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Archive for the ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Category

Lit Cambridge “Woolf and Politics” season continues Dec. 7

Posted in A Room of One's Own, Literature Cambridge, novels, politics, Three Guineas, Woolf Courses, Woolf online, tagged Literature Cambridge, Virginia Woolf courses, Woolf and politics on Sunday 1 December 2024| Leave a Comment »

Join Literature Cambridge for its fifth Woolf Season of lectures and seminars, all live online with leading Woolf scholars. The next session in the current “Woolf and Politics” season is Saturday, Dec. 7. The season includes one session per month until June 2025.

Here’s the schedule

Saturday, 7 Dec. 2024, Ellie Mitchell on Woolf’s War Diary
Saturday, 11 Jan. 2025, Danell Jones on A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Black Britain
Saturday, 8 Feb. 2025, Natasha Periyan on Education in The Years (1937
Saturday, 8 March 2025, Trudi Tate on Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the Vote
Saturday, 12 April 2025, Varsha Panjwani on The Politics of Orlando (1928)
Saturday 10 May 2025, Angela Harris on The Politics of Jacob’s Room (1922).
Saturday 14 June 2025, Claire Davison on Body Politics and Clothing in Three Guineas (1938)

All sessions are at 6 p.m. British Time and last a maximum of two hours.

Prices and booking

Book online for each session you wish to attend.

Prices for individual lectures are:

£32.00 full price
£27.00 Students and CAMcard holders
£27.00 Members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

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Nov. 14 “Room Project” session explores AROO in Spain

Posted in A Room of One's Own, events, tagged A Room of One's Own, France, online events on Saturday 9 November 2024| Leave a Comment »

The first session of the “A Room of One’s Own in Europe” seminar will take place on Thursday, Nov. 14, at 6 p.m. (CET) on Zoom and will track the reception of Woolf’s 1929 essay in Spain. (CET time is six hours ahead of EST time.)

Professor Laura M. Lojo Rodriguez, professor of English studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and Celia Recarey Rendo, freelance translator & editor, will lead the session.

To receive the zoom invitation please contact them at woolfianroom@gmail.com

About the project

The Room Project, which is in its second season, is a research project that takes up Virginia Woolf’s landmark essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and explores its full potential. Nearly a century after its publication, it asks the question: What echo chambers has A Room of One’s Own opened up?

The full schedule from now through 2025 is below.

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Watch or read lecture on “Virginia Woolf’s Politics of Peace”

Posted in A Room of One's Own, events, Reading Virginia Woolf, tagged A Room of One's Own, Cambridge Literary Festival, Elif Shafak, lecture on Monday 27 May 2024| 1 Comment »

Elif Shafak gave the annual “Room of One’s Own” lecture at this year’s spring Cambridge Literary Festival on the topic of “Virginia Woolf’s Politics of Peace.”

The lecture, the festival’s second, provides an opportunity for England’s foremost women writers to contemplate how far we have come since Virginia Woolf said “lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Shafak is a writer, public speaker, political scientist and activist. is an advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression. Her work includes the novels Three Daughters of Eve (2016) and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019).

You can watch the full version of her lecture in the festival’s CLF Player. It was filmed in April 2024 at the festival.

You can also read her lecture, titled “Virginia Woolf’s Politics of Peace,” in The New Statesman.

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The connections between Barbie and Virginia Woolf

Posted in 21st century Woolf, A Room of One's Own, feminism, films, tagged Barbie, Barbie movie, films, Greta Gerwig, Virginia Woolf on Sunday 30 July 2023| 3 Comments »

The way I see it, there are several connections between Greta Gerwig, her blockbuster film Barbie, and Virginia Woolf. Here we go:

One of Gerwig’s all-time favorite books is Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). It is, she notes, “A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose, and it will never be the same again. The metaphysics she presents in the book are enacted in a way that allowed me to begin to understand that corner of philosophy.”
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf writes that “a woman must have a room of her own” in order to write fiction. In Barbie, all of the Barbies have entire dream houses of their own — and they find such ownership essential to their independent, feminist lifestyles.
An NPR story on the film includes this quote: “But Barbie could fend for herself. Like Nancy Drew, she drove her own roadster and lived in her own dream house — Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own painted in pastels.”
From Second Wind Books comes this Facebook post that lists the similarities between Woolf and Barbie:

From Woolf scholar and novelist Maggie Humm comes this Twitter post:

Obligatory Barbie photo. Loved the artifice (like Asteroid City my last movie outing) pic.twitter.com/yzETjzw79J

— Maggie Humm (@MaggieHumm1) July 30, 2023

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A Bloomsbury bedroom dedicated to Virginia Woolf

Posted in A Room of One's Own, Bloomsbury, tagged A Room of One's Own, Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, Virginia Woolf on Friday 14 July 2023| Leave a Comment »

Want to stay in a Bloomsbury bedroom dedicated to Virginia Woolf that is also on the site of a home formerly occupied by Virginia and Leonard Woolf? Maybe you can.

The site of the building at 37 Mecklenburgh Square in which Virginia Woolf lived.

The Woolfs lived on the top floor at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, during the London blitz from 1939-1940, according to Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woolf Life and London: Bloomsbury and Beyond (1987/2011).

Now on that site is the William Goodenough House, which is part of Goodenough College. It has one student-style bedroom dedicated to Virginia, and each year that room is allocated to a literary student who, upon arrival, finds a copy of A Room of One’s Own on their bedside table.

Naida Babic was a student at Goodenough College in 2021. She recently met up with College Director Alice Walpole and friends to install a framed copy of one of her poems outside the room dedicated to Woolf, next to Woolf’s commemorative plaque.

She contacted Blogging Woolf to tell us about it and directed us to a story posted on the college website, where you can read the poem she wrote.

She explains: “I was living at Goodenough College while completing the last term of my MA Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck University, London. I wrote my poem “In the Hand of Virginia” during my poetry module.”

To commemorate the occasion, Maggie Humm, emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of East London and the author or editor of 14 scholarly books and two novels, as well as Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf’s Society of Great Britain, gave a lecture on “The Photography of the Writer Virginia Woolf and Her Sister, the Artist Vanessa Bell.”