Passing and Flowing: Rhythmical Entanglements of Writing, Painting and Knitting in Virginia Woolf and Berthe Morisot

Abstract“[F]or though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common”, Virginia Woolf claims. This chapter tracks the relation among writing, painting, and a more mundane creative practice: knitting. Woolf often describes and stages painterly effects of material reading practices and a language that assumes textile qualities. In To the Lighthouse, moments in which writing, painting, and knitting touch upon each other are often presented as epiphanies that emerge from rhythmical patterns connecting words, textiles, colour, elements of the natural world and human beings. Expanding on such rhythmical entanglements in Woolf’s writing, I will discuss Berthe Morisot’s painting “Young Woman Knitting”. In the painting, the movement of the brushwork performatively presents the activity of knitting, which creates an effect of epiphanic connectedness that immediately splinters into fragments again.