Smith College course features Woolf and friends

A Smith College professor will teach a course on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group that offers students the opportunity to work closely with primary materials from the Smith collections.

Professor Robert Hosmer, of Smith’s English language and literature department, will teach the course, which is called “Reading and Writing with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.” Hosmer specializes in the works of 20th century women writers.

In the course, students will work closely with primary materials from the Mortimer Rare Book Room and the Smith College Museum of Art. The Mortimer Rare Book Room has an extensive collection of Woolf’s works.

In addition, students will be able to view the traveling exhibit, “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in America Collection,” which will be at the Smith College Museum of Art April 3 to June 15.

Read more about the course.

For links to other courses that feature Woolf and her Bloomsbury contemporaries, check the right sidebar under the heading “Woolf Courses.”

Virginia Woolf: There’s an App for that

Being able to download Virginia Woolf novels to Apple’s sleek little iPod means we can now carry her words with us anywhere we go.  Because so far, I haven’t found a pocket that the gizmo — stocked with Woolf novels — doesn’t fit in.

Here’s my story. I bought an IPod touch a few weeks ago. Since then, I have spent way too much time searching for and downloading fun, interesting and useful iPod Apps.

I won’t bore you Woolfians with my love for the AP Stylebook App that set me back $29 but is worth every penny. Nor will I discuss the free Italian lessons I’m taking on my iPod or the Rachel Maddow shows I’m watching or the multiple Twitter accounts I’m following via TweetDeck.

But I will gladly tell you about the Apps I found that are related to Virginia:

• The Virginia Woolf Collection – Nine of Woolf’s novels. Cost: $2.99
• “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
• Three versions of Night and Day at a cost of 99 cents each
• Mrs. Dalloway. Cost: $17.99
• Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers. Cost: $9.99
• Orlando Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
• To the Lighthouse Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents

The best news is that if you want to get Woolf novels for free, and you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, you can. Here’s how:

1. Download the free Kindle App for the iPod touch and the iPhone from the App Store.
2. Visit Amazon.com’s Kindle store. Search for Virginia Wolf. Sort your search by price so you can easily spot the free downloads.
3. Download The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room and Night and Day for free.
4. Relax in the knowledge that no matter where you travel, you can always have Virginia in your pocket.

More of Woolf’s published work is available as Kindle e-books for under $2, including Monday and Tuesday and The Early Works of Virginia Woolf.

What book changed your life?

In a recent interview, writer Jeanette Winterson was asked, “What book changed your life?”

Here is her answer: “The Bible shaped me; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shaped my imagination; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities gave me the courage to write whatever I wanted.”

I posed the same question to myself just moments ago and felt hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I guess I’ll have to swish it around in my mind for awhile.

Meanwhile, I pose the question to you: “What book changed your life?”

Please post your answers in the comments section below.

Woolf’s Lighthouse on list of 40 personal classics

Susan Hill had a mountain of books inside her Gloucestershire farmhouse that she had never made time to read. So she spent a year reading nothing but the unread books that filled her shelves.

The result is Howards End Is On the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, published in August by Profile Books. Included in the book is a list of 40 titles that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life,” Hill said.

Among them is one by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.

Hill said she chose Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter “always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3.”

A review of Hill’s book in The Guardian calls the book “a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.”

Read the introduction to Hill’s book.

Mrs. Dalloway is having a party in San Francisco

If you live in the Bay Area, you can go to Mrs. Dalloway’s party. It’s an evening of short stories written by Virginia Woolf and performed by an ensemble of actors at St. Mary’s College of California.

According to the school’s Web site, “Wry observations and elegant prose come to life onstage through some of Woolf’s most amusing characters-ordinary women and men whose anxious thoughts and social predicaments make this party a night to remember.”

The production is directed by guest artist Delia MacDougall, a founding member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company in San Francisco.

Performances are scheduled on:

• Thursday, Nov. 12, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 13, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 20, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, Nov. 21, 8 p.m.
• Sunday, Nov.15 & 22, at 2 p.m.

When reading Woolf: Read. Think. Repeat.

James Joyce detailed Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin. Virginia Woolf followed Clarissa Dalloway through London on a fine day in June. Ian McEwan told Henry Perowne’s tale on a post-Sept. 11 Saturday in February. And Christopher Isherwood described one day in the life of an ageing professor named George in his 1964 novel A Single Man.

That novel has now been made into a film produced and directed by Tom Ford, who also co-authored the screenplay. And when I read his comments about the impact A Single Man had on him, I saw another similarity to Mrs. Dalloway.

Ford said he first read Isherwood’s novel when he was in his twenties, and the book stuck with him. But it wasn’t until he read it again years later, when he was in his late forties, that he says he found “the book resonated with me in an entirely different way.” Ford called it ”a deeply spiritual story.”

That’s how I felt about Mrs. Dalloway. I was 20 when I first read it and was duly impressed by Woolf’s thinking and her magical way with words. But I didn’t really get Clarissa Dalloway.

When I reread the novel 20 years later, I did. After marriage and children and the winding ways of life, I could understand much more about Clarissa.

But not everything. Each time I reread the novel, I get to know her better. 

That’s why I think these instructions should be on each of Woolf’s novels: Read. Think. Repeat.

Review: The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Many people consider mystery novels the perfect escape. Whether you dip into the genre regularly or infrequently, Woolfians may find it hard to resist a literary “whodunit” with Virginia Woolf at its center.

Stephanie Barron preceded this novel with a series of Jane Austen mysteries; she professes to enjoy making things up about real people, knowing they might not approve of her embellishments on their lives.

The White Garden revolves around the discovery of a new diary, believed to be in Woolf’s hand, but started the day after she was supposed to have drowned herself in the River Ouse. Intending to commit suicide that day, she goes instead to Sissinghurst, where she is comforted and cared for by Vita Sackville-West.

And there’s more, much more, including Woolf’s discovery of some nefarious wartime activities involving Maynard Keynes and others in the Bloomsbury circle, but it’s all too convoluted, and I wouldn’t want to give anything away.

And of course there’s the contemporary angle. The diary is found by an American garden designer, who is at Sissinghurst in order to duplicate the White Garden for her wealthy New York employer, while at the same time trying to uncover a hidden secret in her own family. A number of people become involved in the intrigue and with each other, including the Head Gardener at Sissinghurst, manuscript specialists at Sotheby’s, and a Woolf scholar at Oxford.

Barron reminds her readers that this is fiction, hoping that they will enjoy exploring the possibilities and forgive the license that she takes. There’s plenty of that, from the bald facts of Woolf’s death and the implausibility of the plot to some manipulation of the topography, so one has to suspend disbelief and just go with it. And in the process, you can soak up the atmosphere of Sissinghurst, Monks House and Charleston Farmhouse along with Oxford and Cambridge. You could do worse!

One-woman show about Woolf, women and fiction on stage

A one-woman show about Virginia Woolf is on the St. Mane Theatre stage in Lanesboro, Minn., starting Saturday.

Kristen Underwood developed her play, “Women and Fiction: Virginia Woolf Speaks,” in the early 1990s. It is based on Woolf’s 1928 lecture to women undergraduates later adapted into the influential A Room of One’s Own.

Read more about the play. For reservations, call 507-467-2446.

To find out more about stage productions based on Woolf’s work or life, go here.

Benjamin Harvey reviews “Bloomsbury Artists” exhibit

Editor’s Note: Benjamin Harvey, the author of this piece, is an associate professor of art history at Mississippi State University. He is currently editing an edition of Virginia Woolf’s essays on art criticism and visual culture.

A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections is the largest collection of Bloomsbury art to have been shown in the states for almost a decade.  I strongly suggest you make every effort to see it.  It will probably be more than ten years before a comparable opportunity presents itself again.  If you can’t see the show, which is now at Cornell University, but will shortly move on to other colleges, consider buying the handsome catalog, to which (full disclosure!) I contributed an essay.

Largely created by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, or products of the Omega Workshops, the show’s works provide a vivid sense of the kind of art Woolf surrounded herself with, supported financially, and occasionally wrote about.   Though portraits of Woolf are included, most strikingly one by her sister, now in Smith College, these are not the only objects connected to her.

At Cornell (but not, alas, other locations) it’s a delight to find a writing desk she owned.  Around 1929, Quentin Bell decorated the desk, painting a female figure on its work surface.  There she reclines, wearing sandals and a leafy crown: trumpet in one hand, quill in the other.  Was, one wonders, Woolf’s nephew alluding to the recently published Orlando and the mock pageantry of its famous transformation scene?

Woolf’s books, the product of her desk, suit a gallery space almost as much as a study.  Vanessa Bell dust jackets and woodcuts are included in the show but, more interestingly, so is a selection of seldom seen preparatory works.  Providing insights into how Bell arrived at her final designs, we see studies for Flush’s illustrations and for the covers of A Room of One’s Own, Mrs Dalloway, and The Common Reader.

The exhibition also includes works that relate to Woolf’s broader interests and imagery.  With its array of eclectic objects, Roger Fry’s still life of Paper Flowers on a Mantelpiece (1919) speaks of the impulse to collect, display, and share objects—a theme memorably explored in Woolf’s contemporaneous story “Solid Objects.”  Woolf’s main character, John, will also place his strange collectables on a mantelpiece, and vivid descriptions of objects on a mantle appear in “Blue and Green,” a short, imagistic work found in Monday or Tuesday.

Finally, another favorite Woolfian subject appears in a Grant study.  His 1933 watercolor portrait of Elizabeth Tudor was destined to end up on a plate, part of a large dinner service designed by Grant and Bell for Kenneth Clark.  The service’s coordinating concept was “famous women” and Woolf’s likeness was included in it, too.

Grant’s study indirectly reminds us that Woolf and Elizabeth can, in fact, already be found together on American soil, where they are again associated with appetite.  Both are among the guests of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, now permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Thus long after the current show ends, Woolf will still have a place, or place setting, reserved for her in America.

Woolf used words to get her digs in

Among those who plow through Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters, it is common knowledge that she used her pen to wittily criticize  members of her set as well as other writers of her time.

She was not alone in this practice. And now a new book, edited by Gary Dexter and just out this month, documents what she and other famous writers said about each other’s work.

Poison Pens, Literary Invective from Amis to Zola  is the book, and it is garnering positive reviews.

Woolf’s words about D.H.  Lawrence are one of the featured criticisms. In the book, the following remark about Lawrence is featured: ”English has one million words: Why confine yourself to six?”

Dexter is the writer of a long-running column for the Sunday Telegraph.