The author of Romantic Moderns “will share her favourite ideas and themes from Woolf’s writing on pleasure, love, sorrow, wonder and London” and guide participants “through a menu of conversation topics she has designed especially for us around Woolf’s life and work.”
The event, which begins at 7 p.m. and costs £35, takes place at Fenton House Garden. Fenton House in Hampstead, central London, is a seventeenth-century merchant’s house, garden and orchard managed by the National Trust.
Harris, a literature professor at the University of Liverpool, is currently writing a cultural history of the English weather. It will, of course, include Woolf.
Bitch magazine has taken on Virginia Woolf. Well, not the real Woolf. And not exactly “taken on.” But the feminist magazine has published an online review of Alexandra Harris’s biography of Woolf.
In the publication’s “BiblioBitch” column, writer Katie Presley calls the Harris biography “bold” for presenting Woolf’s work and life in just 10 short chapters totaling 192 pages. Read the full review: “BiblioBitch: `Virginia Woolf,’ Abridged and Alluring.”
Alexandra Harris, University of Liverpool and author of Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, which won the Guardian First Book Award last year. Harris also has plans in the works for two other books.
According to the conference website, the theme is “inspired by Woolf’s efforts to cross, undermine, and sometimes reassert disciplinary and other boundaries in her body of work. Conference organizers welcome scholars, teachers, students, readers, activists, community groups and artists who respond to Woolf and her circle from diverse points of view. Of particular interest are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to Woolf, whether in the form of research, pedagogy and creative work or community or institutional activities.”
A call for papers will be circulated this summer, and more details about the program and events will be posted soon.
For more information, contact organizer Ann Martin.
Alexandra Harris. Her name is on my lips for good reason.
Romantic Moderns, which just won the Guardian First Book Award, arrived on my doorstep last week. I am itching to read it, but things keep getting in the way. Things like grading fall semester essays. The holidays. Prepping for spring semester. And the overwhelming desire to read something light that won’t strain my incredibly tired brain.
And now I read that Harris has been signed by Thames and Hudson to produce two more books. The first, a short biography of Woolf titled Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf, will be published in spring 2011. Yeah for that.
The second, titled The Weather Glass, will discuss the British preoccupation with weather. That made me gasp right out loud. And I am not exaggerating.
Reading of her plan to write about the British interest in weather made me realize that Verita Sriratana and I are not the only ones interested in reading the skies — as they relate to Woolf and other writers.
For her doctoral thesis, Verita is writing about weather in The Years. In Reading the Skies, I discuss Woolf’s use of weather in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. And Harris plans to begin her study with Beowulf and work her way up — hopefully to Woolf.
