I sometimes
think I should abandon my inveterate habit of browsing in secondhand and
charity bookshops – it takes up a good deal of time and money, after all. On the other hand, it leads to many good and
serendipitous discoveries. So today I
have returned home, after dispensing a modest 75 pence, with a nice clean paperback
copy of Zadie Smith’s 2012 London novel, NW. It caught my eye on the shelf because it has
this epigraph from Morris’s A Dream of
John Ball: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’
‘Will no-one
tell me what she sings … ?’ William Wordsworth asks in his ‘The Solitary
Reaper’. Will no-one tell me, in turn,
why Zadie Smith uses the famous Morris quote as the apt tag to her novel, since
I won’t have time in the midst of a very busy academic term to start reading my
delightful new acquisition? Thanks in
advance to any reader of this blog who can help out with this, and hooray for those
local bookshops that let fall such good discoveries into our eager hands.
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1 comment:
Thanks for the reference, Tony. Perhaps someone should try some more systematic mapping of Morris's presence - ghostly and subliminal for the most part, I would think - in contemporary poetry, drama and fiction?
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