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Archive for January, 2017

Woolf Works revival comes to London

Posted in events, tagged , , on Thursday 12 January 2017| 1 Comment »

Woolf Works, the first revival of Wayne McGregor’s critically acclaimed ballet triptych to music inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf, is playing at London’s Royal Opera House from Jan. 21 to Feb. 14.

With music by Max Richter and starring Alessandra Ferri and Mara Galeazzi, the ballet focuses on thee Woolf novels, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves. For each, Richter found a unique musical language, with each individual piece connecting with the others for a unifying whole.

The Mrs. Dalloway section opens with the unique 1937 BBC recording of Woolf’s own voice reading her essay “On Craftmanship.” Her radio appearance was part of a BBC series called “Words Fail Me.”

Woolf Works was first presented in London in May 2015 to rave reviews.

What a brilliant, creative human being Virginia Woolf was. It’s been extraordinary once again to have the chance to be engaged in the matters that troubled her, the questions she wrestled with and the visionary quality of the answers she discovered. – Max Richter on how he composed the score for Woolf Works

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Ali Smith and Virginia Woolf

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , on Wednesday 11 January 2017| Leave a Comment »

Ali Smith gave a lecture—“Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat”—at London’s National Portrait Gallery inpublic-library 2014. That also was the year her remarkable novel, How to Be Both, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and acclaimed by a reviewer: “One might reasonably argue that Ali Smith is among Virginia Woolf’s most gifted inheritors.”

Seeing Woolfian influences in the work of the contemporary post-modernist is no surprise, then; nor are Woolf references in Smith’s recent story collection, Public Library. In “The ex-wife,” the narrator is writing to her former partner after a break-up, accusing her of infidelity, or at least inattention, because of her involvement with Katherine Mansfield, the ex-wife in question.

That’s about all I can say about this marvelously convoluted story. While explicating her litany of objections, the narrator brings up Mansfield’s “friend and rival Virginia Woolf” who was, at the time, writing a book “about a plane that all the people in London look up and see…,” adding, “I have a sense that Virginia Woolf always thought your ex-wife a bit flighty.”

Then there’s “The definite article,” a story about Regents Park that begins: “I stepped out of the city and into the park. It was as simple as that.” The narrator’s visions invoke flora and fauna, Shakespeare and Dickens, the Brownings and the Shelleys, Elizabeth Bowen and Sylvia Plath, to name just a handful, “and Virginia Woolf herself, “howling or furious or sad, doesn’t matter which, walking and walking by the flower-beds till it cheers her up, leaves her happily making up phrases.”

Ali Smith makes up some pretty good phrases herself.

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New double issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany now online

Posted in International Virginia Woolf Society, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, tagged , , , , on Sunday 8 January 2017| Leave a Comment »

The new issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany is now online. This  double issue includes Spring 2016, Issue 89 and the Fall 2016, Issue 90.

The first is a truly miscellaneous collection of essays edited by Diana L. Swanson, and the second features the special topic Virginia Woolf and Illness, curated by guest editor Cheryl Hindrichs.

Download the issue as a PDF.

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Virginia Woolf’s complicated relationship with fashion

Posted in Cecil Woolf Publishers, fashion, Virginia Woolf, Woolf likes and dislikes, tagged , on Wednesday 4 January 2017| 3 Comments »

Virginia Woolf had a complicated relationship with clothing and fashion, one that has been much discussed in academic settings and online.

Monographs on Woolf and fashion

Catherine Gregg explores this theme in her Bloomsbury Heritage monograph Virginia Woolf and ‘Dress Mania’: ‘the eternal & insoluble question of clothes’ (2010). She discusses Woolf’s “delight in clothes and interest in conceptions of fashion and femininity” as well as her sense of being an outsider when it came to fashion, as well as her loathing for its artifice (7).

I edited a monograph for Cecil Woolf Publishers, Virginia Woolf’s Likes & Dislikes (2012), that collects conflicting quotes from Woolf’s diaries and letters and categorizes them, including those that relate to clothing. In them she mentions her dislike of buying hats, her love for her fur slippers and her desire for a pair of rubber soled boots to wear on country walks (43).

Magazine offers shopping advice from Woolf

Today’s post on the AnOther magazine website takes Woolf’s “clothes complex” or “dress mania,” as she called it and as Gregg notes, and transforms it into shopping advice. Titled “Virginia Woolf’s Shopping Tips,” the article aims to “take advice from the modernist author on personal style, battling the sales, and the key to surviving the chaos of Oxford Street.” The magazine shared the post via a tweet.

In a nutshell, they are:

  1. Be brave
  2. Enjoy the process
  3. Ponder before you purchase
  4. Quality not quantity
  5. Be open to all possibilities

I think Woolf applied that same advice to her writing.

How to order monographs from Cecil Woolf Publishers

All of the books published by Cecil Woolf Publishers are available directly from:

Cecil Woolf Publishing, 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP, England, Tel: 020 7387 2394 (or +44 (0)20 7387 2394 from outside the UK). Prices range from £4.50 to £10. For more information, contact cecilwoolf@gmail.com.

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