Blogging Woolf

In Woolf sightings today, we have the odd mention of an author who swam “a spooky mile of the River Ouse” (10) and instructions for setting up “a room of your own” online (13).

There are also plenty of literary discussions with slim and broad connections to Woolf — one on the 1914 literary vanguard (7), “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (8), To the Lighthouse (16, 19) and travel reading in Istanbul.

1. ‘Orlando’: Elizabethan tale with a twist, San Francisco Chronicle
   Virginia Woolf‘s 1928 novel “Orlando” set a precedent for stories straddling multiple genres and narratives. TheatreFIRST’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s …
2. Shock Therapy, The Portland Mercury
   VIRGINIA WOOLF walked into a river with stones in her pockets. Sylvia Plath wrote about the trauma of electroconvulsive therapy. And in Ellen Margolis’ new …
3. Book review: Mutton, By India Knight, The Independent
   I don’t believe in aging,” wrote Virginia Woolf as she approached 50. “I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” Clara Hutt, the peri-menopausal …
4. Book World: ‘The Husband’s Secret’ by Liane Moriarty, Washington Post
   The decades have shown that, too often — as Virginia Woolf once predicted — women write about what goes on inside the houses, and men get to claim ..
5. Tales across time, The Hindu
   There are notable exceptions of course: S.T. Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Virginia Woolf, among others. Nearer home, in post-independence India, …
6. The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist, Wall Street Journal
   I admired the sensibility of Virginia Woolf when she wrote: “On or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one …
7. May Sinclair: the readable modernist, The Guardian
   But 40 years of Virago’s modern classics have shown that Virginia Woolfwasn’t the only female author at the head of the literary vanguard, rediscovering and …
8. From the Stacks: “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” The New Republic
   For most of her life, Virginia Woolf wrote quietly elegiac works, but in the 1930s she began to fashion herself into a kind of British conscience. “I’m just poised to …
9. A Meal of One’s Own, Wall Street Journal
   In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf noted that novelists tended to depict luncheon parties by recounting what was wittily said or wisely done, not what was ..
10. Back strokes: What you can learn from swimming with dead authors, National Post
    Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry David Thoreau, Dylan Thomas andVirginia Woolf, she of the watery suicide, are among the most …
11. Lara Feigel’s ‘Love-Charm of Bombs’, New York Times
    9, 1940, Virginia Woolf’s London apartment was hit by an unexploded bomb. A week later, the bomb went off, blowing up the entire house and destroying the …
12. Hunters in the Snow, by Daisy Hildyard, review, Telegraph.co.uk
    Virginia Woolf once wrote that “the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper…” It is worth quoting here because the words are not just …
13. A Room Of Your Own (Online), Huffington Post
    To echo Virginia Woolf in her essay “A Room Of One’s Own,” every (person) needs a place of their own where they can dream and write and create. In Woolf’s …
14. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, USA TODAY
    But again, I was reminded of another, better book: Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, in which he played off Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway to draw devastating parallels between the First World War and the AIDS crisis.
15. Connolly/Shaw/Drake at the Wigmore Hall, The Times (subscription)
    With Dominick Argento’s prose song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf at its heart, Sarah Connolly, Julius Drake and Fiona Shaw set out to create an hour’s programme to capture for the listener something of the nature of Woolf’s own relationship to …
16. Books that changed me: Susan Holoubek, Sydney Morning Herald
    Oh, Virginia Woolf! The acuity of your insight, those exquisite layers of paradoxical feeling, that startling attention to domestic minutiae. To the Lighthouse was on the University of Adelaide’s English I reading list in 1980. Blessings on the person …
17. Book Review: Low, by Anna Quon, National Post
    In a letter to a friend in 1929, Virginia Woolf described her impulse to write A Room of One’s Own: “I wanted to encourage the young women,” she wrote, “they seem to get fearfully depressed.” Last September, in The Walrus, Stacey May Fowles surveyed …
18. Book review: The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, By Olivia Laing, The Independent
    It was certainly an idiosyncratic work – a homage to the Sussex Ouse and to Virginia Woolf who walked into it to an untimely death in 1941. Laing is evidently fascinated by rivers, and in The Trip to Echo Spring she is following not one but several …
19. A reminder of a masterpiece, The Ledger (blog)
    I sometimes find the brief descriptions of books sophomoric, but Monday’s item reminded me of a truly great book, Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” Here’s the summary: “As a contemplation of marriage and family life, ‘To the Lighthouse’ has no …