Development: A NovelA loosely fictionalized autobiographical novel which takes Nancy--Bryher's fictional self--from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. |
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Page xii
... islands out of grape- blue darkness with a gold knife . " She speaks of waves as dented blue or curved racing green " ; says of the Scillies that " untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness ; as though , a ...
... islands out of grape- blue darkness with a gold knife . " She speaks of waves as dented blue or curved racing green " ; says of the Scillies that " untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness ; as though , a ...
Page 3
... hurricane . It was fun to play ; it was fun to hear of strange islands , buffaloes , boys slashing a path through sugar - canes ; but the morning was wistful with the half - expressed desire , " If 3 THE AGE OF DISCOVERY.
... hurricane . It was fun to play ; it was fun to hear of strange islands , buffaloes , boys slashing a path through sugar - canes ; but the morning was wistful with the half - expressed desire , " If 3 THE AGE OF DISCOVERY.
Page 13
... island . Perhaps a sense of the eternal beauty of the mere names moved her even in infancy ; disdaining the other literature of childhood she lived in Illyria , fanciful , yet so vivid , an unimagined reality . Near Christmas - time ...
... island . Perhaps a sense of the eternal beauty of the mere names moved her even in infancy ; disdaining the other literature of childhood she lived in Illyria , fanciful , yet so vivid , an unimagined reality . Near Christmas - time ...
Page 56
... islands in richness or in beauty . The place slept . At Solunto , at Syracuse , antiquity could claim pre - eminence , but at Monreale the spirit of the Middle Age was enshrined in blurred line and magnificence of mosaic . Here , in ...
... islands in richness or in beauty . The place slept . At Solunto , at Syracuse , antiquity could claim pre - eminence , but at Monreale the spirit of the Middle Age was enshrined in blurred line and magnificence of mosaic . Here , in ...
Page 60
... island , where all the Southern nations in turn disputed for mastery . Undisturbed by the complexities of history , her imagination was free to absorb the entire force of the direct narrative , un- fettered by moralities , by any ...
... island , where all the Southern nations in turn disputed for mastery . Undisturbed by the complexities of history , her imagination was free to absorb the entire force of the direct narrative , un- fettered by moralities , by any ...
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Common terms and phrases
actual adventure Agathokles AGE OF DISCOVERY almond antiquity Arab artist basset hound beauty blue Bouvard et Pécuchet breathed Carthage Carthaginian CHAPTER child childhood colour Crete dark date palms desire desolate Doreen Downwood dream dull eager echoed verse Egypt Elizabethans epic expression eyes feel felt flower freedom French gold Hannibal head girl heart heavy hills hope Iliad imagination immortality islands knew Knossos knowledge land light lived loveliness Luxor temple mind Miss Sampson mistress morning Nancy looked Nancy stared Nancy turned Nancy's never night paint passed petals picture poem poet poetry realised reality rhythm richness ride rose rough ruins sailor sand scarlet seemed ships Sicily silence sleep South spirit strange Swiss Family Robinson Sylvia thought touch truth uncon Verhaeren vers libre verse vivid walked wasted watch waves wild wind window wonderful words
Popular passages
Page 108 - Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights, Wherein you spend your folly : There's nought in this life sweet If man were wise to see't, But only melancholy, O sweetest Melancholy...
Page 53 - Give me my robe, put on my crown ; I have Immortal longings in me : Now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip: — Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. — Methinks, I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of...
Page 54 - Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me; now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire, and air; my other elements I give to baser life.
Page 109 - I sit by and sing, Or gather rushes, to make many a ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love; How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies ; How she...
Page 99 - Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing Worthy your noble thoughts ! 'tis not a life, 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.
Page 122 - But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships, upon our coast, death keeps the shallows - death waits clutching toward us from the deeps. Beauty is set apart; the winds that slash its beach, swirl the coarse sand upward toward the rocks. Beauty is set apart from the islands and from Greece.
Page 59 - She would labour to make it perfect, to make it beautiful, till it became the very epic of the South, till all could read in one volume the knowledge she was seeking in books, in fragments, in pictures, in stones, in the whole of the land itself. At this time a historian usurped, to her, the place that excavators and Egyptologists formerly had held. It seemed a way to keep, to touch the immortality of a greatness...
Page 5 - ... texture of an imaginary dream. Hail and spray rapidly beat a sense of salt reality into her thought till, exultant with discovery that wildness was yet alive and might be hers, she hurried joyously along the beach to be lifted up to see the men in cork belts and sou'westers ready to begin their voyage. A parting of the waves, a vivid shout, and the lifeboat slid into the water, vanishing in the hollows, or flung, a struggling fish, upright against a roll of wave. Gusts of wind caught Nancy as...
Page 171 - ... Masters, A Fair Quarrel, Eastward Ho, was to step back three centuries and actually enter the Elizabethan world. The side of her nature which resented the impossibilities of Fletcher, however beautiful the poetry, was not disquieted with Moll, the Roaring Girl. It was indeed a mad world she read of, curious mingling of a very ferocity of strength with the *"' light-colour summer stuff " out of which Euphues, Campaspe, and Rosalynde were fashioned.
Page 163 - ... thoroughly an element of her mind that it was only by accident she discovered, at fifteen, they were printed symbols to the multitude, and to speak of them as gold or crimson merely provoked derision. It was not until nine years later that she found she was simply a colour hearer and that, while it was not common to every one, as she had at first imagined, it was not confined to the few, but was, in one form or another, fairly prevalent.