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Archive for February, 2012

Day 3 at the Berg: Leads from the curator

Posted in A Room of One's Own, Bloomsbury pacifists, Dreadnought Hoax, tagged , , , on Thursday 9 February 2012| 7 Comments »

Today at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, I got firsthand help from curator Isaac Gewirtz.

First, he showed me an article he wrote comparing the proof copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to the first published copy. It includes an appendix listing every variant between the recently-acquired proof (long thought to have been lost) and the first published version.

As the article shows, Woolf made significant revisions, many related to her views on war and patriarchy. Dr. Gewirtz’s article was published last year in Woolf Studies Annual Volume 17.

Second, Dr. Gewirtz gave me a printout of a Feb. 4 Guardian article that discusses a newly found letter related to the Dreadnought Hoax in which Woolf and four of her friends impersonated Abbysinian royalty to dupe a British admiral and board a Royal Navy dreadnought ship in 1910.

Written by Horace de Vere Cole, one of the pranksters, the letter is being offered for sale by Rick Gekoski, a London dealer in rare books and manuscripts who is imported from the U.S. The letter is accompanied by an original photograph of the hoaxers.

Third, Dr. Gewirtz told me that the Berg Collection holds one of the few existing photos of the Bloomsbury Group members who participated in the Dreadnought Hoax.

All three pieces of information connect to my research topic, the Bloomsbury pacifists.

Isaac Gewirtz is another reason why I ♥ librarians, including library curators.

Read more about my time at the Berg:

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Submissions, latest issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Posted in call for papers, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, tagged on Thursday 9 February 2012| Leave a Comment »

The fall 2012 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany invites brief analyses and explorations of how queer studies can help or has helped illuminate Woolf’s life and work, and vice versa – how Woolf’s work and life nuances or otherwise influences queer studies, broadly conceived.

Send submissions of not more than 2,000 words to Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt at detlofmm@muohio.edu and helt0010@umn.edu by Feb. 15.

Read the newly published issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany (No. 80, Fall 2011). It includes:

  • Christine Froula’s review of The Essays of VW, VI (Random House, Chatto and Windus, Hogarth): pp. 26-28.
  • Roberta Rubenstein’s review of The Edinburgh Companion to VW and the Arts (Edinburgh UP): pp.28-30.
  • Leslie Hankins’ review of VW, Modernity and History (Palgrave Macmillan): pp. 30-31.
  • My review of VW and the Study of Nature (Cambridge UP): pp.31-32.
  • Jane Lilienfeld’s review of A Great Unrecorded History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) : pp.32-33.
  • Vara Neverow’s review of A Room of Their Own (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University): pp. 33-35.

 

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Day 2 at the Berg: Tips from a librarian

Posted in Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury pacifists, tagged , , on Wednesday 8 February 2012| 9 Comments »

Rebecca Filner, librarian at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, doesn’t leave her job behind when she walks out of the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

What that means for me is that after she left work last night, she continued thinking about the Bloomsbury pacifists, the focus of my research at the Berg. And when I arrived this morning for the second day of my Short-Term Research Fellowship, she had some tips to share.

She told me of a recent Berg acquisition, a letter from Lytton Strachey to Duncan Grant.  And she also sent me links to unpublished letters from Vanessa Bell to Maynard Keynes currently housed at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street in Manhattan, and sent me the link to the reading room application.

Rebecca is another reason why I ♥ librarians.

Read more about my time at the Berg:

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New Woolf commodity: Mrs. Dalloway typewriter earrings

Posted in Woolf as Commodity, tagged , on Wednesday 8 February 2012| Leave a Comment »

This unusual pair of earrings must be shared. Take a look at the “Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Typewriter Earrings.”

As the name implies, they combine an image of a vintage typewriter with two lines from the novel typed on the tiny slip of paper inserted in its carriage. But there’s more. The cover of the book, a picture of Woolf, and replica typewriter keys are also part of the set. Kind of a lot to dangle from one’s ears.

They are available from the Literary Gift Company for £20.

Other jewelry offerings from the company include:

the Virginia Woolf Optical Lens Pendant and the Virginia Woolf Pin

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Day 1 at the Berg: Reunion with the lions

Posted in Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Tuesday 7 February 2012| 15 Comments »

Nervous. Anxious. Excited. Awed. Those were my top four feelings today as I walked into the Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library for the first day of my Short-Term Research Fellowship. Feelings not so different from my first trip to Manhattan when I was 12.

That summer, my Italian-American New Yorker dad drove me from Ohio to Brooklyn to visit family. As a special treat, he escorted me into Manhattan on the subway for my first visit to the city of my dreams.

We were strolling along glitzy Fifth Avenue when he suddenly stopped and pointed to the massive building with the elegant stairs and its pair of guardian lions.

“That’s the library,” he said. My mouth hung open. “You mean, it’s full of books?” I asked.

I think we went inside, but I can’t quite remember. It was a long time ago. But I will never forget the feeling of awe I experienced as I looked at that block-long building filled with one of my favorite things on earth — books.

I never would have imagined that I would be doing research on the Bloomsbury pacifists at the building that struck me dumb when I was a girl.

But here I am, and I just finished my first day of bending over a card catalogue drawer and filling out a multitude of tiny forms used for requesting materials from the archives of the Berg Collection.

The collection contains the world’s largest manuscript holdings of Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden. I am there for Woolf and her friends. Another researcher is poring over Auden documents. And a third, Bill Goldstein, is working on a book, The World Broke in Two: A Literary Chronicle of 1922, which will be published by Holt. It focuses on the intertwined lives and works that year of Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence.

Of course, librarian Anne Garner introduced us, and Bill and I compared stories about former careers as journalists, recent work as adjunct faculty, and our current work on Woolf. Bill’s experiences are decidedly more impressive than mine. He is the former books editor of nytimes.com, is a contributing editor at WNBC-TV and taught at Hunter College.

And I? Well, let’s just say I have small-town credentials. Although I do admit that at heart, I am a big city girl.

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