Woolf sightings: Wikipedia, The Great Gatsby & Bloomsbury

In this collection of Woolf sightings, Virginia is quoted regarding Wikipedia’s “woman problem” (6), the character of Edith in the remake of The Great Gatsby dismisses the famous author entirely (10) and Anne Olivier Bell lays Bloosmbury bare in a tell-all interview with The Independent (15).

1. The Last Class: Beth Flynn, Humanities, Michigan Tech News
   The students read James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and others, and for their finale they presented on their final papers. One student asked of Lawrence: “sexist or savvy?” Another looked at androgyny in Woolf via Alice Walker. Another …
2. Double vision, The Economist (blog)
   Their method—having their actors or opera singers use hand-held cameras to frame and shoot the scene which plays above the stage—developed out of Woolf’s own experiments with literary form. “Virginia Woolf’s writing created the idea,” says Ms …
3. Coming of age in the nuclear age with ‘Ginger and Rosa’, Monterey County Herald
   After a screening at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, it became clear that I hadn’t just loved Potter’s adaptation of “Orlando,” starring Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf’s gender-shifting character; or “Yes” (Joan Allen as a married scientist who …
4. Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage, Huffington Post
   She went to nearly thirty places, including the homes of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ansel Adams. She followed …
5. Abbott cares for mums, but why so little support? – Brisbane Times, Brisbane Times
   He might, for all we know, have a Virginia Woolf voodoo doll that he jams full of pins when he’s bored. All these things may be true, but so is this: Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is vastly superior to the Labor government’s legislated scheme …
6. BETWEEN THE LINES: Wikipedia’s woman problem, Livemint
   Virginia Woolf touched on the intricacy of this “problem” in her comment on Max Beerbohm in “The Modern Essay.” “We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word he writes,” Woolf says of Beerbohm. “The triumph is the triumph of style.
7. Joanna Kavenna is one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. But will she …, The Independent
   Virginia Woolf writes, “Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? ‘This great book,’ ‘this worthless book,’ the same book is called by both names.” All you can really do, Woolf continues, is write ..
8. READING & WRITING, E Kantipur
   The promise of this manufactory was evident to Virginia Woolf. Throughout her fiction she attacked the problem of the world’s persistent demand upon our attention, which overcomes even the security and seclusion of a room of one’s own. Woolf asks us to ..
9. An Apple a Day: Charting a Long Battle With Anorexia, Daily Beast
   Emma Woolf (Virginia Woolf’s great-niece) pens a memoir, now out stateside, about trying to recover from a decade-long eating disorder—and how finding love gave her hope. Share. facebook; twitter · google plus · email; print; 0. I’ve always been …
10. Scott and Zelda, as seen through a complicated lens, Chicago Tribune
    Best of all, in Patti Roeder’s Edith, we get to see a woman who was far more modern and forward-thinking than her tightly corseted characters suggest. Though she may dismiss Virginia Woolf’s ”Mrs. Dalloway” as “a 200-page excuse for not washing one’s …
11. What’s in a Routine?
    Daily Beast
    About a third of the way through A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes the way Jane Austen wrote all of her novels. According to Woolf, Austen spent her days interrupted by visits and various obligations, and writing almost covertly—always …
12. Book News: Microsoft Rumored To Be Interested In Buying Nook – for KUHF
    KUHF-FM
    Alex Jung considers Virginia Woolf, camp and the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books: “I have often thought that if I were ever a drag queen, and more specifically that if I were ever a drag queen who was a …
13. A recording studio in the garden: How creativity comes in shedloads, The Independent
    George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion from his garden shed in Hertfordshire, which was built on a turntable, which turned to face the sun; Roald Dahl wrote most of his children’s books in his Buckinghamshire “writing hut”; Virginia Woolf wrote in her ..
14. All About The New Books!, Oman Daily Observer
    By Majed Al Sulaimany — • Be yourself, everyone else is taken! — Oscar Wilde • If you do not tell the truth about yourself; you cannot tell it about other people! — Virginia Woolf • Say what is true, although it may be bitter and displeasing to …
15. Bloomsbury laid bare: The last member of the famous artistic set reveals all, The Independent
    It is more than 70 years since Virginia Woolf last put pen to paper. And 50 since her sister Vanessa Bell put away her paints. In 1941, Virginia filled her pockets with stones and walked out into the River Ouse, never to return. Vanessa died peacefully …
16. There’s no such thing as the wrong sort of book, The Independent
    “There is a great tradition of English, a canon of transcendent works, and Breaking Dawn is not one of them.” Neither was Middlemarch the minute it was published of course, though it became quite popular, Virginia Woolf praising it in The Common Reader …
17. Inversion therapy: Dan Brown’s cure for writer’s block put to the test, Telegraph.co.uk
    Comments. Writers block – the curse of so many great authors. Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Andrew Motion and Hilary Mantel have all complained that occasionally they just don’t know where the next word is coming from.
18. Reporter spends a day in Dan Brown’s boots – Calgary Herald, Calgary Herald
    Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Andrew Motion and Hilary Mantel have all admitted to occasional writer’s block. Now the renowned best-seller Dan Brown has joined this literary hall of fame. It may be hard to tell from …
19. Why ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ Still Matters, The Awl
    Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published on this day in 1925. Set on a single day in London, in June of 1923, it tells the parallel stories of Clarissa Dalloway, who is throwing a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War One veteran.
20. Who Was Afraid of Viviane Forrester?, Jewish Daily Forward
    … Iconoclastic French-Jewish Novelist and Essayist. Woolf At The Door: Viviane Forrester’s last book was a biography of Virginia Woolf 
21. Meditation on Mortality, Wall Street Journal
    There was a time when most educated people would have recognized Lincoln’s reference: “Gray’s Elegy,” wrote Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), “includes more familiar phrases than any poem of equal length in the language.” Its 32 stanzas …
22. Defending depth in the time of 140 characters or less – Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Morning Herald
    In her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Virginia Woolf offers a polemic against the Edwardian novelists and their reliance on the outer trappings of character, descriptions failing, she says, to provide a ”single person we know”. Woolf argued …
23. Student entrepreneurs: what are you waiting for?, Telegraph.co.uk
    Comments. It’s 9.00am and I’m in a seminar on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; there’s a discussion about modern femininity taking place and I can’t quite remember my opinions on gender-neutral toilets. My brain feels hazy; four hours ago I was napping on the …
24. Third Tuesday Book Club: Favorite reads and rules for success, Washington Post
    “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Magus” by John Fowles. “The Nine Tailors” by Dorothy L. Sayers. “Stones for Ibarra” by Harriet Doerr. Third Tuesday Book Club’s rules for book club success. 1. Pick a …
25. Even Khaled Hosseini Can’t Tell Stories as Effectively as He Wants to, The Atlantic
    Herman Melville scribbled changes onto the final proofs of Moby-Dick until the printer’s deadlines could wait no longer; in her journals, Virginia Woolf announced at least four separate times that she’d finally completed The Waves. Writers often keep …

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Shades of Woolf: Mapping the NYC thoughtscape

Here’s an interesting twist on the stream of consciousness technique Virginia Woolf used in several of her most famous novels. It’s a project that involves walking and talking. Simultaneously.

Andrew Irving, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester, decided to record the “inner dialogues of people walking in New York City—to map part of the city’s thoughtscape, layered beneath its audible soundscape.” To do so, he approached strangers at Manhattan intersections and asked if they would share what they were thinking.

Surprisingly, out of  those he asked, about 100 said yes. He then asked the agreeable pedestrians to wear a microphone attached to a headset and speak their thoughts aloud as they walked. He filmed their walking and recorded their audio, then overlay one on top of the other for his project called “New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens.”

To learn more, read Can we record our inner monologues? in Salon, and watch his four videos: “Walking,” “Bridges,” “Squares” and “Cafes.”

I guarantee you will be charmed by at least one of these brief videos. Perhaps predictably, my personal favorite is “Walking,” which is obviously reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway.

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Toby’s Room: Better late than never

 I finally read Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. My library’s reservation system is fantastic but does require some patience! Paula first mentioned it here last summer, noting the allusions—in more than the title—to Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, as did Hermione Lee, who reviewed it for The Guardian.

I read Barker’s Life Class around that time before I knew it was the prequel to Toby’s Room, and I posted on the “near sightings,” the Bloomsbury references when the protagonist, Slade art student Elinor Brooke, has tea at Ottoline Morrell’s.

Elinor’s brother Toby, like Jacob before him, dies serving in World War I, and like Jacob is revealed mostly through family and friends. Toby’s Room is still Elinor’s story, in which she seeks to unearth the mysterious details of his death. Woolf appears in entries from Elinor’s diary. She records her impressions from a weekend at Charleston Farmhouse, presumably at the invitation of Vanessa Bell:

“VB was in the drawing room when I arrived, with her sister, Mrs. Woolf. I’ve met her more than once, though I don’t think she remembered me and gave me a lukewarm welcome. Doesn’t like young women, I suspect. I thought the talk would be well above my head, but they were quite relaxed and gossipy and we chatted on easily enough. Or they did. I was too nervous to say much. It was like listening to an old married couple. They’ve got that habit of completing each other’s sentences…”

The other guests are “the conscientiously objecting young men” working at the farm, none of whom, she realizes, are going to be interested in her. There’s talk of the war at dinner, and Woolf talks about “how women are outside the political process and therefore the war’s got nothing to do with them.”

Elinor is struck by Woolf’s observation but finds it less convincing when she later tries to echo the sentiment herself. Barker has no such problem making her case. In both novels, she challenges readers to explore the role of art and artists in time of war, heightening the drama with real, fictional and hybrid characters as she did in her Regeneration trilogy.

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Woolf sightings: On a bike, in a lodge, in a war

Virginia Woolf and Dutch biking trivia is Woolf sighting number one this week. Other sightings include a mention of Woolf’s writing lodge in the same breath as a UK Thinking Shed (3), an op-ed in the LA Times that includes three Woolf novels on a list of “Literature’s Greatest Hits,” and a quasi-mystical novel that connects Woolf to an imaginary Nazi win in World War II (6). Read on for more.

1. A spin through a world where bicycles rule streets, Los Angeles Times
   It seems just about any and every famous person who ever rode a bike in Amsterdam or who wrote about the city’s cycling scene earns a cameo, including Audrey Hepburn, Albert Camus and Virginia Woolf. In 1935, Woolf wrote in her diary that “the cyclists …
2. Woolf’s Orlando on stage at USM, The Portland Phoenix
   With insights into both the masculine and the feminine, s/he is at the center of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a fabulist commentary on the fluidity of gender and sexual identity. Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the novel is on stage in a vivacious …
3. The Diary: Inspiration? Here’s a shed load of ideas, The Star
   The Thinking Shed at Digital Media Centre Barnsley . By Colin Drury Published on 22/04/2013 09:40. THE shed: a humble environment which has inspired some of history’s most creative moments. Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and Roald Dahl all wrote in theirs.
4. A Golden Age Mood Board Based on Spring Altuzarra, New York Magazine
   He’s referring to the cinematic version of Virginia Woolf’s book, a gender bending time-warp with Tilda Swinton as its main character. One scene, with Moorish architecture and Ottoman fashion, served as inspiration for this heavily spangled look. And …
5. Austin Peay State University’s Jill Franks to discuss new book at May 14th …, Clarksville Online
   A brilliant but melancholy young writer named Virginia Woolf often attended these salons, known as the Bloomsbury Group, and it seems fitting that her presence will again be evoked at 5:00pm on May 14th during the Austin Peay State University Center of …
6. In House of Rumour, Ian Fleming and Aleister Crowley win World War II – io9, io9
   But in Jake Arnott’s novel House of Rumour it becomes the focal point for a secret history that’s stranger and more elaborate than just “What if the Nazis won?” Arnott weaves figures like L. Ron Hubbard and Virginia Woolf into a quasi-mystical tale.
7. Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by …, The Guardian
   Her book belongs to the growing genre of what might be called Sisterly Feelings; Paula Byrne’s excellent recent The Real Jane Austen and Dunn’s own A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf are notable examples, though perhaps one of …
8. ‘The Interestings,’ by Meg Wolitzer, Washington Post
   “The Interestings,” the new novel by Meg Wolitzer, arrives with an endorsement from the estimable author of “The Marriage Plot” and “Middlesex,” stating that, “Like Virginia Woolf in The Waves, Meg Wolitzer gives us the full picture here.” (Riverhead …
9. `William and Judith’ takes on the Bard at the Browncoat, StarNewsOnline.com (blog)
   Photo courtesy of Richard Davis. Downtown Wilmington’s Browncoat Pub & Theatre opens its latest play April 19, “William & Judith,” an original work by Cody Diagle. It was inspired by this quote from the author Virginia Woolf: “Let me imagine, since the …
10. Don’t Miss: April 19-26, Wall Street Journal
    … recalling Mr. Bennett’s working-class childhood in the north of England. An engaging treat, as we follow the gentle slope of the career he sums up as: “If you’re born in Barnsley and set your sights on being Virginia Woolf, it isn’t going to be ..
11. To the Lighthouse: You Know, the One in San Francisco Hardly Anyone Seems …, The Atlantic Cities
    So I pose the question to you, dear reader, by way of Virginia Woolf: For how would you like to spend the night upon a private island the size of a tennis lawn in San Francisco Bay? For just a night or two, I reckon most of us — like Woolf’s young …
12. Best Bets, April 19, Austin American-Statesman
    Virginia Woolf’s and James Joyce’s studies of characters’ inner ramblings are a Modernist artifact for plenty of writers and readers today. But for Kelman, they remain a useful way to explore the depths of people often considered outsiders. His Booker …
13. Entertainment calendar, News Sentinel
    IPFW’s Department of Theatre presents “Orlando,” the stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel by playwright Sarah Ruhl in its last weekend. Performances are at 8 p.m. today-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday in Williams Theatre, 2101 Coliseum Blvd. E.
14. ‘Orlando’ highlights role of Greek chorus, Yale Daily News (blog)
    “Orlando,” a play by Sarah Ruhl, a lecturer at the School of Drama and Theatre Studies Department, is a dramatic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Orlando is a young man born in Elizabethan England who lives in several …
15. Tribeca Film Festival Will Honor Nora Ephron With an Annual Award to a Woman …, Slate Magazine (blog)
    But it’s a substantial cushion, an updated version of Virginia Woolf’s ”money and a room of her own.” And unlike lots of people who are honored by Hollywood, Ephron’s a genuinely great role model, someone who made movies about and for women—but not…
16. On the Page: Willa Cather and Fiona Maazel, New York Observer
    If Willa Cather isn’t the most well-known 20th century American writer, she’s certainly one of the most underrated, a direct descendent of Virginia Woolf and a clear precedent to the straight-laced social realism of Jonathan Franzen. The pressing …
17. Sleeping with Tilda and Quentin, Huffington Post
    In 1993, Tilda Swinton portrayed an English nobleman next to Quentin Crisp’s Queen Elizabeth in Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel, Orlando. In the film, Orlando, played by Swinton, subtly, surprisingly changes his …

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Student tells digital story of Mrs. Dalloway passage

Erin M Kingsley, Ph.D. candidate and digital pedagogy instructor in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigns her students a creative project each semester. This term,  one student turned a famous passage from Mrs. Dalloway into what Kingsley describes as “a compelling piece of digital storytelling.”

Kingsley said she enjoyed the video, particularly its flower imagery, and asked Virginia Woolf Listserv readers to share their thoughts.

Comments from a few Listserv readers are posted below. I invite you to watch The Odes to Time and share your response to this powerful and thought-provoking video in the comments section at the end of this post.

A quote from a Virginia Woolf Listserv reader:

I thought this was great! Startling and in a good way so as to make me see, think and feel the words and their movement. What a great project!

And another:

The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time.

We saw the 2 types of shell; it would have been good to have seen 2 types of  plane, and shavings from a plane.  I can’t remember when I last saw shavings from a plane in real life.  It takes me back to my childhood. The images certainly made me *think* about this sentence, not just read it.

And yet another:

VW constantly surprises with the freshness and sharpness of her images; she forces the grey matter to stand up and dance.

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Woolf sightings in academia: A natural fit

Two sightings that locate Virginia Woolf in academia — a natural fit of course.

First up is a sighting posted by Emily Kopley to the Virginia Woolf Listserv that has also made its way around Facebook. It appeared in the April 8, 2013, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education as an essay on teaching English to high school students and was titled ”What my Ph.D. Taught Me.” The author is Jessica Levenstein, an English teacher at Horace Mann.

Kopley posted “the Woolfian bit” to the list, since the article is available to Chronicle subscribers only. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Thirties Poets (Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2011, #60 in the Bloomsbury Heritage monograph series).

“Every now and then, in the classroom, there are transcendent moments that surpass my own great expectations, formed in the classrooms of my astounding professors. Last spring, as we finished discussing Clarissa Dalloway’s June day, we read aloud Clarissa’s reaction to the news of Septimus’s suicide: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.”

“The room was quiet for a moment, as my students considered what that ”thing” might be for Clarissa, and what it might be for them. Finally, an 11th-grade girl at the far end of the table sighed, “I wish I could always be in the middle of reading *Mrs. Dalloway.*” Become a teacher, I thought, and your wish can come true.

The second academic sighting is Simon Gikandi’s editor’s column, “The Fantasy of the Library,” in the January issue of PMLA. Gikandi begins the piece by relating the envy of Woolf that he felt “Once upon a time, when I was dreaming of becoming a writer.”

His envy, he explains, was “because she had the good fortune to live in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and its famous Reading Room.” He goes on to cite Woolf’s descriptions of the room in A Room of One’s Own and Jacob’s Room.

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Woolf sightings: A life changing quote and more

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” – Virginia Woolf

Current Woolf sightings include a rerun of Virginia Woolf’s 1920 attack on misogyny republished in the New Statesman (4), mention of the quote above as an idea that can change one’s life (6), commentary about references to Woolf in the Tina Fey film Admission (18-19), and the Oxford University Press discovery of a Woolf introduction in an out-of-print edition of Laurence Sterne’s 1928 novel A Sentimental Journey (21).

1. Virginia Mak, Virginia Woolf and a room of one’s own, Vancouver Sun
   With a nod to Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own, Toronto-based artist Virginia Mak offers a series of photographs that comment on the conditions required to engage in the creative process. Mak’s exhibition, Of One’s Own, is on display at …
2. Virginia Woolf, By Alexandra Harris, The Independent
   Harris deftly takes us through Woolf’s stodgy Victorian childhood, when the always surprisingVirginia was a demon cricket bowler, the mysterious abuse by half-brother George and the first assault of bipolar disorder at 14, which transformed her life …
3. Bridge: Do Not Forget To Count The Points, Dalles Chronicle
   Virginia Woolf said, “On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.” It is a sad fact of bridge that it does not matter how great your bidding might be. If you do not make the contract, the opponents get points. In this deal …
4. Inside The Centenary Issue, New Statesman
   In addition to our stellar spread of original content, we republish key pieces from the Statesman’s venerable archive, from Virginia Woolf’s 1920 attack on misogyny to John Maynard Keynes powerful meditations on the Spanish Civil War, from 1937.
5. The Bechdel Test, The Daily Cougar
   And how small a part of a woman’s life is that” – “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf. It is patently obvious, in going through the history of cinema, that men and male roles have dominated the silver screen. Woolf’s quote, particularly “and how …
6. How 99 Days Can Change Your Life: The Hope Street Challenge, Huffington Post
   These women, Virginia Woolf, George Elliot, Charlotte Brontë and Florence Nightingale among them, had a great deal of inspiring ideas about how to best fulfill your dreams and transform your life. To launch the book I wrote a 99 Day blog — on Facebook …
7. The Saturday Quiz, The Independent
   In order to write fiction, said Virginia Woolf, one must have money and… what? 3. The Vogalonga is an annual rowing race that takes place in which European city? 4. Which tennis player, b1952, holds the record for the most tournament victories (109 …
8. Unmastered Angel: PW Talks with Katherine Angel, Publishers Weekly
   The word “unmastered” started swimming about in my head a few months into the writing, and it immediately felt important. Then, rereading [Virginia] Woolf’s diaries, I found the quote I used—“Why do we like the frantic, the unmastered?”—and that …
9. Emma Watson learns pole dancing skills for new film, Business Standard
   So I had this surreal experience where I was studying the modernists, writing about Virginia Woolfon Friday night, then driving to London for pole dancing classes on Saturday morning,” she said. Watson also said that she is highly inspired by the ..
10. Sally Potter Relives Cold War Tensions With ‘Ginger & Rosa’, EDGEOnTheNet
    For the woman who made her name adapting Virginia Woolf, and writing entire films in iambic pentameter, it’s a startling turn. The last thing we expected from Potter, a decided experimentalist, was a reserved historical drama, especially one driven …
11. Why So Many People Misunderstand Jane Austen, Slate Magazine
    Writing about a rough draft of The Watsons, one of Austen’s unfinished books,Virginia Woolf said that “the stiffness and bareness of the first chapters” suggest that “she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first …
    

    In Denver photographer Sally Stockhold’s series of hand-colored prints, “myselfportraits, ode to icons,” on view at the Firehouse Art Center, she assumes the role of various iconic women, such as here, where she plays Virginia Woolf. (Firehouse Art Center)

12. Longmont’s Firehouse Art Center: Sally Stockhold exhibit closes Sunday, Longmont Daily Times-Call
    In Denver photographer Sally Stockhold’s series of hand-colored prints, “myselfportraits, ode to icons,” on view at the Firehouse Art Center, she assumes the role of various iconic women, such as here, where she plays Virginia Woolf. (Firehouse Art …
13. What do we learn from images of violence?, BDlive
    In her book, Three Guineas, written in 1938, Virginia Woolf professed that the shock of horrific images of war cannot fail to unite people of goodwill. Woolf responded to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London, who asked: “How in your opinion are we …
14. Laurinburg scholar focuses on women sleuths, Laurinburg Exchange
    “I love Virginia Woolf with the intellectual love of an adult, but I love Georgette Heyer with the deeply passionate, emotional attachment reserved for the favorite texts of one’s youth,” she wrote in the preface. If middlebrow fiction was shunned by …
15. Is Wales the new Sussex for gardeners?, Telegraph.co.uk
    Witness the intriguing plot at Charleston, where the garden was a communal effort involving the numerous weekend guests of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, including E M Forster, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf (Vanessa’s sister) and Lytton
16. Review: Vanessa and Virginia, Nouse
    In a humble London studio, a two-strong cast resurrects the Bloomsbury sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Vanessa and Virginia is Elizabeth Wright’s new play, based on the semi-biographical novel by Susan Sellers. Those who are yet to encounter …
17. Orlando’ hits the ground running at F&M College, Lancaster Newspapers
    In Sara Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s high-spirited biographical parody, opening Thursday at Franklin & Marshall College’s Roschel Performing Arts Center, Orlando will race through more than 300 years of history and some pretty radical changes.
18. Reel Advice : Reel advice: Schooled, ChicagoPride.com
    Her long time partner Mark (Michael Sheen in another cartoonish role), has been cheating on Portia with a she-wolf Virginia Woolf scholar. Her relationship with her self-sufficient, single mother Susannah (scene-stealer Lily Tomlin), author of the …
19. Hey, ‘Admission’: Quit using Virginia Woolf as a punchline!, Christian Science Monitor
    Thanks to “Admission,” a new film comedy starring Tina Fey as Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton, Virginia Woolf is getting a renewed profile – although not necessarily the kind of attention that promises to win Woolf new readers. Skip …
20. HISTORY LESSON: Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf died, Alfred Hitchcock film…, San Angelo Standard Times
    In 1941, novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England. In 1943, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills, Calif.In 1963, the Alfred Hitchcock film “The Birds” premiered in New York. In …
21. Virginia Woolf on Laurence Sterne, OUPblog 
    During a recent trip to Oxford University Press’s out of print library in Oxford, we came across the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition of his novel A Sentimental Journey, which included an introduction by none other than Virginia Woolf. In it, Woolf …
22. A Servant of One’s Own: On Virginia Woolf, Domestics, and Downton Abbey, The Millions
    At least, that is the case for the inhabitants of Downton, a grand house that is within itself a dying breed, but the 18 years Nellie Boxall served as cook to Virginia Woolf, however, were a far more fraught affair than the coupling of Lady Mary …
23. Magical & delicious, The Recorder
    … her sister, Vanessa Bell. The cover of the newly released volume, which includes “On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf and “Notes from Sick Rooms” by her mother, Julia Stephen, who wrote from the perspective of a caregiver. Cover art and design by Don …

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Remembering Virginia Woolf in words and music

On this, the 62nd anniversary of her death, common readers and writers around the globe remember Virginia Woolf, in words as well as music:

I am remembering Virginia Woolf today, as are many. She died too soon, but by her own choice. What great works she may have written, we will never know. But her influence will be felt for centuries. I know that reading her novels, diaries, letters, and works written about her, by those who knew her, influenced my life in numerous ways. I became a college English instructor, and have also written an op-ed column, and freelance articles, and always in the back of my mind, I thought of Virginia and her struggles and triumphs, in a time when women were supposed to get married and be quiet. RIP dear friend.  - Carol Butler Jensen on the Virginia Woolf Facebook Page

A Room of Her Own’s 6th Gift of Freedom winner and finalists reflect on the anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death, a day on which we celebrate the meaning of her life and her work.

Gift of Freedom Winner Diane Gilliam, Poetry

“It’s not a simple thing to be on the side of life.  There’s no naivete to it, it’s not a wish to return to the simplicity, the unambiguous peace of the Garden.   “[T]he beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder,” Woolf says near the beginning of A Room of One’s Own, locating the beauty of the world right on the fine line between love and grief.  To hold the balance of those two opposites, this is my version of being on the side of life, to know that both things are always true even though on any given day one or the other may be out of sight.  For me, that’s wholeness, presence, sanity.” Read More of Diane’s Essay “Two Edges”

Genre Finalist Florencia Ramirez, Creative Nonfiction

“I am grateful to Virginia Woolf’s legacy that spills beyond the constraints of her years lived. The long string of words, sentences, stories and books she wrote in her lifetime continue to breathe with new vitality.  They spread and take new forms; like a writer’s retreat in Ghost Ranch or a woman inspired to write her own stories in a room of her own. Each act reminds us that Virginia Woolf hasn’t died; she became a river.”  Read More of Florencia’s Essay“Virginia Woolf and a River”

Genre Finalist Ire’ne Lara Silva, Fiction

“How do we define ‘tragedy’? How do we define ‘victory’? Virginia Woolf was 59 years old when she took her own life. She chose the time and manner of her passing. For how many years—how many decades—was she able to keep the demons at bay with her creative work?”Can we ask for more than that? To outrun the darkness and wrestle the monsters with all our might long enough to say what we most needed to say the way we needed to say it? To leave a legacy of work and thought and aesthetics that has influenced and will influence so many writers, so many women?”  Read More of Ire’ne’s Essay “The Dream:  Reflections on the Anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s Suicide”

Today’s responses from readers of Woolf

• Afterwords: Moving Letters of Condolence on Virginia Woolf’s Death …www.brainpickings.org/
  
• Profile of the Day: Virginia Woolf www.geni.com/blog
• bookshelves of doom: March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf drowns. bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com/bookshelves_of_do…
• English novelist Virginia Woolf died – 1941 | The Official Website of … michaelthomasbarry.com/
• Free eBooks by Virginia Woolf - GalleyCat www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/
• 28th March 1941: Virginia Woolf, Dead at 59 | A Small Press Life onetrackmuse.com/

Archival materials

• Looking at Virginia Woolf’s death with newly opened archive …
• New Bloomsbury archive casts revealing light on Virginia Woolf’s …

Social media responses

Below is a March 28, 2013, post on the Virginia Woolf Author Facebook page, along with comments added in response. Following the Facebook offerings is a selection of the numerous tweets in several languages resulting from a “Virginia Woolf” search on Twitter on March 28, 2013:

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Woolf and Austen, together again…

It’s no surprise to have Virginia Woolf’s name come up in discussions of Jane Austen and vice versa. Austen is, of course, one of the foremothers held up in A Room of One’s One and in a number of Woolf essays. My pleasure is in finding Woolf sightings in fiction, the more obscure the better, but it came as a complete surprise when she appeared in Beth Pattillo’s Jane Austen Ruined My Life.

This charming romp follows the adventures of Emma Grant, an American university professor and Austen specialist. Following her divorce and the loss of her teaching position, she goes to England in search of Austen’s missing letters, the ones her sister Cassandra supposedly burned after her death. She’s wooed by the “Formidables,” a secret society of devoted Janeites, who entice her with a few sample letters and send her on a sort of Austenish scavenger hunt to prove she’s worthy of their cache.

At Austen’s house in Chawton, Emma sees a little table and chair in front of the sitting room window—it’s where Austen wrote. She observes that, “In spite if all the distractions, she’d created her masterpieces with nothing more than paper, pen, and ink. Virginia Woolf was famous for saying that any woman who wanted to be a writer needed to have five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own. Austen had possessed neither of those things, and yet somehow she had outshone authors with far more worldly advantages.”

In all this she also has to deal with a couple of dishy and attentive suitors vying for her affections and inserting themselves into the mystery. The outlandishness of it all reminds me of the movie “An Unmarried Woman,” in which the betrayed wife, Jill Clayburgh, has immediate consolation from the likes of Alan Bates. Oh sure, just like real life, huh?

But I won’t quibble. The book was delightful and well written, a perfect weekend escape. Now I’m tempted to track down Pattillo’s other Austen novels–Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart and The Dashwood Sisters Tell All– both continuing the successful formula of blending literary mystery with contemporary stories.

Maybe I’ll be rewarded with more Woolf sightings.

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Woolf sightings: Including a song of Julia

Sufjan Stevens

Some interesting Woolf sightings today, including the unreleased demo by Sufjan Stevens, which is based on Virginia’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (4); Emma Watson’s musings on her shifts from high to low culture (11); and small talk about whether one would want to be stuck in a lift with Woolf (40).

1. A Servant of One’s Own: On Virginia Woolf, Domestics, and Downton …, The Millions, March 15, 2013
   A Servant of One’s Own: On Virginia Woolf, Domestics, and … but the 18 years Nellie Boxall served as cook to Virginia Woolf, however, were a …
2. Book News: Apostrophe Chaos, Abercrombie and Žižek, New Yorker (blog), March 18, 2013
   Alexis Coe on the “long and tumultuous saga” of Virginia Woolf and her servant Nellie Boxall. Langston Hughes’s collection of Harlem …
3. theater – Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO, adapted by Sarah Ruhl, Glens Falls Post-Star, Feb. 28, 2013
   In Sarah Ruhl’s whimsical adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel ORLANDO, we are invited to take a journey of self-discovery as Orlando lives as a duke, …
4. [listen] Hear an unreleased Sufjan Stevens demo “Julia”, ChartAttack, March 15, 2013
   Sufjan says he recently unearthed the cassette demo in an Adidas shoebox, and “Julia” refers to Julia Prinsep Jackson, Virginia Woolf’s mother …
   
   
5. Michelle Shocked explains allegedly anti-gay remarks, Examiner.com, March 19, 2013
   … icons including Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Ella Fitzgerald, Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keefe, Billie Holiday, Amelia Earhart …
6. Live, Love and Eat! Neighborfood Launches in Santa Barbara, Noozhawk
   … neighbors to live it, love it and eat in it, because as Virginia Woolf said, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
7. Philip Roth’s Eightieth Birthday Celebration, New Yorker (blog), March 20, 2013
   

   Orlando DVD

   … the biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, who gave a learned survey of Roth’s use of Shakespeare in his novels; Alain Finkielkraut …

8. Sam Mills’ top 10 fictional sex changes, The Guardian, March 20, 2013 Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Orlando, Woolf’s fantastical biography, records the 400-year life of Lord Orlando. He begins as a nobleman in the …
9. Admission, Willamette Week, March 20, 2013
   In an overstuffed subplot, Portia’s sheepish poetry-professor partner (Michael Sheen) leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar he’s already …
10. What Our Memories Tell Us About Ourselves, TIME, March 20, 2013
    In her striking description of lying as a small child in her cot at St. Ives, Virginia Woolf noted that this wasn’t just her earliest memory; it was the …
11. Emma Watson parties hard, ‘goes shopping’ in ‘Bling Ring’ trailer, Kansas CW, March 8, 2013
    So I would go from reading Virginia Woolf to [watching] Kim Kardashian. I kind of loved it, this mix of super-high and super-low culture. I think it …
12. Women’s Rights Movement in Colombia Takes the Stage, Foghorn Online, March 19, 2013
    “Like Virginia Woolf would say, 22 years ago I resolved to have my own room,” and as an actress, Colombia’s Virginia Woolf has found her …
13. The Making Of ‘Descender’: Andrew Wyatt on Creativity, Violin …, Noisey (blog), March 19, 2013
    There is an underlying message to that effect in Mrs. Dalloway, the Virginia Woolf novel from which the anecdote is partially taken. There are of …
14. Belated Apology to Anton Chekhov, The Atlantic, March 19, 2013
    His work inspires adoration from readers, including writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Raymond Carver. When asked about his …
15. Professor of book art will speak on women’s roles in printing, Santa Fe New Mexican.com, March 18, 2013
    Virginia Woolf is best known as an essayist and novelist of London’s Bloomsbury Group in the early 20th century. Less known is her and her …
16. The Accidental Artist, Baltimore City Paper, March 19, 2013
    … the tinkering with conventional realism and syntax practiced by James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Tristan Tzara, Virginia Woolf, …
17. Review: ‘Bates Motel’ a twisty, moody modern prequel to ‘Psycho’, Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2013
    When, in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf conjured the tragically compelling possibility of Shakespeare’s sister, a new …
18. Sundance Channel’s ‘Top of the Lake’: Out of the gloom, a chilling …, Washington Post, March 17, 2013
    … asked to help with the case of Tui Mitcham, a 12-year-old rescued while wading, Virginia Woolf-style, into the frigid waters of Lake Wakatipu.
19. Long-lost essay by ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ author discovered, News & Observer, March 18, 2013
    Stevenson devotes most of the essay to the art of capturing or even simulating reality on paper, a puzzle that Virginia Woolf and other 20th …
20. Magical & delicious, The Recorder, Feb. 20, 2013
    This is an undated photo of British author Virginia Woolf. (AP Photo) Ashfield poet and publisher Jan Freeman found a draft of “On Being Ill’ …
21. Author Ann Patchett coms to Writers Center Stage at the Ohio …, Plain Dealer, March 17, 2013
    In essence, Patchett is staking out a 21st-century version of Virginia Woolf’s argument in “A Room of One’s Own”: That writers (Woolf was talking …
22. Women writers romancing the Word,
    Inquirer.net, March 15, 2013
    Move over, Virginia Woolf. For the women writers whose works are on exhibit until April 30, the most important message they wish to convey, …

23. Margaret Fuller: Journalist, Critic, Transcendentalist,

    WBUR, March 14, 2013

    Running ahead of Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keefe, Amelia Earhart. Of Edith Wharton. Hemingway. A proto-feminist. Transcendentalist.

24. Putnam overcomes adversity, wild final minutes to win …, MassLive.com, March 17, 2013
    The win was about as easy as putting together IKEA furniture while blindfolded, as simple as reading aVirginia Woolf book backwards and in a …
25. Whatever Happened To The Real Gingers And Rosas?, NPR, March 14, 2013
    Undoubtedly the women’s movement bailed out Potter, most of whose movies — including her famously stylized adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s …
26. Amanda Coplin’s novel path to success with ‘The Orchardist’, OregonLive.com, March 16, 2013
    Her desire to write stories dropped away and she studied novels by the masters, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf.
27. The Xtra Diary: Berwick Street’s haggling history, West End Extra, March 15, 2013
    But it was not only hard-up Londoners who faced the schleppers and VirginiaWoolf was known to visit the stocking stalls and enjoy haggling …
28. Girl Trouble by Carol Dyhouse – review, The Guardian, March 15, 2013
    (Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were fairly ambivalent towards the suffrage movement.) Stories like this one, from Carol Dyhouse’s …
29. Hilary Mantel faces six newcomers in contest for women’s fiction prize, The Guardian, March 12, 2013
    “I’m not trying to make some big generalisation out of it … but if you think back to Virginia Woolfsaying that her ideal for women writers is that …
30. New Helvetia Theatre stages deeply satisfying ‘Ordinary Days’, Sacramento Bee, March 13, 2013
    … becomes linked to Kiera Anderson’s harried Deb after he finds her daily planner stuffed with notes on her stalled thesis about Virginia Woolf.
31. Sisters with no cause to thank their parents, Evening Standard, March 14, 2013
    Dunn, whose previous biographies include a double portrait of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, steers as gracefully as she can around the fact ..

32. Writing Idols: Jodi Picoult, Huffington Post, March 14, 2013

    

    Jodi Picoult

    For me, the list would consist of such names as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Tana French, J.D. Salinger, John Irving and …

33. Identifying Mrs Meeke, OUPblog (blog), March 13, 2013
    In twentieth-century terms, this would be roughly akin to identifying a family tie linking Virginia Woolfto Agatha Christie. But what had led …
34. The Top Five Least-Hipster Buildings in Downtown Dallas …, D Magazine, March 12, 2013
    Black hat, black jeans, Moleskine: hipster. Flannel shirt, beard, canteen: hipster. Olde tyme bloomers,Virginia Woolf tattoo, Big Bird sneakers: …
35. Manifesto for critical times, The Hindu, March 11, 2013
    Writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust desired independence from all and everything — including culture, family, and …
36. London’s ‘Village’ People, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2013
    The Bedford Estates is the largest private landowner in Bloomsbury, home to the British Museum and an intellectual hub since Virginia Woolf .
37. Mark Haddon: ‘The London theatre world is so much more alive than …, Evening Standard, March 12, 2013
    Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness style remains his touchstone. One reviewer said that his most recent novel, The Red House, about a …
38. Alice Walker: ‘I feel dedicated to the whole of humanity’, The Guardian, March 9, 2013
    It would be decades before I read Virginia Woolf and had her beautiful rendition of that thought, but I knew that was what I needed. The story …
39. William Nicholson’s cultural highlights, The Guardian, March 9, 2013
    The models he used were his friends, the Bloomsbury lot, so you can spot the likes of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. What I love …
40. Small Talk: Amity Gaige, Financial Times, March 8, 2013
    John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Nabokov, Edward Albee. Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with? Hugh Jackman. He could sing …

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