LitSalon Gallery

Moby Dick on board the Eda Frandsen July 2025

Photographs © Sarah Saunders 2025

Euripides’ Trojan Women on Agistri, May 2025

Photographs © Nanette Bertschy

Remembering Pam Johnson,
1 April 1949 – 27 April 2025

On a fine June evening members of the Salon community gathered in a beautiful London garden, fragrant with jasmine, to remember one of our most stalwart participants, Pamela Johnson.

Pam was a wise and witty woman who learned about the Salon through another Salonista in 2016. She immediately jumped in with both feet to study Ulysses, and from there her always hungry mind brought her to studies of Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Kate Chopin and many others. A passionate reader of Virginia Woolf and a grounding force in the Woolf Journals group, some of our most expansive times with Pam were spent on travel studies in St Ives. We mourn her loss and remember her with great affection.

Below are extracts from some of the readings offered by those who attended the memorial event.

“An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and peace … Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time; they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So much the better-this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness, it perfect happiness. They had now what they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy a have been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.” It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from them.”

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied tomorrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, disassociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; She hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Banks to one very small piece more and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there likes a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook she felt, carefully helping Mr. Banks to a specially tender peace, of eternity; As she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out ( she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights ) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after. This would remain.“

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling & thinking I have never come up against this before. Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child – couldn’t step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange – what am I? &c. But by writing I don’t reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind.”

From Virginia Woolf’s Diary, Thursday 30 September 1926

“The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.”

From The String Quartet, published in the collection of Virginia Woolf’s short stories: Monday or Tuesday

“In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all her imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as she can. In the next place, she judges with the utmost severity. Every book, she will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. She will be adventurous, broad in her choice, true to her own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people. This is an outline which can be filled in at taste and at leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

“If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure – mysterious, unknown, useless as it is – is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat around the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”

Adapted from How Should One Read a Book? by Virginia Woolf, first published in the Yale Review, October 1926, and later in The Common Reader: Second Series and Selected Essays

“Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“Because after all, minuscule though every individual, every ‘self’, is, he/she/it is an object through which life is being expressed, and leaves some sort of contribution to the world. The majority of human beings leave their genes embodied in other human beings, other things they have made, everyone things they have done: they have taught or tortured, built or bombed, dug a garden or chopped down trees, to that our whole environment, cities, farmland, deserts – the lot! – is built of contributions, useful of detrimental, from the innumerable swarm of selfs preceding us, to which we ourselves are adding our grains of sand. To think our existence pointless, as atheists are supposed by some religious people to do, would there be absurd; instead, we should remember that it does make its almost invisible but real contribution, either to usefulness or harm, which is why we should try to conduct it properly…

“What dies is not a life’s value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self-awareness of itself: away that goes into nothingness, with everyone else’s…. The difference between being and non-being is both so abrupt and so vast that it remains shocking even though it happens to every living thing that is, was, or ever will be.”

Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

13 June 2025, ‘Dalloway Day’ at the Cinema Museum

On 13 June, the date in 1923 on which Mrs Dalloway embarked on the walk through the streets of London chronicled in Mrs Dalloway, we met at London’s Cinema Museum in Kennington to mark 100 years since the 1925 publication of Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking novel. Following an enlightening conversation between LitSalon founding director Toby Brothers and Woolf scholar Karina Jakubowicz, and questions from the audience, we settled in our old-school plush cinema seats to watch The Hours, the 2002 film of Michael Cunningham’s novel inspired by Woolf ‘s creation.

We hope to arrange more in-person events at this wonderful venue in the future.

The Odyssey on Agistri, April 2025

Celebrating Mrs Dalloway’s centenary in Alfriston

Over two weekends in April 2025, Salonistas celebrated 100 years since publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in the village of Alfriston on the Sussex Downs. In addition to readings, discussions and sharing our appreciation of this extraordinary book, we produced some artwork inspired by the words and life of the author: