New Woolf essays to be reprinted

Thirty-four essays by Virginia Woolf will be reprinted for the first time when Stuart N. Clarke publishes Volume VI of Woolf’s essays, he reports via the VW Listserv.

 

The new essays, most of which Clarke describes as “fairly short,” will be among the 53 that will be included in the new volume. All date from 1906 to 1924 and were discovered since the publication of Vols I-IV of The Essays of Virginia Woolf.

Nearly all are listed in the fourth edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th ed., by B. J. Kirkpatrick and Clarke, published in Oxford by the Clarendon Press in 1997.

Woolf in the running

Two books that feature Virginia Woolf are in the running for for this year’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, according to the Guardian.

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light’s account of Woolf’s relationships with her live-in staff, is one.  In it, Light explores the ’sordid’ power struggle between Virginia Woolf and her live-in cook, Nellie.

Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad, a history covering the way women were treated for mental issues, is the other.

Both books are included among 20 books on the longlist.

The shortlist of five books will be announced May 15, with the £30,000 prize to the top book awarded at a July 15 ceremony in London on July 15.

Woolf writing on foot

Did Virginia Woolf really do all of her writing standing up?

A student asked me that question recently, and I had to think for a moment before I could give her an answer.

We had just finished reading Three Guineas for a class I teach on gender roles in war and peace. The students were not familiar with Woolf. Some of them admitted being afraid to read her novels, as they had heard she was “difficult.” Most had not read more than a snippet or two of A Room of One’s Own.

The student raised the question of Woolf’s writing posture when we took a break in our discussion of Three Guineas. She had read that Woolf did all of her writing standing up, she said, and found it unbelievable that Woolf — or anyone — would be able to do so much writing on foot. It sounded exhausting.

I was excited by her question. It meant that despite the rumored or real “difficulty” of Woolf’s writing, this student had appreciated her enough to find out more about her.

I told my student that I thought Woolf had used a stand-up desk as a young woman living in her parents’ home in Kensington. I mentioned, too, that I recalled seeing a regular desk and chair in Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex.

Later, I found a photo posted on Flikr by Renaud Camus that pictures the desk. The Smith College Libraries Woolf in the World online exhibit also links an image of Robert Browning’s portable desk to a quote from one of Woolf’s letters that

And, of course, one can order one’s own Woolf-alike stand-up desk, as long as one has the necessary stamina for writing on foot, as well as the requisite funds.

Read more about where writers write and the routines they follow — including a mention of Woolf’s — on the BBC Web site.

In memoriam to Virginia Woolf

It was 67 years ago today, March 28, 1941, that Virginia Woolf left behind Leonard, Monk’s House, and two suicide notes and walked across the Sussex Downs.

With stones weighing down her coat pockets, she waded into the River Ouse and drowned.

In memoriam, we repeat the last line of the memorial poem Vita Sackville-West wrote in tribute to Woolf, which was published in The Observer in April of 1941. It contains more truth than Sackville-West could have imagined.

“She now has gone/Into the  prouder world of immortality,” Sackville-West wrote.

For a touching video that pays homage to what Woolf accomplished during her life — and what she could have accomplished if she had lived on – watch “The Adventures of Virginia Woolf“ on You Tube.

For an earlier memoriam to Woolf, click here.

Or read more about the response of her contemporaries to her untimely death in the 2005 book, Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, edited by Sybil Oldfield.

Woolf token woman among writer dolls

Virginia Woolf is the token woman writer marketed as a doll by the Oddfellows Online Store.

The tip came to Blogging Woolf from Cristina, of the Brontë Blog team.

Check out the doll. It’s only $5.99.

Was Sasha a Russian ballerina on ice in Orlando?

Did Lydia Lopokova serve as inspiration for the character of the Russian princess Sasha in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando?

That was the question that popped into my mind after reading a review in The Guardian of Judith Mackrell’s book, The Bloomsbury Ballerina, which tells the story of modernist ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

The Russian ballerina took London — and the Bloomsbury circle — by storm for the 11 months of her first tour there, beginning in September 1918.

But according to the Guardian article, her sudden flight from the ballet world to take up with a Russian lover in July of 1919 disappointed the Bloomsbury crowd. By the time she returned in 1921, they were no longer enamored of her.

The review says Woolf only once made “significant fictional use” of Lopokova — as the inspiration for Rezia in Mrs. Dalloway.

However, I see another. I am struck by the similarities between the single-minded ballerina Lydia Lopokova and the exciting Muscovite princess, Sasha of Orlando.

Both moved with great grace and energy — Lopokova on the stage and Sasha on the ice. Both were charismatic. Lopokova mesmerized her audiences, and Sasha enchanted Orlando. Both were unconventional, mysterious, adventurous, and well-traveleled. And both had a dangerous side.

Lopokova and Sasha both ran off to Russia after a brief stay in London. And each of them captured the heart of a quintessential Englishman. For Lopokova, it was John Maynard Keynes’s heart, which resulted in a long-lasting marriage. For Sasha, it was Orlando’s, which resulted in heartbreak for the young lord.

All of this just brushes the surface. Feel free to add some strokes of your own — on either side of the issue.

Woolf and the beauty of words

Words can open our minds, stir our feelings, and touch our souls.

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, says the words of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway did even more. They cracked the world open for him.

Read the interview.

Speaking of words — Woolf’s, that is — a reviewer credits them with making the barren set of the stage adaptation of “Orlando” both “vivid and fantastical.”

The play, written by Sarah Ruhl, stars American Conservatory Theater’s master’s program students. It is on stage at the Zeum Theater in San Francisco. Read the review in the UC Berkeley student newspaper.

Israel celebrates A Room of One’s Own

On March 12, women in Israel will embrace Virginia Woolf’s idea that they need a private space in which to flourish.

The 2008 International Women’s Festival in Holon, Israel, will feature Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as its theme.

The festival’s theater, dance, music, art and literature offerings aren’t negative about men, says festival artistic director Rivi Feldmesser Yaron, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Instead, they “reveal the woman’s world and its inherent power,” he said. 

A word about Jean Guiguet

Jean Guiguet is dead. But until I read about his passing on the VW Listserv,  I did not know of his connection to Woolf. Neither did I realize that he was a man.

The clues to both facts were contained within several messages to the list from Woolf scholars.

First, Stuart Clarke wrote to share the news that Guiguet died Jan. 30 at the age of 94.

Then Karen Levenback weighed in with her tribute to the French professor as one ”of the earliest to recognize and honor Virginia Woolf and her achievement.”

Levenback wrote that his 1960s book, Virginia Woolf and her Works, “was one of the very few critical studies of Woolf before the publication of Quentin Bell’s biography in 1972.” 

What’s more, she wrote, it was written before Woolf’s extensive diaries and letters were available to scholars. The only such resource at the time Guiguet wrote his book was the relatively slim version of Woolf’s diaries, A Writer’s Diary, heavily edited by Leonard.

Guiguet also wrote the preface to a volume titled Contemporary Writers: Essays on Twentieth-Century Books and Authors, a collection of 40 Woolf essays on writers of her time.

In Virginia Woolf: A-Z, Mark Hussey makes numerous references to Guiguet’s Virginia Woolf and Her Works in entries covering Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction — from The Voyage Out to Three Guineas.

For a price, the Sept. 22, 1966, review of Guiguet’s book in the New York Review of Books is available online, as is Guiguet’s 1966 essay on Orlando. 

To read a piece of Guiguet’s work for free, download the Fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. His “Response to Suzette Henke’s article: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and `The Prime Minister’: Amnesias and Genealogies begins on page 42.

Another Guiguet article, “Virginia Woolf: A Multifaceted Brain, a Single Purpose,” was published in the May 2001 issue of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin.

Both Levenback and Denise Marshall spoke of Guiguet’s valuable involvement with the International Virginia Woolf Society.   Levenback remembered him as the only French member of the group when she served as secretary-treasurer in the late 1980s. Marshall recalled that when she served in that position in the early 1990’s, the group had more international members, “but none as faithful or as communicative as Jean Guiguet.”

In memoriam, Marshall wrote, “His work helped me with my dissertation and later teaching, and his is one of those volumes I always reached for as needed. I am saddened to hear of his passing.”

“I hope  that  we remember him and his important contribution with esteem,” Levenback concurred.

Novel connections and talk of madness

Rewind to The Hours

Whether you consider the film version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours a success or a failure, you may want to check out an interview with David Hare, screenwriter for the 2002 film.

He explains the miracle of making a commercial success out of the type of British film traditionally destined for art houses.

What is even more unusual, according to Hare, is that the film’s success caused Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, on which The Hours is based, to climb to the top of the U.S. paperback chart.

“No academic, however jealous, could disdain a medium that drives the modern reader back to Virginia Woolf,” Hare says.

Funny how he sounds so disdainful of academics.

Back To the Lighthouse

A Boston Globe review of a new collection of American novelist William Maxwell’s work credits Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as the inspiration behind They Came Like Swallows, his highly autobiographical work that covers the death of his mother in the flu epidemic of 1918-19.

Writer on Woolf tells own story

Ruth Gruber is famous for a number of things.

Her work on behalf of Jews during and after World War II is legendary.

Woolfians also admire her for her almost prescient study of Woolf written to fulfill her doctoral requirements at the University of Cologne, making her the youngest recipient of a Ph.D. in history.

Her groundbreaking work, Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, was first published in 1935 and reprinted with the addition of new material in 2005.

Now 95, Gruber is still writing. This time, she has published her own story, and it is aptly titled Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the 20th Century Tells Her Story.

Listen to an interview with Gruber.

Woolf one of many

In Mad, Bad and Sad: the History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, Woolf is just one of the many women whose mental state author Lisa Appignanesi discusses.

In truth, however, Appignanesi does not think any of these women deserve the description her title seems to bestow upon them. Read about the book in The Guardian Unlimited and The Telegraph.