Blogging Woolf

Rewind to The Hours

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

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

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

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

Funny how he sounds so disdainful of academics.

Back To the Lighthouse

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

Writer on Woolf tells own story

Ruth Gruber is famous for a number of things.

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

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

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

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

Listen to an interview with Gruber.

Woolf one of many

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

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