Wright’s play premiered in Europe and tells the story of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. The evening will end with a few scenes from a play written by Shakespeare’s Sister’s, Kris Lundberg, about the love affair between famed artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his muse and model, Elizabeth Siddal.
The readings will commence in a Lower East Side sultry venue, the DL, located at 95 Delancey St. (at Ludlow) in the second floor Casino.
For more information, contact Kris Lundberg at info@shakespearessister.org or visit the Shakespeare’s Sister Company website.
Formed in 2008, The Shakespeare’s Sister Company (SSC) is a not-for-profit theater organization supporting women in the arts. It is committed to producing established works and new plays by female authors, as well as by Sir William Shakespeare. Its mission is to address global change through the theater, including workshops with the community and literacy for youth.
Vanessa and Virginia, a new play about Virginia Woolf based on the eponymous novel by Susan Sellers, will be on stage at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 11 and 12 at the Byre Theatre at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Written by Elizabeth Wright, the play includes original music and is peformed before a backdrop of projected images inspired by Vanessa Bell’s paintings.
It has been invited to Poland, Germany, Greece and across the UK for performances in theatre spaces, at literary conferences and at site-specific locations. It began touring in France last September and will be on the road until September of this year.
Sellers‘ novel provides a fictional account of the sibling rivalry between Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell. She is a member of the at St. Andrews’ School of English.
Susan Sellers
A book signing at 6:45 p.m. in the foyer of the theater will preceed the play. A question and answer session with director Emma Gersch, the playwright and the cast will follow it.
The next day, a Virginia Woolf symposium will be held to mark the publication of a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s writing by Cambridge University Press, according to Blogging Woolf reader Kathleen Dixon Donnelly.
The symposium will be held in the School of English, Lawson Lecture Room, Kennedy Hall, The Scores, from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. It will include talks on:
the relevance of Virginia Woolf for the 21st century
Nicole Kidman in The Hours and
creating the stage play Vanessa and Virginia.
Members of the school’s Literary Society and Feminist Society can obtain discounted tickets. Visit the Byre Theatre website for more details on performances and tickets.
Watch a preview of the play and an interview with the director. Read more about the novel, including a review by Alice Lowe, a frequent contributor to Blogging Woolf.
Being able to download Virginia Woolf novels to Apple’s sleek little iPod means we can now carry her words with us anywhere we go. Because so far, I haven’t found a pocket that the gizmo — stocked with Woolf novels — doesn’t fit in.
Here’s my story. I bought an IPod touch a few weeks ago. Since then, I have spent way too much time searching for and downloading fun, interesting and useful iPod Apps.
I won’t bore you Woolfians with my love for the AP Stylebook App that set me back $29 but is worth every penny. Nor will I discuss the free Italian lessons I’m taking on my iPod or the Rachel Maddow shows I’m watching or the multiple Twitter accounts I’m following via TweetDeck.
But I will gladly tell you about the Apps I found that are related to Virginia:
The Virginia Woolf Collection – Nine of Woolf’s novels. Cost: $2.99
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
Three versions of Night and Day at a cost of 99 cents each
Mrs. Dalloway. Cost: $17.99
Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers. Cost: $9.99
Orlando Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
To the Lighthouse Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
The best news is that if you want to get Woolf novels for free, and you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, you can. Here’s how:
Authors of novels about real people have great freedom, in the name of fiction, to carve out their territory. Virginia Woolf and her coterie seem to be frequent subjects of these bold interpretations, and Woolfians are irresistibly drawn to them, myself included.
In recent years I have added to my shelves Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez, But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury by Gillian Freeman, and of course Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. The latest is Vanessa and Virginiaby Susan Sellers.
An accomplished Woolf scholar, Sellers makes few departures from the lives of the sisters. At the recent Virginia Woolf Conference in New York, she confessed that she chose the form of a first-person monologue by Vanessa as she would have been terrified to try to speak in Woolf’s voice. Yet one can appreciate her creativity and the risk involved in this undertaking as she presents a provocative perspective.
Sellers conveys a forceful immediacy with Vanessa’s present tense narrative directed at Virginia, who is “you” throughout. The four shattering family deaths are related in the first three chapters, resounding, one after the other, with startling violence. Vanessa observes that, “If this were a work of fiction, instead of an attempt to discern the truth, then Stella’s death, coming so soon after Mother’s, would seem like malicious overload on the writer’s part” (35).
Susan Sellers
Her story is one of bitterness and relentless envy from the start, as she perceives Virginia usurping Thoby, Mother, and then Clive. She resents Virginia’s relationship with Leonard and Duncan’s with Bunny—someone else is always taking her place, and she has to care for everyone while no one takes care of her. Even Virginia’s illness becomes an accusation: “There was manipulation as well as helplessness in your loss of control. By relinquishing the burden to me, you ensured I remained in Mother’s place, parenting you, indulging you” (51).
Vanessa’s language is lyrical and painterly when speaking of the colors, textures and shapes in her paintings, but there’s little joy, and her art often seems like a sedative. Drawing classes in her youth enabled her to “forget your pain and Father’s misery and Stella’s cares” (27); she paints to avoid feeling. Self-disparaging comparisons to Virginia and a lack of confidence in her work lead to her cloying subservience to Duncan, in both art and life, and seem to diminish her as an artist and professional.
While Sellers skillfully and sensitively conveys the complexity and pathos of Vanessa’s life, she makes a few unnecessary forays. A few instances of foreshadowing seem gratuitous, but this is, after all, fiction.
Overall, I found it satisfying and compelling, and I read it from cover to cover on the day I departed New York following the Woolf Conference. It gave me food for thought as I descended from conference immersion and a long flight into daily life, and now, more than a month later, I find I’m still swishing it around, enjoying the flavor.
Vanessa and Virginia, by Susan Sellers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston/New York, 2009.
Wow! That is my overwhelming response to the Virginia Woolf conference that ended yesterday afternoon in New York City.
The comments I heard throughout the four-day event tell me that Woolf and the City left everyone buzzed. Anne Fernald and her team of volunteers from Fordham University — Megan Branch, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Kelly Spall and Sarah Cornish — put together a dynamite event that sparked many ideas in the minds of Woolfians from around the world.
Here are some highlights:
Fifty fabulous panels featuring the work of Woolf scholars and common readers from around the globe, including Bloomsbury biographer Frances Spalding of Newcastle University, Pace University’s Mark Hussey of Virginia Woolf from A to Z fame, Alice Lowe of San Diego, artist Suzanne Bellamy of the University of Sydney, Sarah Prieto of SUNY New Paltz, Katarzyna Rybinska of Wroclaw University in Poland and Iolanda Plescia of Roma Tre University in Rome.
Alice Lowe
Dr. Ruth Gruber. Yes, Dr. Ruth Gruber. The 97-year-old journalist, photographer and author of Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, was part of a conversational panel led by writer and broadcaster Katherine Lanpher. She shared fascinating stories of her 1930s experiences as a journalist who visited the Soviet Arctic and a writer who met Virginia and Leonard Woolf in their Tavistock Square flat.
Susan Sellers, author of Vanessa and Virginia, the novel based on the relationship between sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, which is receiving rave reviews in the U.S. after its recent release, was also part of the Lanpher conversation. When she read a passage from her novel, I wasn’t sure what impressed me more — the words she read or the liltingly beautiful English accent with which she read them. Maybe it was the combination.
Kris Lundberg, founder of Shakespeare’s Sister, a New York theater company for women that also focuses on community literacy. She did a dramatic reading of Woolf’s words that made a hush fall over the audience.
Keynote speaker Rebecca Solnit, a prolific author whose soothing voice left her audience in a state of suspended animation while her intriguing ideas left their minds in a state of excitement.
Tamar Katz of Brown University who spoke about the importance of “pausing and waiting” in life and in Woolf.
Anna Snaith of King’s College, London, who shared her views regarding the meaning of street music in The Years — and treated us to audio clips of the actual tunes as well.
Plus a reading from Vita and Virginia and a performance that combined rock-out music from Princeton with dance from the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre.
A table full of lovely books for sale from New York’s independent, activist book seller, Bluestockings.
Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson
And, of course, what Woolf conference would be complete without the inimitable combination of Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and their collection of Bloomsbury Heritage Series monographs, including their two latest.
These monographs, published by their London publishing house, Cecil Woolf Publishers, are always popular at Woolf conferences, as they cover topics often missing in other Woolf scholarship.
Get the full list of books available in his Bloomsbury Heritage and War Poets series.
I will soon be posting an order form as a PDF to make the purchasing process easier. And I promise to keep you updated on other steps Cecil and Jean plan to take to make their monographs more available to their reading public.
