On September 10th, American Scholar, writer of Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes, Professor Patricia Laurence had come to “Lectures on Thinking and Literature” on invitation, making a presentation titled The Narrow Artistic Bridge: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. It was presided over by our Professor Luo Gang of School of Chinese. Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes had been translated by a Chinese translator Ms. Wan Jiangbo. More than 100 teachers and students of School of Chinese listened to it.
Professor Patricia Laurence is an expert at English Literature, Literature theories, history of novels and modern feminine books. In her new book Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes, she extended her researches on silence to the Oriental through her investigation on some archives and related interviews during her journeys in China and Britain.
In this lecture, Ms. Laurence at first told an inter-cultural love between Ling Shuhua, a female writer in our modern history of literature, and Julian Bell, nephew of the English writer Virginia Woolf. She thought that their relationship could be 2 paralleled literary communities – a tie between the New Moon School of China and Bloomsbury of Britain. Then she further explored the relationship between Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf and compared their similarities, depending on their literary works, diaries, letters, paintings and some other achieves. She wanted to prove that literature is kind of public cultural field, which is open, inter-language-family, and cross-national.
