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Archive for April, 2015

Wearing Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, commodification, tagged , , , on Thursday 30 April 2015| Leave a Comment »

If you are attending the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, held June 4-7 at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa., you can add the conference T-shirt to your collection. Just place your order for a shirt when you register. The cost is $12.

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The history of Virginia Woolf’s stand-up desk: From Woolf to Bell to Franklin to Baskin to Duke

Posted in Bloomsbury, commodification, Virginia Woolf, Woolf Icon, tagged , , , on Wednesday 29 April 2015| 1 Comment »

Remember the Virginia Woolf desk acquired by Duke University that we wrote about last week? Additional details about the desk, which Woolf designed and her nephew Quentin Bell painted, have come to us from Caroline Zoob, author of Virginia Woolf’s Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk’s House. 

Zoob, who lived at Monk’s House for a decade as a tenant of the National Trust, said she had never seen the desk. So she wrote Naomi Nelson of Duke, asking if the desk Duke had acquired — one Zoob described as “slopey” — had ever been at Monk’s House.

Nelson quoted from a letter dated Jan. 5, 1981, from Bell to Colin Franklin, to whom Bell sold the desk in 1980:

The history of it as far as I can remember is this: it remained in my aunt’s possession until about 1929, having been taken first to Asheham and then to Monks House at Rodmell. There in some kind of general turnout and spring clean, Virginia decided to throw it out. I think she had for many years abandoned the habit of writing in an upright position and certainly I never saw her doing anything of the kind, so that this tall desk, usually, I think, used by office workers of the last century and requiring the writer to stand or to sit on a very high stool, was going free. I was offered it and accepted it, and it came to Charleston.

According to Nelson, Bell’s letter “goes on to describe painting the design on the top and reveals that his wife [Olivia] shortened the legs (‘long before the current revival of interest in Virginia Woolf.’)”

Lisa Baskin Unger acquired the desk from Franklin, and it became one of “the most iconic items” in her collection, which is described as one of the largest and most significant private collections on women’s history. So the Virginia Woolf desk now in Duke’s possession is apparently Woolf’s original stand-up desk with its legs shortened to suit Olivia Bell.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University recently acquired Unger’s collection and is now in the process of cataloguing it. The Baskin Collection also holds a collection of letters to Aileen Pippett, author of The Moth and the Star, the first full-length biography of Woolf. Pippett’s correspondents include Vanessa Bell.

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Virginia Woolf scholar shares expertise about Downton Abbey social context

Posted in 21st century Woolf, Virginia Woolf, World War I, tagged , , , , on Friday 24 April 2015| Leave a Comment »

Erica Delsandro, a visiting assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Bucknell University, is a Virginia Woolf scholar who specializes in the literature of the interwar period. She teaches a course on “The Literature of Downton Abbey” and was interviewed twice this year by Whitney Chirdon and Lindsey Whissel, hosts of “After Abbey,” a WPSU show.

You can watch both interviews below.

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Happy World Book Day from Virginia Woolf

Posted in 19th Annual Internatinal Conference on Virginia Woolf, books, tagged , , on Thursday 23 April 2015| Leave a Comment »

Happy World Book Day from Virginia Woolf, who authored so many wonderful ones.

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Women war poets in Virginia Woolf’s time

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf and war, World War I, tagged , , , , on Thursday 23 April 2015| Leave a Comment »

Here are two wonderful resources shared with the VWoolf Listserv by Karen Levenback, Female Poets of WWIauthor of Virginia Woolf and the Great War (2000).

The first is an online timeline of literature in the context of historical, social and cultural events from 1914-1919.

The second is research conducted by Lucy London, who Levenback describes as “a most helpful woman in England, who is working on women and the Great War.”

London, a poet who trained as a French/English shorthand secretary and worked in London in the media and public relations, is now researching women poets of the Great War around the world.

She describes her project as “a (self-funded) research project that seeks to inform the general public about the First World War through exhibitions of the work and lives of women who wrote poetry at that time.”

Her blog, Female Poets of the Great War, documents her efforts. But she has other blogs as well:

Follow her on Twitter @LucyLondon7, where she posted this thank you after learning that Blogging Woolf was reporting on her efforts:

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