“Hilda and Virginia” starts today and runs through March 3. This double bill of two plays by veteran writer and activist Maureen Duffy, tells the stories of two remarkable women:
7th-century abbess Hilda of Whitby, who brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons and was a teacher and adviser to kings, in “The Choice,” and
Virginia Woolf, who, in “A Nightingale In Bloomsbury Square,” looks back on her life, revealing the backdrop to her successful works.
The production is at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 16b Jermyn Street,, London SW1Y 6ST 020 7287 2875. Tickets are £30.
View of Porthminster Beach while walking to Talland House, June 2004
Last September Ratha Tep, a contributing writer for the New York TimesFootsteps column, emailed me. She was looking for answers to questions and names of people to contact concerning Virginia Woolf and St. Ives.
Her piece, “In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lost Eden in Cornwall,” appeared online today and will be in the March 4 print edition. It is marvelous, full of history, love for Woolf as a literary and feminist pioneer, and touring tips for St. Ives and Cornwall that connect us to Virginia’s experiences there.
It also provides an optimistic update about the apartment complex to be built below Talland House that threatened the view and elicited protests from Woolfians around the globe nearly three years ago.
I visited St. Ives in 2004, taking the six-hour train ride on the Great Western Railway, visiting Talland House — where we were invited in by the woman who occupied the first floor flat — and traipsing around the charming town.
I have not been back since then. After reading Tepp’s piece, my desire to return is stronger than ever.
Long an admirer of this modernist literary pioneer, not only for how Woolf redefined the possibilities of the novel but, for the simple reason that no other writer has given me, sentence for sentence, such pleasure, I decided to go in search of Woolf in her early years. – Ratha Tep, NYT
Porthminster Beach, June 2004
St. Ives Bay, with Godrevy Island and lighthouse in the distance, June 2004
Lots of Woolf on the Web these days. Here are a few important sightings gleaned via Twitter links shared by Jane deGay and Maggie Humm.
Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, edited by Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley, is a collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences.
Bonnie Greer on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, a podcast discussing the friendships, work and designs behind the artists, coordinated with the Virginia Woolf exhibition at Tate St Ives, 10 February – 29 April 2018. Then view her art walk below.
Cecil Woolf cuts the cake designed by Cressida Bell for the 100th birthday party of the Hogarth Press last June in Reading, England.
Cecil Woolf, accompanied by his wife Jean Moorcroft Wilson, talks about being The Other Boy at the Hogarth Press at the 100th birthday party for the Hogarth Press in Reading, England last June.
Cecil Woolf published his story, The Other Boy at the Hogarth Press, last spring, unveiling it at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.
Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson at their post-conference party last June at their London townhouse.
Cecil Woolf stops at 46 Gordon Square, London, while giving Blogging Woolf a personalized tour of Bloomsbury in June 2016.
Taking a break with Cecil Woolf in the Tavistock Square garden after the 2016 Woolf conference.
Panel organizers have issued a call for papers on Virginia Woolf’s novel in the centennial year of its publication that address the question: What is the twenty-first century legacy of Woolf’s “nineteenth-century” novel?
Please send 250-word abstracts to Mary Wilson at mwilson4@umassd.edu by March 12. Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, is the author of The Labors of Modernism and Rhys Matters.
