Blogging Woolf

By Paula Maggio
Founder of Blogging Woolf

The Italian and half-Italian contingent, including Sara Sullam, Patrizia Muscogiuri, Paula Maggio, and Elisa Bolchi, at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

How did you come to Woolf?

How did you come to Woolf? In Virginia Woolf circles, that is a common question. And Woolfians enjoy sharing how they first got interested in reading, studying, researching, and obsessing about one of our favorite 20th-century British authors.

We do that online and in person in various ways. In 2013, one such sharing took place on the VWoolf ListServ. Another was a feature at the Virginia Woolf dinner at the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago in 2015. You can watch that encounter on YouTube as more than two dozen scholars and common readers shared “How I Came to Woolf.” My bit is close to the beginning, at the 3:48 mark. Difficult as it was, I kept it brief. I think.

Meanwhile, here is my good luck tale about how I came to Woolf, what led me to start this blog in 2007, and the lovely long journey on which my study of Woolf has taken me.

How I came to Woolf after the Kent State massacre

I first read Virginia Woolf as an English major at Kent State University more than 50 years ago, during a time of student protests against the Vietnam War. A temporary refugee from that troubled Ohio college town, I picked up my first Woolf novel, The Years (1937) in the summer of 1970. I was in Berkeley, Calif., to escape the aftermath of the tragic May 4, 1970, shootings on my campus, a massacre that killed four students and wounded nine others during an anti-war rally protesting President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia.

Our campus shut down on May 4, and students who lived in the dorms were sent packing the same day. Those of us who lived off-campus had a choice. We could stay on. We could head for our childhood homes. Or we could hit the road.

Although I was uneasy about the presence of armed National Guard around town, resentful of the imposed curfew, and wary of the townspeople who blamed the students for what had happened, I stayed in Kent until my rent was up. I didn’t know where else to go. And neither did many of my traumatized friends.

My first copies of The Years and Mrs. Dalloway

Then I hit the road, squeezing into a car with five other students and a large but placid white dog to drive cross-country, ultimately joining a sizable group of Kent transplants in a tree-lined neighborhood near UC Berkeley.

I was still in a fog from the trauma we had all experienced, so I don’t know what led me to pick up The Years that summer. I just remember reading it while sitting in the sun on the front porch ledge of an old two-story house on Walnut Street that I shared with a dozen or so other young, traumatized refugees from Kent State.

It had taken me weeks to be able to read for pleasure again, despite a lifelong habit of turning to a book for solace. And although I didn’t understand much about Woolf at the time, she was balm for my wounded heart and my troubled soul. Since I was living out of a backpack at the time, the fact that I managed to hang onto my original trade paperback copy of that novel — marginalia and all — is a testament to my early love of Woolf.

Meeting Woolf in the classroom

When I returned to Ohio in time for Christmas, I enrolled in courses for spring quarter. And that’s where I met Woolf in an official capacity. “Women in Literature” was the course, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) was on the syllabus.

Since it was the spring of 1971, there was no Women’s Studies Program at my university. The first such courses of study began at San Diego State and Cornell universities in 1970, and it always takes a while for things to move inland from the coasts. But in later years I realized that course, the first I had ever taken that put women at the center of inquiry, was probably the first women’s studies class offered at Kent State.

Did I understand the groundbreaking nature of Woolf’s work? Did I realize the political undertones that saturate much of it? Did I have a grasp of the times in which she lived and the forces that influenced her? I would be forced to answer “No” to all those questions. But I loved her anyway. And on some level, I must have realized that her ideas about war, peace, nationalism, patriarchy, and feminism had much in common with my own.

I would read more Woolf – To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929) – and re-read Mrs. Dalloway numerous times during the next three decades, after I returned to Ohio to finish my degree, raise two children, marry two husbands, and hold a variety of jobs in the communications field.

How I came back to Woolf

After 20-plus years working as a journalist and communications professional, I decided to head back to graduate school while still working full-time. In the fall of 2001, I enrolled in the Master of Liberal Studies program at Kent State, an interdisciplinary program that blessedly allowed me to design my own course of study. I, of course, focused on Woolf.

As part of that program, I enrolled as a guest student in a class through the University of Alabama at Huntsville that took me to England in Woolf’s footsteps. My love for Woolf deepened as I trod the streets of London and St. Ives and visited Knole, Sissinghurst, Charleston, and Monk’s House. I began to understand the places and things that had shaped her.

As part of our Woolf class, we took a boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse.

Taking one class at a time, I devoured Woolf. I began reading everything she had written and everything written about her. Obviously, I had a lot of territory to cover.

With the brilliant Woolf scholar Tammy Clewell as my adviser, I finished my graduate program and my thesis, Virginia Woolf and War: Taking Up Her Pen for Peace, graduating in the fall of 2006.

I then wondered:

What I would do next to keep Woolf in my life and connect me to the world of readers and scholars who loved her?

How I went on to blog about Woolf

The answer came when I attended my first Virginia Woolf conference at Miami University of Ohio in June of 2007, with the theme of “Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism.” I was awed to find myself sitting in the same rooms with many of the famous scholars I had read and quoted during graduate school.

And when the four-day event ended, I came away with a question lodged in my head:

Is there a website focused on Virginia Woolf that is kept updated and shares news and links about her?

I discovered there was none, so I decided to create one. One month later, I put up my first post on Blogging Woolf. Now, in mid-October 2020, the blog has nearly 1,400 posts and a host of contributing writers from around the globe.

How I met Cecil Woolf

Taking a break with Cecil Woolf in the Tavistock Square garden during a walking tour of Bloomsbury after the 27th Woolf Conference in 2017.

Probably the luckiest thing that happened to me was meeting Cecil Woolf at that 2007 Woolf conference.

Drew Shannon, organizer of the 29th Woolf conference in 2019, and Kristin Czarnecki, current president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, realized I was a newcomer and graciously took me under their wing. In the process, they pointed out Cecil Woolf, nephew of Leonard and Virginia, who had traveled to Ohio from London, England. I was awed, excited, and determined to meet him.

The next day, I wasted no time introducing myself to this famous but amazingly approachable gem of a man. We hit it off immediately and a 12-year friendship began.

Throughout those years, we corresponded by Royal Mail and email, with Cecil offering gentle encouragement, helpful advice, recommended reading, and moral support regarding both my personal and professional lives.

How I published my work about Woolf

Cecil became my publisher, as well as my friend. I pitched my idea about Woolf and weather to him at that first meeting, and by the end of the conference, he agreed to publish Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels (2009).

Through his London publishing house, Cecil Woolf Publishers, he went on to publish four additional monographs I wrote or edited for his Bloomsbury Heritage Series:

• The Best of Blogging Woolf, Five Years On (2013)
  

  The Bloomsbury Pacifists and the Great War (2018), published by Cecil Woolf Publishers

• Virginia Woolf’s Likes and Dislikes, Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes. (2013)
• Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and the Great War, Seeing Peace Through an Open Window: Art, Domesticity & the Great War (2016)
• The Bloomsbury Pacifists and the Great War (2018).

I have also published four papers I presented at Woolf conferences. Each appeared in the volume of Selected Papers that resulted from those events. They include the following:

• “Virginia Woolf in the Cyber City: Connecting in the Virtual Public Square” in Woolf and the City (2010).
• “Woolf Blogging, Blogging Woolf: Using the Web to Create a Common Wealth of Global Scholars-Readers” in Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader (2014)
• “Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?” in Virginia Woolf: Writing the World (2015)
• “Thinking Is Our Fighting: How to Read and Write Like Woolf in the Age of Trump” in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2018)

In addition, I have been fortunate enough to contribute the Introduction to Virginia Woolf in Richmond (2018) by Peter Fullagar.

Hanging out with the Woolfs

When Cecil visited the U.S. to attend a Woolf conference, we would seek each other out. I would hang out with him at his display of monographs. We would grab lunch together. We would save each other seats at Saturday evening banquets.

Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson at their home in London, June 2017.

And whenever I visited England, I spent time with him and his wife Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a noted biographer of World War One poets, at their London home filled with books and art. On each trip, they would host me – and other Woolfians – for dinner and parties, as we sat charmed by their company and the original Bloomsbury art that surrounded us.

But one of my favorite days was a sunny one in June 2016, when he conducted me on a walking tour of Bloomsbury, regaling me with first-person stories of sitting in Tavistock Square with Virginia and Leonard as his aunt and uncle sipped wine.

We spent seven hours exploring Bloomsbury together that day, with one stop for lunch and another for tea. Throughout our six-mile walk on that fine June afternoon, the conversation with this witty, insightful, and well-read man never flagged.

Emma Woolf outside Virginia and Leonard’s home in Richmond in June 2016.

I was also lucky enough to enjoy the company of Emma Woolf, the daughter of Cecil and Jean and another well-known author. We had coffee together in Richmond on a rainy day that same summer, then set out to visit the places in which Virginia and Leonard had lived from 1915-1924. She was as lovely a tour guide as her charming father.

I treasure the times I spent with Cecil, Jean, and Emma. That is even more true since Cecil passed away last June at the age of 92. It was my privilege to know him – and it is my continuing privilege to know Jean, Emma, and the many Woolf scholars around the globe that I have met throughout the past 13 years of following Woolf.

Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf: Join the circle

If you have ever thought about attending a Woolf conference but were afraid of the reception you would receive, cast your fears aside. I did. And I was embraced. You will be, too, whether you are a common reader or a scholar.

Stefano Rozzoni and Maria Oliveira at the 29th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, June 6-9, 2019. It was Stefano’s first.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the stories of the warm welcome international scholars from Italy, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Brazil received when they braved their first Woolf conference:

• A view of this year’s Woolf conference from a “new guy” Italian scholar
• Get a Czech perspective on the 29th annual Woolf conference
• The Canadian Gone Abroad: An International Review of the 29th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference
• A Brazilian scholar thinks against the current at the 29th Woolf conference

Meanwhile, you can join the circle without leaving your armchair. Consider becoming a member of these Woolf societies:

• International Virginia Woolf Society
• Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
• Italian Virginia Woolf Society
• Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes
• The Virginia Woolf Society of Japan

You can also sign up for the free VWoolf Listserv, which is how I learned about that Woolf course that took me to England back in 2004.

And don’t forget to go the right sidebar and sign up to receive notifications whenever new posts are added to Blogging Woolf. You can also follow Blogging Woolf on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @woolfwriter.

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