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Archive for the ‘essays’ Category

Virginia Woolf wrote hundreds of essays during her lifetime. The total varies from “nearly 600” (Fernald 160) to “640,” (Rigel Daughtery 9) so it can be difficult to locate just the right essay when needed. For that reason,  sometimes a slim collection of Virginia Woolf essays that focus on a specific topic is just the thing.

Here are two.

On freedom

The first is part of a 27-volume Vintage Mini collection, a Vintage Classic published by Penguin/Random House. Titled Liberty, it includes selections from A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), and the essays “Street Haunting” and “How Should One Read a Book.”

Here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes – jacket quote from Liberty (2018)

On the visual arts

The second is the twentieth volume in the ekphrasis series published by David Zwirner Books in 2021 and is a collection of Woolf’s writings on the visual arts.

Titled Oh, to Be a Painter!, the volume begins with an introduction by Claudia Tobin and includes Woolf’s longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).

References:

Fernald, Anne E. “A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century.” Feminist Studies 31:1 (2005): 158-182.

Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “The Transatlantic Virginia Woolf: Essaying an American Audience.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 76 (2009): 9-11.

 

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The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf’s book of essays published in 1925 with a jacket design by her sister Vanessa Bell, was provisionally titled Reading.

In it, she planned to revise some of her previously published essays and add some new ones, according to Mark Hussey in Virginia Woolf A to Z. Among its most important essays are “On Not Knowing Greek,” “Modern Fiction,” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

One hundred years ago today, in her Sept. 5, 1923, diary entry, Woolf fills the half hour before dinner with her thoughts about beginning to write her book of collected essays:

A cold douche should be taken (& generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say “Oh all right. I write to please myself,” & so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite & outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; & did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, its odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this 2 or 3 years thought of, at once becomes clear; & gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves–Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age, &tc something frivolous, or irrelevant, gents the book –Dinner! – Diary 2, 265.

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I can’t take credit for these non-fiction Woolf sightings. That goes to Benjamin Hagen, president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, who posted them on Facebook.

From Ann Patchett

First comes Ann Patchett’s “Eudora Welty: An Introduction,” in which Patchett describes her encounters with Welty in writing and in person.

It begins with Woolf and with Welty’s foreword to To the Lighthouse (1927) and leads into a reflection on first encounters and later returns.

The piece is included in These Precious Days, a 2021 collection of Patchett’s essays.

From Brian Dillon

Second is critic and essayist Brian Dillon’s “Vagueness” in Affinities, just out in paperback (2023), which includes a chapter on the proto-modernist photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, Woolf’s Victorian great-aunt.

Hagen wrote that he was “Surprised to find this lengthy essay on Julia Margaret Cameron, which begins with her stunning photograph of Julia Jackson (later Stephen), Virginia Woolf’s mother. Woolf gets some attention here too.”

Thanks for being on the lookout, Ben.

Ben Hagen’s Aug. 6, 2023, Woolf sightings Facebook post, complete with photos of pertinent pages from the two books he mentions.

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Living in the U.S., I am not always able to listen to BBC broadcasts. But I could — and did — give a listen to a new one on the Radio 4 show “In Our Time.” It discusses Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own (1929).

In the 42-minute program, Melvyn Bragg and guests Hermione Lee and Michele Barrett discuss Woolf’s classic and oft-quoted essay about women and literature that contains the famous line: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

The discussion also involves:

  • how Woolf’s views in A Room of One’s Own are reflected in her 1928 novel Orlando,
  • the precursors to Room, Woolf’s 1928 lectures at Newnham and Girton colleges, the latter of which she attended with Vita Sackville-West,
  • Woolf’s ideas about the lecture as a form,
  • women’s roles as figures in literature rather than writers of literature,
  • Woolf’s invention of Shakespeare’s sister,
  • Room’s humor,
  • Room’s legacy,
  • and more.

Hermione Lee is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and Michele Barrett is emeritus professor of modern literary and cultural theory at Queen Mary, University of London.

Listen now.

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Virginia Woolf didn’t get old—not what we call old—but she brooded about aging,VW Diary Vol. 5 increasingly so in middle age.

Shortly before her 50th birthday, she wrote in her diary:

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already and sometimes that I am still the youngest person on the omnibus” – Diary 4, 1/13/32)

Her ambivalence was predicated on her writing. When it was going well, she was contented and high—“divinely happy & pressed with ideas” (D4, 1/16/34). If it wasn’t, she was “so old, so ugly, & can’t write” (D5, 3/11/39).

The clock ticks for us all

Woolf’s experience isn’t unique. After 40 or 50, we hear the clock ticking, feel age creeping up on us. We fend it off, stay active and engaged, but we can’t deny the inevitable. We get old, and as we do, our creativity and productivity become increasingly challenged. We face and fear disability, dementia, decline, death. We’re subjected to increasing ageism from without and self-doubt from within. How can we sustain a positive mindset?

In the recently published Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Coffeetown Press, 2022), Priscilla Long proposes looking at creativity in old age “as a potentially dynamic and productive time full of connections to others and deeply satisfying work.”

Our advantage is experience, the skills we’ve learned and exercised over time, not just technical and craft skills but also the attitudes and ways of working that Long calls meta-skills.

In her own case, she says, “I have learned how to learn. I have learned how to focus, how to break a problem down into its component parts, how to encourage myself, how to take my time when venturing into new territory.”

Continuing to create

Dancing With the Muse reinforces extensive research and scientific findings with examples of women and men, most in the arts, who continued to be creative and productive well into old age. Long cites more than 100 artists and musicians, scientists and athletes, and writers, including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Iris Murdoch, and Doris Grumbach (a Woolf enthusiast who died last year at 104). And Leonard Woolf!

Among those whose creative output in their later years included “looking back, remembering, and articulating one’s life and its meanings,” Leonard Woolf wrote his five-volume autobiography in his last decade. Had she lived to old age, I believe Virginia Woolf would have expanded her self-writing, extending the autobiographical work in Moments of Being.

This is Priscilla Long’s sixth book, including two volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and a writing manual. At 79, she has several works in progress, her goal to publish ten more books while making sure to clock her 10,000 steps every day. Virginia Woolf didn’t have a Fitbit, but her miles over the Downs and around London were conducive to her physical and mental health and stimulated her creativity.

Poised to shoot forth arrows

The painter Robert Motherwell said at age 71 that “to retire from painting would be to retire from life.” I’m certain that “old Virginia,” as she liked to refer to her future self in her early diaries, would have concurred and would have continued to write. At 50, she declared herself “poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun” (D4, 10/2/32).

When an acquaintance worried that his creative well would run dry, she observed that her concern was quite the opposite; she wondered if she would have enough time to write everything that was in her head.

Days before her death at 59, she reminded herself to “Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential” (D5, 3/8/41).

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