Blogging Woolf

“Status Updates,” a Jan. 11 essay in the New York Times about how many live and dead authors appear on Facebook and Twitter, was of particular interest  to me because it closed with a reference to Virginia Woolf.

Just as Blogging Woolf contributor Alice Lowe focuses on Woolf sightings in contemporary fiction, I pay particular attention to sightings of my favorite author in social media and other online venues.

I have written about Woolf’s online presence in “Virginia Woolf in the Cyber City: Connecting in the Virtual Public Square,” published in Woolf & the City: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish (2010). And I updated my research for the Introduction to The Best of Blogging Woolf, Five Years On, published by Cecil Woolf Publishers late last year.

Essay author Julianna Baggott notes that multiple folks have adopted Woolf’s persona, (including yours truly via Facebook). Here’s what she has to say:

In many cases, I didn’t find just one person who had taken on a dead author’s voice. With Virginia Woolf, for example, multiple avatars fill the page, some 60 tweeting Virginia Woolfs. They tweet in Spanish, in Arabic, in Italian, in languages I don’t even recognize, all these Woolfs holding one Woolf’s words alive. One Woolf recently quoted the original: “What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate! #TheVoyageOut #RichardDalloway.

It holds true, maybe now more than ever. Amid the barrage of social media, each of us is still somehow alone. Yet I find comfort in Woolf’s tweets, echoing across our solitary icebergs.

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