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Screen Shot 2013-07-29 at 1.09.27 AMYou can join the waiting list for Nights Out: Drinks with Virginia Woolf, an evening in a secret Hampstead apple orchard that includes a conversation with Woolf biographer Alexandra Harris. But the July 30 event is sold out.

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.

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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.”

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While the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Contradictory Woolf will kick off less than a week, plans for the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf are ramping up.

Contradictory Woolf will take place June 9-12 in Glasgow, Scotland, and Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf will be held June 7-10 at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.

The 22nd conference website is now live, and the plans already formulated sound pretty exciting.

Plenary speakers include:

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. 

Meanwhile, here’s another fun weather read — especially at this time of year in places where snow is likely. It’s called The Wrong Kind of Snow: The Complete Daily Companion to the British Weather.

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Romantic Moderns in the money

An academically focused text has won this year’s Guardian First Book award and £10,000.

Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper beat four other works. It covers English writers of the 1930s and ’40s.

You can read the first chapter on the Guardian website. You can also read the review roundup.

The book is now available in the U.S.

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