Lawrence and the Machine … and Woolf

Jesse Blair is an editorial assistant for Killing the Angel, the new Woolf-inspired literary journal, so it’s no surprise that she inserts a dialogue about Woolf to introduce the characters in her novella, Lawrence and the Machine.

Lawrence responds to an ad for a room in a house near the New England university where he studies accounting and is taken into the living room to meet its eccentric inhabitants, self-professed intellectuals, in the midst of a discussion about Virginia Woolf:

“I don’t care what you say. The Voyage Out was Woolf’s most groundbreaking work.”

“Are you high?”

“Not anymore.”

“Every Virginia Woolf scholar worth her salt knows that Mrs. Dalloway is her epic success.”

“To the Lighthouse.”

“Oh, please. How clichéd. Your literary opinions embarrass you and your sweet little library degree.”

“The scholars agree! To the Lighthouse revolutionized the modern novel. The Voyage Out was by far Woolf’s least brilliant novel.”

“According to you. Have you ever had an original thought, or do you just read the criticism of others to develop your theories?”

And so it goes, until they notice Lawrence and someone asks his opinion of Woolf’s greatest masterpiece. Lawrence: “Woolf, Woolf … I strained to recall syllabi from my one or two undergraduate literature classes, to no avail. ‘Well…’ I finally improvised. ‘They were all pretty good, weren’t they?’

The story veers off from there into some pretty bizarre territory, well beyond talk, and while Woolf doesn’t make any more appearances, I think she would have approved of the proceedings.

Summer’s coming–here’s one to take to the beach and read in a single outing (but don’t forget the sunscreen).

Related articles

• “Mrs. Dalloway” At 88 (theawl.com)
• The Invisible Thread: the Anniversary of Mrs. Dallwoay (anniecardi.com)
• Happy Birthday, Mrs. Dalloway! (theparisreview.org)

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A video tour of Monk’s House

This video tour of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House in Rodmell, Sussex was produced by the BBC and is hosted by Paul Martin.

If you haven’t walked in her steps through England — or even if you have — this is a great way to get an up-close look at the Woolfs’ longtime home.

Related articles

• Monk’s House and Berwick (bookssnob.wordpress.com)
• Hogarth House, home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf (conwaydavid0.wordpress.com)

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“Woolf’s lapidary craftsmanship” in “On Being Ill”

Virginia Woolf begins her 1926 essay, ‘On Being Ill,’ with a doozy of a sentence.

So begins an essay by my San Diego writing colleague, Tom Larson, “Writing While Ill: Pathography, Then & Now” in Shenandoah, the literary journal of Washington & Lee University. He then quotes Woolf’s lengthy sentence, the first of a three-page, 21-sentence paragraph, so that readers can “behold Woolf’s lapidary craftsmanship . . . a stunningly stylized lead, rich in Proustian intricacies of phrasal singing and delayed cadence.”

He draws on Woolf’s essay, noting the likelihood that she wrote it after she had recovered from that particular bout of illness and the fact that it doesn’t discuss her ailments themselves. Woolf remarks that, “Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts;” in other words, writers in the throes of illness don’t feel well enough to write. Larson contrasts the illuminating vision of “On Being Ill” with Woolf’s more immediate but less-poetic responses to her daily condition in her diaries, and moves into his thesis by asking: “How do we make sense of language’s expression of the body (Woolf’s diary) and literature’s avoidance of the body (Woolf’s essay)?”

Cover of Illness As Metaphor

While neither Woolf nor Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, write about their own illness–significant as it was–in exploringthe topic, now we find ourselves in ”the age of pathography, a virulent subset of memoir,” a term first used in 1988 by Joyce Carol Oates when describing biographies whose authors overemphasize the seedier aspects of their subjects’ lives, and now applied to the present plethora of illness and tragedy memoirs.

Tom Larson is not new to Virginia Woolf or the topic of memoir, which has made him both a resource and a stumbling block for me. His 2007 book, The Memoir and the Memoirist, explores the genre both past and present. He differentiates between autobiography and memoir, citing Woolf’s “I now and I then” perspective from “A Sketch of the Past.”

I was considering a paper on Woolf and memoir for a Woolf conference until I read Tom’s book and realized that I couldn’t add much to what he had already said.  Now, in this eloquent essay, he develops his ideas further.

Related articles

• Woolf, her mother and narrative medicine at NYU
• Alice Lowe on life, food and Woolf (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
• Narrative Voice in Mrs Dalloway (marnielangeroodiblog.wordpress.com)

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Woolf, her mother and narrative medicine at NYU

Paris Press Books: On Being Ill

 

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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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Woolf sightings: Fifty stuck in the pipeline

From late December until now, the number of Woolf sightings I have received through a standard Google alert have dwindled to nearly nothing. One might think that Woolf’s popularity has dwindled. That is not the case.

The problem seems to be that something has changed on the Google end of things, and the Woolf sightings I used to receive daily without effort must now be retrieved by initiating a specific search.

Search I did, and here are the 50 Woolf sightings I found stuck in the Google pipeline one recent afternoon. They include references to Woolf and Beyoncé (10), Woolf and gardens (26), Woolf and the Oscars (41), and Woolf and fashion (44).

1. Bristol Women’s Literature Festival: Interview with Sian Norris, Guide2Bristol, March 5, 2013
   … many wonderful books, but one of my favourite women writers…one of my favourite writers of all time…is Virginia Woolf, I absolutely love her.
2. Casey Legler & Andrej Pejic’s Androgyny Isn’t A Trend At All, Refinery29 (blog), March 4, 2013
   While gender permutation is certainly not a new “trend” in fashion — think Bowie, Virginia Woolf, or even the wig-wearing 18th century men …
3. Review: Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters by Jane Dunn, Telegraph.co.uk, March 3, 2013
   Dunn, one of six sisters herself, has written before of sisterhoods, notably in her study of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. She knows that “it is …
4. Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird …, The Independent-March 1, 2013
   Following Jane Dunn’s account of the sisterly dynamics of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, this is the premise of her engaging study of the …
5. 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’ …
6. It takes balls to be a Great Actor, Irish Independent, March 2, 2013
   Virginia Woolf put it best when she said that a book is always considered important if it deals with men going off to war, but “insignificant if it …
7. 31 Days of Daily Inspiration From Brilliant Women, Huffington Post, Feb. 28, 2013
   … Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Abigail Adams, Caroline Hershel, Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Marie Curie.
8. Women in love, Financial Times, March 1, 2013
   Virginia Woolf once joked: “If any … dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” It is a sign of Jane Dunn’s generous …
   
9. William Dalrymple: If I had five more lives, I’d live them all in India, gulfnews.com, Mar 2, 2013
   … Shah Shuja and the first battle for Afghanistan,” says Dalrymple, who has literature in his blood – his father was a cousin of Virginia Woolf.
   
10. Same love; different lyrics, The Guardian (blog), March 1, 2013
    It’s a sign of the times that Beyoncé’s lyrics contain more feminist polemic than Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “My persuasion can build …
11. In the Critics this Week, New Statesman, Feb. 14, 2013
    The Critics section of this week’s New Statesman is lead by Jeanette Winterson’s article on the “joyous transgressions” of Virginia Woolf’s
12. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is right: working from home is bad for …, Telegraph.co.uk, Feb. 27, 2013
    As Virginia Woolf observed of (middle-class) women writers, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”; she … 
13. James Wood on five great novels of consciousness, Telegraph.co.uk, Feb. 26, 2013
    Mrs Ramsay, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) sits and thinks randomly (about God, her children, how the greenhouse will cost £50), …
14. Cafe Royal: The life and times of a London institution, CITY A.M., March 1, 2013
    The Twenties’ renovation contributed to its success in a new era; Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, Laurence Olivier, Ivor Novello, JB Priestley and ..
15. Cracking the Shell of Chick-Lit, Teen Ink, March 1, 2013
    Sparks’ process of publishing novels is the same as that of J.K. Rowling or Virginia Woolf. It starts with inspiration, continues with hours of …
16. Sarasota, are you ready to take on the challenge of Marcel Proust?, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (blog), March 1, 2013
    Many significant writers of the 20th century, including Graham Green, W. Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Michael ..
17. A glimpse of the words in action, gulfnews.com, Feb. 27, 2013
    Virginia Woolf’s novels, though I can’t read them now because she’s so terribly snobby. But her prose was a revelation. Do you think the craft …
18. The case against working at home, Long Beach Press-Telegram, Feb. 28, 2013
    One of the great thinkers on work-life conditions, Virginia Woolf, argued that our ideas themselves are subtly, but importantly, affected by the …
19. Theater review: Ordinary Days, Columbus Alive, Feb. 27, 2013
    … enthusiasm by Zack Steele, and ever anxious Deb, struggling with her dissertation on Virginia Woolf and given vivid voice by Leslie Goddard, …
20. A Reading List of One’s Own: 10 Essential Feminist Books, The Atlantic, Feb. 20, 2013
    Noteworthy feminist writing, from the works of Virginia Woolf to Caitlin Moran. banner_woolf.jpg.Virginia Woolf. flavorpillheader.PNG …
21. Goodbye Longbourn, hello Lahore, New Zealand Listener, Feb. 27, 2013
    Mullan goes on to quote that wonderful Virginia Woolf line that “of all great writers [Austen] is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness”.
22. Sex not specified: photography’s gender frontiers, The Age-by Steve Dow, Feb. 25, 2013
    … the Eurythmics had done and Tilda Swinton in her breakthrough role as the sex-switching Orlando of the film of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel …
23. Stoppard in name of love, The Border Mail, Feb. 27, 2013
    ”He was a modernist, he edited Conrad and he knew Joyce, he knew Virginia Woolf. He was very stimulated by that whole modernist world.
24. The continued conundrum of consciousness, Binghamton University Pipe Dream, Feb. 26, 2013
    Consider some of the great creative minds of the past century: Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath,Virginia Woolf and many more, not exclusive to …
25. What does it mean to be a writer? For me, writing is a parenthesis …, Financial Times, Feb. 22, 2013
    I’ve never had a Virginia Woolf “Room of One’s Own”. … Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998).
26. Rhododendrons to shine at Philadelphia Flower Show, Montgomery Newspapers, Feb. 26, 2013
    The gardens are promised to feel so authentic and peaceful that passersby might envision historical British figures like Virginia Woolf, Roger …
27. Karen Russell: By the Book, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2013
    … Wallace Stevens, Stephen King, Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, Virginia Woolf, Ben Marcus, Kelly Link, Joy Williams, Carson McCullers.
28. App brings artists to all, Your Local Guardian, Feb. 26, 2013
    … do have key links with number of influential authors, such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alexander Pope and of course Virginia Woolf.” …
29. Ups and Downs: Famous Writers and their Day Jobs, Nelson Mail (blog), Feb. 21, 2013
    It’s one of the orange-striped Popular Penguin mugs, with “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “George Orwell” written on it. The Virginia Woolf model …
30. New on Netflix: The Hunger Games, The Paperboy, The Artist …, Reel Life With Jane, Feb. 27, 2013
    This gripping drama follows the parallel lives of three 20th-century women: incomparable writerVirginia Woolf, an unsatisfied 1950s housewife …
31. Bring Back the Illustrated Book!, New Yorker (blog), Feb. 22, 2013
    In her 1926 essay, “Cinema,” Virginia Woolf reëmphasized the distinction between visual stimulation and the ineffable conjurings of prose.
32. ‘Or’ star Emily Gunyou Halaas on life in (and out of) the theater, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 23, 2013
    Virginia Woolf wrote that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to …
33. Love Letters: Old Fashioned Affection in a Digital Age, Washington College Elm, Feb. 15, 2013
    Few love letters evoke this risk as mesmerizingly as Virginia Woolf’s letter to her lover Vita Sackville-West, written in 1927: “Look here Vita …
34. DDF triumph: ‘Soap and Water’, Palatinate, Feb. 24, 2013
    … suicide: Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane and Virginia Woolf remind the audience that although the piece may present itself as a contrived situation, …
35. Review – Ingrid Jonker: A poet’s life, Independent Online, Feb. 21, 2013
    Often compared to Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf because of her suicide (she drowned in July 1965), sometimes to Marilyn Monroe over her …
36. Former TNR owner/publisher has seller’s remorse, Hot Air, Feb. 14, 2013
    The first and second cohort of editors and writers included such giants as Felix Frankfurter, Virginia Woolf, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rebecca West, …
37. Touching Plath’s Hair, Daily Beast, Feb. 11, 2013
    In 2005, I was lucky to travel to Knole, the family seat of Vita Sackville West, where the original manuscript for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is on …
38. Sylvia Plath’s London: ‘When I came to my beloved Primrose Hill …, Evening Standard, Feb. 22, 2013
    The evening was spent gossiping about the private lives of DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, WH Auden and Stravinsky. The following month the …
39. Glimpse of a mischievous, surprisingly saucy Austen, Irish Independent, Feb. 18, 2013

    Nevertheless, in the limited world Austen inhabited, holding, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “a candle to life on a country house stairway”, a life …

40. JG Ballard’s Memoir, ‘Miracles of Life’, New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013
    “No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car,” Ballard notes. “No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever …
41. Why the Oscars Really Are Worth Watching, Esquire (blog), Feb. 22, 2013
    Neither did Kafka, nor Virginia Woolf, and on and on. These writers weren’t particularly uplifting people. They didn’t write virtuous books.
42. Do we still need women-only spaces? The Guardian (blog), Feb. 15, 2013
    Feminism in the 1970s was based on the truism that every woman needed “a room of one’s own”, a phrase that drew on Virginia Woolf’s …
43. From Arab Spring to global revolution, The Guardian, Feb. 5, 2013
    I am drawn to Virginia Woolf’s comment: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” She was referring to a revolution in social …
44. Autumn/Winter 2013-14 Ready-To-Wear, Vogue.com, Feb. 12, 2013
    It was all very much anchored in that Virginia Woolf poetic vein – dropped-waist dresses, billowy sleeves, high necks, flocked florals, dancing …
45. Lens Crafter, Santa Fe Reporter, Feb. 19, 2013
    … Sigmund Freud’s couch, Annie Oakley’s heart target and Virginia Woolf’s writing table. “Woolf was very messy…art is messy,” Leibovitz says.
46. Treading warily through history, Huffington Post (blog), Feb. 14, 2013
    Virginia Woolf, for example, deplored Lytton Strachey’s original decision to garner the facts with invented passages in his book, Elizabeth and …
47. Last Whiff of PIFF, Willamette Wee, Feb. 20, 2013
    Chekhov’s elusive endings haunt us, said Virginia Woolf, because we feel “as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it …
48. This is 50, The Christian Century, Feb. 15, 2013
    The novelist Virginia Woolf sounds a bit like Thomas Merton. At 50, she wrote of her desire to concentrate her life, to turn it away from the …
49. Writing of walking, Spectator.co.uk (blog), Feb. 7, 2013
    Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial …
50. Chrissie Swan, The Age, Feb. 9, 2013
    Kind of like Virginia Woolf’s ”room of one’s own”, but it’s a “domain of one’s own”. In their lovely, intimate space, they create a magnificently rich …

Related articles

• To the Arthouse (themillions.com)

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IVWS call for papers for MLA 2014

The International Virginia Woolf Society has issued a call for papers for the Modern Language Association Convention, which will be held in Chicago, Jan. 9-12, 2014.

Guaranteed panel at MLA

The society will have one guaranteed panel, Woolf, Wittgenstein, and Ordinary Language, which invites papers on Woolf’s championing of the ordinary in language and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of ordinary language, both thinkers’ tangential relationship to the “Apostles,” and/or their influence on Bloomsbury.

Organizers: Madelyn Detloff at detlofmm@miamioh.edu and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. at pohlhag@miamioh.edu.

Deadline: 300-word abstracts are by March 8 to the organizers.

More information: For more information about the panel, please contact the organizers directly.

Proposed panel

The society will propose an additional panel to submit to the MLA Program Committee, which
must be accepted by the committee before it is official. Panel details are as follows:

Woolf and London’s Colonial Writers: Literary, political, social, and spatial connections between Woolf and London-affiliated writers from the British colonies. Papers may focus on any number of writers who traveled from various locals in the British Commonwealth and spent time in London contemporaneously with Woolf, including Mulk Raj Anand and Mahatma Gandhi of India and C.L.R. James, Una Marson, and Jean Rhys, from the West Indies. Papers might address intersections through the Hogarth Press, mutual friends and social circles, shared literary and political investments, literary responses, and common spaces.

Organizer: Elizabeth F. Evans at elizabeth.evans@nd.edu.

Deadline: 300-word abstracts are due by March 8 to the organizer.

Proposed collaborative panel

The society will also collaborate with another allied organization and submit a third panel, which is not guaranteed. For 2014, that will be a panel with allied organization, SHARP: The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Organizers will choose papers for this panel and submit the proposal to the MLA Program Committee and hope for their approval.The topic is: Book History & Virginia Woolf: A joint session of the International Virginia Woolf Society and SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) on Woolf & book arts & history: letterpress, typesetting, bookbinding, manuscripts, the material book . . . her books in book history, and more.

Angles for this panel include Virginia Woolf, history, & the book arts. Woolf and letterpress, bookbinding, the book arts; depictions of the material book or the printing process in Woolf; or bibliographical or manuscript-based studies. Sly references to letterpress, type and typesetting, bookbinding and the Book Arts, glimpses in bookshop windows, descriptions of books on tables, with just a line of text to tease the reader, books wrapped in plain brown wrapper, manuscripts tucked in the bosom, books abound within the text of Woolf’s books. How do they work? Can they be identified? What do they mean? How do they shed light on Woolf as a book-maker/book-binder, a lover of the history and art of the book—in addition to her love of writing?

Organizers: Leslie K. Hankins at lhankins@cornellcollege.edu and Greg Barnhisel at barnhiselg@duq.edu

Deadline: 300-word abstracts are due March 8 to the organizers.

MLA Woolf Bash

The society’s annual MLA bash will be held at the home of Pamela Caughie.

Important note: You must be on the books as a member of MLA to organize or present on a panel.

Related articles

• Last call for panel proposal for MLA Convention 2014 (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
• Learn to Create an Upcycled Daybook – A Creative and Unique Calendar – with Bookbinding Expert Juliayn Coleman at the San Francisco Center for the Book (prweb.com)

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Journal of Modern Literature full of Woolf

As Kristen Czarnecki of Georgetown College noted in a message to the Virginia Woolf Listserv, the latest issue of the Journal of Modern Literature is “full of Woolf.”

Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find — for free — as HTML or as downloadable PDFs:

• Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway by Annalee Edmondson
• Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves by Maureen Chun
• The Early Life of Septimus Smith by Kathryn Van Wert
• Virginia Woolf and British Russophilia by Michael Lackey
• Dismantling the Modernist Myth: Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf in the Literary Marketplace by Alison Howard
• A constellation of modernist historiography: Woolf with Benjamin by Jean-Michel Rabaté

The articles are published in Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2012 by Indiana University Press.

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Woolf sightings: To the Lighthouse inspires video game

Ever since the holidays, I have felt a disturbance in the Force, the Force of Virginia Woolf in the Universe. From mid-December until now, the number of Woolf sightings has diminished greatly. At times, they have even disappeared.

I don’t know what to make of this unusual development, but take heart. Woolf has broken new ground. This month, her novel To the Lighthouse has been credited with inspiring a video game (4). And I have heard talk that an Israeli Woolf has been sighted (13).

1. Showing her funny side: British Library to release Virginia Woolf’s last …, The Independent
   The British Library is to show the mischievous and comic side to Virginia Woolf, with the release of her last unpublished work later this year. The 90-year old writings dubbed The Charleston Bulletin Supplements will be published for the first time in …
2. Virginia Woolf’s fun side revealed, The Guardian
   An affectionate, mischievous side to Virginia Woolf is set to be revealed in the author’s last unpublished work, a series of 90-year-old family vignettes that will be released for the first time this summer. The Charleston Bulletin was a family …
3. Virginia Woolf and other great literary cooks, The Guardian (blog)
   When the US food-and-lit blog Paper and Salt (paperandsalt.org) last week published a recipe for a cottage loaf as Virginia Woolf might have cooked it, other sites linked to it eagerly, suggesting America is at least as baking-mad as we are. Even more …
   
4. How Virginia Woolf inspired Far Cry 3, Shacknews
   What was the reasoning behind making such a compelling character leave the narrative so early? Lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem explained that Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse inspired that decision. In Woolf’s novel, “the main character dies in the …
5. Watch Patti Smith Read From Virginia Woolf, And Hear The Only Surviving …, Huffington Post
   In the video above, poet, artist, National Book Award winner, and “godmother of punk” Patti Smith reads a selection from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 experimental novel The Waves, accompanied on piano and guitar by her daughter Jesse and son Jackson.
6. Was the first world war accompanied by a rising literary nationalism?, The Guardian (blog)
   In one of the talks this weekend, Rachel Bowlby will discuss Virginia Woolf’s justly famous essay from 1923 (pdf), “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, and take on her teasing contention that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”. I can’t imagine … Read more about The Rest is Noise event at Southbank Centre, London, on Feb. 2 that included Woolf.
7. Book News: Alice’s Appeal, Virginia’s Pastime, New Yorker (blog)
   Virginia Woolf on the virtues of keeping a diary. Data analysis of literary works reveals Jane Austen and Walter Scott tobe the most influential authors of the nineteenth century. A new digital edition of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl …
8. Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf, Los Angeles Times
   Today is the 131st anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s birth. Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf! Woolf was a groundbreaking writer, an incisive critic and a catalyst for the modernist movement in British letters. Among her most significant works are the …
9. WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BIRTHDAY, The Hour
   Legendary British author, Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882. On January 26, 2013 her birthday will be celebrated in a most auspicious way at the Wilton Library, 137 Old Ridgefield Road in Wilton. 20 actors have been scheduled to read from …
10. Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry, Phys.Org (press release)
    Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry, written by Maxwell Bennett, one of the leaders in the field of neurosciences, provides an explanation of the symptoms and untimely suicide of one of literature’s greatest authors, Virginia Woolf. The sources used are …
11. Jaipur Literature Festival 2013: I am proud to be related to Virginia Woolf …, Zee News
    On Day 1 of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2013, Resham Sengar of Zeenews.com managed to have a quick chat with William Dalrymple who also happens to be the festival’s co-director. Read on to know what he said about being related to Virginia Woolf, his …
12. A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf – review, The Guardian
    “Greetings! my dear ghost,” Virginia Woolf addresses her older self whom she imagines might one day read the diary entry she is writing. The pages are haunted with such hypothetical selves but also with her fictional characters as they are brought into…
13. The Israeli Virginia Woolf, Haaretz
    “I am holding a book by the Israeli Virginia Woolf,” she announced. “You must write about it!” She handed then editor Benjamin Tammuz the first novel by Yael Medini, “Kavim U’keshatot” (“Arcs and Traces” ). Tammuz held Kahana-Carmon – a revered author …
14. The joyous transgressions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, New Statesman
    In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf did away with the usual co-ordinates of biography and set off through time as though it were an element, not a dimension. The story is simple: Orlando is a young nobleman, aged 16, in the reign of Elizabeth I. After a …

Related articles

• Happy 131st birthday, Virginia Woolf (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
• Virginia Woolf: writer and bread baker (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
• British Library reveals playful Virginia Woolf manuscripts (telegraph.co.uk)
• Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice (openculture.com)

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Woolf newsletter seeks contributions

Editors of the International Virginia Woolf Society newsletter, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, are looking for contributions of different kinds for the next issue. The following submissions are welcome:

• information about upcoming conferences, symposia, reading and/or writing events
• conference reports and reports from other gatherings (300 words or so)
• book announcements, book readings – short book reviews (300 words or so)
• interviews with creative writers working on Woolf-related things
• reports on recent events and/or on exhibitions – notice of upcoming Woolf-related events and/or exhibitions
• anything else that falls within the realm of the Woolfian

According to the submission guidelines, electronic submissions are preferred in MS Word and using MLA format. Hard-copy manuscripts will not be returned to the sender. Submissions are not refereed. In most cases, submissions are reviewed and selected by the editor of record for the issue in which the submission will be published.

Send submissions to Kathryn Simpson at k.l.simpson@bham.ac.uk by March 5.

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