Posted in coronavirus, films, Mrs. Dalloway, You Tube, tagged Film, Hermione Lee, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf videos, YouTube on Thursday 27 August 2020| Leave a Comment »
This is a nearly one-hour 1987 dramatized documentary on the novel, with an introduction by Woolf biographer Hermione Lee.
This is an approximately 25-minute triptych featuring (among others) Hermione Lee, Eileen Atkins, Nigel Nicolson and Frances Spalding.
Posted in books, Virginia Woolf, tagged books, Maggie Humm, St. Ives, Talland House, To the Lighthouse on Friday 21 August 2020| 5 Comments »
When I first heard that renowned Virginia Woolf scholar Maggie Humm was writing a novel featuring
Lily Briscoe and based on Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse (1927), I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy.
The opportunity came in March, when I saw on Facebook that Maggie had advance reader’s copies in her grasp. After meeting Maggie at many Woolf conferences, I consider her a friend. So I contacted her and asked for a copy. She immediately promised to send one.
A few hours later, pandemic reality hit her. Recalling that the coronavirus had pretty much grounded all international flights, thereby shutting down international mail delivery, Maggie realized that a copy mailed from England would be unlikely to reach me. She put me in touch with her U.S. publicist to obtain a copy stateside instead.
The book arrived quickly, and I expected to jump right in. But my pandemic reality meant I had difficulty focusing on Maggie’s book — or any book — until recently. That made me late finishing the novel and late posting about it here as well. But since it is now available on Amazon, better late than never. So here goes.
Maggie, emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, is the author or editor of 14 books, with the last three focused on Woolf and the arts. So it is only natural that in her first novel, Talland House, Maggie focuses on artist Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse.
To that end, Talland House fills in Lily’s back story — the death of her mother, her art studies in Paris and St. Ives, her work as a nurse during the Great War, and her involvement in the suffrage movement. Set between 1900 and 1918 in both Cornwall and London, it also provides a prequel to Woolf’s novel and reimagines that work from Lily’s perspective.
That reimagining includes Mrs. Ramsay’s demise. Her death, mentioned briefly and parenthetically in Woolf’s novel, is “discovered” or explained in Maggie’s novel. But I will include no spoilers here.
While conducting research to write the novel, Maggie pored over old photos of St. Ives, as well as Cornish newspapers, artists’ memoirs, and art journals to get a feel for the seaside town and its art community during the years the novel covers.
St. Ives Bay, June 2004
The extent of her research shows in her luminous prose that paints a compelling and colorful picture of St. Ives and its charms, the location of all of Woolf’s novel and much of Talland House. The picture is so complete — from the view of the lighthouse from Talland House to the fishing boats in the harbor — that one is transported back in time to the cobblestone streets of the Cornish town.
Woolf scholars and readers will delight in catching the specific references to Woolf’s work that Maggie slips into this historical novel.
Lily makes note of Mr. Ramsay’s boots and his recitation of Tennyson’s poems. She recalls moving the salt cellar at dinner and describes the animal skull on the nursery wall and the tapping sound of the window blind’s acorn on the nursery floor. And in a fresh take-off on Woolf’s famous line in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), “Thinking is my fighting,” Lily proclaims that painting is hers.
If you are a fan of Woolf, this is a must-read. If you are not, it will make you want to become one, just so you can connect this enchanting novel to Woolf’s works.
Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes in 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?) and the Retreat West and Eyelands prizes in 2018.
Read more about Talland House:
Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas; she has a deep, awe-inspiring understanding of the role of the visual in Woolf’s work, and here she reveals that she also has a novelist’s gift to create something new, that has its own imaginative life, from that understanding. -Lauren Elkin, author of the award-winning Flaneuse
Maggie Humm talking about Virginia Woolf and her photo albums at Waterstone’s Gower Street during Dalloway Day celebrations in London in 2018.
Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, tagged Jenny Offill, literary lists, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf on Tuesday 18 August 2020| Leave a Comment »
A couple of months ago I posted a Woolf sighting on Jenny Offill’s Weather (which I just read for the second time). I’m happy to see that the book is on the shortlist for the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Here, the six shortlisted authors recommend novels that have been meaningful to them–all of them worth noting–and Jenny Offill has chosen Mrs. Dalloway.
Besides Offill, the 2020 shortlist features Angie Cruz, Bernardine Evaristo, Natalie Haynes, Hilary Mantel, and Maggie O’Farrell.
And so I picked up Mrs Dalloway and was thrilled by its subversive swings from the trivial to the sublime and back again. I also found in it a model for the novel I hoped to one day write. Her [Virginia Woolf’s] elaborate, far-reaching sentences were very different from my own but her insistence on the importance of recording the modest, the quiet, the almost unseen moments of life was a revelation and continues to be. – Jenny Offill on Mrs. Dalloway
Posted in events, Virginia Woolf, Woolf Courses, tagged A Room of One's Own, Literature Cambridge, novels, online study, polemic, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf courses on Monday 17 August 2020| 1 Comment »
If you have ever wanted to study all of Virginia Woolf’s major works in consecutive order, now is your chance — no matter where you live.
Literature Cambridge has planned a “Virginia Woolf Season” that will run from Oct. 24 of this year through June 5, 2021 — and each of 18 study sessions will be available online via Zoom.
This unique eight-month season of Woolf study will cover her 12 major books in order of publication, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941). Each session includes a live, newly commissioned online lecture and seminar via Zoom. A few topics are repeated to accommodate different schedules.
£26 full price
£22 students and CAMcard holders
Book them online.
Karina Jacubowicz
Trudi Tate (center) welcomes students to the Virginia Woolf’s Gardens course at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge in July 2019.
Posted in events, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, tagged Cornwall, coronavirus, events, St. Ives, Talland House, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain on Sunday 16 August 2020| Leave a Comment »
St. Ives Bay, June 2004
Alice Lowe
Catherine
Kaylee Baucom
Paula Maggio
Stefano Rozzoni
seanmcphail
suzannebellamy1
veronikakra
Vara Neverow
William Patrick Wend
Zoe Wolstenholme
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