Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for May, 2019

What: Exhibition: Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry
Where: Senate House University Library, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU (Room 101, 1st Floor)
When: 17 – 28 June 2019

Senate House Library holds little-known materials on modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Nancy Cunard and Djuna Barnes. Their experimental texts were published by small presses and little magazines, but also attracted the attention of larger commercial book publishers. To gain greater control over the publication process, Woolf, Stein, Cunard and others created their own presses and engaged closely with the physical materiality of books.

To mark the release of the edited collection Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), this exhibition focuses on these fascinating modernist publishers that opened new markets for fiction and poetry. From a mass of little-seen materials in Senate House Special Collections, Leila Kassir and Lise Jaillant have selected books, periodicals, correspondence and ephemera relating to three themes:

  1. Women and Publishing;
  2. Race and Modernism;
  3. Middlebrow and Celebrity.

Among the items on display are letters by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, rare editions published by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press, neglected periodicals and publicity materials. Short videos by experts of modernism contextualise the exhibition and the material context in which the new literature first appeared.

Read Full Post »

Anne Olivier and Quentin Bell’s home, Dower House, in West Firle in the South Downs of England is now listed on Airbnb for rental. So far, it has a five-star rating and boasts a “Bohemian atmosphere.”

The home has a well-equipped kitchen, book-lined study, large drawing room opening onto a terrace, two bathrooms, and four bedrooms, three with a queen-size bed. Inside amenities include a fireplace, free wifi, washer, iron, central heating, all bedding and linens, and TV. Free parking is available.

Outdoors, there is a walled garden and breathtaking views, as the house is situated in the heart of the South Downs National Park, just outside Firle village at the foot of the Downs.

The cost for six guests is $438 per night. Read more.

With its fascinating history and unique artistic and literary associations, staying at the Dower House is an unusually intimate and enriching experience.

Screenshot of the Dower House listing on the Airbnb website.

Read Full Post »

To mark the 90th anniversary of the first publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Malvern Garden Buildings has created  a writing retreat inspired by Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House in Rodmell for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which runs through May 25.

VW's writing Lodge

Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House

The shed, which was created with the help of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and Monk’s House, was unveiled by Woolf’s great-niece Cressida Bell on Press Day, May 20.

It is painted a dove grey color and features double French doors opening onto a deck, as does the Monk’s House Lodge.

Inside, the lodge is furnished with a desk in the spirit of Woolf, an armchair with a tray, and a bookcase filled with a set of volumes covered in marbled paper — as was Woolf’s Shakespeare collection. Completing the look are writing paraphernalia and other objects from the 1920s and 1930s.

Once you view Malvern’s creation, I guarantee you will want one for your own back garden. I know I do.

Read more about the project and view photos as well.

A screenshot of the Malvern Garden Buildings Facebook post, as shared by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.

Read Full Post »

Sally Rooney is being touted as the premier millennial writer these days; her new novel, Conversations-with-Friends_-Sally-RooneyNormal People, is garnering rave reviews. I’m still on the library queue for that one, but I just finished Conversations with Friends and was impressed with its intelligence and insights.

I was especially delighted when I came across an early passage in which the protagonist, Frances, is at a party where people are trying to pigeonhole her culturally and politically. I’m lost in the Irish references until someone asks, “Which county do you support in the All Ireland?”

Her reply: “As a woman I have no county.”

Woolf would have loved the sly homage as she would have loved Rooney’s word play and cool take–much like her own–on women and men, life and love. Bridging the gap in time is a mental image of Frances at Mrs. Dalloway’s party.

Read Full Post »

Review by Tatiana Krasavchenko, Leading Researcher, Institute of Social Sciences Information, Russian Academy of Sciences

Virginia Woolfs Portraits of Russian Writers by Darya Protopopova
Hardcover: 244 pages
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 1 edition (April 1, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1527527530
ISBN-13: 978-1527527539

From learning to read Chekhov in original, to being haunted by Sophia Tolstoy’s attempted suicide – Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Russian literature was as dramatic as it was essential to the modernists in their search for cultural alternatives urgently needed to revitalize traditional forms in British literature and art.

The first part of this new study of Virginia Woolf’s international context follows the daughter of the conservative Victorian Lesley Stephen as she befriends anti-tsarist émigrés, dresses up like a Russian ballerina, and publishes pamphlets on the Soviet Union.

The main part of the book explores her views on the four Russian writers she most admired: Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Woolf’s essays are set side by side with other writings on Russian literature that were familiar to her, including works by Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Edward Garnett.

However, the book does not simply lay out facts about Woolf’s Russian literary encounters. It uses Woolf’s preoccupation with Russian literature as a key to understanding one of the key processes in European culture – the creation of the cultural Other.

Response to Russian art

The book explores Woolf’s interpretations of Russian literature as part of a wider response to Russian art in British culture of the time. It portrays Woolf’s literary and biographical encounters with the Slavonic ‘Other’ in their full socio-cultural significance. The book carefully documents how Woolf used her essays on Russian writers as a platform for expressing her views on fiction, translation, biography, and, most importantly, on what constitutes new realism in literature.

The major difference between this book and the existing studies of Woolf’s response to Russian literature (see, for example, Rebecca Beasley, Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881-1922, Oxford University Press, 2017, and Claire Davison, Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, Edinburgh University Press, 2014) is its attempt to place her writings about Russian novelists within a historical context. Woolf was anxious to go beyond seeing Russian literature from the national point of view. She became intensely interested in biographies of Russian writers which showed her how diverse their philosophical and moral positions were, and suggested how impossible it was to unite them under one label of ‘Russianness’. In order to examine Woolf’s dialogue with her contemporaries regarding the national element in literature, this book sets her reviews and essays on the Russians side by side with other modernists’ writings.

The book invites a wider readership with its discussion of the Russian ballet designs familiar to Woolf, paintings by Boris Anrep and Natalia Goncharova, also known to Woolf through her friendship with Anrep, as well as via Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions, and, finally, photographs of Woolf and her Russian friends.

Explores links to Fry and Eliot

Since Roberta Rubenstein’s study Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), scholars have made significant discoveries about the importance of continental art and literature to British modernists. Protopopova’s book continues this line of research, linking Woolf’s essays on the Russians to Roger Fry’s interest in Russian Post-Impressionists and T.S. Eliot’s love for Stravinsky and the Ballet Russes.

The book exhibits the full extent of intimacy with which Woolf knew the then newly translated Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, as a result of her earnest attempts to read the Russians in original. Quoting from the Russian sources, Protopopova illustrated the precision of Woolf’s remarks on Russian literature, thus allowing her readers to continue their own dialogue with Woolf or, perhaps, challenge Woolf’s vision of Russian authors – the vision she at times adapted to fit her idea of new literary forms.

The book is aimed primarily at academic audiences: modernist scholars, art critics, historians of British cultural exchanges, scholars of Russian literature, and specialists in inter-civilizational studies. It will also appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of English and Russian literature, as well as a wider circle of admirers of Virginia Woolf and Russian literature.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: