A screenshot of the title page of the scanned Common Reader: Second Series
Edward Mendelson of Columbia University has shared scanned images of three sets of proofs newly discovered in Columbia’s library. They include two Virginia Woolf novels, as well as an edition of The Common Reader: Second Series.
These invaluable resources are available on Mendelson’s web page — where he has shared his scanned proofs of other Woolf novels. The new scans include the following:
The corrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of The Waves (1931) “in which the multicolored revisions on p. 301 are a sight to behold,” according to Mendelson. He notes that the page contains links to scanned PDF images of the proofs and early printings of The Waves and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions, extracted from the scanned images. This page also includes notes on the text and on existing editions of the novel.
The corrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). Scanned images of the marked proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace from the Columbia University Library.
The uncorrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of Orlando(1928), with some index entries added in an unknown hand. Scanned images of the proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of Orlando from the Columbia University Library. Mendelson notes that Virginia or Leonard Woolf removed the leaf with the list of illustrations (pp. 13-14) before sending these proofs.
More Woolf scans from Mendelson
Mendelson has provided scans of other Woolf works.
On “Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: texts and scanned images, Mendelson includes links to searchable scanned PDF images of three early printings of To the Lighthouse, PDF documents containing the texts of those editions, extracted from the scanned images, and more.
Cast a vote for the Orlando oak at Knole Park in England, which is up for the title of Tree of the Year 2025. It is thought to be the one featured in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. And the Orlando oak is one of 10 inspirational trees that are up for this year’s tree title.
This year’s competition is themed “Rooted in Culture” and spotlights the vital role trees play in literature, music, film and theatre.
Looking through the Knole gate
About the Orlando oak
At 135 feet high and the tallest sessile oak in Britain, this special tree towers over the others at Knole, the family home of Virginia Woolf’s lover and friend, Vita Sackville-West and the inspiration for her 1928 novel.
The early pages of the novel describe Orlando walking
to a place crowned by a single oak tree…so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or perhaps forty!
It is this tree that inspires Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree,” which appears repeatedly throughout the book. Orlando eventually returns to the tree to bury the poem as a tribute.
The tree with the most votes will go on to represent the UK in the next European Tree of the Year competition.
How to vote
Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 19. The winner will be announced Sept. 26. Read more and cast your one-time vote. The contest is sponsored by the UK’s Woodland Trust.
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. ”—Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne”, The Common Reader (1925)
The 2024 Woolf conference hosted a total of 29 panels across its four-day program. These panels, all brilliant, demonstrate in various methods a review of Woolf studies under the theme of technological innovation.
The two panels discussed in this post were respectively attended by the authors who also presented in them. Leanne reports on the panel “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf’,” which is interested in the contextualizing and de-contextualizing of Woolf on public platforms in processes of reading.
Serena writes on the panel “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism,” which engages with the relationship between crafting and reading in aesthetic approaches to Woolf’s work. Both accounts find solace – and new ideas – in their own clusters of research.
Panels
“Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf”
By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island
L-R: panelists of “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf” include Adriana Varga, Lisa Tyler, Judith Allen, Leanne Oden, and panel chair, Anne MacMaster. Photo courtesy of Amanda Golden.
The panel that I was selected to present in, alongside Lisa Tyler (Sinclair Community College), Judith Allen (Kelly Writers House), and Adriana Varga (Nevada State University), moderated by our panel chair, Anne MacMaster (Millsaps College), engaged with Woolf by rethinking the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her work.
From memes to politics
Lisa Tyler’s presentation, “‘Very Beautiful and Very Frightening:’ Interpreting Virginia Woolf-Related Memes,” investigates the circulation of Virginia Woolf’s images and quotations from her public and private writings on social media. She defines memes in her research as “cultural units—ideas, tunes, catchphrases, or images—that arise and propagate themselves through imitation.”
In her presentation, “Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and ‘the Manufacture of Consent,’” Judith Allen examines the political insights of Virginia Woolf alongside that of Walter Lippmann, who coined the term “manufacturing consent” in 1922.
Allen’s research leads her to question agents of power and their relationship to censorship, urging the audience to consider “which person, corporation, or government official controls the narrative — or at times, ‘purchases’ the narrative — and what might happen if we take risks, opposing the ‘official story’, the acceptable opinion.” In her concluding thoughts, Allen left the audience with a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “And so, difficult as it may be: ‘We must speak out!’ In Martin Luther King’s words: ‘Silence is betrayal.’”
Culture, audience and responses to AROO
The presentation that I gave centers on the dynamic relationship between culture and audience as explored in Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941), as a shared experience between the characters within and the readers outside of the text. In this research, I examine the culture-audience relationship as a striking historically specific example of human-agent interaction (HAI), particularly through the literary representations of artifacts like the paintings and the newspaper.
My paper investigates the ways in which Woolf models a kind of cultural engagement that reflects new subjective modalities made possible through technology and modernity. Many thanks to Alice Wood, as well as my mentor and dear friend, Stephen Barber, for their brilliant research which has so inspired me and pushed my thinking.
Our final panelist, Adriana Varga, delivered her presentation, “‘A Room of One’s Own:’ Reevaluations,” in which she examines several 20th and 21st century responses to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, in order to understand how different authors have interpreted and responded to it and why it continues to be a source of inspiration.
The Q&A session asked our panel of presenters to consider “where does Woolf go when decontextualized?” This sophisticated question inspired us to think across all of our presentations and the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her life and works.
By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow
I presented on the third day of the conference with fellow panelists Brenna Barks (Fresno State University) and Melissa Johnson (Illinois State University), in a panel with the theme of the interlocking connections between reading, aesthetics, and craft.
Clothing, Orlando, and the intersections of craft and art
L-R: Panelists of “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism” include Melissa Johnson, Brenna Barks, Serena Wong, and panel Chair, Marcia James. Photo courtesy of Jane Goldman.
Barks’ paper explored how clothing is used in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, and its film and play adaptions in 1992 and 2022/23 respectively.
As a fashion and art historian and material culturist, Barks is eager to define and simultaneously question gender, history, and the self in her study of these renditions regarding the making and theorizing of costumes.
Johnson, who hosted the aforementioned craft workshop, is a professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Illinois State University.
With a research focus on the histories of craft and its intersections with modern and contemporary art, Johnson examined the resonances of text and textile between Woolf’s writing and the work of artist Ann Hamilton.
In a panel that foregrounds the value of creative practice to interpretations of literature, I gladly noticed that the scholars’ discussions, as did my own, emphasized sensory experiences as a crucial tool of artistic exploration. Moreover, from our individual presentations rose an implied agreement that crafting is a political act.
Pottery as resistance
My paper, entitled “Strange Stories on a Willow Pattern Plate: Virginia Woolf, P’ou Song-Lin, and the Chinaware of Bloomsbury,” puts forward the aesthetic and orientalist tensions in Woolf’s 1913 review of Pu Songling’s short story collection Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure.
My creative practice with pottery painting had led me to create with artist friend Joanne Ning a chinoiserie-style plate, which found its inspiration in the depictions of this review. The plate not only serves as a visualization of the review but is more importantly offered as a project of resistance against the orientalist narratives that surround its form.
I extend my thanks to Barks and Johnson for brilliant conversions on our panel papers, and to the audience who during the Q&A impressed on my mind the blurred boundaries between aesthetic seduction and sedation.
Leanne Oden is a first-year Ph.D. student and an Instructor of Record in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. In her forthcoming research, Leanne is interested in questioning the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary as challenged through Woolf’s writing among other modernists. In her role as an educator for the University of Rhode Island, she regularly teaches ENG 110: Introduction to Literature and WRT 106: Introduction to Research Writing.
Serena Wong
Serena Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral study situates itself at the crossroads of British modernisms and Chinese modernity, with a focus on the orientalism in Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and formal representations of China. Her research also looks at theoretical and creative studies of ornamentation, which she positions as an important dimension of orientalist thought.
In a world that feels heavy right now, this post will be rather light, focusing on how Virginia Woolf still inspires fashion.
This time, it’s how Christian Dior’s spring/summer line shown during Paris Fashion Week provides a new take on Woolf’s Orlando, emphasizing the novel’s gender fluidity.
As described on the Dior website, it provides “an opportunity to reawaken essential themes related to sartorial memory — in particular the creativity of previous centuries.”
Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuria could not have picked a better work of fiction to get creative with the fashions of previous centuries than Woolf’s psuedo-biography Orlando, in which the male/female title character lives through 400 years of history — and fashion.
opulent, gender-fluid silhouettes and intricate detailing
a reworking of classic Elizabethan sillouettes
a monochromatic color palette of black, white and cream, with flashes of red
ruffled shirts with high colors
long black coats, some heavily tailored, many trenches
intricately detailed dresses
combinations of leather and lace
“The start of the final act evoked the fusion of masculine and feminine styles. Intricately embroidered ribbons, richly woven fabrics and delicate embellishments stood alongside sharp tailoring, trench coats and oversized bags,” reflected fashion historian Robert Ossant, as quoted in The Industry Fashion story.
“The contrast of structure and softness embodied Orlando’s gender duality.”
The West Bridgford Dramatic Society will stage Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando from Nov. 12-16 at Studio Theatre, Stamford Road, West Bridgford, Notts NG2 6LS. Performances are at 7.30 p.m. each day and also at 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 16.
About the play
This imaginative and thought-provoking play is adapted from Virginia Woolf’s celebrated novel by Sarah Ruhl. It immerses the audience in a world where a sixteenth-century youth embarks on a remarkable journey, changing sex, encountering Queen Elizabeth I, and traversing centuries. Live the novel, it includes Orlando’s quest for love, grapple with questions of identity, and ultimately achieve a deep understanding of life’s experiences.
Barbara Seymour directs the play, which includes a talented ensemble of actors and stunning costumes and set.
