Review: “Angel Down," "To the Lighthouse" and the communicative difficulties of World War I
“It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes: 'It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.” - Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. The difficulty of interpersonal communication at the turn of the century was a common subject for British literature in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From Will and Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch , who drown in longing while unable to express their true feelings, to EM Forster, whose motto “Only Connect” underscored the extent to which his characters could never quite get on the same page. By the time World War I started, all Europe may have been sick from this communicative illness. A case can even be made that the war began and worsened because of this difficulty, which must have infected the network of literal royal cousins who ruled the whole continent when the archduke of Austria was suddenly murder...