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Archive for February, 2012

Woolf haunts Glaciers

Posted in books, contemporary fiction, Virginia Woolf, Woolf Icon, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , on Wednesday 15 February 2012| 1 Comment »

In a newsletter from Powell’s, the fabulous book emporium in Portland, I read about a first novel by one of their own former staffers, Alexis Smith.

According to the publisher’s notes: “Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf.”

I picked it up at my local library, a slim and inviting paperback with a collage-like cerulean cover. I found it charming, and the narrator, Isabel, a sympathetic character—bookish and introspective, observant, partial to thrift stores. I wasn’t expecting an actual reference to Woolf, but her ghost appeared near the end when Isabel and a group of friends are telling personal stories, their host assigning topics. Someone is asked to tell a story about regret:

“So she tells a story about visiting England when she was in college. She had a chance to visit the river in which a beloved writer drowned. She had a mousy friend with a family cottage nearby. But she wanted desperately to be fashionable. So instead she went toLondon to see a boy who later humiliated her…” (165).

This was my first Woolf sighting in fiction this year, my 24th since completing my 2010 monograph, Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, with 37 references. I don’t go looking for them, but they keep appearing; Woolf continues to hold a unique place in the hearts and minds of writers and readers: muse, model and mentor, and yes, icon.

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Day 6 at the Berg: Move to the Morgan

Posted in Bloomsbury pacifists, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 14 February 2012| 4 Comments »

Last week, NYPL Berg Collection librarian Rebecca Filner gave me the hot tip that I could find unpublished letters written by Vanessa Bell to Maynard Keynes at the Morgan Library & Museum. Today I went there to read them.

The routine at the Morgan is different than that at the Berg. At the Morgan, one is required to lock one’s personal items in a small locker, wash one’s hands, then read a full page of instructions about handling the rare materials before any are handed over. Then the materials come to you one slim folder at a time, after being checked and logged by the librarian. When you are ready for another, you let her know, and she picks up the current folder and brings a new one. As a reader, you never carry the materials.

At the Berg, one is brought as many as five folders at once and just expected to be careful. There is no hand washing procedure, and the librarian locks your purse in a bookcase after one has checked other items in the NYPL cloakroom. Sometimes I returned the materials to the librarian’s desk; other times she picked them up from me.

Today at the Morgan, I focused on letters written during World War I. About 17 of them connected to the Bloomsbury pacifists, the topic of my Short-Term Research Fellowship. But other tidbits included in these letters caught my eye as well. Here are a few of them:

  • Vanessa gave her children haircuts and shaped the hair of one of her servants into what sounded like a stylish bob (May 1916).
  • Vanessa complained that a vist from Ottoline Morrel was so taxing she couldn’t spend more than one weekend a year with her (August 1916).
  •  Both Vanessa and Clive asked Keynes to look over their investments and make suggestions for ways they could maximize their income (February 1918).
  • Keynes invested in David “Bunny” Garnett’s bee keeping enterprise (February 1918).
  • Wood was so scarce during the latter part of the war that Vanessa asked Keynes to save packing cases from a recent wine purchase for her to use as rabbit hutches (February 1918).
  • Vanessa couldn’t imagine anything more hellish than Keynes’s upcoming three-day trip to America (October 1918).

The bit that popped out at me the most, though, was the contrast between Vanessa’s letters to her sister Virginia written shortly before the birth of her daughter Angelica on Christmas Day 1918 and those written to Keynes. The letters to Virginia were filled with a panicky rush of last-minute requests and instructions regarding the upcoming birth and the care of Vanessa’s two older children. Her letters to Keynes are measured and sedate, calculated to reassure him that all is well.

To Keynes, she writes that Duncan Grant (Angelica’s father, although Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell played that role for many years) is quite anxious to be useful around the house. She mentions that he has cut up wood for the fire and done other necessary chores, while agreeing to stay on until after the baby is born.

Vanessa also boasts that Grant is spoiling her. She says she spends the mornings in bed, is only allowed downstairs for lunch, then is kept quiet in the drawing room for the rest of the day. Best of all, she notes, Grant never lets on that this domestic pampering routine is the least bit boring.

I found it interesting the way Vanessa changed the tone and content of her letters, based upon her audience.

Read more about my time at the Berg for my NYPL Short-Term Research Fellowship:

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Woolf sightings: Valentine’s Day, Charleston song and the Dreadnought Hoax

Posted in Dreadnought Hoax, music, Virginia Woolf, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , , on Monday 13 February 2012| 1 Comment »

This week’s Woolf sightings use a Virginia Woolf quote to justify recommending a good dinner as an excellent Valentine’s Day tribute (# 7, 25), cite Woolf as the inspiration for the song “Piece by Piece” by Charleston (#41), and include multiple mentions of the new letter for sale that discusses the Dreadnought Hoax (#35-38). Read on for these and more.

  1. Emeli Sandé: Our Version of Events – review, The Guardian
    Even fewer declare Virginia Woolf as an influence and fewer still have a giant tattoo of Frida Kahlo down one arm. There is such a great deal to commend singer Emeli Sandé. If her peroxide quiff stands visually for Sandé’s unconventionality, …
  2. ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 38 Special, Three Dog Night, Tulsa Golf Expo, Tulsa World
    …     with performances of “William and Judith,” a what-if story by playwright Cody Daigle that re-imagines the creation of “The Tempest” using a hypothetical theory proposed by Virginia Woolf that Shakespeare had an equally creative sister named Judith.
  3. Playhouse Tulsa takes Shakespeare to new levels with repertory, Tulsa World
    Cody Daigle’s “William and Judith,” after all, is a highly imaginative take on the creation of Shakespeare’s final play – one that involves the playwright’s mythical sister, Judith, a character the writer Virginia Woolf dreamed up to make a few points …
  4. New play ‘William and Judith’ inspired by Shakespeare story, Tulsa World
    What if, as Virginia Woolf stated in her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” William Shakespeare had a sister named Judith? And what if Judith was her brother’s equal in temperament, intelligence and creativity? And what if Judith shows up on her brother’s …
  5. Black and white in colour, Hindustan Times
    “It was a fine time to be a Mumbai garbage trader,” Abdul would think, just as his middle-aged neighbour Asha, whose daughter went to college and “by-hearted” Virginia Woolf and William Congreve at home, thought that the moment was opportune to employ …
  6. Which writer taught me most about love? The Guardian In Freud’s rhetorical ploys, he’s always pitting himself against creative writers, which is why Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, for instance, took the bait and bristled accordingly. I first read Freud’s Contributions to the Psychology of Love and bits of …
  7. Dolce Sapori, Calgary Herald
    The menus at Dolce Sapori quote Virginia Woolf: ” Once cannot think well, love well or sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Amen to that. Dolce is open for dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday.
  8. A hard bargain University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily
    As Virginia Woolf was fond of saying, the experience of higher education affords a rare opportunity to stand back from our civilization and ask tough questions about it. If you find it wanting, you have the freedom to imagine it differently and boldly …
  9. Exhibition: Shelf Lives, Varsity Online
    At the back of the room is an original manuscript written by Virginia Woolf. She has a small, characteristic scrawl, and writing that slants up at the ends of her lines. It’s a treasure chest for literature lovers here. John Clare and John Donne stare …
  10. Gallery’™s family affair, Sheffield Telegraph
    Examples here are Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers, with its jumble of limbs, and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf. “It’s very sensitive of the fact that she didn’t like being pictured and so it’s not highly detailed,” observes Briggs.
  11. The L Mag Questionnaire for Writer Types: Kate Zambreno, The L Magazine (blog)
    Virginia Woolf’s     Mrs. Dalloway, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher and Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, …
  12. Tales of love and cous cous at Pea Souk, This is Cornwall
    With tales read by actors acclaimed at the du Maurier, Brighton and Chester Literary festivals from authors including Virginia Woolf, Edna St Vincent Millay and Kate Chopin, you’ll be treated to some frightening, foolish and funny takes on love.
  13. Song and ecstasy, The News International
    Virginia Woolf     in a haunting essay assures us that when the Most High is seated on His throne, to one side of Him will be Homer and to the other side Shakespeare. Our own poets cannot be too far away. Saigal and the great singers, and who knows the …
  14. The Heresy of Love, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, The Independent
    She became a nun because, in those days, liberal convents provided the equivalent of Virginia Woolf’s “a Room of One’s Own” to women who wanted to give priority to their intellectual existence over marriage. And in a hideous, desolating twist, …
  15. Nasty literary prize awarded, GlobalPost (blog)
    It is novelist Adam Mars-Jones for his sledgehammering of Michael Cunningham’s “By Nightfall” in the Observer newspaper Cunningham is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Hours” a modern take on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
  16. Hollinghurst’s biographical ambitions, Spectator.co.uk (blog)
    These questions were considered last night, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, by two literary grandees from opposing sides of the issue: Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Alan Hollinghurst, whose recent novel, …
  17. John Patrick Organic Crafts a Beautiful Vision for Fall 2012 at New York …, Ecouterre
    …     however, to the work of 19th century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, in particular “A Beautiful Vision, Julia Duckworth,” a carbon print of Cameron’s niece and goddaughter and the future mother of author Virginia Woolf.
  18. Culture 2 Go, Orlando Weekly
    The group left behind significant works of literature – Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes and historian Lytton Strachey all spent writing holidays at the farm – whereas their painters are less well known, comprising a …
  19. Her Version Of Events: Emeli Sandé Interviewed, The Quietus
    I was really made up to hear that one of your favourite books is by Virginia Woolf. What a fearsome writer, and perhaps someone who really isn’t known for her approachability or her simple clarity of prose. So what do you take from Virginia Woolf?
  20. When novelists reach the end of their stories, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf    ? Yup. Thomas Hardy? Sure enough. EM Forster? Saw the problem coming and headed it off at the pass. Or think of ours. Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift – that excellent generation of novelists whose …
  21. Russell pioneers queer theory in literature at Vassar, The Miscellany News
    Currently, he is teaching a seminar on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a six-week course on Virginia Woolf and a 200-level English course entitled Gay Male Fiction in America after 1945. Russell came to Vassar in 1983, and since then the courses he has taught …
  22. Great expectations for Simon Callow’s latest project. . ., Cambridge News
    Tolstoy praised Dickens for tackling issues such as social reform, but Henry James and Virginia Woolf weren’t a fan, saying his work was too sentimental and implausable. :: Details from his domestic routine and method of working suggest Dickens had …
  23. Valentines for word lovers, AZ Central.com (blog)
    A classic Steel sentiment: “He was gone, and she was broken hearted, that was all that mattered.” PS I got in trouble for reading Danielle Steel. After that, my mother brought me Little Women. She now buys me books by Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro.
  24. The lamb and the lion, Australia Business Review Weekly (subscription)
    Virginia Woolf captures the agony of that failure indelibly in her short story, The New Dress, from which i have selected some of its many evocative images … “Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off …
  25. Say ‘I love you’ with a 3-course meal, Aiken
    Standard     English author Virginia Woolf (“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”) would probably agree. Mixing it up in the kitchen is a delicious way for a couple to celebrate Valentine’s Day, perhaps with a bottle of bubbly …
  26. ‘A Sympathiser with the Poor’: Charles Dickens at 200, The American
    As Virginia Woolf explained, “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,” for he created “characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.
  27. Review of The Hours author’s latest book wins inaugural hatchet job award ,The Guardian (blog)
    After aligning his Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours to Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, Cunningham makes a mistake in linking By Nightfall to Joyce, continues Mars-Jones: “If he had chosen softer models he would cut a better figure, the contrast being …
  28. Don’t Ask! Just Buy It! – February 8, 2012: One Sword, Slightly Used, ComicsAlliance
    My favorite of the stories in here is “The Brain That Wouldn’t Virginia Woolf,” which is (in both form and content) an attempt to graft together things that don’t actually fit together at all. Jason Lutes has been averaging an issue a year of his …
  29. Alan Moore On Harvey Pekar, Grant Morrison And ‘Stealing Characters’ [Video], ComicsAlliance
    Then Virginia Woolf comes along a few hundred years later and decides to create the character as her dual gender character Orlando… It might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these people, these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of …
  30. Anna Clyne’s “Night Ferry” set to sail after a long creative voyage, Chicago Classical Review Clyne also researched other artists and writers who had similar emotional issues such as the poets and writers Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf and Randall Jarrell. Cast in a single 20-minute movement, Night Ferry is Clyne’s largest effort to date.
  31. The Calling of Disorder, Harvard Crimson
    The invocation of Virginia Woolf’s titular assertion, that women needed to be able to support themselves and have their own, personal space if they were to write, immediately gave Bassett an idea. She would provide the necessary funds to support …
  32. Picture preview: The Family in British Art, The Independent
    Among the work on display is William Hogarth’s A House of Cards (1730), Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and their daughter Ann, (c1786) by Henry Walton, Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers (1934) and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf (1912).
  33. Happy birthday Mr Dickens! Universitas Helsingiensis
    Virginia Woolf     thought she would have crossed the road to avoid his showman vulgarity. And yet despite professional literary disdain for his popular fame, we should remember his contemporary John Ruskin’s balanced comment: ‘But let us not lose the use …
  34. Literature of the World in 2012 Cuban Book Fair, Prensa Latina
    …     will put in the reader’s hands universal classics such as Gargantúa and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais; The Nun, by Denis Diderot; The Red and the Black by Stendhal; Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad; and The Lady in the Mirror, by Virginia Woolf.
  35. Monday reads: Virginia Woolf punk’d the Royal Navy and more, Los Angeles Times
    In 1910, Virginia Woolf and her friends pretended to be “Abyssinian princes” and their British guides, convincing the Royal Navy to give them access to the battleship Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet. They were given a tour and feted with a band …
  36. The Week in Culture – The Yorker, The Yorker
    This week Virginia Woolf wears a beard, fiction receives a Hammer-ing, and we reveal that romance is dead for all you culture vultures. 102 years ago to the day, Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group walked the decks of the Royal …
  37. How a bearded Virginia Woolf and her band of ‘jolly savages’ hoaxed the navy, The Guardian
    The letter was written by Horace de Vere Cole, who described how he and five friends, including the novelist Virginia Woolf and painter Duncan Grant, duped an admiral and the crew of the battleship HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet.
  38. A Brick-and-Mortar Amazon Store?; Jonathan Franzen Loves Edith Wharton, The Atlantic Wire [The New Yorker] There’s a letter being offered at auction by a London rare books dealer that details Virginia Woolf’s role in a “shriekingly funny” prank that resulted in Woolf and painter Duncan Grant being given access to the HMS Dreadnought in 1910 …
  39. Konstantin Soukhovetski at Phillips Collection, Washington Post
    The sense of the melodramatic was palpable, as Soukhovetski introduced the piano version of Philip Glass’s score for “The Hours” by quoting from the suicide note left by Virginia Woolf in the film. He gave this music, characterized by its sometimes …
  40. Annie Leibovitz’s personal ‘Pilgrimage’ feels commercial, Washington Post
    The results are eclectic but mostly reflect the heroic pantheon of the bookish liberal establishment: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the 64 photographs culled for the Smithsonian …
  41. Charleston – Piece by Piece, Electric Banana
    The trio cite Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Woolf as influences, and claim the track is about ‘regressing to a primal state’. Don’t be discouraged by the pretentiousness, this is a good tune.
  42. Pause Before You Send Email (Or Anything), Lifehacker Australia
    BBC Point Of View columnist Lisa Jardine uses the example of an angry letter Virginia Woolf planned to send to a correspondent. After thinking better of it, she drafted a more conciliatory reply. Jardine argues that this demonstrates a flexibility …
  43. Cute in a Klimt, The Nation
    The concept is “East Meet West”, and the designs combine simplicity and elegance, drawing inspiration from Chinese women of the 1960s and the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Classical Western styling marries Eastern sexiness in the outfits …
  44. The master storyteller: William Boyd interview, Telegraph.co.uk
    …     a failed novelist whose passage through the 20th century leads him from pre-war literary London to the Spanish Civil War to an Angry Brigade-style group of anarchists in the 1970s, taking in encounters with such characters as Virginia Woolf, …
  45. Being bipolar in Pakistan, DAWN.com
    Some of the most creative geniuses had bipolar disorder such as Virginia Woolf. Stephen Fry openly talks about it and has even made a documentary about what it is like to be bipolar. Studies show connections between bipolar disorder and creativity and …
  46. The Little Theatre that grew, Winnipeg Free Press
    It was a time when the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group were being published, as were those of Gertrude Stein’s expatriate “crowd” in 1930s Paris, and everyone was talking about them (Hendry once signed off a letter to …

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Day 5 at the Berg: Visit to an exhibition

Posted in Woolf diary, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , on Sunday 12 February 2012| 4 Comments »

My fifth day at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection was yesterday. But since I skipped out early to go to the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College, I don’t have a lot to say about my research for the day.

Instead, I’ll tell you about my visit to the library’s current free exhibit at its 42nd Street location. Of course, it includes two Virginia Woolf items. And one of them is mentioned in the banners publicizing the exhibit.

“Celebrating 100 Years” contains highlights from the library’s extensive collections, including everything from a Gutenberg Bible to one of Malcolm X’s journals. It features more than 250 items and is available through March 4.

The Woolf items on display are the walking stick she was carrying when she walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941, the day she died, and her March 24, 1941, diary entry, her last, in which she wrote:

A curious sea side feeling in the air today.

Read more about my time at the Berg for my NYPL Short-Term Research Fellowship:

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Day 4 at the Berg: Maternal concerns of Vanessa

Posted in Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury pacifists, Charleston Farmhouse, Vanessa Bell, tagged , on Friday 10 February 2012| 7 Comments »

Door to the Berg Collection

After four hours of reading mostly unpublished letters from Vanessa Bell to her sister Virginia Woolf today, I felt sad.

The letters — and there are 371 of them dating from 1910 to 1940 in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection — are full of details about living arrangements, house guests, child rearing, artistic endeavors and personality conflicts.

But the thing that stuck out to me today — which is well off my research topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists — was how much Vanessa had to juggle. And that made me sad.

The letters written during the World War I years, which was also the period of time in which she had young children at home, had the biggest impact on me. In them, I saw how much she did to keep so many balls in the air at once.

Vanessa kept the household running smoothly, doing her best to economize on household expenses such as coal and foodstuffs and to work around such challenges as war rationing and exiting servants.  She kept the men in her life, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant and David “Bunny” Garnett, happy and productive, and she helped Grant and Garnett obtain conscientious objector status. She raised three children, instructing at least two of them in French and music, along with the similarly aged children of friends.

To me, several of the most poignant letters were written shortly before Christmas 1918, after the Armistice but before Vanessa gave birth to her third child and only daughter, Angelica. Those letters, obviously written hastily, with last-minute thoughts scribbled up the margin and across the top of the page, were full of instructions to Virginia about the children.

Virginia had generously agreed to care for Vanessa’s two eldest, Julian and Quentin, when she gave birth to her third child. And Vanessa was frantic to convey her gratitude, as well as her advice — about using nightlights and administering bromide and promising to ship additional clean clothing for the boys after their arrival.

While writing the last of the letters, on Christmas Eve, Vanessa went into labor. Angelica was born on Christmas Day.

Even then, there was no real rest for Vanessa. For she had guests. Garnett was at Charleston Farmhouse on the day of the birth, and Maynard Keynes was a houseguest as well.

More amazing than all this is that on top of the busy life as a wife and mother that Vanessa led, she produced art, wonderful art. How did she find the time and energy for it all?

All I can say is, she was a woman. And that is what women do. Isn’t it?

Read more about my time at the Berg for my NYPL Short-Term Research Fellowship:

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