Clarissa, a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, was featured at the Cannes film festival and is expected to be released in the U.S. later this year.
The film transposes the story from London to a modern Nigeria. The Guardian’s film reviewer gives it four stars and describes it as:
a seductively mysterious, languorous, melancholy drama with commanding performances and a great musical score […] set partly in modern-day Lagos, whose ambient streetscapes are conjured up with style, and partly in the more bucolic Abraka in southern Nigeria, 30 years in the past.
Starring Sophie Okonedo as an older Clarissa and David Oyelowo as an older Peter, the film premiered in Cannes earlier this month. Nigerian film-making brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri directed the film.
The next and final installment in the A Room of One’s Own Seminar, on Woolf’s 1929 essay and its reception in Japan, will take place via Zoom May 21.
It will feature a talk given by independent scholar and translator Aki Katayama.
Katayama is an independent scholar and translator who sometimes teaches part-time at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Her Japanese translations of Virginia Woolf include A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Between the Acts, “Monday or Tuesday,” and several shorter essays.
Her work on Three Guineas inspired her to speak out against the genocide in Palestine. She is currently co-translating the final essays of Refaat Alareer, a professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.
The A Room of One’s Own seminars are part of the A Room of One’s Own: Echos and Circulation Project based in France, which offers to take up Virginia Woolf’s landmark essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and explore its full potential. Nearly a century after the publication of Woolf’s iconic polemic, the project asks, what echo chambers has A Room of One’s Own opened up?
Led by Valérie Favre (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Anne-Laure Rigeade (Université Paris Est Créteil), the project will be ongoing until 2029, the centenary of the publication of A Room of One’s Own, and will include seminars, a conference, and a collective publication.
The deadline for the call for papers for the publication is coming right up — May 15, 2026.
Share your thoughts about teaching and learning from Virginia Woolf’s essays.
I am particularly interested in how Woolf’s essays affect and influence teachers. – Beth Rigel Daughterty
Beth’s sequel looks at Woolf’s essays through a pedagogical lens. Here are the questions she poses:
What have Woolf’s essays taught you about the process of learning and/or the process of teaching?
What does she say to you about how and why we educate?
How do you use Woolf’s essays in your teaching, whether formal or informal, inside or outside the academy?
Would you be willing to share your thoughts with me (Beth) by filling out a survey or talking with me on Zoom?
Details and deadline
More details — her rationale and goal, eight survey questions, permission forms, and contact information — can be found at this link. Beth asks that respondents fill out this Google Form or email answers to woolfessaysurvey@gmail.com, preferably by August 31, 2027.
Ever gracious, Beth adds, “Thank you so much for considering my request.”
Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 13, to celebrate #DallowayDay in London. Here’s the schedule.You can book events via Eventbrite.
11.30 a.m.–12.30 p.m.: A Bloomsbury Walk
A sell-out crowd for the Dalloway Day event at Hatchard in 2025.
Guided by Clara Jones, participants will saunter in the streets and squares of Virginia Woolf’s beloved Bloomsbury.
Please note: the walk is available only for those with All-Event Tickets. Organizers will send ticket-holders details of the meeting place by email.
Dr. Jones is senior lecturer in Modern Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist and the forthcoming British Interwar Women Writers, and editor of an essay collection, Virginia Woolf and Capitalism.
2 – 3 p.m.: A Woolf in the Archives
In conversation with Maggie Humm, Nicola Wilson and editors from the Times Literary Supplement will discuss “Virginia Woolf: Reader and Writer'” in relation to her work as publisher alongside Leonard Woolf and as a regular critic and reviewer.
Professor Humm is Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. She is the author/editor of twenty books, many focusing on Woolf and the arts. Her novel Talland House, based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, won the Women’s Fiction International Impact Book Award 2024. The Bloomsbury Photographs won the American Writing Awards 2025 for photography, and her most recent book is Snapshots: Autobiography, Virginia Woolf, Writing and the Visual.
Fiona McKenzie Johnson, whose biography Roger Fry: Bloomsbury and the Invention of Modern Art has recently been published by Triglyph Books, will discuss Fry’s life as a pioneering curator and artist, and in particular his friendship with Virginia Woolf, whose own biography of him was published in 1940.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson on the doorstep of 46 Gordon Square, Woolf’s first Bloomsbury home, during Dalloway Day 2018. A blue plaque is to the right of the front door.
Here is news about projects from Woolf scholars around the globe.
Maggie Humm and Snapshots
Maggie Humm’s new book, Snapshots: Autobiography, Virginia Woolf, Writing and the Visual, published by Edinburgh University Press, is now out and receiving much acclaim. Read about it on USA Book DNA and on the EUP blog.
The book provides a survey and analysis of feminist criticism from the 1970s and an historical account of UK women’s writing from 1900 to the present. It also brings together Humm’s pioneering work on feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf, film and visual cultures.
Look below for the code to get a 30 percent discount on Snapshots from EUP.
Humm is an emeritus professor and vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain whose last book was The Bloomsbury Photographs.
Martin Ferguson Smith, professor emeritus of Classics, Durham University and member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain who is now in his eighties, has two new books out.
Urbi et Orbi: The Epicurean Inscription and Prescription of Diogenes of Oinoanda Tab Edizioni, Rome, March 2026, paperback and Open Access
Martin the Epicurean (autobiography), SilverWood, Bristol, 15 April 2026, paperback and ebook. For other information, including about the earlier books of the writer’s eighties, In and Out of Bloomsbury (2021; paperback 2023) and The Artist Helen Coombe (2023), visit http://www.martinfergusonsmith.com
