Olivia’s awakening towards literature and love parallels each other, and even though she has lost love at the ending (I assume, since I did not find a plot summary), she still has literature, a door towards ‘the emotions of men and women’, experiencing love again and again.Īs for the sincerity for Art… Oscar Wilde, W. The complex feeling upon literature reflects Olivia’s own sensitivity, being able to be influenced by words so deeply, yet, it is just merely words, how could they become so powerful? It is just Mlle Julie, how could she stir my emotion so much? Is it just memory, just writing, just this and that, why should I become so passionate again? Who would still be able to write like these lines nowadays? Who would still be able to catch the passion of heart and the yearning for hope so sincerely nowadays? It should be more shocking that writing in her eights, looking back, her emotion never withers and if she could not capture such emotion in words in her sixteen, she is able to achieve so in her eighties. “If those lines sound melodramatic, or ultra-passionate’, that is because first love is generally thus, or particularly unrequited one awaken in a pure and innocent heart. Her writing is the natural explosion of accumulated fuel exposed toįlame, an eruption from one who ‘at home ever alluded to feelings or ever She writes in the mind of Olivia, a young woman, more a girl, fired byįirst love. The over-flowing of feeling is a conscious choice for thematic That, Strachey’s writing feels sincere, and not the product of stylisticĮxtremes. Writes of a time a whole world ago, of a self she has long since passed. She says ‘those Victorian days’ (66) she means 1870s. Her in her 40s at most, extending her faculties back only a few decades.

I learnt how old she was when writing this.

I saw a writer whose style lacked justification. Not because I thought the writing poor, but On my first reading I held this against Strachey, her If those lines sound melodramatic, or ultra-passionate,

Olivia by dorothy strachey