Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
In this chapter, Elsa Högberg illuminates Woolf’s sensual, lyrical writing in light of its contact with Thomas De Quincey’s ‘impassioned prose’, drawing out the erotic and political dimensions of the book as a gift to Sackville-West. Examining the dream-like, visual and musical aspects of a long sentence at the end of Chapter V, Högberg considers the gender politics involved in Woolf’s appropriation of De Quincey’s prose style. In Högberg’s reading, the lyricism of Orlando unravels the time of the legal sentence, and thereby the logic by which aesthetic and material property is passed down an exclusively male line of inheritance.
Keywords: gender politics, inheritance, intertextuality, literary fugues, lyricism, poetics, sexuality, Thomas De Quincey, Vita Sackville-West
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