I had never thought about Virginia Woolf and failure until last week when I received the Spring-Fall 2025 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. To me, Virginia Woolf had always been synonymous with success.
But this new issue invites readers “to think about, analyze, expose, and otherwise wallow in failure” — and asserts that “[f]ailure circulates throughout Woolf’s work and carries with it many meanings.”
In her introduction to the issue, Number 103, editor Mary Wilson argues that “Woolf’s engagement with failure in her public and private writing offers some models for decoupling that failure/success binary.”
The 60-page issue includes 14 thought provoking articles and two poems on the topic.
Here are just a few:
“Turning on Woolf: When Woolf Failed Me, or I Her” by Pamela L. Caughie
“Woolf’s Variations on Failure” by Savina Stevanato
“The Aesthetics and Polemics of Failure: Virginia Woolf as Novelist and Feminist” by Harish Trivedi
“Failure Allure,” a poem by Cecilia Servatius
This issue is available online, along with Miscellany back issues. Find out more about joining the International Virginia Woolf Society, publisher of the Miscellany.
How to contribute
If you want to contribute an article or a poem or an artwork, are looking for an article published in the Miscellany, need to access a print or online copy of an issue, want to acquire issues of the publication to use in a classroom, or have any questions about the it, please contact Vara Neverow at neverowv@southernct.edu.
I am a bit late to the party, but the inaugural issue of the Virginia Woolf Fanzin is here. An online publication of the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey, it debuted in March with articles from 10 contributing authors.
The 46-page publication includes:
research articles and essays,
traces of encounters with Virginia Woolf and the impressions they left,
a special poetry section,
a translation,
and event reports and announcements.
About the Virginia Woolf Fanzin
According to the publication’s introduction, it is “a space born out of admiration, curiosity, and a shared desire to keep Woolf’s voice resonating across time and borders.”
Turkish is its first language, so it is natural that the editor and its board connect Woolf to Turkey in a multitude of ways. As they put it:
Here, Woolf meets Istanbul’s streets, Anatolia’s silences, and the layered histories of Turkish women writers and thinkers. Each contribution—be it essay, artwork, translation—echoes Woolf’s spirit while refracting it through our own cultural lens.
Online in two languages
While the majority of articles are written in Turkish, several are written in English. They include:
“Angela Inside the Convent and Angela Inside the College. Life Among Women in Mansfield’s ‘Taking the Veil’ and Woolf’s ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’” by Eleonora Tarabella,
“Towards A Room of One’s Own Centenary by Valérie Favre and Anne-Laure Rigeade,
“Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys’s Embodied Writing” is the topic for the next Woolf seminar presented by the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey, featuring Eret Talviste on April 17 at 7 p.m. (Turkey time).
About the talk
Eret’s talk will focus on her new monograph Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment, and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), in which she explores how Woolf and Rhys understood writing as an embodied practice, starting with diaries, letters, and autobiographical texts, and moving into novels and short stories.
About Eret
Eret is a researcher in English Literature at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary fiction, transnationalism, feminism, and posthumanism. Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys is her first monograph.
How to attend
This is a Zoom event. Register on the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey website. Then click on the Zoom link on the date and time posted above. Please check your time zone.
Ben Majchrowicz at Charleston’s new exhibit, “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press,” which runs through Sept. 9.
When I messaged Ben Majchrowicz last week, asking him for details about “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press“ the new exhibit at Charleston in Firle, he was in the middle of the installation process. But true to form, he sent me everything he promised before the exhibition opened April 1.
Co-curated by Ben and Stephen Barkway, along with Charleston’s exhibition team, the exhibition is a major one. Running through Sept. 9 and created in partnership with the Gordon Square Society, Antwerp, it brings together for the first time the most complete collection to date of hand-printed books produced by the Hogarth Press.
While many know of Virginia’s role as a writer, and her husband Leonard ’s roles as a writer, editor, and Labour Party committee member, this new exhibit shows their pivotal roles as printers, publishers, and makers.
Multiple copies of Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
The exhibition includes works loaned from several major private collections across Europe, including Ben’s.
It features more than 100 rare books alongside archival material, letters, and artworks. It also positions the Hogarth Press as a literary enterprise as well as a radical, handmade practice at the heart of British modernism, according to a Charleston media release.
According to Ben, one of the difficulties of putting the exhibit together was making choices. The co-curators had to decide which of multiple copies of Virginia’s Kew Gardens, R.C. Trevelyan’s Poems and Fables, and Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak they should include.
Founded as an independent printing venture in 1917 in the Woolfs’ own home, Hogarth House in Richmond, the press originally sat on the Woolf’s dining room table.
Later, when a larger Minerva platen printing press was purchased in 1921, it moved to the basement. And when the Woolf’s moved to 52 Tavistock Square, London, in 1924, the press made its home in the basement again.
The Minerva platen printing press is now housed at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, Kent. And the dining table on which it sat is in the London kitchen of the late Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and has seen many dinner guests over the years.
The Hogarth Press and its writers
The Woolfs hand-set and printed many of their early works including their first book publication, Two Stories (1917) by the couple, Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918), and T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919).
Besides publishing the work of members of the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth Press also published a diverse list of international writers, including 29 translations from Russian, German, and Italian between the two world wars.
According to the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, the press deliberately pushed to reshape the publishing landscape of interwar Britain, producing seminal texts. These included works by Nancy Cunard, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, the colonial novels of William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, and the English translations of Sigmund Freud.
As part of its literary history, the Hogarth Press championed a wide selection of otherwise popular, middlebrow writers, educational and political tracts, children’s literature, and medical and self-help manuals. In the 1930s it published many titles, including these: Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), William Plomer’s The Case is Altered (1932) and Virginia Woolf’s own Flush (1933).
The Hogarth Press also served as a diversion for Virginia. As Leonard put it in Beginning Again, the third volume of his autobiography:
It struck me that it would be a good thing if Virginia had a manual occupation of this kind which, in say the afternoons, would take her mind completely off her work . . . we definitely decided that we would learn the art of printing. (Beginning Again, 233)
About “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press”
Five different covers of Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak
Bringing together hand-printed books, illustrated editions and works conceived through close collaboration between writers and artists, the exhibition reframes publishing as a creative practice shaped by intimacy, courage and control over one’s own voice.
The exhibition includes first editions of key modernist texts published by the Hogarth Press, including T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land and Hope Miralees’Paris. These classics, appear alongside lesser-known works and books of original visual prints that demonstrate the press’s commitment to new voices, ideas and creativity.
Displayed together, these books reveal the Hogarth Press as a place where literary innovation, political thought and artistic experimentation converged.
Six cover versions of “Poems and Fables” by R.C. Trevelyan
As handmade objects, the books bear the visible traces of their making: one-of-a-kind covers, typographical errors and inky fingerprints. These material details are central to the exhibition, emphasizing publishing as a form of iterative creative practice rather than industrial production.
The exhibition also highlights the contributions of Bloomsbury artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, whose designs for book covers and illustrations helped craft the Hogarth Press’ distinctive visual identity. These collaborations underscore the close relationship between literature, art and design within the Bloomsbury group, and Charleston’s role as a centre for this interdisciplinary creative community.
Publications of the Hogarth Press blurred boundaries between art, craft and literature, treating the book itself as an art object.
About the co-curators
Ben Majchrowicz is co-founder of the Gordon Square Society, Belgium. Last November and December, he held a world premiere exhibition, sponsored by the Gordon Square Society, called “Letter by Letter (From the Woolfs’ Hands): Handprinted Books by Virginia & Leonard Woolf.” For the first time in Belgium, the public exhibition brought together all 34 books hand-set, printed, bound and published in limited editions by Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves under their Hogarth Press imprint. These rarities came from Ben’s collection, as well as that of Pierre and Marie-Madeleine Coumans.
Stephen Barkway is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. Along with Stuart N. Clarke, he collected and edited a massive volume of The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf, which was published last year. He co-edits and regularly contributes to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin.
Co-curators Ben Majchrowiczand and Stephen Barkaway at the Charleston exhibit “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press
Publicity graphic distributed before the exhibition opened April 1. It runs through Sept. 9.
