6 MURASAKI Lady Murasaki Shikibu • ca. 978 –1026 (Lake Biwa region, Japan) CLAUDIA TOBIN
Lady Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese novelist and poet who served as a ladyin-waiting to the Empress Shoshi at the Imperial court, during the Heian period. Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, ca. 1005) is widely recognised as a classic of Japanese literature. Among the pictorial works inspired by the novel are twelfth-century handscroll illustrations, which represent ‘the type of small-scale pictures created to amuse Heian aristocrats, particularly women’.1 Duncan Grant’s early art education involved copying Japanese prints, and in 1925, he read the first volume of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji.2 In that same year,Virginia Woolf published a review of Waley’s translation, describing it as a ‘story of the enchanting boy – the Prince who danced “The Waves of the Blue Sea” so beautifully that all the princes and great gentlemen wept aloud.’3 Woolf paints a romantic picture of the novelist sitting down to write ‘in her silk dress and trousers with pictures before her and the sound of poetry in her ears’, in stark contrast to her contemporaries of the same period in the Western world, who were ‘fighting or squatting in their huts while she gazed from her lattice window at flowers’.4 In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf mentions Murasaki alongside Emily Brontë and the Greek poet Sappho as a ‘great figure of the past’.5
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Murasaki (detail from Famous Women), 25.5 cm diameter, ceramic. Copyright the Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett and Duncan Grant Estate, DACS 2017. Digital image courtesy of Piano Nobile (Robert Travers Works of Art Limited).
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1 Griselda Pollock, et al. ‘Women and Art History’, Grove Art Online: Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092072. 2 Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 264. 3 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tale of Genji: The First Volume of Mr Arthur Waley’s Translation of a Great Japanese Novel by the Lady Murasaki’, Vogue (late July 1925), 66 no. 2: 53–80, 53. 4 Woolf, ‘The Tale of Genji’. 5 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 82.