Screen shot of Virginia Woolf at bat in NYT Book Review caricature
In the years between the two world wars, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas played ball — baseball. Their team, known as Le Gang Stein, included female luminaries from the literary world.
New York Times illustrator Rick Meyerowitz captures the team as he imagines it in a caricature titled “The Girls of Summer.” Published in the Aug. 3 NYT Book Review, it features a snippet of a poem by Stein and includes Virginia Woolf.
But there’s more about Virginia Woolf and baseball. According to the Cosmic Baseball Association website, she played infield on the Paradise Pisces team.
What’s more, Woolf is said to consider Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al, her “favorite baseball book.”
Todd Avery documents the connection between Woolf and Lardner in “‘The Girls in Europe Is Nuts over Ball Players’: Ring Lardner and Virginia Woolf” (1968). Avery writes that “Both writers—Lardner as a matter of professional obligation as well as personal interest, Woolf as a feminist theorist—were attuned to an unusual degree to the ideological role of sports in their respective societies” (1). He adds that just one 1925 essay, “American Fiction,” which is included in The Moment And Other Essays, expresses Woolf’s interest in Lardner.
A July 23, 2012, Wall Street Journal article, “Taking Fiction Out to the Ballgame,” also mentions Lardner’s appeal to Woolf, citing her “American Fiction” essay: “[Lardner] writes the best prose that has come our way, often in a language which is not English.”
Alice Lowe manages to connect Woolf and baseball as well, in her essay ”Seventh Inning Stretch,” published in Hobart in April 2011.
And if you love baseball as much as you love Woolf, you can combine the two by purchasing your very own Woolf baseball jersey.
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Is it possible for me to love her anymore than I already do?
I know what you mean, but somehow the love just keeps growing.
It really does.
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Well, Woolf was known as “the demon bowler”, which is cricket-speak for ‘pitcher’. What a gal!
Alice, wouldn’t it be neat to see Virginia sitting in the stands at a baseball game? What a picture I have in my mind!
Thanks for the playful post, Paula, not to mention the plug for my baseball essay, which includes Jane Austen as well as Woolf. I like to think that if Woolf had come to the U.S. she would have gone to a baseball game – Yankees vs Red Sox – perhaps as a guest of Ring Lardner himself. And she would have enjoyed the nuances of the game, just as she enjoyed the quiet precision of lawn bowling – bowls – in her own back yard.