I[end italics] dribble on among Aristotle, golf & Byron. The last is a stiff job -- my God I've never read such trash as those Giaours and Corsairs. I had never read them before & assumed that they were nauseous, but I never imagined such feeble banalite as they contain. The letters however make up for a great deal & on the whole there is some amusement in steadily plodding through a whole author & really for once getting to know about one [...] I have also at last read [Joris Karl Huysmans'] A Rebours ... it [italics]is[end italics] diseased magnificence. The words simply dazzle me. I rather thought that sentence in the colossal chapter on the flowers & des Essintes' [sic] nightmare was in a way an epitome of Huysmans if not of all France. "Tout n'est que syphilis." Pish! I suppose everything is.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf      Print: Book

Joris Karl Huysmans : 

Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 January 1906: 'I have practically settled down for two weeks here [...] it is one immense sea of hills [...] I walk out onto these & wander from about 7-9 every morning & from 4-6 every evening, the rest of the day I read Voltaire's letters, Huysmans & Henry James.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf      Print: Book

Click check box to select all entries on this page: