Today, May 14, marks the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, with 1,500 copies sold within a month of its publication.
A reader favorite
Woolf’s fourth novel, set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, elicited a variety of responses after its publication.
As Mark Hussey explains in Virginia Woolf A to Z (1995), the novel has not only held the attention of critics over the years, but “with To the Lighthouse, has probably generated more commentary than any other of Wolf’s fictions” (175).
The novel, lauded for its use of interior monologue, as well as its poetic language, is a reader favorite. It is certainly one I have picked up and read at various stages of my life during the last 50 years, always finding some new insight into Clarissa, along with some new connections between Clarissa’s thoughts and life and my own.
Links to follow in celebration of the centenary
Here are some links to articles and events noting this milestone, thanks to Vara Neverow, professor of English at Connecticut State University and editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
The whole world is a work of art – Virginia Woolf, “Moments of Being”
The interactive workshops at the 2024 Woolf conference provided a hands-on experience at the intersection of theory and practice. Conference attendees were invited to engage with Woolf’s thinking and writing in an exchange of ideas involving tactile, visual, and virtual modalities.
The two workshops highlighted in this post include the following:
Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch,” a craft workshop enjoining the act of reading and the practice of stitching, and
Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended,” an exhibit of graduate work in the interest of creating virtual rooms overseen by J. Ashley Foster at Fresno State University.
Conference attendee Laura Ludtke reflected on her participation in “A Million Hands Stitch” as an active practice that she incorporated into subsequent events during the conference:
Stitching as I listened to other Woolfians share their research and work made me more attentive and attuned to the intricacies and implications of their observations. I’m grateful to have attended a conference where creative and critical practices are so purposefully imbricated.
Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch”
By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow
“A Million Hands Stitch” was a craft workshop organized by Melissa Johnson that connected literary reading with creative practice. The workshop, as laid out in the conference booklet, promotes experimentation “with various kinds of making centered in text and textile.”
Melissa Johnson’s thread box at the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
An assortment of tools were offered at the workshop to approach this experiment, including felt, paper, needles, embroidery floss, scissors, a typewriter, and notably stacks of excerpted phrases and passages from Woolf’s writing.
Woolf’s words inspire
I attended the workshop with an interest in expanding the scope and thinking of my own creative practice. I had recently begun to work with pottery and ceramics to process through art Woolf’s discussions of the East, and within the exercises of this project I have come to recognize the benefits of exploring theories in creative practice via additional modes of craft.
Participants of Melissa Johnson’s “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop busy at work. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
Taking Johnson’s cue to create from our specific approaches to Woolf, I decided to work with a phrase that caught my eye among the stacks of prompt cards: “white plates in a sunny room.”
The phrase is found from a monologue by Susan in the third section of The Waves. “Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room.”
In contemplation with my conference paper about Woolf’s discourse on the chinoiserie plate, I took the liberty to suspect, in the context of the British empire’s taste for the willow pattern aesthetic, that the plates in question could be of such design.
After all, Susan’s monologue follows another visualization from Bernard about patterned plates with “Oriental long-tailed birds.” In the empire on which the sun “never” sets, crusts and bread and butter and chinoiserie plates are aligned for consumption in its sunny rooms – though the novel repeatedly gestures to a smashing of china from afar.
Serena’s finished piece from the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo by Serena Wong.
Text and thread combine
I completed my workshop piece by typing the phrase on paper and adding to it an embroidered design with needle and thread.
There is something especially beautiful about stitching on paper. In working with so delicate a medium, the practice registers an attempt to make solid what is elusive, as with capturing words on a typewriter or framing sensations in art.
My piece thus results from a merging of my interpretations in reading, pottery painting, and stitching. A huge thank you to Johnson for hosting the wonderful craft workshop, which produced a token for me that I now have framed on my desk as a remembrance of the 2024 Woolf conference.
By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island
Leanne Oden (center) with Callie Weiler of Fresno State University (right) discuss Weiler’s group project, which created an interactive virtual room in the form of a garden that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.
I attended Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended” where I had a lovely conversation with Callie Weiler about the project that she, Joseph LeForge, and Elizabeth Cardenas created as part of a graduate course with J. Ashley Foster.
Titled “The Cultivation of Love and Identity,” it created a virtual room in the form of a garden that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists.
Reimagining Bloomsbury as a virtual garden space
Callie shared the vision for this project as outlined in the group’s abstract: “Bloomsbury’s life and love are difficult to describe in concrete terms, and it is this difficulty that necessitates a ludic reimagining of the space they created for themselves and others.
“They transcend barriers and labels to congregate as a group of individuals decisively to explore their meaning of love in its ephemeral, ungraspable form: love is a stimulating exchange, expressed with and through art, and was undefined by sexual orientation, the number, or the gender of partners engaged in romantic discourse.”
Callie walked me through the creative process step by step, starting from the readings that were assigned, choosing partners to collaborate with, identifying a topic, mocking up a storyboard, building a website, and designing the virtual room using Unreal Engine, culminating in a final paper composed by the group.
Creating the garden
The garden they created is fully interactive, allowing users to choose a path in the garden leading to a different artist. Each artist’s path is marked by an associated color.
She shared with me that the idea is to represent each color of the rainbow to emphasize the fluidity of sexuality and gender expression embraced by this group of modernist artists. Users were welcome to add to the garden, making this a truly communal, multimodal project.
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.
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way”—Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
This first piece of our four-part reflection series on the 2024 Woolf conference introduces the ways in which we each found our paths to Woolf, and subsequently the approaches we respectively took going into the conference.
Leanne Oden, Serena Wong, and Jessica Kim, all first-time Woolf Conference attendees. Photo courtesy of Benjamin Hagen.
Though our interests may differ, there are common grounds in our experiences – Mrs. Dalloway has served as the starting text to our research as Woolfians, and we were both contemplating on notions of illness when first arriving at Fresno.
When we met on the first day of the Woolf conference, therefore, we found our interests enhanced by the nuances of each other’s research perspectives. The dynamic that emerged from our conversations, which led to a fast friendship, mirrors the vibrant cohesion that marks the Woolf community at large.
This collaborative series is a tribute to the generations of multifaceted Woolf exchanges that we hope our contribution will continue to add to and encourage.
For of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number” –Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917)
Leanne on encountering Woolf: illness vs. health
By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island
Leanne Oden
As inspired by Sonita Sarker’s keynote presentation “Teks, Technê, Technology: Woolf as Modernist Icon,” I open this contribution with a reflection on who I need Woolf to be and the experiences I carry with me into my reading and research on her work.
Coming to Woolf
I came to Woolf in 2012 in the throes of an illness. In my sophomore year of undergraduate studies, reading Mrs. Dalloway — an assigned text for a course on “Fiction: Narrating Society and Self” — breathed new life into me and profoundly shaped my aspirations as a scholar. Her words captured what I felt, yet could not express.
When I think back to that first reading, an experience I wish I could have again, it is the feeling of recognition, of survival, of the courage to face seemingly insurmountable challenges, that calls me to Woolf and holds me there.
I recovered from the illness that gripped me in those earliest encounters with Woolf. However, illness would remain a driving force in my life and my reading of Woolf.
Taking a risk
In 2018, after the birth of my second child, illness would return to my life in the form of postpartum complications. The way I came to understand myself was permanently altered with the diagnosis that I received — a diagnosis that requires me to take medication for the rest of my life.
It took years for me to live a life reminiscent of the one I had previously enjoyed. In 2022, I took what I consider to be the risk of my life and applied to grad school years after determining that I now had to live out the rest of my life with a broken brain. In her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” Woolf writes so brilliantly into existence:
It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
While my doctoral work is just beginning as a first-year Ph.D. candidate, having just completed my master’s program in May, I am eager to bring my own encounters with illness into an investigation of the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary through Woolf’s writing, among other experimental modernist writers.
Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction alike have become my own survival narratives, and this is the lens through which I come to understand Virginia Woolf.
Serena on encountering Woolf: illness and an orientalist aesthetic
By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow
Serena Wong
I came across Virginia Woolf in my undergraduate studies but was first truly enthralled by her work when doing my master’s in 2019, during which I joined a course titled “Woolf Writes Modernity” that covers all the novels in her oeuvre.
Woolf’s celebrated reputation in the modernist studies canon gave me high expectations of her texts that do not disappoint. Like many other new readers of Woolf, I found myself soon admiring the poetic flow of her writing and the feminism that abounds in her narratives.
Struggling with discomfort
Yet I also found myself struggling with some descriptions that the majority of my peers seemed not to notice. As one of the two Asian students in an overwhelmingly Caucasian cohort, Woolf’s aesthetic employment of “Chinese eyes” in Mrs. Dalloway and subsequently in To the Lighthouse was, and still is, a point of discomfort that I actively raise in the classroom. This observation led to my master’s dissertation, which went on to become my Ph.D. project.
My early encounter with Woolf and with modernist literature at large is then also intertwined with contemplations on illness. My illness, according to orientalist literature, is one that pertains to culture and race.
In 2023, within the Woolf panel of my first American conference at the Modern Language Association Convention, I gave a paper centered in “On Being Ill” that discussed an overlapping merge of illness with racialized, orientalist aesthetics in the works of Woolf and Thomas De Quincey.
As I compare my research interests with Leanne then — at the Woolf conference — and now — at the time of our collaborative writing — I am fascinated by how our respective positions drive us to see things uniquely, albeit in the context of the same texts and theme.
I am grateful for Leanne’s open-mindedness to my research project, and I hope I have been just as supportive of hers. Our exchanges – which, by happy coincidence or fate, began when we initially met in the first panel of the first day of the 33rd Woolf conference – reaffirmed for both of us the necessity of flexible and sympathetic communications in academic practices.
Keen to collaborate
As scholars in the early stages of our studies and careers, we are keen to collaborate on this entry as a testament to our inheritance of the shared efforts that have come before us, and as an example to those who will come after. Besides, Leanne is one of the many lovely people with whom I’ve engaged in broad and stimulating conversations at last year’s Woolf conference.
Here I must thank the members of the International Virginia Woolf Society and all others involved who have sustained the Woolf community as such a vibrant and forgiving space of exchange. It is no surprise, perhaps, that the Woolf community is working hard to encourage inclusive practices within its scholarship.
Woolf’s writing, though problematic, has always been radical in political thought and creative experimentation by the standards of its time. Though I am criticizing in parts her orientalism, I am by no means trying to extend harsh commentaries to the ensemble of her work. We are all products of our own time, and the generations that follow will continue to reorient the faults in our discourses.
In the meanwhile, however, the success of this intellectual legacy is dependent on a process that communicates from a multiplicity of perspectives and a diversity of forms.
Future posts in the four-part series
Our future posts for Blogging Woolf will record snippets of the panels, workshops, and keynotes at the 2024 Woolf conference that in their multifariousness together celebrate the accomplishments of this culture.
About the authors
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 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.
If you have always wanted to own a Virginia Woolf work with an original Hogarth Press cover design, you are in luck — if you live in the UK or Europe.
Penguin’s Vintage Classics series now includes three Woolf works, including Mrs. Dalloway, with the original Hogarth Press covers designed by her artist sister, Vanessa Bell, in celebration of the 1925 novel’s centenary.
About the Virginia Woolf Gift Classics
Mrs. Dalloway is part of a special three-volume hardback set that also includes A Room of One’s Own (1929) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Each edition features an original cover with gilt-printed boards beneath.
All three book covers in the Virginia Woolf Gift Classics maintain the distinctly hand-rendered shapes and the textural grain of analogue printmaking that the Hogarth Press employed — including the “imperfections” of the originals.
The process and the prices
To create the final replica covers, multiple covers of the originals were scanned and pieced together.
Because of challenges raised by the original sizes of the spines, “these are not facsimile editions but we have made reference to the first editions in every detail of the design and production, from the typeface used in the typesetting, to the choice of paper, to the colour of the cover boards,” explained Charlotte Knight, editorial director at Vintage Classics.
The volumes are available for £24.42 each on the Penguin UK website. The set of three is currently priced at £54. Delivery is only available to the UK and Europe.
Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell is the subject of a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes. “Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour” is on now through Sept. 21.
Bell, a member of the Bloomsbury group, was a groundbreaking artist and key figure in 20th-century British art who is only now getting her due. With more than 100 pieces on display, the Charleston at Lewes exhibit is the biggest ever dedicated to Bell, “affirming her as a radical pioneer of modernism in her own right,” according to the Charleston website.
The exhibition includes her vibrant paintings, as well as her revolutionary textiles, furniture designs, ceramics, and book covers. Charleston, in partnership with MK Gallery, organized the exhibition.
Location: Charleston in Lewes, Southover Road, Lewes, BN7 1FB
Hours: Wednesday through Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Cost: £14 | Free for supporters
