L15Nosignpostsinthesea(08.10吴飒).doc

Lesson 15
No Signposts in the Sea
About the author
Vita Sackville-West, the daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville, was born in Knole House, Kent in 1892. In 1913 she married the diplomat and journalist Harold Nicholson.
Sackville-West's first published works were a collection of poems, Powers of West and East (1917). Her long poem The Land won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She also wrote the novel Heritage (1919) and a history of her family, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922).
In the 1920s Sackville-West became romantically involved with the writer, Virginia Woolf, who celebrated this love affair in her novel Orlando (1928). Dedicated to Sackville-West, the book traces the history of the youthful, beautiful, and aristocratic Orlando, and explores the themes of sexual ambiguity. This was followed by the novels, The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931) and The Dark Island (1934).
Sackville-West also published books on travel and literary topics and for many years wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer. Her unorthodox marriage was described by her son, Nigel Nicholson, in Portrait of a Marriage. Vita Sackville-West died in 1962.
Lead-in questions
What is your first impression of the text?
What can you feel from the story? Why? → gloom, romance.
We all know that life is short and precious,and everyone wants to live a happy and long one day if you knew you had only a few days to live What would you do?
What feelings would you have?
We can see what feelings Edmund Carr would have before his death.
Summary of the novel
The 144-page novel is written in the form of a journal kept by a man called Edmund Carr, 50, an influential(有势力的,有影响力的) political columnist and a bachelor. He learns that he has a limited time to live—a few days or weeks, a month or two at most. How shall he spend them? In this situation, he learns that a widow who he has lately met at random social occasions has booked passage on a cruise to the Far East. Her qualities,