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This week’s Woolf sightings use a Virginia Woolf quote to justify recommending a good dinner as an excellent Valentine’s Day tribute (# 7, 25), cite Woolf as the inspiration for the song “Piece by Piece” by Charleston (#41), and include multiple mentions of the new letter for sale that discusses the Dreadnought Hoax (#35-38). Read on for these and more.

  1. Emeli Sandé: Our Version of Events – review, The Guardian
    Even fewer declare Virginia Woolf as an influence and fewer still have a giant tattoo of Frida Kahlo down one arm. There is such a great deal to commend singer Emeli Sandé. If her peroxide quiff stands visually for Sandé’s unconventionality, …
  2. ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 38 Special, Three Dog Night, Tulsa Golf Expo, Tulsa World
    …
    with performances of “William and Judith,” a what-if story by playwright Cody Daigle that re-imagines the creation of “The Tempest” using a hypothetical theory proposed by Virginia Woolf that Shakespeare had an equally creative sister named Judith.
  3. Playhouse Tulsa takes Shakespeare to new levels with repertory, Tulsa World
    Cody Daigle’s “William and Judith,” after all, is a highly imaginative take on the creation of Shakespeare’s final play – one that involves the playwright’s mythical sister, Judith, a character the writer Virginia Woolf dreamed up to make a few points …
  4. New play ‘William and Judith’ inspired by Shakespeare story, Tulsa World
    What if, as Virginia Woolf stated in her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” William Shakespeare had a sister named Judith? And what if Judith was her brother’s equal in temperament, intelligence and creativity? And what if Judith shows up on her brother’s …
  5. Black and white in colour, Hindustan Times
    “It was a fine time to be a Mumbai garbage trader,” Abdul would think, just as his middle-aged neighbour Asha, whose daughter went to college and “by-hearted” Virginia Woolf and William Congreve at home, thought that the moment was opportune to employ …
  6. Which writer taught me most about love? The Guardian In Freud’s rhetorical ploys, he’s always pitting himself against creative writers, which is why Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, for instance, took the bait and bristled accordingly. I first read Freud’s Contributions to the Psychology of Love and bits of …
  7. Dolce Sapori, Calgary Herald
    The menus at Dolce Sapori quote Virginia Woolf: ” Once cannot think well, love well or sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Amen to that. Dolce is open for dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday.
  8. A hard bargain University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily
    As Virginia Woolf was fond of saying, the experience of higher education affords a rare opportunity to stand back from our civilization and ask tough questions about it. If you find it wanting, you have the freedom to imagine it differently and boldly …
  9. Exhibition: Shelf Lives, Varsity Online
    At the back of the room is an original manuscript written by Virginia Woolf. She has a small, characteristic scrawl, and writing that slants up at the ends of her lines. It’s a treasure chest for literature lovers here. John Clare and John Donne stare …
  10. Gallery’™s family affair, Sheffield Telegraph
    Examples here are Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers, with its jumble of limbs, and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf. “It’s very sensitive of the fact that she didn’t like being pictured and so it’s not highly detailed,” observes Briggs.
  11. The L Mag Questionnaire for Writer Types: Kate Zambreno, The L Magazine (blog)
    Virginia Woolf’s
    Mrs. Dalloway, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher and Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, …
  12. Tales of love and cous cous at Pea Souk, This is Cornwall
    With tales read by actors acclaimed at the du Maurier, Brighton and Chester Literary festivals from authors including Virginia Woolf, Edna St Vincent Millay and Kate Chopin, you’ll be treated to some frightening, foolish and funny takes on love.
  13. Song and ecstasy, The News International
    Virginia Woolf
    in a haunting essay assures us that when the Most High is seated on His throne, to one side of Him will be Homer and to the other side Shakespeare. Our own poets cannot be too far away. Saigal and the great singers, and who knows the …
  14. The Heresy of Love, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, The Independent
    She became a nun because, in those days, liberal convents provided the equivalent of Virginia Woolf’s “a Room of One’s Own” to women who wanted to give priority to their intellectual existence over marriage. And in a hideous, desolating twist, …
  15. Nasty literary prize awarded, GlobalPost (blog)
    It is novelist Adam Mars-Jones for his sledgehammering of Michael Cunningham’s “By Nightfall” in the Observer newspaper Cunningham is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Hours” a modern take on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
  16. Hollinghurst’s biographical ambitions, Spectator.co.uk (blog)
    These questions were considered last night, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, by two literary grandees from opposing sides of the issue: Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Alan Hollinghurst, whose recent novel, …
  17. John Patrick Organic Crafts a Beautiful Vision for Fall 2012 at New York …, Ecouterre
    …
    however, to the work of 19th century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, in particular “A Beautiful Vision, Julia Duckworth,” a carbon print of Cameron’s niece and goddaughter and the future mother of author Virginia Woolf.
  18. Culture 2 Go, Orlando Weekly
    The group left behind significant works of literature – Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes and historian Lytton Strachey all spent writing holidays at the farm – whereas their painters are less well known, comprising a …
  19. Her Version Of Events: Emeli Sandé Interviewed, The Quietus
    I was really made up to hear that one of your favourite books is by Virginia Woolf. What a fearsome writer, and perhaps someone who really isn’t known for her approachability or her simple clarity of prose. So what do you take from Virginia Woolf?
  20. When novelists reach the end of their stories, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf
    ? Yup. Thomas Hardy? Sure enough. EM Forster? Saw the problem coming and headed it off at the pass. Or think of ours. Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift – that excellent generation of novelists whose …
  21. Russell pioneers queer theory in literature at Vassar, The Miscellany News
    Currently, he is teaching a seminar on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a six-week course on Virginia Woolf and a 200-level English course entitled Gay Male Fiction in America after 1945. Russell came to Vassar in 1983, and since then the courses he has taught …
  22. Great expectations for Simon Callow’s latest project. . ., Cambridge News
    Tolstoy praised Dickens for tackling issues such as social reform, but Henry James and Virginia Woolf weren’t a fan, saying his work was too sentimental and implausable. :: Details from his domestic routine and method of working suggest Dickens had …
  23. Valentines for word lovers, AZ Central.com (blog)
    A classic Steel sentiment: “He was gone, and she was broken hearted, that was all that mattered.” PS I got in trouble for reading Danielle Steel. After that, my mother brought me Little Women. She now buys me books by Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro.
  24. The lamb and the lion, Australia Business Review Weekly (subscription)
    Virginia Woolf captures the agony of that failure indelibly in her short story, The New Dress, from which i have selected some of its many evocative images … “Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off …
  25. Say ‘I love you’ with a 3-course meal, Aiken
    Standard
    English author Virginia Woolf (“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”) would probably agree. Mixing it up in the kitchen is a delicious way for a couple to celebrate Valentine’s Day, perhaps with a bottle of bubbly …
  26. ‘A Sympathiser with the Poor’: Charles Dickens at 200, The American
    As Virginia Woolf explained, “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,” for he created “characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.
  27. Review of The Hours author’s latest book wins inaugural hatchet job award ,The Guardian (blog)
    After aligning his Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours to Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, Cunningham makes a mistake in linking By Nightfall to Joyce, continues Mars-Jones: “If he had chosen softer models he would cut a better figure, the contrast being …
  28. Don’t Ask! Just Buy It! – February 8, 2012: One Sword, Slightly Used, ComicsAlliance
    My favorite of the stories in here is “The Brain That Wouldn’t Virginia Woolf,” which is (in both form and content) an attempt to graft together things that don’t actually fit together at all. Jason Lutes has been averaging an issue a year of his …
  29. Alan Moore On Harvey Pekar, Grant Morrison And ‘Stealing Characters’ [Video], ComicsAlliance
    Then Virginia Woolf comes along a few hundred years later and decides to create the character as her dual gender character Orlando… It might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these people, these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of …
  30. Anna Clyne’s “Night Ferry” set to sail after a long creative voyage, Chicago Classical Review Clyne also researched other artists and writers who had similar emotional issues such as the poets and writers Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf and Randall Jarrell. Cast in a single 20-minute movement, Night Ferry is Clyne’s largest effort to date.
  31. The Calling of Disorder, Harvard Crimson
    The invocation of Virginia Woolf’s titular assertion, that women needed to be able to support themselves and have their own, personal space if they were to write, immediately gave Bassett an idea. She would provide the necessary funds to support …
  32. Picture preview: The Family in British Art, The Independent
    Among the work on display is William Hogarth’s A House of Cards (1730), Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and their daughter Ann, (c1786) by Henry Walton, Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers (1934) and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf (1912).
  33. Happy birthday Mr Dickens! Universitas Helsingiensis
    Virginia Woolf
    thought she would have crossed the road to avoid his showman vulgarity. And yet despite professional literary disdain for his popular fame, we should remember his contemporary John Ruskin’s balanced comment: ‘But let us not lose the use …
  34. Literature of the World in 2012 Cuban Book Fair, Prensa Latina
    …
    will put in the reader’s hands universal classics such as Gargantúa and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais; The Nun, by Denis Diderot; The Red and the Black by Stendhal; Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad; and The Lady in the Mirror, by Virginia Woolf.
  35. Monday reads: Virginia Woolf punk’d the Royal Navy and more, Los Angeles Times
    In 1910, Virginia Woolf and her friends pretended to be “Abyssinian princes” and their British guides, convincing the Royal Navy to give them access to the battleship Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet. They were given a tour and feted with a band …
  36. The Week in Culture – The Yorker, The Yorker
    This week Virginia Woolf wears a beard, fiction receives a Hammer-ing, and we reveal that romance is dead for all you culture vultures. 102 years ago to the day, Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group walked the decks of the Royal …
  37. How a bearded Virginia Woolf and her band of ‘jolly savages’ hoaxed the navy, The Guardian
    The letter was written by Horace de Vere Cole, who described how he and five friends, including the novelist Virginia Woolf and painter Duncan Grant, duped an admiral and the crew of the battleship HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet.
  38. A Brick-and-Mortar Amazon Store?; Jonathan Franzen Loves Edith Wharton, The Atlantic Wire [The New Yorker] There’s a letter being offered at auction by a London rare books dealer that details Virginia Woolf’s role in a “shriekingly funny” prank that resulted in Woolf and painter Duncan Grant being given access to the HMS Dreadnought in 1910 …
  39. Konstantin Soukhovetski at Phillips Collection, Washington Post
    The sense of the melodramatic was palpable, as Soukhovetski introduced the piano version of Philip Glass’s score for “The Hours” by quoting from the suicide note left by Virginia Woolf in the film. He gave this music, characterized by its sometimes …
  40. Annie Leibovitz’s personal ‘Pilgrimage’ feels commercial, Washington Post
    The results are eclectic but mostly reflect the heroic pantheon of the bookish liberal establishment: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the 64 photographs culled for the Smithsonian …
  41. Charleston – Piece by Piece, Electric Banana
    The trio cite Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Woolf as influences, and claim the track is about ‘regressing to a primal state’. Don’t be discouraged by the pretentiousness, this is a good tune.
  42. Pause Before You Send Email (Or Anything), Lifehacker Australia
    BBC Point Of View columnist Lisa Jardine uses the example of an angry letter Virginia Woolf planned to send to a correspondent. After thinking better of it, she drafted a more conciliatory reply. Jardine argues that this demonstrates a flexibility …
  43. Cute in a Klimt, The Nation
    The concept is “East Meet West”, and the designs combine simplicity and elegance, drawing inspiration from Chinese women of the 1960s and the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Classical Western styling marries Eastern sexiness in the outfits …
  44. The master storyteller: William Boyd interview, Telegraph.co.uk
    …
    a failed novelist whose passage through the 20th century leads him from pre-war literary London to the Spanish Civil War to an Angry Brigade-style group of anarchists in the 1970s, taking in encounters with such characters as Virginia Woolf, …
  45. Being bipolar in Pakistan, DAWN.com
    Some of the most creative geniuses had bipolar disorder such as Virginia Woolf. Stephen Fry openly talks about it and has even made a documentary about what it is like to be bipolar. Studies show connections between bipolar disorder and creativity and …
  46. The Little Theatre that grew, Winnipeg Free Press
    It was a time when the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group were being published, as were those of Gertrude Stein’s expatriate “crowd” in 1930s Paris, and everyone was talking about them (Hendry once signed off a letter to …

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The title resounded – “Song of Lunch” – I couldn’t remember what or where I’d heard about it, so I Googled and found that it’s a poem by Christopher Reid that was adapted by the BBC and shown on British television last October.

“Virginia Woolf lurking off to the library”

Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are former lovers who meet for lunch after 15 years. It’s mostly his voiceover – the poetic narrative – and just a little conversation. I could drown in Alan Rickman’s voice as happily as in a vat of dark chocolate, how about you?

I watched two online clips – more than a teaser but far short of the full portion.  You will find the first one here. I was delighted to find that Woolf pops up near the beginning. As the man leaves the publishing house, where he works, he strolls through “Bloomsbury and its blue plaques,” “leafy literary land” (I adore the alluring alliteration). With a little imagination, he says, you can see “Virginia Woolf lurking off to the library with a trug full of books” and “T.S. Eliot bound for his first martini of the day.”

It appears that the ending is available online too, but a sizable middle chunk seems to have been held back. I’m hooked and dangling, but I don’t want to jump ahead and miss anything, so I’ll wait for the PBS airing here, Nov. 13 on Masterpiece.

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Three things pop out at me from this week’s list of Woolf sightings. The first is the mention of Virginia in a story about young female artists who represent “unmentionable” female body parts in their work. See #22.

The second is the mention of Woolf’s use of the word “scrolloping,” an item that drew the recent attention of the VWoolf Listserv. See #7.

The third is a new song about Virginia Woolf. It is one of 13 cuts on a new album due out Nov. 7 by Florence + The Machine. The song’s title, “What the Water Gave Me,” comes from a 1938 oil painting by Frida Kahlo. See #17-21 and listen to the song below.

  1. Thought-Provoking Highbrow Magazine Launches, MarketWatch (press release)
    Virginia Woolf once described a highbrow as “…the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.” “It is that pursuit of an idea that inspires us at the magazine to critique and analyze …
  2. Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, Movie City News
    Virginia Woolf defined the middlebrow reader as “betwixt and between,” devoted not to art for its own sake but to “money, fame, power, or prestige.” In other words, the middlebrow is not quite as smart as the true highbrow and not as spirited as the …
  3. Much ado about nothing, Boston Globe
    That would not necessarily be a difficulty: Think of Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Mr. Richard Savage,” or the many marginal yet unforgettable subjects in Virginia Woolf’s “Common Reader.” Yet unlike the treatment of his parents in “Basil Street,” …
  4. A fascination with real lives, Boston Globe
    I admire Virginia Woolf, but I’m not sold on her novels. I’d rather read her diaries, journals, and letters. Henry James – finally a man – I love him. Last year I read “What Maisie Knew.” I was relieved that I understood it. James is hard. …
  5. MEMOIR: A fun and gossipy look at British bluebloods, Minneapolis Star Tribune
    He shows the ties between Beckett’s illegitimate daughter by Keppel, novelist Violet Trefusis, and Violet’s lesbian lover, poet Vita Sackville-West, then links them both to Virginia Woolf. He manages, too, to find a long association between Vita’s …
  6. Book review: House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly …, Taipei Times
    The author clearly wants to offer a life of Heinrich, but also to bring in other authors, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who he never met. Diverse topics are also given capsule treatment — how writing-quills were once made, and the theory …
  7. OMG, the charabanc has been plutoed, Telegraph.co.uk
    But I am likely to need help with Samuel Beckett’s use of “athambia”, or Virginia Woolf’s of “scrolloping”. In any case, predictions about what will last are risky. In 2007 Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary chose “pod-slurping” as its word of the year. …
  8. The New Atheism, The Guardian
    Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Camus – and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee – have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief; …
  9. The dentist & Dr. Seuss, Boston Globe
    “But it’s like minor works by Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. They may be minor, but they’re the minor works of a genius,” Nel said. In order to bring these stories to a fresh audience, Cohen first needed to prove his own credibility. …
  10. Bridge Views: Grounded in 1980, Patch.com
    “If you want to learn point-of-view, read Henry James; if you want to learn irony, read Jane Austen; if you want to learn what Hell smells like, read John Milton; if you want to understand the importance of using punctuation, read Virginia Woolf—she …
  11. iriam Grant, Vice Provost of Research and Dean of the College of Graduate Studies, Castanet.net
    He has distinguished himself as a scholar of the work of Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and Wyndam Lewis. Of particular note is his forthcoming book, Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur: The Annotated Edition is the first annotated edition of Pound’s highly …
  12. Interview: Lynne McTaggart, Author of The Bond, Blogcritics.org (blog)
    Twentieth century writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, but also so-called ‘new journalists’ – Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote – who wrote non-fiction using fictional techniques. My heroes in journalism were …
  13. Why women are enjoying being home alone, The Age
    VIRGINIA WOOLF thought every woman writer needed a room of her own. But many women are now opting for an entire home of one’s own. Women are twice as likely as men to live alone for more than a decade, and report greater levels of …
  14. A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers” by Michael Holroyd, Washington Post
    The child, Violet, achieved notoriety first, during and after World War I, as the same-sex lover of the writer Vita Sackville-West — their scandalous affaire was mirrored in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” (1928) — and then, starting in the 1930s, …
  15. Michael Holroyd finally reveals himself in ‘Book of Secrets’, Plain Dealer (blog)
    Virtuoso insights connect the dots among his characters, as he intertwines the lives of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, the illegitimate daughter of Grimthorpe. Holroyd himself finally arrives center stage. …
  16. ‘Miracle’ in Battersea: Francesca Kay has turned from the enigmas of art to …, The Independent
    In the switches of mood and tone of an urban panorama, with a politician’s wife close to its heart, the book brought to my mind Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Kay says that she did not take Woolf’s metropolitan collage as a model, although “I do …
  17. Florence + The Machine, new album due Nov 7, Street North East (blog)
    It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps into it, and of course Frieda Kahlo, whose painfully beautiful painting gave me the title.” ‘What The Water Gave Me’ it’s available now on iTunes.
  18. This week in new music, FasterLouder
    For a tune named after a Frida Kahlo painting and featuring reference to Virginia Woolf it still has festival anthem written all over it. Let’s hope we get to see her again this summer. James Blake and Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon met at this year’s South …
  19. Florence And The Machine Reveal New Track, RTT News
    While speaking about the track with NME.com, Florence Welch revealed that the track was inspired by the story of writer Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by drowning. It also shares a title with a painting by legendary Mexican artist and feminist …
  20. Florence and the Machine debut new track ‘What The Water Gave Me’ – video, Digital Spy
    When I was writing this song I was thinking a lot about all those people who’ve lost their lives in vain attempts to save their loved ones from drowning. “It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps …
  21. Hear Florence and the Machine’s new song ‘What The Water Gave Me’ – audio, NME.com
    The track is named after a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and has also been part inspired by the death of author Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in a river by filling her coat pockets with stones. You can see Florence working on the album …
  22. The naming of parts: a new frankness about vaginas, Evening Standard
    Chicago created 39 place settings for famous female “guests” – including Sappho, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf – with labias rising up out of the plates themselves. The new craft-led work is as much about playfulness as a po-faced “comment” on …
  23. Orlando, St George’s West, Edinburgh, The Independent
    Adapting Virginia Woolf’s fantastical novel, which follows the title character through four centuries and a sex change, is no mean feat. It has the potential to be epic, but Darryl Pinckney’s script for theatre company Cryptic goes in …
  24. A ‘World of Taste’ hits Rishon Letzion, Ha’aretz
    By Elka Looks Tags: Israel culture Virginia Woolf once said, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” After attending Rishon Letzion’s ‘World of Taste’ fair, I could not agree more. Over twenty of Israel’s leading …
  25. Tale of loss and friendship cuts to the quick, Independent Online
    Today, she is Senior Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the distinguished biographer of TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and, most recently, the acclaimed poet Emily Dickinson. …
  26. How One Book Changed My Life, Huffington Post
    I have most all of Virginia Woolf’s books on one shelf. There are books by Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, John Irving and dozens of other favorite authors. There is my friend Peg’s wonderful novel, “Spinning Will. …
  27. Fill up your shelves at the Locust Grove book sale! [Books], Louisville.com
    My own personal finds from past sales have included titles from Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. And, of course, no shortage of Shakespeare. Tax deductible book donations will also be accepted at any time …
  28. Stigma should be removed from mental illness, Cincinnati.com
    Provided Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Eugene O’Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Carrie Fisher, Mike Wallace, Patty Duke, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta-Jones – all talented and gifted individuals, …
  29. Book festival: Andrew O’Hagan, Edinburgh Festivals
    Last night’s topic was landscape, which Bakewell addressed with Olivia Laing, author of To The River, a meditation in travel, nature and history along the course of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941. ..
  30. Offerings from Edinburgh’s International Book Festival, STV Local
    At 7 pm she’ll be reading from her book To the River, the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over 60 years after Woolf’s death, Olivia Laing walked the river from source to sea. …
  31. ED2011 Theatre Review: Sailing On (ShadyJane), ThreeWeeks News
    It revolves around a girl’s poignantly suppressed memory coming to light with the help of a pretend Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. Though beautifully enacted and adeptly enhanced by the use of multimedia, it was not the performance itself that most stood …
  32. Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights: Bronte vs Bronte, Telegraph.co.uk
    Virginia Woolf once said that, in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë had gigantic ambition that was summed up by the sentence “You the eternal powers…” but she didn’t know how to finish it. I think there’s something in that. For me, Wuthering Heights is …
  33. Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition opens at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, ArtfixDaily (press release)
    She later became the mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Mary Hillier, a local shoemaker’s daughter who served as a parlor maid in Cameron’s household, became, as the artist wrote, “one of the most beautiful and constant of my models. …
  34. Robert Fulford: Postmodern love?, National Post (blog)
    Books appeared under otherwise identical titles about Nietzsche, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf, St. Augustine, Jesus and many more. Postmodernism, while it no longer so freely speaks its name, remains the operative principle beneath much of contemporary …
  35. ED2011 Theatre Review: Orlando (Cryptic), ThreeWeeks News
    Adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel, this production is especially adept in its synthesis of Woolf’s linguistic virtuosity with contemporary sound and projection techniques. Although the show’s pace lags occasionally, Judith Williams impresses with a …
  36. A New Life of EM Forster, Xtra.ca
    While his contemporaries were DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury circle and Christopher Isherwood, a new generation of Americans also longed to meet him. People such as artist Paul Cadmus, actor William Roerick and painter Jared French …
  37. Play’s a slap in face for parents, Macedon Ranges Weekly
    She says the play is like “Virginia Woolf on steroids” and audiences will experience a “rollercoaster of emotions. It’s a fun play and it disintegrates into madness!” Ms Boyd said it had already received much praise from the Melbourne theatre network. …

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The Guardian promised they would correct Paul Lester’s egregious error, and they did.

By July 22, Paul Lester’s item in The Guardian, New band of the day: Wolfette (No 1,065),  which claimed that Dominique Woolf, of Wolfette fame, was Virginia Woolf’s great granddaughter, was amended. The paper published an official correction on its Corrections and Clarifications page on the same day.

As the correction states, “Virginia and Leonard Woolf did not have children. Wolfette has been quoted in an interview as saying `She was married to my grandmother’s uncle. That makes her my great-great-aunt by marriage … I think.'”

I can now breathe easily again. And we can all move on to something more interesting in the world of Woolf.

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Guardian, say it isn’t so

Bothered by the glaring error in Paul Lester’s music review of Wolfette in The Guardian? The one where he claims that Dominique Woolf is the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf?

Well, email your complaint to reader@guardian.co.uk, the office that handles reader queries about Guardian accuracy and standards. When requesting a correction, you should send a web link of the story.

Since the Guardian’s policy is “to correct significant errors as soon as possible,” they will want to know about this one. After what happened with News of the World, someone has to keep a squeaky clean image.

Meawhile, out of Woolfette’s mouth came these words, spoken during an April Q&A posted on So So Gay:

Apparently you’re distantly related to Virginia Woolf.

She was married to my grandmother’s uncle. That makes her my great-great-aunt by marriage… I think.

Readers have pointed out Lester’s error, but so far he has failed to admit his mistake or publish a correction. Let’s hope the powers-that-be at The Guardian will show him the error of his ways — in more ways than one.

But as Stuart N. Clarke noted, “According to A E Housman, `the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth’.”

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