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Archive for the ‘Virginia Woolf’ Category

Woolf letters offered at auction in London

Posted in a blog of her own, Blogging Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Woolf Letters on Thursday 8 November 2007| 4 Comments »

Anyone with £7,000 to £10,000 to spend and the flexibility of traveling to London next Wednesday might be interested in the following e-mail, sent to the VW Listserv today.

It offers news about typed letters sent by Virginia Woolf to Mrs. Motier Harris Fisher in August of 1940, while Woolf’s summer home was exposed to air raids during the Battle of Brittain, which raged over Sussex and Kent.

The letters, which indicate Woolf’s state of mind during that traumatic time, will be offered for sale at a Christie’s auction Wednesday.

Then again, a flight to London isn’t necessary. You can view the auction offering online and get the full details right from your desktop. Or you can register to watch, hear and bid on Woolf’s letters from the comfort of your home PC.

Copied below is the text of the e-mail message sent from the account of Molly Marple.

Greetings to the group.

I have some letters and a manuscript which my mother-in-law is auctioning at Christies, King Street, London next Wednesday 14th November. Valuable Printed Books & Manuscripts, lot 56. The lot is somewhat hidden amongst so many really old manuscripts I’m fearful that nobody has been able to see them.

The letters were typed by Virginia Woolf and discuss with Mrs. Motier Harris Fisher the submission of the text for Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. The essay manuscript was written in August 1940. There is discussion about submitting the essay to “The Forum” and “New Republic”. Some of the text is re-printed in the auction catalogue and on-line. If anyone is interested I can copy the text to another message.

The documents were handed down to to my mother-in-law by her mother, Mrs. Motier Harris Fisher. We don’t know if there was a connection between Mrs. Fisher and Virginia Woolf other than a business relationship.

I hope this is of interest to the group.

Barbara

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Woolf inspires sweet stuff

Posted in a blog of her own, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, Woolf blog on Thursday 1 November 2007| Leave a Comment »

Even youngsters can be inspired by Virginia Woolf.

In New York City, girls are making money and asserting their independence through a program of the Lower East Side Girls Club called the Cookie Academy.

Girls Club director Lyn Pentecost told Time Out New York that Woolf — who Time Out calls “the grande dame of feminism” — was a source of inspiration for the program. Or at least her words were.

“Everyone thinks Virginia Woolf said, ‘All a woman needs is a room of her own,’ ” Pentecost is quoted as saying in Time Out’s Nov. 1 edition. “What she really said was, ‘All a woman needs is money and a room of her own.’”

However, we all know that what Virginia really, really said was, “A woman needs an income and a room of her own to write fiction.”

Quote quibbling aside, it’s nice to see that young women — the girls club is for girls and young women ages eight to 23 — appreciate the wisdom of Woolf.

We are not alone in our admiration for Girls who Quote Woolf. The Girls Club has received good press since it was founded in 1996. And it has been recognized for its high quality programming.

To take a look at the goodies available in the Girls Club online store, click here. Virginia would approve.

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Editors invite contributions to 2001 conference volume

Posted in 11th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, a blog of her own, Blogging Woolf, books, call for papers 2, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf, VWoolf Listserv, Woolf blog on Tuesday 30 October 2007| 1 Comment »

Guest editors Jane de Gay and Marion Dell invite submissions to the Selected Papers from “Voyages Out, Voyages Home”: The Eleventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, which was held in Bangor, North Wales, June 13-16, 2001.

The volume will be published by Clemson University Digital Press.

“Although some time has now passed since the conference, the International Virginia Woolf Society is keen to see this volume in print (and online), in order to have a complete set of selected papers from the annual conferences. All speakers at the Bangor conference are therefore invited to submit their paper for consideration,” the editors wrote in a message to the VW Listserv.

“Papers should be no more than 4,000 words in length, and presented in MLA format. In order to preserve the flavour of the conference as far as possible, we ask contributors to submit the version they presented in 2001, preserving the tone of the talk as it was given. Necessary corrections and judicious updating are welcome, but we do not encourage submission of a fully-developed article that has been published elsewhere.

“However, contributors are welcome to include (within the 4,000 words) an optional Afterword of 2-300 words, looking back on the paper in the light of subsequent developments, or indicating how the paper fed into their more recent research,” the editors wrote.

“As an additional feature of this volume, we plan to compile a bibliography of publications arising out of papers given at the conference. We therefore encourage all contributors to let us have full publication details of any such articles, even if they do not wish to submit a paper for this volume,” the editors added.

Paper Submissions

Send papers by e-mail to: Jane de Gay at j.degay@leedstrinity.ac.uk

Deadline

January 1, 2008

Guest Editors

Dr. Jane de Gay

Senior Lecturer in English

Leeds Trinity and All Saints, UK

Marion Dell MA

Associate Lecturer in Literature

The Open University, UK

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Playing Virginia

Posted in The Party, Virginia Woolf, Vita and Virginia, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf blog on Monday 29 October 2007| 2 Comments »

Kathleen Chalfant is preparing to play Virginia Woolf in the Eileen Atkins play Vita and Virginia on Monday evenings in New York this fall. Patricia Elliott will appear opposite her as Vita Sackville-West.

But that is not the only Woolf-related role Chalfant will take on. She will also play a part in The Party, which is based on three Woolf stories.

Both bits of news come from an Oct. 27 story in the New York Times.

Chalfant has the experience and credentials to take on such hefty roles. She was nominated for a 1993 Tony Award for her featured performance in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. She also received critical acclaim and numerous awards for her performance in the off-Broadway play Wit.

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Woolf experiments in the lab of the mind

Posted in books, Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Woolf and science, Woolf blog on Tuesday 23 October 2007| 2 Comments »

Want help with science? Ask Virginia.

Jonah Lehrer, a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, argues in his new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, that scientists and artists can learn from each other. And he says one artist we can learn from is Woolf.

Lehrer’s premise is that in the process of doing their work, both scientists and artists search for truth. But while scientists find their truths while working in an actual laboratory, writers like Woolf find theirs while at work in the lab of the mind, as they put pen to paper. They use their artistic insights to make their own kind of scientific breakthroughs, breakthroughs so intuitively radical that scientists themselves may take years to catch up with them.

While Proust, the title character in Lehrer’s book, explored the accuracy and inaccuracy of human memory,  Woolf explored the fragility of the self and the vagaries of the human mind. She did so by inventing the stream of consciousness technique, which she developed in her post-World-War-I novels, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway.   

Woolf, he notes, illustrates the birdlike quality of the human mind, as her characters’ thoughts flit about, quickly moving from one topic to another, never resting for long on any one subject. The self emerges from this constant mental movement, she tells us, a “kind of whole made of shivering fragments.”

Lehrer tells us that Woolf’s view of the way the brain works matches recent scientific findings. An experience only lasts for about 10 seconds in short-term memory, he notes: “After that, the brain exhausts its capacity for the present tense, and its consciousness must begin anew, with a new stream.”

There’s more ground-breaking science in Woolf’s novels. Remember the artist Lily in To the Lighthouse? She complains that she is always of two minds: “Such was the complexity of things … to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now.”

Well, Lehrer explains how science took nearly 40 years to catch up with Woolf’s art. It was the early 1960s before two neuroscientists discovered “the divided mind, and the way we instinctively explain away our divisions.” It was a discovery that had a profound impact on neuroscience, according to the author.  

So what kind of help can scientists expect from Woolf? Lehrer has an answer.

“Virginia Woolf isn’t going to help you finish your lab experiment,” he says in a Q&A in Wired Magazine. “What she will do is help you ask your questions better.”

It’s no wonder Lehrer has such an appreciation for Woolf, including her among just five authors he discusses in his book. After all, he studied with Woolf biographer Hermione Lee at Oxford.

Read a review in the Los Angeles Times.

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