Helen Waddell's Writings from Japan

by Burleigh, David; Waddell, Helen

• ISBN13: 9780716533504
• ISBN10: 0716533502
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-01
• Publisher: Irish Academic Press

Summary

'The richest thing in my life has been Japan' wrote the Irish scholar Helen Waddell (1889-1965) when she was in her twenties. At the time she was still living in Belfast, and had not yet embarked on the medieval Latin scholarship which later made her famous. As a child of missionary parents, Waddell had not only been born in Japan, but had spent the important years of her childhood there. It was on this experience that she drew in her first attempts at writing in the 1910s. Waddell's writings on Japan comprise autobiographical short stories, a play that was performed at the Belfast Opera House in 1915, and some allusive literary essays which anticipate the style of her mature writing on medieval subjects. These ostensibly miscellaneous pieces are, the detailed introduction argues, all connected by a single theme - the author's preoccupation with her favourite brother Billy, who died while they were being written. Besides offering new insights into the interpretation of Waddell's work as a whole, the present volume also attempts to reconstruct a 'book' that Helen Waddell herself once hoped to assemble, according to her letters.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(63)
Notes	64	(11)
Part 1: After Strange Gods: Stories of Childhood
After Strange Gods	75	(7)
Kwannon of the Single Grace	82	(10)
The Doorkeeper of Buddha	92	(3)
In Things Evil	95	(3)
The White Iris	98	(11)
Part 2: The Spoiled Buddha: Tales of Imagination
The Spoiled Buddha (prose version)	109	(6)
The Spoiled Buddha: A Play in Two Acts	115	(16)
The Flowing Invocation	131	(5)
Metier de Femme	136	(7)
Part 3: The Uttermost Isles: Essays on Literature
The Hyacinth Fields	143	(6)
The Uttermost Isles	149	(11)
Appendix: Japanese Poetry	160