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Archive for January, 2025

Virginia Woolf’s 143rd birthday around the Web

Posted in Woolf birthday, Woolf online, tagged , on Saturday 25 January 2025| Leave a Comment »

It is Virginia Woolf’s 143rd birthday. But I am not the only one thinking of her today. Here are a few photos and posts being shared by others online in honor of her Jan. 25, 1882, birthday.

Annual Birthday Lecture

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain hosts an annual lecture in honor of Woolf’s birthday. This year’s, held today, featured Eleanor McNees speaking on “Double Vision: Woolf’s Reading of Hardy and Meredith Through Leslie Stephen’s Eyes.”

Eleanor McNees is pictured cutting Virginia’s birthday cake, decorated with a photo of a young Virginia with her father, Leslie Stephen, at the Annual Birthday Lecture sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. McNees’s topic was “Double Vision: Woolf’s Reading of Hardy and Meredith Through Leslie Stephen’s Eyes.”

Artist pamphlet on Virginia Woolf in the city

Artist Louisa Albani’s new beautifully illustrated pamphlet, “Virginia Woolf in the City: Oxford Street Tide,” became available today, in honor of Woolf’s birthday.

More Facebook posts noting Woolf’s birthday

French magazine cover features Woolf

This magazine cover photo was posted on Facebook today in honor of Woolf’s birthday. It is not clear when the issue was published, but the cover story features Woolf.

Read more birthday posts

 

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Warm up with Virginia Woolf summer course “Writing Life”

Posted in Literature Cambridge, Woolf Courses, tagged , on Thursday 23 January 2025| Leave a Comment »

It has been a cold January, and the last few days have plunged us into a deep freeze in Ohio, where I live. So there is no better time to think about summer and to begin making plans to attend Literature Cambridge’s Virginia Woolf Summer Course 2025 with its theme of “Virginia Woolf: Writing Life.”

Register for this summer’s Literature Cambridge course on Virginia Woolf: Writing Life, either live online or in person in Cambridge.

The course will run twice — live online first, then in person in Cambridge, England, later. Here are the details from Trudi Tate of Lit Cambridge.

About the course

How does one write a life — a fictional life or a real life? The 2025 summer course will look at the real and imaginary lives in five of Woolf’s most brilliant novels.

Literature Cambridge summer students at a lecture.

We will explore how Woolf writes the lives of her great fictional characters: Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, Mrs. Ramsay, the six characters in The Waves (1931). We will study how she uses, and challenges, the traditions of biography in Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933). We will think about Woolf’s own life as a writer, and what that meant. And we will do a reading of her only play, Freshwater, which takes a comical look at the lives of her Victorian forebears.

The course is based on five books which we will study in close detail, one book per day. Each day, there is a lecture and a supervision (tutorial), plus talks and discussions. In Cambridge there are also visits to colleges, two communal dinners, and more.

Lectures

• Trudi Tate, Life and Death in Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Ellie Mitchell, To the Lighthouse (1927): Writing from Life, Writing to Life
• Karina Jakubowicz, The Life of Orlando (1928)
• Claire Davison, The Ripple of Life in The Waves (1931)
• Alison Hennegan, Writing Flush (1933)

Talks and readings

  • Marielle O’Neill on Leonard Woolf: Reflections on a Political Life
  • Claire Davison on Leslie Stephen: Life Force, Life Writer
  • Group reading of Woolf’s only play, Freshwater, led by Ellie Mitchell
  • Karina Jakubowicz, reading aloud from Woolf’s writing
  • Beth Rigel Daugherty on Woolf’s essays on biography (tbc)
  • Ann Kennedy Smith on the life and memoir of Jane Harrison, Fellow of Newnham College and friend of Virginia Woolf

Visits

In Cambridge, students  will visit Newnham College (est. 1871) and Trinity Hall (est. 1350), with a talk and tour of both colleges.

Live and in-person course dates

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Two Virginia Woolf poems discovered in Texas

Posted in poetry, tagged , , , , on Sunday 19 January 2025| Leave a Comment »

The news is out on both sides of the pond. The Times Literary Supplement and NPR report that two poems Virginia Woolf wrote for her niece and nephew were discovered in a folder at a university library in Texas.

Sophia Oliver, a lecturer of modernism at the University of Liverpool, found the poems at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive library at the University of Texas at Austin, while doing research on Gertrude Stein. Oliver went on to poke about in the Woolf files and spotted the poems at the back of a folder of letters to her niece, Angelica Bell.

The poem for Bell is titled “Angelica” and the piece for her nephew, Quentin Bell, is titled “Hiccoughs.” Oliver estimates that both were written after 1927.

Below are photographs of the TLS article that Jane Goldman posted to Facebook. She is a poet and reader in A vant-garde poetics and creative writing at the University of Glasgow. Thank you, Jane!

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British Virginia Woolf Society holds birthday lecture Jan. 25

Posted in events, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, tagged , , , , on Monday 13 January 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain‘s Annual Birthday Lecture 2025, in honor of Virginia Woolf’s birthday, will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday,  Jan. 25, the date of her birth in 1882.

This year, the lecture will be given by Eleanor McNees, Professor of English at the University of Denver and the topic will be “Channelling/Challenging Leslie Stephen: How Should Virginia Woolf Read the Victorians?”

Lecture location is the Claudia Jones Room in Camden Town Hall, 5 Judd Street, London WC1H 9JE. The location is a short walk from either Kings Cross or Euston stations.

The lecture will be followed by a birthday cake and wine/soft drink reception.  Attendees will receive a printed copy of the lecture.

Cost and payments

Cost: £25 for members of the Society and £30 for non-members.

Payment may be made by: 

  • cheque payable to the Society and sent to Lindsay Martin, 12 Elm Park Road, London N21 2HN
  • bank transfer to: account name: Virginia Woolf Society GB, Sort Code: 09-06-66, account no.: 40411044
  • PayPal to lindsay.martin@cantab.net

In each case use ‘ABL25’ to indicate clearly what the payment is for.  Tickets will not be issued. Ticket holders names will be on a registration list at the lecture.

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Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own now in public domain

Posted in A Room of One's Own, tagged , , on Thursday 9 January 2025| Leave a Comment »

It’s a new year and another work by Virginia Woolf has entered the public domain in the United States. Woolf’s feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own, which was published in 1929, is now added to the list of Woolf works that are out of copyright.

Besides A Room of One’s Own, the list includes:

In the U.S., any work published before 1924 is in the public domain. Works published between 1923 and 1977 generally receive copyright protection for 95 years from the date of their publication. In 2012, writers who died before 1942 entered the pubic domain.

According to U.S. copyright law, these works are available for people to use, share and adapt after 95 years, when their copyrights expired.

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