A 2024 book by Olivia Laing compares her rundown garden to a passage from this section where an overgrown house is on the verge of “pitching downwards to the depths of darkness.” For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this brief section of a larger novel that centers on a house slowly falling into disrepair as it is cared for by its housekeeper, Mrs. McNab. It is interspersed with comments in square brackets on the fates of its characters.
ANSWER: “Time Passes” [prompt on the second section of To the Lighthouse or the middle section of To the Lighthouse] (The Laing book is The Garden Against Time.)
[10e] Laing also praises this writer for her restoration of Sissinghurst Castle. This author of The Edwardians was fictionalized as the title character of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.
ANSWER: Vita Sackville-West [or Victoria Mary Sackville-West]
[10h] Sackville-West’s rural upbringing inspired her to write this Georgic poem, which opens, “I sing the cycle of my country’s year.” Woolf satirized this poem as “The Oak Tree” in Orlando.
ANSWER: The Land
<CM, British Literature>