A year ago at this very time, we were delighted by the announcement about the publication of Ewa’s first book, whose journey across outer and inner landscapes continues to this day. We could say the theme of this journey still sounds like an evergreen in our hearts – and the cover of the next book, entitled The Arthurian Legend from the Victorian Perspective in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”, seems to confirm. For the last, and chronologically the first, of Ewa’s scholarly texts, symbolically stamping perhaps the happiest years of her life, prepared by us and published by the Instutute of English Studies (University of Warsaw) has left the printer’s nest (or more precisely: Sowa [the Owl] printing house). The book is a posthumous edition of Ewa’s MA thesis, written under the supervision of Professor Grażyna Bystydzieńska and defended in 2008. Above all, it is a testament to her reciprocal love of literature, which – embraced by her with quotation marks on the pages of her academic papers – now does embrace her with marks of infinity from Avonlea to Avalon:
“They had studied Tennyson’s poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot. Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present.”
L. Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXVIII
Our sincere thanks go to Ewa’s Parents for sharing the manuscript, to Professor Justyna Włodarczyk, Head of the Institute of English Studies (University of Warsaw), for her kind heart and assistance, and to Mr Simon Hunt (University of York) for his diligent and sensitive approach to the role of proofreader. The unique illustration on the cover also this time was created by Barbara Sobczyńska. An electronic version of the book is available on the website and a paper copy can be purchased at a charity auction, supporting a worthy cause.
The eponymous Arthurian legend is the starting point of a story that crosses the centuries and tells us about the search for a moral compass, about faith (and the crisis of faith), the dichotomy of human nature, hero worship, and, finally, about love – after all, ‘all stories are love stories’ (R. McLiam Wilson), and so is our story about Ewa.
“All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.”
W.B. Yeats, Where My Books Go
translated by J. Niedziela
