Many of us find it tricky to put our feelings into words, and few feelings are as slippery as hope. For the poet Emily Dickinson, it’s always on the brink of takeoff. Hope is, she writes, “the thing with feathers” that “perches in the soul”. For Virginia Woolf, though, hoping comes down to earth. Two years after her mother’s death, the teenager consoled herself by gardening. As she wrote to her brother:
Already we have created a flower bed … and we propose to renew the grass – to have a border of lilies and other flowers … in short do not be surprised if you behold a miniature Kew when you are next here … one of these days we hope to install a cow or at least a sheep on the luxuriant pastures.
