Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for April 19th, 2026

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 a 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.

About the issue’s editor

Wilson is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and author of The Labors of Modernism: Domesticity, Servants, and Authorship in Modernist Fiction (2013).

Read Full Post »