A particular theme may be chosen depending upon the proposals received.
Submit paper proposals by e-mail. Submissions should be two pages. The cover page should include name, e-mail address, mailing address, phone number, professional affiliation and title of paper. Page two should contain a 250-word proposal.
Send proposals to Kristin Czarnecki at Kristin_Czarnecki@georgetowncollege.edu by Sunday, Sept. 14.
Members of the panel selection committee include Jeanne Dubino, Mark Hussey, Jane Lilienfeld and Vara Neverow.
The editors of The Review of English Studies invite contributions on any topic of English literature or the English language from medieval times to the twentieth century for its 2009 essay competition.
The RES Essay Prize aims to encourage scholarship amongst postgraduate research students in Britain and abroad. The closing date for submissions is Sept. 30, 2009.
The winner will receive:
Publication of the winning essay in The Review of English Studies
A cash prize of £250
£250 worth of Oxford University Press books
A free year’s subscription to The Review of English Studies
How to enter
Review the entry guidelines and full details of the competition rules.
The museum invites proposals for presentations on such topics as Bloomsbury art production, criticism, display, and collecting; the Omega Workshops; design of books, fashion, gardens, architecture, domestic spaces, ceramics, furniture; ekphrastic writing and other aspects of visual culture related to the Bloomsbury group or its influences.
Please submit by e-mail a 250- to 300-word proposal with a title, your name, e-mail and mailing addresses, phone number, and institutional affiliation to Professors Christine Froula at cfroula@northwestern.edu and Christopher Reed at creed@psu.edu by Sept. 11, 2009.
The museum will offer all speakers a small honorarium and will cover travel expenses and accommodations.
Read more about the exhibit, which is at Cornell University through Oct. 18.
Anita Brookner published her first novel in 1981 at the age of 53, following with one a year until 2000 when she slowed down just a bit. Her 25th novel, Strangers, was released this year.
She rejects feminism, and her protagonists are very traditional, but sometimes they make surprisingly independent and unorthodox choices.
Virginia Woolf appears in at least two of her novels, once as a significant icon and once in passing, both references adding flavor to the stories.
Edith Hope is a romance writer with the pen name of Vanessa Wilde. People have noted her resemblance to Virginia Woolf, including her publisher, who says: “She really does look remarkably Bloomsburian…the hollowed cheeks and the pursed lips.”
Her life in disarray, she retreats to a Swiss resort and its eclectic cast of characters. A man says, “Whoever told you that you looked like Virginia Woolf did you a grave disservice, although I suppose you thought it was a compliment.” Edith prefers men to women, and favors the work of Colette and Henry James. Yet she is proud that she earns her own money, and she rejects the opportunity for a conventional life of comfort and ease.
Claire faces her future after her mother’s death, content to take life as it comes: her job in a Bloomsbury bookshop, involvement with the lifeless Martin. Claire’s opening line is a hook: “It is my conviction that everyone is profoundly eccentric.” She admits to making hasty assessments as a result of observing rather than participating in life, but her bland façade hides secrets.
Claire says of the bookshop owners: “I was surprised that they…always had lived in Bloomsbury. But I suppose that what was once an accident of geography had hardened over the years to a conviction that he was part of a ‘set’, an authentic Bloomsburian. Whether [Virginia Woolf] ever noticed him when they passed in the street, as they must have done on occasions, would have been highly unlikely.”
The Debut
I reread Brookner’s first novel, with another woeful protagonist and dutiful daughter, and another great opening line (“Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”), wondering if I might find a forgotten reference to Virginia Woolf.
Woolf didn’t appear, but Ruth Weiss, an authority on women in Balzac, seems the academic counterpart to Edith Hope. “Her appearance and character were exactly halfway between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she was scrupulous, passionate, thoughtful, and given to self-analysis, but her colleagues thought her merely scrupulous…” She is often sidelined by the exploits of her manipulative parents and escapes for a time to Paris to pursue her Balzac studies.
