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Archive for July, 2022

Sept. 11 unveiling of Talland House plaque recognizing Virginia Woolf

Posted in Susan Sellers, tagged , , , on Sunday 31 July 2022| 1 Comment »

On Sept. 11, one of England’s famous plaques noting the literary historical significance of a particular location will be unveiled at Talland House, Virginia Woolf’s summertime home in St. Ives from 1882-1894.

Blogging Woolf was part of a pilgrimage to Talland House in 2004. This photo depicts the front right corner of the home.

Unlike London’s Blue Plaques, this one will have a black background and white letters, the colors of the Cornish flag.

Although Woolf sets her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse in the Hebrides, St. Ives is its true location and inspiration. Godrevy Lighthouse, three miles out across the bay, was part of her view each summer and inspired the titular pilgrimage made by the novel’s family, the Ramsays.

How it came to be

Woolfians from around the globe raised nearly £4,000 to help fund the plaque, which was championed by Maggie Humm, author and vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. She says the property, Talland House, is a “crucial part of the Woolf story.”

Humm, author of the novel Talland House,was a major force behind the effort. She advocated for the move by providing St. Ives Town Council with useful and persuasive information about the summers Woolf spent at Talland House until the age of 12.

The society proposed the idea for a plaque 20 years ago but stepped up its efforts during the past four years. The St. Ives Town Council approved the idea in March.

We first reported about this effort in October of 2021.

Community response

The proposal for the plaque elicited more than a dozen comments from supporters, local and otherwise.

Here is one from the woman who has restored the Talland House gardens to the glory of Woolf’s time:

The research I have undertaken to inform me about which heritage plants to use in the garden has revealed, beyond my initial imaginings, just how important Talland House and St Ives were to Woolf and to what was to become a groundbreaking new form of literature and key component of Modernism. In her memoirs she describes a philosophy of life that was formed in the garden at Talland house, that she carried with her throughout her life and that fed into her work, informed it even. The house, and gardens, significance cannot be underestimated! – Polly Carter

And here is another from a St. Ives resident and a former resident of Talland House:

As an ex-resident of the house I met many people who had travelled to St. Ives purely for the Virginia Woolf connection; often I would see them in the road looking up to the house and would go and talk to them. Seeing how much the house and surrounding area meant to these people, a plaque honouring Virginia and marking the place that inspired her so much would be perfect. I spoke to previous owners of the building who said Virginia Woolf fans have been coming for years. Chris Roberts

Note: Talland House sits above Porthminster beach. This blog’s header photo depicts a 2004 view of the beach from just below Talland House.

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Opening of Mrs. Dalloway set to music by Max Richter

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, music on Saturday 30 July 2022| 1 Comment »

Max Richter’s release of his 33-minute ballet “Exiles” has been out for a year, but I just discovered it. On it, is “filler” that includes a previously unreleased outtake from his ballet “Woolf Works,” inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf.

Of note for readers of Woolf is the eight-minute piece “Flowers of Herself,” which  provides an orchestral soundtrack for the opening of Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. It includes the tolling of Big Ben by tubular bells and provides the musical energy of a bustling street scene as we imagine Clarissa winding through the streets of London on her walk to “buy the flowers herself.”

According to BBC World Service, as “One of his most intricate and attractive orchestral pieces, “Flowers” receives an outstanding performance by the young musicians of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic led by Kristjan Järvi.

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Parsing Three Guineas via the Woolf Salon Project

Posted in events, tagged , on Thursday 21 July 2022| Leave a Comment »

The next three sessions in the Woolf Salon Project are dedicated to a study and open discussion of Virginia Woolf’s anti-war polemic Three Guineas (1938).

Details of the sessions

  1. What: Woolf Salon #20 – “Let It Blaze! Let It Blaze!”
    Date:     Friday, July 29
    Time: 3-5 p.m. ET (New York); 12 p.m.–2 p.m. PT (Los Angeles); 4–6 p.m. Brasilia; 8–10 p.m. BST (London); 9–11 p.m. CEST (Paris)
    Homework: Chapter 1 of Three Guineas, along with endnotes.
  2. What: Woolf Salon #21 – “Our Mothers Will Laugh”
    Date: Friday, Aug. 25
    Time: 3-5 p.m. ET (New York); 12 p.m.–2 p.m. PT (Los Angeles); 4–6 p.m. Brasilia; 8–10 p.m. BST (London); 9–11 p.m. CEST (Paris)
  3. What: Woolf Salon #22- “Unnatural Daughters”
    Date: Friday, Sept. 30
    Time: 3-5 p.m. ET (New York); 12 p.m.–2 p.m. PT (Los Angeles); 4–6 p.m. Brasilia; 8–10 p.m. BST (London); 9–11 p.m. CEST (Paris)

How to join

Anyone can join the group, which meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Bloomsbury Girls at Bloomsbury Books

Posted in books, bookstore, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , on Wednesday 13 July 2022| Leave a Comment »

Bloomsbury Books is a quiet, dusty, tradition-bound London bookstore that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men. But in 1950, it’s a new world, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans.

This is from the dustcover promo in my serendipitous sale table acquisition, Bloomsbury Girls, a recently published novel by Natalie Jenner, author of the international best-seller The Jane Austen Society.

My first reaction was to cringe at the title, but it’s true, we were all still girls, regardless of age, in 1950. The novel is a coming-into-their-own story about three women challenging the set-in-stone hierarchy at a fictional bookstore in Bloomsbury.

Real-life personages—Daphne du Maurier, Peggy Guggenheim, Samuel Beckett—appear as characters in the novel, but you can’t be in a Bloomsbury bookshop without the spiritual presence of and references to Virginia Woolf.

When Vivien is named acting manager during a temporary shake-up, the first thing she does is create a prominent display of classic women authors. Woolf, she observes, is “the only woman whom the male stiff did not seem to mind taking up valuable shelf space,” but she moves them all front and center:

Anne Bronte would gain her rightful place next to her sisters, Katherine Mansfield would join her longtime pen pal Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Gaskell would emerge from the Victorian shadow of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope.

Vivien is a closeted writer, too. After one of her stories is plagiarized by a male colleague, she expresses her frustration to a friend in Queen Square, near the store. Returning to the shop,

she knew she was angrily stomping the very ground where T.S. Eliot had worked as an editor, Virginia Woolf had drawn inspiration for her novel Night and Day, and Thackeray had set his earliest chapters in Vanity Fair.

Evie, doing research in the store’s archives, rues the many lost and forgotten books and wants to reprint the important ones: “Typeset and print it, just like Virginia Woolf ‘n’ her husband did … with a handpress, in her drawing room!”

Light and just a bit frothy, but entertaining. Woolfians could do worse than transplant ourselves to an earlier time in a Bloomsbury square.

 

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Get Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship at a discount

Posted in books, essays, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Thursday 7 July 2022| 2 Comments »

Beth Rigel Daugherty is beloved in Virginia Woolf circles for both her scholarship and her down-to-earth approach to Woolf studies. Her latest book, Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist, out his month, is available at a 30 percent discount from the Edinburgh University Press. Just enter the code EVENT30 when you checkout and you can share her brilliance at a discount.

What’s in the book

  • The most comprehensive portrayal of Virginia Woolf’s education to date
  • Examination of the link between Virginia Stephen’s education and Virginia Woolf’s essays
  • A focus on Woolf’s nonfiction and her early work
  • Two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time
  • A compilation and organization of archival material in appendices for future researchers.

According to the publisher:

This study takes up Woolf’s challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father’s library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen’s learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

About Beth Rigel Daugherty

Beth Rigel Daugherty (at far left), Leslie Hankins and Diane Gillespie presented a panel on “Portraying and Projecting Age, Ageism, and Activism” at the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, with its theme of social justice, at the University of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati in June of 2019.

Recently retired from Ohio’s Otterbein University, Beth Rigel Daugherty taught modernist English literature, Virginia Woolf and Appalachian and Native American literature along with many thematically focused writing courses, for 36 years.

Her plenary talk at the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, “On the Ethics of Teaching: Virginia Woolf’s Essays,” received accolades from everyone who heard it.

Beth fell in love with Virginia Woolf and her essays while at Rice University and has been presenting and publishing on both ever since. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in edited collections; editions of the “How Should Read a Book?” holograph draft and Woolf’s fan letters in Woolf Studies Annual; and, with Mary Beth Pringle, the Modern Language Association teaching volume on To the Lighthouse.

A review

Drawing on deep research into the social history of women’s lives and of education, Daugherty shows with superb attention to detail how Virginia Stephen’s early experiences of teaching and of being taught nourished the seeds that flowered as Virginia Woolf, “an essayist compelled to teach.” This is impeccable and important scholarship.

– Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University

 

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