Blogging Woolf

A Virginia Woolf connection to the 2012 Summer Olympics? But of course! As it turns out, one of her ancestors lived in Clissold House, now the park cafe and the spot where the Olympic torch will be passed on tomorrow.

Included in this week’s Woolf sightings is The Guardian reflection on Woolf’s 1937 musings about the park and the city in which it sits.

1. Donation speaks volumes, This is South Wales
   The collection includes a number of books by and about Virginia Woolf, and books previously owned by Enid Bagnold. The volumes were donated to Oxfam by a woman who worked at a London bookshop by day and a theatre by night. Oxfam Bookshop’s …
2. Olympic torch route, day 64: there’s something for everyone in Clissold Park,
   The Guardian
   An ancestor of Virginia Woolf inhabited Clissold House, now the park cafe, when it was a private home. After visiting the park in 1937, she wrote in her diary of the contrast between the life her family would have led there when the house was an elegant private …
3. Big Apple for bookworms,
   Sydney Morning Herald
   Cast your eyes down and you’ll find words of wisdom from Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and many others. The plaque that features poet Muriel Rukeyser reads: “The universe is made of stories,…
4. Book of a lifetime: Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, The Independent
   But I do remember coming across Prelude, her only novel – novella, really, a long, long short story made up of scenes a bit like chapters – published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1918. This edition I found, when I was about 12 or 13, among the books …
5. Happy Birthday Judy Chicago! (INTERVIEW, PHOTOS), Huffington Post
   Installation view of The Dinner Party, Wing 3 showing Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe Placesettings © Judy Chicago, 1979. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Photo © Donald Woodman. HP: How do you think works like “The Dinner Party” have …
   
6. Werk Collective review: Fresh talent, San Francisco Chronicle
   In her “Angel” duet, Finwall cites Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as inspirations, but this seems less an homage than an austere formalist essay uniting two physically disparate dancers, Julia Hollas and Vivian Aragon. They launch into sequential …
7. Inside the List, New York Times
   “Some of the most interesting insights on happiness came from my favorite novelists,” Rubin writes: “Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson — in fact, some novels, such as Michael Frayn’s ‘A Landing on the Sun,’ Ann Patchett’s ‘Bel Canto’ and …
8. Luna Stage announces its 20th Anniversary Season
   NorthJersey.com (press release)
   The season will feature the New Jersey premiere of “Vita and Virginia” by Eileen Atkins, adapted from correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; the world premiere of “Carnaval” by Obie Award-winning playwright Nikkole Salter; and a ..
9. Travel 101 … Ravello, TODAYonline
   Villa Cimbrone is famed as where the authors of the Bloomsbury group – Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E M Forster and John Maynard Keynes – used to hang out. Villa Rufolo, on the other hand, inspired composer Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Entry costs …
10. Caitlin Moran on Slut Walks, Feminism, and Being the British Tina Fey, Daily Beast
    If you want your perfect feminist British fucking revolution where people go on Slut Walks dressed as Virginia Woolf, waving Penguin Classics in the air, then you go and have that revolution. Have you seen Girls? Oh my God, have I seen Girls? I live in …
11. Kitty Wells: Feminist Country Godmother to Britney Spears, The Atlantic
    She created the musical equivalent of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own.” Her first hit and signature song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was written as a direct rebuke to a line in Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life” and precipitated a …