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Archive for April, 2022

BBC Radio 4 short work includes Virginia Woolf

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf audio, tagged , , , , on Saturday 30 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

Got time for a short broadcast with a Virginia Woolf connection? Yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Short Works fits the bill and is available online.

“Dance of the Wild,” a story by Amanthi Harris, is set in contemporary Alpujarras in Spain. That’s where Gerald Brenan spent his summers and where Virginia Woolf visited him. The story focuses on a young woman who “sees” and “hears” Woolf talking to herself about creating Mrs. Dalloway.

They seem very real here, don’t they? – “Dance of the Wild”

The Woolf character’s words are based on Woolf’s diary and the manuscripts of the novel held in the British Library and the New York Public Library.

This news comes from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. The 14-minute reading, which will be available online for more than one year, can be found on BBC Sounds.

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Two novelists on Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story

Posted in books, events, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , , , on Thursday 14 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

If you can get to Cambridge or London this month or next, you are in luck. You have two chances to learn more about the relationship between Maynard Keynes and ballerina Lydia Lopokova, straight from Susan Sellers, author of Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, which explores the couple’s love story.

Maggie Humm, whose recent novel Talland House explores the life of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse heroine, Lily Briscoe, joins Sellers for both conversations, the first in Cambridge and the second in London.

Here are the details for both events.

A Bloomsbury Love Story

When: Sunday 24 April 2022, 10-11 a.m. BST
Where: The Cambridge Union Society, 9a Bridge Street, Cambridge CB2 1UB
Why: Part of the Cambridge Literary Festival
Cost: Tickets £12. Book here.

Susan Sellers and Maggie Humm, two world-leading experts talk about the women of Bloomsbury, and what a lifetime of reading, researching, teaching and writing about Virginia Woolf has taught them.

An Evening in Bloomsbury with Susan Sellers and Maggie Humm

When: Thursday 5 May 2022, 6.30 p.m. BST
Where: Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE
Cost: Tickets £10 Book here.

Join Susan Sellers discussing the lives of Bloomsbury’s most unlikely lovers, Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, with Maggie Humm.

It is the winter of 1921 and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes launch a flamboyant new production at London’s Alhambra Theatre. Maynard Keynes is in the audience, though he expects little from the evening. Despite Lydia’s many triumphs, including the title role in Stravinsky’s Firebird, Maynard’s mind is made up – he considers her ‘a rotten dancer’. Besides, Lydia has at least one husband in tow and Maynard has only ever loved men.

Tonight, however, as Susan Sellers relates, that is all about to change and while The Firebird is a fictional re-imagining, life is often stranger and more surprising. Especially, perhaps, when it comes to the lives of theBloomsbury Group.

About the speakers

Susan Sellers

Susan Sellers is professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews. Her first Bloomsbury-inspired novel, Vanessa and Virginia, was an editor’s pick for The New York Times and has been translated into 16 languages.

Maggie Humm

Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor, international Woolf scholar and novelist. She has written many books on feminism, art and Virginia Woolf, and in 2020 published her debut novel Talland House, a gripping historical romance/detective fiction set in picturesque Cornwall and London during World War I. Shortlisted for several prizes including Eyelands and Impress, Talland House was chosen by the Washington Independent Review of Books as one of its ’51 Favorite Books’ of 2020.

 

When the don met the dancer – this is the story of how Maynard Keynes, the great economist, fell for Lydia Lopokova, celebrity ballerina and Russian émigrée. And it is also a story of resistances, when a different kind of woman stepped into the settled world of Virginia, Vanessa, and all the rest of their English entourage. – In Firebird, Susan Sellers restages the bright Bloomsbury years of the early 1920s as they have never been seen before. – Rachel Bowlby

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When a novelist and a Woolf scholar discuss Virginia Woolf

Posted in books, You Tube, tagged , , , on Monday 11 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

What happens when a novelist and a scholar get together to discuss Virginia Woolf? Interesting things, as you will see below. But first the back story

The back story

Last week, a Zoom call for members of the International Virginia Woolf Society introduced us to the The Oxford Companion of Virginia Woolf (2021), edited by Anne Fernald and published by the Oxford University Press.

On that call, we met many of the prominent international scholars who contributed the 39 original essays that appear in the volume. They include Urmila Seshagiri, Elsa Högberg, Vara Neverow, Elizabeth Outka, and Roxana Robinson, whose novel Sparta (2013) I used in a class I taught on women and war.

The YouTube video

During the discussion about the handbook, Fernald mentioned an April 5 discussion she had with Robinson about Virginia Woolf, which is now posted on YouTube.

In it they talk about many things, including how they first met Virginia Woolf, what she has to say to us today, and Fernald’s vision for the essays she included in The Oxford Companion of Virginia Woolf.

As she puts it, “I wanted to make a new pattern for what we know about Woolf’s life.”

Fernald is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Issues at Fordham University, editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006).

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Charleston attic opens to visitors with “Near Heaven” exhibit

Posted in art exhibits, Charleston Farmhouse, events, Vanessa Bell, tagged , , on Saturday 9 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

You can see two of the attic windows in this photo of Charleston taken in 2019.

I have been fascinated by attics since I was a little girl, when the bed in my childhood bedroom bumped up against the door to our home’s attic, where family treasures were left to collect dust.

Now, visitors to Charleston have the rare opportunity to visit that home’s attic, the former studio of Vanessa Bell and the site of a new free exhibit, “Near Heaven.” The title comes from a quote from Vanessa’s daughter Angelica Garnett, in which she explained how important the attic space was to her mother.

A steep climb to a place of escape

After a climb up two flights of steep and uneven steps, visitors can view this new exhibit by Langlands & Bell. It is billed as “exploring the space as an artistic refuge and a place of escape” and contemplation from the domestic demands Vanessa faced.

Lord knows they were many and pressing. Her letters housed in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library show the many domestic concerns Vanessa had to juggle — living arrangements, house guests, child rearing, and personality conflicts — all while creating art.

While entry to the free exhibit does not include a tour of the home itself or its other exhibitions, visitors can get a view of the home’s famous garden from the attic windows.

How to book

“Near Heaven” is the first contemporary exhibit ever to be installed at the house. While free, it does require booking a specific time slot. The exhibit is open from April 2 through Aug. 29. 

Charleston is based in the heart of the South Downs National Park in East Sussex, UK.

Another exterior view of Charleston, 2019

 

 

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New and old in the world of Virginia Woolf and books

Posted in books, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Wednesday 6 April 2022| Leave a Comment »

What’s new — and old — in the world of Virginia Woolf and books? A couple of things.

A graphic biography

First, the new. In the summer of 2024, Weidenfeld & Nicolson will publish Virginia Woolf: A Graphic Biography,  Ella Bucknall’s “fascinating, engaged and deeply scholarly” graphic biography of Virginia Woolf.

The publisher says: “From Woolf’s earliest memoirs of the sound of the sea in St. Ives to her final submersion in the River Ouse, Bucknall tells the story of Woolf’s life, recalling deaths and marriages, friendships and rivalries, creative droughts and floods of inspiration.

“Combining her distinctive and intricate illustrations, with a scholar’s intellect and understanding of Woolf’s life and works, Bucknall’s is a completely original approach to this most beloved author, and a pioneering contribution to the biography genre.”

This is the first book for Bucknall, a writer and illustrator currently studying for a Ph.D. in creative writing at King’s College London.

Woolf tells all in Literary Confessions

Now the old. The book Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions, was expected to sell for between £4,000 – £6,000 at Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Gloucestershire in January. Instead, it fetched £21,000.

In it, Woolf, along with Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, Hilaire Belloc, Stella Benson and Margaret Kennedy, shares her thoughts on the best and worst writers in the literary world.

Woolf completed her questionnaire on May 6, 1924, answering all 39 questions and signing it using her trademark purple ink. The questions ranged from “who is the greatest prose writer that ever lived” to who was the “worst living English playwright”. The ten sets of handwritten answers were dated between 1923 and 1927.

Woolf named T.S. Eliot and Clive Bell as “the best living critic of literature.” She answered that Jane Austen was “the best deceased English novelist.” And when asked to name the deceased men of letters whose character she most disliked, she wrote: “I hate all dead men of letters.”

Margaret Kennedy’s grandson William Mackesy found the book while sorting through his late grandmother’s effects.

In under 100 handwritten words, in her distinctive purple ink, Virginia Woolf tells us so much about her literary passions and aversions. One could read whole biographies to seek out such snippets and here all is set out pithily on two pages. – Chris Albury, auctioneer

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