Just saw this exciting news on Facebook: Anne Fernald will be one of several writers and public figures who will speak about favorite Virginia Woolf novel To the Lighthouse on April 24 at 7 p.m. at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. in New York City.
Fernald is associate professor and director of writing and composition and writing at Fordham University. She blogs at Fernham. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Palgrave 2006) and recently completed a new annotated Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway.
When Paula posts her weekly sightings, I’m amazed and overwhelmed as I skim through them. My eyes skip past anything that mentions Nicole Kidman, a certain play by Edward Albee, or the latest from some obscure (to me) pop singer or rock group. I pick and click casually, on the lookout for any hint of a Woolf appearance in contemporary fiction. Our blogmeister slips them in there, I know, to keep me on my toes.
Last week was no exception, and in “Fifty-six in 10 days” I hit the jackpot at number 10, a review of In-Flight Entertainment, a collection of short stories by Helen Simpson. I’ve read Simpson’s stories in The New Yorker, and I know that she’s an eclectic author, writing winsome love stories, hilarious farces and, most recently, an horrific futuristic tale. And now Woolf? My library branch hunted down this latest volume, Simpson’s fifth.
In “Festival of the Immortals,” famous authors—but only those out of copyright—give readings and discuss their work at an annual conference. On a break before Charlotte Bronte is to read from Villette, two women “in the November of their lives” chat in the tea line and discover that they’re old school friends.
Phyllis recalls, “The first time I saw you, we were in the canteen. You were reading The Waves and I thought, Ah, a kindred spirit.” Viv responds: “I still do dip into The Waves every so often. It’s as good as having a house by the sea, don’t you think? Especially as you get older. Oh, I wonder if she’s on later, Virginia; I’d love to go to one of her readings.” But Phyllis reminds her that Woolf isn’t out of copyright for another five years because of changes in copyright law.
They tell each other about their lives in the intervening years, and Viv remarks that, “It’s not in the books we’re read, is it, how things have been for us. There’s only Mrs. Ramsey, really, and she’s hardly typical.”
Thanks, Paula, for pointing me to this book. I recommend the collection–other standouts here were “Channel 17” and the very moving “Charm for a Friend with a Lump”– and I plan to read more of Helen Simpson.
Every month I sift through online literary journals to see what’s being published, to find those who may want to publish me. Imagine my delight at finding Killing the Angel magazine, “a literary experiment inspired by Virginia Woolf.” This new publication, preparing to launch its first issue, was started by Jessica Rosevear, self-described writer, teacher and Woolfian.
I also found Hippocampus Magazine, and in a section on “The Writing Life,” I came across “How I Joined the Working Class & Yet Also Maintained My Sanity and Lofty Literary Goals; or How Following Virginia Woolf’s Instructions is Tricky.” After quoting Woolf about “money and a room,” the author, Hilary Meyerson, starts off by saying “Women writers just love old Ginny,” following with some observations about solitude and space for writing. (A writer friend with whom I shared it said, “Ginny? What effrontery!”) But she takes an interesting approach, the dilemma of too much solitude. “When the writer’s world shrinks to a small sphere,” she risks becoming boring.
But, of course, the other ingredient is money, and Meyerson tells about having to take a job in order to pay the bills (until she strikes it rich with her writing, of course). She discovers that having co-workers and meetings opens up her world and her writing. As she describes it: “I write for pay – a hired gun – then go home and hang up my holster and write for love.” But she thinks “Ginny” would understand.
Ten days and 56 Woolf sightings, including a mention of Woolf in Italy, her lone children’s story and a National Poetry Competition Award for a poem named after To the Lighthouse.
Fashionistas: 48-Hours In The Gulf Of Naples, WCW
If you begin to loose your bearings, you can always turn to Ravello, a small village that has charmed artists Boccaccio, Virginia Woolf, and even Truman Capote. La Dolce Vita almost seems to have been born here. The names of the towns such as Sorrento …
Book groups that turned into well-loved sagas, Sheffield Telegraph
Members all get together once a year, with up to 60 attending, this year discussing Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse with council chief executive John Mothersole. Previous guests have included Bishop Jack Nicholls, MPs Nick Clegg and David Blunkett …
Personal Matters: Dealing with anger — in a healthy fashion, Gloucester Daily Times
“Scratch a woman and you find rage,” wrote author Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s words are compelling not just in their main point — that women, usually thought of as happy and nurturing peacemakers, are filled with anger — but in the more subtle sense that …
Nurse creates museum to her profession, Daily Astorian
A book written by novelist Virginia Woolf called “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.” • Various historical pins from the Red Cross and the US Navy Nurse Corps. • A Nazi cross pin purchased at a garage sale in Seaside. • A Marybel doll, “the doll that gets well,” …
The Victorian Hugos: 1890, io9 … Phra the Phoenician, was not just a popular favorite, but has critical significance as one of the first mainstream novels to portray an immortal’s life, and has reasonably been argued as an influence on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).
BOOK REVIEW: ‘In-Flight Entertainment’, Washington Times
“The Festival of the Immortals” tells of Viv and Phyllis meeting at a literary festival at which the likes of Virginia Woolf,George Eliot and DH Lawrence show up to read their works and answer questions. Alexander Pope always drives a new high-powered …
Laguna Dance Festival gets personal, OCRegister
I did some readings from Virginia Woolf. Then it became a much more personal piece for me.” Gates, who has been choreographing since 1999, acknowledges Forsythe as a major influence, but she feels that with “Delicate Balance” she is finding her own …
Turn sands of depression into pearls of creativity, China Daily
According to Dolman and Turvey, other creative people who were bipolar include the poets William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, and Sylvia Plath; the authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf; the artists Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch …
Stone’s throw trek for body and soul, The Age
Mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, the Brontes. In preparation, I read Daniel Defoe’s account of his travels in the Lake District, published five years after Robinson Crusoe.
Illustration: Paul Newman Source: The Australian, The Australian
“Almost any biographer can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection,” observed Virginia Woolf. “He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.” Such is James’s realm and, though his subject …
‘The Passionate Muse’, EurekAlert (press release)
Lady Macbeth’s guilt as she sleepwalks and cries, “Out damn spot” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Septimus Smith’s disturbing case of “shell shock” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the intense, undercover love affair between Winston Smith and Julia in …
Works by Rachel Kneebone at the Brooklyn Museum, New York Times
(The place settings for Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf and the “Primordial Goddess,” at the entrance to the installation, seem particularly apropos.) Ms. Chicago’s work — created in collaboration with dozens of other women, although it unfortunately …
On Being an American, or Dykes Are Always Foreign, Huffington Post (blog)
Along with Camus and Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, too, who had a lot more to say than I imagined about social change. I pretended I was an American who had something important to say about the country that gave birth to me, and shaped me.
Week at a glance, Corvallis Gazette Times
“The Hours”: This 2002 film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore follows three women of different generations whose lives are connected by Virginia Woolf’s novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” “A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, …
Judging a book by its cover, Financial Times Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room could sell for £25000 with a dust jacket (the fashion for discarding dust jackets was at its height during the Bloomsbury group era) – or £1000 without one. In the case of US authors, the jacket on F Scott Fitzgerald’s The …
Portraits transcending reality, Independent Online
Modernist author Virginia Woolf in her diaries spoke of: “taking one thing and making it stand for 20” and her character, the artist Lily in To the Lighthouse said: “50 pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman…
Fear exists as more than physical, UT Daily Beacon
Additionally, as a 20 year-old who was never a Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf fan, my own mortality was never an issue I spent too much time thinking about. So if it wasn’t death, then what do I fear? After an hour or so of soul searching (an hour I …
Looking into Writers’ Bedrooms, Personal Style, Lives, Autostraddle
Apartment Therapy has a look at the insides of 15 writers’ bedrooms, including Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Mary Roach, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau. If, like I do, you spend a great deal of your procrastination time on …
Why the Literary Landscape Continues to Disadvantage Women, New Republic
It is even more painful today to read A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s landmark work of literary feminism, published in 1929, eighty-three years ago. It opens with a semi-description of a female writer, who may or may not be Woolf, being shouted …
My top five: Books that make you think, The Guardian
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Even bypassing Woolf’s criticism of English society, its class system, its prejudice against women and the narrow-minded conformity it encouraged, this book still had a huge effect on me. Why? The way Virginia Woolf…
Three Ways to Foster Creativity in Your Organization, Forbes
But that doesn’t mean it’s less important; he cites Virginia Woolf and Paul Cezanne as examples of what he calls “experimental” or “empirical” creativity, which requires time to develop and evolve. If an organization only rewards conceptual creativity, …
A Book Book Lovers Will Love, Oswego Daily News
I would categorize this book by Hill as in the same vein as those books mentioned in the diaries of familiar authors such as the literary author, Virginia Woolf, or in the non-fiction by popular writer, Stephen King. Readers often read books on books …
Fifty Shades of Fan Fiction, The Millions
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours offers us two subgenres of fan fiction: the AU of the modern-day Clarissa, Richard, and Sally, and the RPF — that’s Real Person Fic — of the Virginia Woolf passages. With RPF, you’re not writing about Aragorn and …
Inward journeys, The Hindu
And there are many women in my head, from Virginia Woolf to Joni Mitchell. I think all of us have plenty of these unmet beings kicking around within us, and by looking at them, and what they’re doing there, we can perhaps understand aspects of …
‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 2 New Characters: Who’s Who?, Access Hollywood
He also played Brooks Baekeland to Julianne Moore’s Barbara Daly Baekleland in the unsettling “Savage Grace” and Leonard Woolf to Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolfe in 2002’s “The Hours.” Stephen Dillane as Stannis , Liam Cunningham as Davos , Carice van …
Kabuki With Bando Kotoji at Japan Society, New York Times Virginia Woolf titled one essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” which she began, “For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek.” In the world of the performing arts the same disclaimer should be applied by Westerners to the Japanese traditional forms of …
April foolery of the literary heavyweights, The Guardian
Take Virginia Woolf, an earnest writer and thinker, yet as a young woman capable of participating in one of the pranks of the 20th century. Anticipating the tomfoolery of Waugh’s bright young things of the 1920s, the so-called Dreadnought hoax in 1910 …
Two lesbian literary titans take on their greatest demon: Mom., New York Magazine … Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, and a lot of fifties lesbian pulp fiction of the Beebo Brinker variety.
17 Things Every Woman Should Know How To Do In Her Own Home, The Frisky
Whether you cohabitate or live alone, whether it’s a huge room or a tiny corner, whether you use it for meditating or solo dance parties, every woman needs, as Virginia Woolf put it, “a room of her own.” Make sure you create that space for yourself and …
The personable CLR James, Foyles
TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell and their many devotees pounded the streets. James attends lectures and stays up late into the night, discussing books and reading aloud, with fellow bibliophiles. These reports took me back to my days as an …
Mirror Mirror’ is stunning, sometimes in a good way, Capital New York
Mirror Mirror has all that good stuff, too: Singh alludes to everything from Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Ray Harryhausen’s Medusa monster from the original Clash of the Titans. What’s off-putting about Mirror Mirror, …
Paul Russell: Trial details still too much for some readers, National Post
“In 1938, Virginia Woolf asked this question: ‘What kind of education would not lead to war?’ It’s 2012 — we haven’t come close to answering it, have we? Allow me to end this column with a challenge of readers of both genders.
OCHS students celebrate women, Shore News Today
Nicole Hyde was Susan B. Anthony; Sam Robinson portrayed Anne Sullivan; Hope Bromhead was Virginia Woolf. Laura Pomeroy portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt and Connie Meyer acted as Gloria Steinem. The program ended with a presentation from some of the OCHS …
Hans Kraus, La Lettre de la Photographie
That’s when I learned that Lewis Carroll wasn’t just a writer and that Virginia Woolf’s little group often toyed around with image-making. Which is why I really wanted to see the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition at Hans Kraus.
“Good Books” HuffPo Thinks Women Should Read, Salon (blog)
I remember being miserable when I was assigned A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. But I get that it is historically important. Glad that Bossypants is on the list as well- I think it makes a good foil. Seeing Twilight on the list was alarming.
Eminent Bohemians, Wall Street Journal
From the 1900s to the 1930s, this small group of intellectuals, painters, philosophers and writers—most famously Virginia Woolf; her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, who painted canvases and walls; and economist John Maynard Keynes—collaborated on work …
Book review: ‘Lives of the Novelists’ by John Sutherland, Los Angeles Times … detective fiction, maestros of pulp and even Victorian-era porn along with the expected literary greats, who include Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Anthony Trollope, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, …
Art without God, ABC Online
From the polished circumlocution of Henry James, to the delicate streaming of Virginia Woolf; from Claude Monet’s floral shimmerings to the jagged savagery of Francis Bacon; from Hector Berlioz’s grand swellings to Brian Eno’s fractal background muzak
Ransom Center to expand internship pool, UT The Daily Texan
“We can walk out from the street and hold a document from Virginia Woolf, and not every undergrad has that opportunity. Not every scholar has that opportunity,” McKinney said. Rachel Platis , a senior Plan II and multimedia journalism major , prepares …
Library to show Waterhouse works, BBC News
Organisers said it would explore how writers from “Chaucer and Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf and Hanif Kureishi have been inspired by, and helped to shape, the nation’s understanding of landscape and place”. Keith Waterhouse.
Times Calendar, The Daily Advertiser
Inspired by a passage of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own, “William and Judith” imagines an equally talented and equally ambitious playwright sister of Shakespeare — Judith — who flees to London after being disowned by her father for refusing to …
Writer’s block unplugged, The Asian Age
Both Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf suffered from writer’s block. They also suffered from depression. Hemingway once said in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.
Israel, Palestine and the anti-Semitism of the Left, Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
It was a little difficult to argue this point frankly with Leonard there” – Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, being himself Jewish. This is a very English anti-Semitism: let’s keep the Jews out because they are too clever.
Mark Hussey organized and hosted the first annual Woolf event at Pace University in New York City in 1991. Since then, the conference has been held at a different university or college every year.
The page is a work in progress, according to Neverow, but it already includes information about Woolf conferences dating from 1995 as far into the future as 2015. Links to conference Web pages are available beginning with the 2001 conference, “Voyages Out, Voyages Home,” which was held at the University of Wales in the UK.
The site also provides access to selected papers from the annual Woolf conferences. These include:
The first 10 volumes, initiated by Hussey, published in print format by Pace University Pressand dating from 1991 through 2000.
Beginning in 2001, Wayne Chapman at Clemson University Digital Press began to publish the selected papers electronically as well as in print-on-demand format. They can be read online in PDF format.
