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Archive for November, 2012

Woolf sightings: Award-winning kids’ book, The Dalloway, The Women’s Library

Posted in Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , , on Friday 16 November 2012| 2 Comments »

This year’s children’s book that was based on a loose exploration of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell has won the 2012 Governor General’s Literary Awards for children’s literature — illustration. See 4.

Other news in this week’s list of Woolf sightings includes the opening of The Dalloway in Manhattan (6) and the controversy surrounding the move of The Women’s Library (14).

  1. Reframing Classics, Wall Street Journal
    By PAUL LEVY. LONDON—”Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present” is, surprisingly, the National Gallery’s first major show of photography. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)—Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt—regarded her own photography as “high art” …
  2. Get educated, be political: 2012 Students for Liberty Colorado, Rocky Mountain Collegian
    I was ready to move on to discussing a topic other than politics: Virginia Woolf novels, Doctor Who episodes, the weather, anything. But this weekend I had the incredible opportunity to be a part of the 2012 Students For Liberty Colorado Regional …
  3. Free of context and expectations: ‘Minimally Charged’ takes portraits into …, Tribune-Review

    “Each character represents a female shackled by the behavioral expectations of society and trying to break free,” artist Jackie Hoysted says. “My Virginia will do what she wants.”

    To that end, the piece “Virginia” might be the quintessential example. The title is inspired by the movie “The Hours,” which revolves around how the lives of three women of different generations are interconnected through Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs …

  4. Governor General’s lit prize winners led by women, CBC.ca
    … literature – illustration. Accompanying text by Kyo Maclear, Arsenault’s whimsical images delve into the world of childhood dreams and creativity as they loosely explore the relationship between author Virginia Woolf and her sister, painter Vanessa …
  5. A Note to Virginia Woolf, Huffington Post (blog)
    … indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. I encountered this quote by Virginia Woolf the other day and decided to respond to it — the present speaking …
  6. Lani Kai Replacement The Dalloway Opens Tomorrow, Zagat (blog)
    Tomorrow, a SoHo watering hole is going even further back in time, taking inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s famous hostess. The Dalloway will open in the bi-level space that used to house Lani Kai. The spot came up with a new term to describe itself …
  7. Lennon’s letters offer intimate insight, New Zealand Herald
    There have been volumes of letters produced by Ernest Hemingway, J.R.R. Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, Abraham Lincoln, amongst others. It might be a dying art form, but a handsome new book shows the fleeting beauty tossed-off notes and messages can have.
  8. WHY HAVE SO MANY WRITERS LOST THE PLOT?, Express.co.uk
    Many literary greats lost a parent in childhood (Swift, Keats, the Brontes, Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath), were orphans (Poe, Tolstoy, Conrad) or were plunged into poverty (Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Yeats, Joyce). An unhappy childhood …
  9. Politics and business, sex and violence, wrestling and the Pulitzers–all of …, Inquirer.net
    Since one of the protagonists in the novel is modernist maven Virginia Woolf, a suicide, Cunningham said he had thought at first of not researching to save on money. But when plane fares went down, he went to England, “and I was so glad I did because I …
  10. Verbal Landscaping, Wall Street Journal
    No one does this better, I think, than Virginia Woolf. In her early short story “Kew Gardens,” she writes: “From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks…unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of …
  11. Kalumaali: Laying bare motherhoods inconvenient truths, The Sunday Times Sri Lanka
    “I have lost friends, some by death…others by sheer inability to cross the street,” saidVirginia Woolf. So ladies, it’s time to cross the street and find out what’s on the other side. ‘Kalumaali: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups is an original play …
  12. On the Night Table: Sally Ito, Winnipeg Free Press
    Back at home, still on the nightstand, are Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Mrs. Dalloway and Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing, a wonderful book on the art of writing.” Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition …
  13. The Saturday Quiz answers, The Independent
    The Saturday Quiz. Suggested Topics. Virginia Woolf · Newmarket Racecourses · Pippa Middleton· Bermuda (uk) · Gibraltar (uk). 1. Quebec. 2. 1970s. 3. FA Cup final referees. 4. Leonard andVirginia Woolf. 5. Duffel. 6. Annie Hall. 7. The Rock of …
  14. A room of her own: The battle for the Women’s Library, Telegraph.co.uk
    If a woman is to write fiction, declared Virginia Woolf in 1929, she must have a room of her own. And, the author noted, money. The Women’s Library, based in London’s East End, has provided just such a room for more than 75 years. But money has, of …
  15. A ‘Wicked’ test of time, Albany Times Union
    The idealistic nerdess bears some chromosomal resemblance to the young Virginia Woolf, for her acerbity and intellect; and to the young Laura Nyro, for her invention and energy; and to the older Emily Dickinson, for her willingness to retire when the …

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Woolf and her mother On Being Ill

Posted in Julia Stephen, Woolf events, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 13 November 2012| Leave a Comment »

Woolfians near Manhattan have an advantage tomorrow. They can attend a book launch celebrating the Paris Press 10th anniversary edition of Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill that includes Notes from Sick Rooms by her mother, Julia Stephen.

It marks the first book publication of Woolf and her mother.

The event will feature readings by Rita Charon (physician and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine), Mark Hussey (Pace University and acclaimed Virginia Woolf scholar), Judith Kelman (Director of Visible Ink Writing Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering), and Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins (physician and poet).

Held at Case Lounge, JG Hall, Columbia Law School, the event is free and open to the public.

Read a review of the book in Publisher’s Weekly.

Related articles

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Woolf sightings: Britney Spears as the next Virginia Woolf

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , on Friday 9 November 2012| Leave a Comment »

This week in Woolf sightings, we have the essay, as Woolf wrote it, described as the art form of the future (5); art, as Woolf called it, thought of as a form of fishing (7), and fiction, as Woolf tells it, spun as a spider’s web (8). Oh, and we also have Virginia Woolf and Britney Spears in almost the same sentence (1). Seriously.

Britney Spears (Photo credit: steven.ishiwara)

  1. WHAT!? Britney Spears Could Be Writing The Next Great Novel (DETAILS), Global Grind
    Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’ Conner, Toni Morrison and J.K. Rowling, move over and make room for the next great female novelist. PHOTOS: Britney Spears’ Lucky Magazine Cover Is Causing Some Controversy! According to TheHollywoodReporter, pop …
  2. ‘Orlando’ Steals the Stage, New University Online
    Modernist author Virginia Woolf attempts to answer many of these questions in her novel “Orlando,” a tale of a young boy who lives for five centuries, changes genders once and doesn’t age past 36 years. The Claire Trevor School of the Arts had big …
  3. Who Would These 9 Famous Authors Vote For In The 2012 Election?, Huffington Post
    Who would lyricists like Virginia Woolf cast their ballots for? It’s difficult to say, but fun to speculate. In his famous essay, “Why I Write,” George Orwell said, “…no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have …  Read “Would Virginia have voted for Mittens? Cast your vote“
  4. Justin Cronin, author of The Passage, on book two of his vampire trilogy, A.V. Club
    As I started writing her, and writing her mind in her state of busy surface activity containing deep unpleasant thoughts, rather quickly, the inspiration, the literary source for this became Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. [Laughs.] A book I loved in …
  5. issue 151 out now, E-Flux
    Energy & Rue: Brian Dillon surveys writers from Michel de Montaigne to Wayne Koestenbaum, and from Virginia Woolf to Chris Marker, and asks whether the centuries-old form of the essay could be the genre of the future. City Report: Amsterdam: To …
  6. What are London’s best museums for lovers of literature?, Telegraph.co.uk
    It can feel as if he (the key London literary museums all remember men, and Virginia Woolf’s Mecklenburgh Square home was destroyed in the Blitz) has just popped around the corner for a bushel of wheat and is due back at any moment. Lovesick poet Keats …
  7. The art of Judy Chicago, The Guardian
    “I didn’t make myself an outsider,” she says. “The art world made me an outsider. Of course, isolation is essential to the creative act. You have to be with yourself, with your ideas. Virginia Woolf talked about it as fishing: you sit on the shore, you …
  8. Through the Window, By Julian Barnes, The Independent
    As Virginia Woolf put it: “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” Well, Barnes is something of an arachnologist and in this anthology he has pinned down a surprising selection …
  9. From the heart Stories and secrets, The Economist
    Virginia Woolf dismisses “Ulysses”: “an illiterate, underbred book it seems to me.” Sir Noel Coward is confused by John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger”, the celebrated play of the 1950s. “It is so full of talent and fairly well constructed but I wish I …
  10. PW Picks: The Best New Books for the Week of November 5, 2012, Publishers Weekly
    This week: books from Oliver Sacks, Barbara Kingsolver, and Virginia Woolf. Plus: an outstanding graphic memoir on bipolar disorder. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn …
  11. USA TODAY, USA TODAY
    At home, Elinor, obsessed with her missing brother, paints his image over and over between weekend getaways to Bloomsbury hangouts where she encounters a chilly Virginia Woolf (of course, Barker’s title evokes Woolf’s 1922 novel, Jacob’s Room).
  12. Q&A: In Zadie Smith’s ‘NW,’ Some Harsh Truths About Friendship, PBS NewsHour (blog)
    When people use that, it’s kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page. Stream of consciousness is something like Virginia Woolf, for example, which is quite different from what I was trying to do. I just wanted …

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Would Virginia have voted for Mittens? Cast your vote

Posted in Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Thursday 8 November 2012| 2 Comments »

Now I’ve heard everything. The Huffington Post claims to have made educated guesses as to how nine famous authors would have voted in Tuesday’s presidential election. And their ill-educated guess regarding Virginia Woolf has her casting her ballot for Mitt Romney.

The Huff Post’s rationale is simplistic and ill-informed. Writers cite the fact that she “nearly always wrote about the upper-middle class, focusing on well-crafted, artful prose as opposed to social issues,” and they allege that in her feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own, Woolf “asserts that wealth is necessary to produce art.”

Both assertions fail to recognize the true breadth and depth of Woolf’s art, as well as her thinking about social and political issues. Yes, she wrote about the upper-middle class. But what did she actually say about them? Yes, she maintained that women needed a room of their own and £500 a year in order to write fiction. But what did she mean by that?

In both cases she was exploring and critiquing a highly stratified patriarchal society that saw women as less than men. Considering how Mittens fared with women on Tuesday — he garnered 43 percent of women’s votes, compared to Obama’s 55 percent — I doubt that Woolf, in all her feminist wisdom, would have made him her choice.

Oh, and let’s not forget her support for the Labour Party during elections that took place in her adult years.

But shallow confused thinking is what occurs when writers rely on quick and dirty Google-based research about an author. They pick one quote from an academic essay — in this case Leonard’s famous line that his wife was “the least political animal that has lived” — and leave the rest behind.

You can weigh in via the poll below. To keep things simple, it only includes the two major party candidates by name. But if you think she would have made an alternate choice, you can write it in.

Thanks for voting!

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