Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex, England
Virginia Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929) continues to matter to women, particularly those who identify as feminists.
In a video presented March 18 by the South Orange Public Library in honor of Women’s History Month, Anne Fernald discusses Woolf’s seminal book. In the hour-long “Virginia Woolf and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Today,” Fernald discusses rooms, freedom, and how feminist writers and scholars think through Woolf today.
She also asks listeners to imagine what their own room dedicated to creative pursuits might look like.
Fernald is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Issues at Fordham University, editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006).
Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House, 2019
Louisa Amelia Albani, whose pamphlet and companion exhibit on Virginia Woolf we featured in July, is currently holding an online art exhibition inspired by Woolf’s essay “Oxford Street Tide.” Take a look.
Online reading group
Starting Monday, Jan. 11, and running through Monday, April 12, 2021, Anne Fernald will lead a Zoom reading group dubbed “All Woolf” at the Center for Fiction, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to fiction writing. The fee is $120 for four sessions, with an additional fee charged for books. Meetings begin at 6 p.m. EST.
Online view of The Bloomsbury Look
View “The Bloomsbury Look,” Saturday, Nov. 28, at 2 p.m. via a free virtual event with author Wendy Hitchmough as she speaks live from the Charleston studio to art historian Frances Spalding. The event will include the opportunity to submit questions live, and signed copies of The Bloomsbury Look are available to purchase through the Charleston online shop. However, the link to the event is not up right now, and unfortunately the book is out of stock.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. It also marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in the U.S.
Fittingly enough, both deal with women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote.
While Woolf’s novel has often been overlooked, it is currently receiving the recognition it deserves. Nowadays it is described as “a remarkable story of two women navigating the possibilities opened up by the struggle for women’s suffrage.”
Reading and discussing Night and Day
In September of last year, Anne Fernald, professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, led a reading group on Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn that featured novelists Julie Orringer and Michael Cunningham discussing Night and Day.
According to Restless Books, the new edition of Woolf’s novel is part of a “series of beautifully packaged, newly introduced and illustrated great books from the past that still speak to our time, our place, and, especially, our restlessness. In addition to their original artwork and fresh introductions, Restless Classics brings the classroom experience to the reader with linked online teaching videos.”
Night and Day in conversation
You can also sit in on last year’s discussion of the novel held at the Brooklyn Center for Fiction by watching the video below.
Virginia Woolf scholar and Fordham University professor Anne Fernald is featured in an article in the fall issue of Matters Magazine. In “Woolf at the Door: Finding a Home and a Room of Her Own in South Orange,” Fernald discusses her scholarly, aesthetic and personal interest in Woolf.
Take a living colored look at 1927 London in this video, which I found on the web page for Anne Fernald’s essay, “Mrs. Dalloway at 88” on The Awl website.
In her essay, Fernald notes that the traffic problem at Piccadilly Circus that Richard Dalloway mutters about under his breath was an ongoing problem of the time, as cars, horse-drawn vehicles, hand-pushed carts and pedestrians “all competed to cross streets at a time when traffic signals still had to be changed manually by a traffic officer.”
This video gives one a sense of the traffic Woolf describes in her 1925 novel.
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