I had never thought about Virginia Woolf and failure until last week when I received the Spring-Fall 2025 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. To me, Virginia Woolf had always been synonymous with success.
But this new issue invites readers “to think about, analyze, expose, and otherwise wallow in failure” — and asserts that “[f]ailure circulates throughout Woolf’s work and carries with it many meanings.”
In her introduction to the issue, Number 103, editor Mary Wilson argues that “Woolf’s engagement with failure in her public and private writing offers some models for decoupling that failure/success binary.”
The 60-page issue includes 14 thought provoking articles and two poems on the topic.
Here are just a few:
“Turning on Woolf: When Woolf Failed Me, or I Her” by Pamela L. Caughie
“Woolf’s Variations on Failure” by Savina Stevanato
“The Aesthetics and Polemics of Failure: Virginia Woolf as Novelist and Feminist” by Harish Trivedi
“Failure Allure,” a poem by Cecilia Servatius
This issue is available online, along with Miscellany back issues. Find out more about joining the International Virginia Woolf Society, publisher of the Miscellany.
How to contribute
If you want to contribute an article or a poem or an artwork, are looking for a article published in the Miscellany, need to access a print or online copy of an issue, want to acquire issues of the publication to use in a classroom, or have any questions about the it, please contact Vara Neverow at neverowv@southernct.edu.
I am a bit late to the party, but the inaugural issue of the Virginia Woolf Fanzin is here. An online publication of the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey, it debuted in March with articles from 10 contributing authors.
The 46-page publication includes:
research articles and essays,
traces of encounters with Virginia Woolf and the impressions they left,
a special poetry section,
a translation,
and event reports and announcements.
About the Virginia Woolf Fanzin
According to the publication’s introduction, it is “a space born out of admiration, curiosity, and a shared desire to keep Woolf’s voice resonating across time and borders.”
Turkish is its first language, so it is natural that the editor and its board connect Woolf to Turkey in a multitude of ways. As they put it:
Here, Woolf meets Istanbul’s streets, Anatolia’s silences, and the layered histories of Turkish women writers and thinkers. Each contribution—be it essay, artwork, translation—echoes Woolf’s spirit while refracting it through our own cultural lens.
Online in two languages
While the majority of articles are written in Turkish, several are written in English. They include:
“Angela Inside the Convent and Angela Inside the College. Life Among Women in Mansfield’s ‘Taking the Veil’ and Woolf’s ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’” by Eleonora Tarabella,
“Towards A Room of One’s Own Centenary by Valérie Favre and Anne-Laure Rigeade,
“Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys’s Embodied Writing” is the topic for the next Woolf seminar presented by the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey, featuring Eret Talviste on April 17 at 7 p.m. (Turkey time).
About the talk
Eret’s talk will focus on her new monograph Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment, and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), in which she explores how Woolf and Rhys understood writing as an embodied practice, starting with diaries, letters, and autobiographical texts, and moving into novels and short stories.
About Eret
Eret is a researcher in English Literature at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary fiction, transnationalism, feminism, and posthumanism. Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys is her first monograph.
How to attend
This is a Zoom event. Register on the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey website. Then click on the Zoom link on the date and time posted above. Please check your time zone.
Ben Majchrowicz at Charleston’s new exhibit, “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press,” which runs through Sept. 9.
When I messaged Ben Majchrowicz last week, asking him for details about “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press“ the new exhibit at Charleston in Firle, he was in the middle of the installation process. But true to form, he sent me everything he promised before the exhibition opened April 1.
Co-curated by Ben and Stephen Barkway, along with Charleston’s exhibition team, the exhibition is a major one. Running through Sept. 9 and created in partnership with the Gordon Square Society, Antwerp, it brings together for the first time the most complete collection to date of hand-printed books produced by the Hogarth Press.
While many know of Virginia’s role as a writer, and her husband Leonard ’s roles as a writer, editor, and Labour Party committee member, this new exhibit shows their pivotal roles as printers, publishers, and makers.
Multiple copies of Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
The exhibition includes works loaned from several major private collections across Europe, including Ben’s.
It features more than 100 rare books alongside archival material, letters, and artworks. It also positions the Hogarth Press as a literary enterprise as well as a radical, handmade practice at the heart of British modernism, according to a Charleston media release.
According to Ben, one of the difficulties of putting the exhibit together was making choices. The co-curators had to decide which of multiple copies of Virginia’s Kew Gardens, R.C. Trevelyan’s Poems and Fables, and Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak they should include.
Founded as an independent printing venture in 1917 in the Woolfs’ own home, Hogarth House in Richmond, the press originally sat on the Woolf’s dining room table.
Later, when a larger Minerva platen printing press was purchased in 1921, it moved to the basement. And when the Woolf’s moved to 52 Tavistock Square, London, in 1924, the press made its home in the basement again.
The Minerva platen printing press is now housed at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, Kent. And the dining table on which it sat is in the London kitchen of the late Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and has seen many dinner guests over the years.
The Hogarth Press and its writers
The Woolfs hand-set and printed many of their early works including their first book publication, Two Stories (1917) by the couple, Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918), and T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919).
Besides publishing the work of members of the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth Press also published a diverse list of international writers, including 29 translations from Russian, German, and Italian between the two world wars.
According to the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, the press deliberately pushed to reshape the publishing landscape of interwar Britain, producing seminal texts. These included works by Nancy Cunard, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, the colonial novels of William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, and the English translations of Sigmund Freud.
As part of its literary history, the Hogarth Press championed a wide selection of otherwise popular, middlebrow writers, educational and political tracts, children’s literature, and medical and self-help manuals. In the 1930s it published many titles, including these: Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), William Plomer’s The Case is Altered (1932) and Virginia Woolf’s own Flush (1933).
The Hogarth Press also served as a diversion for Virginia. As Leonard put it in Beginning Again, the third volume of his autobiography:
It struck me that it would be a good thing if Virginia had a manual occupation of this kind which, in say the afternoons, would take her mind completely off her work . . . we definitely decided that we would learn the art of printing. (Beginning Again, 233)
About “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press”
Five different covers of Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak
Bringing together hand-printed books, illustrated editions and works conceived through close collaboration between writers and artists, the exhibition reframes publishing as a creative practice shaped by intimacy, courage and control over one’s own voice.
The exhibition includes first editions of key modernist texts published by the Hogarth Press, including T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land and Hope Miralees’Paris. These classics, appear alongside lesser-known works and books of original visual prints that demonstrate the press’s commitment to new voices, ideas and creativity.
Displayed together, these books reveal the Hogarth Press as a place where literary innovation, political thought and artistic experimentation converged.
Six cover versions of “Poems and Fables” by R.C. Trevelyan
As handmade objects, the books bear the visible traces of their making: one-of-a-kind covers, typographical errors and inky fingerprints. These material details are central to the exhibition, emphasizing publishing as a form of iterative creative practice rather than industrial production.
The exhibition also highlights the contributions of Bloomsbury artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, whose designs for book covers and illustrations helped craft the Hogarth Press’ distinctive visual identity. These collaborations underscore the close relationship between literature, art and design within the Bloomsbury group, and Charleston’s role as a centre for this interdisciplinary creative community.
Publications of the Hogarth Press blurred boundaries between art, craft and literature, treating the book itself as an art object.
About the co-curators
Ben Majchrowicz is co-founder of the Gordon Square Society, Belgium. Last November and December, he held a world premiere exhibition, sponsored by the Gordon Square Society, called “Letter by Letter (From the Woolfs’ Hands): Handprinted Books by Virginia & Leonard Woolf.” For the first time in Belgium, the public exhibition brought together all 34 books hand-set, printed, bound and published in limited editions by Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves under their Hogarth Press imprint. These rarities came from Ben’s collection, as well as that of Pierre and Marie-Madeleine Coumans.
Stephen Barkway is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. Along with Stuart N. Clarke, he collected and edited a massive volume of The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf, which was published last year. He co-edits and regularly contributes to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin.
Co-curators Ben Majchrowiczand and Stephen Barkaway at the Charleston exhibit “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press
Publicity graphic distributed before the exhibition opened April 1. It runs through Sept. 9.
Turning my back on the view to look up at Talland House on a misty day in June of 2004.
Admirers of Virginia Woolf and protectors of her literary legacy are not giving up.
Yesterday, it seemed the legal cost of protecting the historic view of the Cornish coast and Godrevy Lighthouse from Talland House would prohibit any further action. Today, I share news from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain that Polly Carter has set up a GoFundMe account to help protect that very view.
Carter, the National Trust certified gardener at Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall, says that if the £1,400 target cannot be met, all donations will go toward creating a commemorative website with films and artworks celebrating the view for next year’s To the Lighthouse centenary events in St. Ives.
“Unfortunately the development has just received permission from Cornwall Council to make amendments to a set of plans on a historical, 2009, planing permission. Legal advice that we took suggests that there is a legal challenge to how those amendments got attached to the permission.
If we were able to challenge this at judicial review, there is a chance that the developer would not want to build the original plans and be put off. It is not a sure way of stopping the development but this is currently our only way of impacting any change on being able to resist the view disappearing.
“This is my last attempt at raising the the funds that the campaign group need. I realise that raising that much that quickly is unlikely and if we don’t reach the target and are unable to go to judicial review, any funds that are donated will go towards commissioning a website with commemorative films and artworks of the view/centenary celebrations of To The Lighthouse next year in St Ives.”
A judicial review could halt or deter the development, but the cost of initiating it is £20,000, and funds must be raised by Monday, March 30.
Why save the view?
Talland House is important to Woolf’s legacy for several reasons. It was the setting and inspiration for her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. It was also where Woolf and her family spent their summers until her mother, Julia Stephen, died in 1895, when Woolf was 13.
The house and its surroundings attract hundreds of visitors each year, drawn by its significance in Woolf’s life and its central role in To the Lighthouse. “The view from the house and garden is an essential part of this heritage setting and deeply connected to Woolf’s personal history, her writing, and the development of Modernism,” according to Carter.
What is the history of the development project?
Plans to obstruct the view are not new. Earlier plans for the construction of $3 million worth of flats near Talland House in 2003 sparked protests from Woolfians around the world, and the project did not proceed. In 2009, developers submitted a new plan, but that did not move forward despite receiving planning permission.
When development plans were in the news again in 2015, Woolfians fought back against the six-flat version of the project that threatened the view of Godrevy. To someone across the pond, it seemed that the protests halted the development. But a March 28, 2026, email from Polly Carter explained why the project did not move forward.
“Just for clarification,” she wrote, “the 2015 planning permission for a different building didn’t get stopped. Cornwall Council granted the permission, but it was never acted on by the developer and then they sold the plot, with the original planning permission from 2009, which was extant.”
Why can’t Talland House be protected?
It’s complicated. In 2015, a local resident forwarded Blogging Woolf an email from English Heritage detailing a provision that could shut down the project. It said current legislation included a provision to “avoid harm to the setting of a listed building if it contributes to the significance of the building.”
Talland House is listed and considered Grade II, which means it is “nationally important and of special interest.” The St. Ives resident cited National Planning Framework Section 12 paras. 128,9,132 and shared that information on the St. Ives Council’s comments page for the proposed development.
Then — and now — I did not know if Talland House’s recognition as “nationally important and of special interest” helped halt the development project in 2015 — and could help it now — or not. But the email from Carter clarified the situation.
Carter wrote:
“It’s been particularly complicated due to the fact that the [current] application related to an already existing planning permission. The point made by English Heritage in 2015 would absolutely still stand if what we were dealing with was a new application.
“All the way through we having been trying to find a way to force a resubmission of the 2009 planning application so that we could object on the heritage grounds. Very sadly, this is impossible as it’s a fixed entity in law, and it’s just devastating that no one challenged the permission in 2009.”
Why is the view in jeopardy once more?
A screenshot of the planning document that shows the west and east elevations of the multi-story proposed development, which is called The Terrace St. Ives.
As described above, past efforts to block development plans that would obscure the view from Talland House resulted in temporary delays and the sale of the St. Ives property, but the original planning permission is still in place.
Now a new developer has taken up the project, made adjustments, and is moving forward under the permission granted in 2009. Cornwall Council recently approved amendments to the 2009 planning permission, and work has begun. This time, the new five-story development of 12 flats will likely give its residents a lovely view of the coast and the lighthouse, while completely blocking the view from Talland House.
This is the situation despite legal advice suggesting there may be grounds to challenge the process — and despite posted objections from St. Ives residents and others around the globe. UK media, including the BBC, The Telegraph, and St. Ives Local, have also covered this developing story.
Peter Eddy, owner of Talland House, was quoted in St. Ives Local as saying:
In 2022, Talland House was formally recognised as a significant heritage property in Cornwall and awarded a black plaque by the Cornwall Heritage Trust. As guardians of Talland House, we are committed to preserving both the fabric of the building and the unique landscape that inspired one of literature’s most iconic works. To compromise or lose the view that shaped Virginia Woolf’s creative imagination would be a travesty for the literary world and a profound loss to Cornwall’s cultural heritage.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on March 28 to include clarifications from Polly Carter.
Polly Carter is restoring the Talland House garden now, but this was the view of a set of stone steps leading to a “Private” area of the garden in June of 2004.
Professor Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, and Councillor Johnnie Wells, Deputy Mayor of St. Ives, at the Talland House plaque unveiling on Sept. 11, 2022. Photo: St. Ives September Festival
