Caring about Lyricality

This article offers a close reading of Laura Marcus’s styles of close reading, taking as its point of departure a lockdown recording (in spring 2020) of her lyrical rendition of the ‘Time Passes’ section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The essay pays particular attention to the enduring place lyricality occupied in Marcus’s critical imagination, both as an object of analysis and as a feature of her own prose. David James argues that Marcus often modelled a mode of critical practice oriented around affectively attentive, densely exemplified, and above all intimate explications of literary expression – a practice whose lyrical textures were themselves a performative affirmation of what that intimacy could creatively and analytically achieve.