A new digital resource is now available for readers and scholars interested in Virginia Woolf. WoolfNotes.com, a project that digitizes her reading and research notes, is now live on the King’s College, London website.

This major digital humanities project brings into the public domain Woolf’s last remaining substantial unpublished work.

Brenda Silver and Michele Barrett have been collaborating on the project since 2016. Their aim was to make the notebooks  freely accessible through high-quality digital images, in order to demonstrate the range of Woolf’s scholarship and reading.

What you will find

The core of the project is the 67 reading notebooks that Silver researched and described in detail in her original 1983 book published by Princeton University Press, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks, which was digitized in 2017 and made available online for free.

The website provides high quality images of Virginia Woolf’s lifetime reading and research notes.  It shows how her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, was indebted to extensive and rigorous research on social, historical, economic, political and imperial issues. It also shows the depth of her formal and informal education.

The project includes background information that should help readers put Woolf’s notes in context. The digital images of Woolf’s Reading Notebooks is paired with Silver’s explanations from her 1983 book.

The physical notebooks are housed at three different sites, making it challenging for scholars to access them — until now. Thirty-three of Woolf’s Reading Notebooks  are archived at the New York Public Library Berg Collection, 33 at The Keep in Sussex, and one at the Beinecke Library, Yale.

Providing digital images of all 67 online — and for free — makes them easily accessible to Woolf scholars and readers worldwide.

The WoolfNotes site also includes digital images of Note Cards that Woolf made for various projects.

Background of the project

The WoolfNotes project started in 2016 as a collaboration between two Woolf scholars, Michèle Barrett and Brenda Silver, with the idea of juxtaposing the notebook manuscripts with Silver’s 1983 guide to their contents.

The technical director, Gilly Furse of Osprey Websites, has played an important role in bringing the project to fruition online. The team now includes Clara Jones, who will move the project forward.  Others who have provided assistance include Nadia Atia, Catherine Lee and Victoria Walker.