A Facebook friend of mine is very good at spotting Virginia Woolf online. And when she does, she posts the links to my wall. Here are a couple of amusing Woolf sightings she posted just this week:
A photo depicting the cover of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as the surface for a grouping of plastic Disney princesses. The photo illustrates this Oct. 24 piece on a New York Times blog: “Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps.” Devorah Blachor, the author of the piece, is also the inventive Woolf-loving photographer.
This essay is generating lively discussion on the VWoolf Listserv, with writers questioning author John Colapinto’s assertion that Woolf’s lighthouse imagery in To the Lighthouse was borrowed from Wharton. As Linda Camarasana put it, “Makes me want to tell him to read ‘Reminiscences’ and ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ Surely he should at least acknowledge Woolf’s youth, trips to St. Ives, the haunting sounds of the waves, Julia’s death, and Stella’s death as the most obvious influences on To the Lighthouse.”
Another dispute is prompted by this line of Colapinto’s: “Though I can find no record of Woolf having read The Age of Innocence, it seems unlikely that she would have failed to read Wharton’s most famous and celebrated book, if for no other reason than she would have been curious about the first novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer.”
According to Stuart N. Clarke, Woolf acknowledged receipt of a copy of The Age of Innocence in an uncollected letter to publishers Messrs Appleton & Co. on 18 Nov 1920. The letter was published in the January 2011 edition of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. In that issue’s accompanying note, Stephen Barkway discusses Woolf’s published comments on Wharton and Wharton’s irritation.
3. Review of Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut, a fictional biography of E.M. Forster in the Washington Post, Sept. 18, 2014, that includes “lightly fictionalized” accounts of meetings with Virginia and Leonard Woolf.
5. Professor’s new book explores theories of place in the Bowdoin Orient, Sept. 12, 2014. The People, Place, and Space Reader, a new anthology dedicated to scholars writing about the ways in which people inhabit the space around them, includes an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own.
Woolf is among four British humanists whose quotes will be featured on posters displayed in 100 London Underground stations, beginning this week. The national campaign, “Thought for the Commute,” is being launched by the British Humanist Society.
The campaign will be replicated in cities across the UK. It answers BBC Radio Four’s “Thought for the Day,” which allows only religious contributors.
A history project in San Francisco’s gay district that honors Virginia Woolf. The last bronze plaque of the 20 in the Rainbow Honor Walk will memorialize Woolf as a deceased person in the LGBT community who left a lasting legacy. Author Armistead Maupin will dedicate her plaque, which will be located near the Twin Peaks bar at the corner of Castro and 17th streets.
Dr. Claire Nicholson’s exploration of Woolf’s often ambivalent relationship with clothes and fashion as part of the National Portrait gallery’s exhibit on Virginia Woolf. The Luncthtime Lecture, Virginia Woolf: A Woman of Fashion?, is free and will be held Sept. 4 at 1:15 p.m. at the NPG.
Insurrections of the Mind, coming Sept. 16 from Harper Perennial, collects 70 essays from the influential The New Republic magazine that includes one from Woolf.
A review of the documentary Secrets from the Asylum that mentions Laura Stephen, Woolf’s half-sister.
See Virginia Woolf biographer Alexandra Harris in Woolf’s Monk’s House writing lodge, bathrobe-wearing Nicole fresh from the shower at her Washington, D.C., kitchen table, and Giselle on a bench in a quiet, tree-lined spot in Kensington Palace Gardens.
Then share photo portraits of you or friends in the rooms and spaces that are meaningful to you in the National Portrait Gallery’s “A Room of One’s Own” competition on Tumblr. Winner of Woolf-related prizes will be selected at random. Submit them here.
On a related note, The Telegraph includes a reference to Woolf in a story about rooms of her own, which it dubs she-caves, as spaces where women can read, relax, and do crafts or yoga.
“Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibit of Woolf portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London, opened July 10 and runs through Oct. 26. Read more about the exhibit.
