A collection of articles from Routledge Literature journals focused on Virginia Woolf are free to access
Included in the collection is an article by Professor Martin Smith that was recently published in English Studies.
Access the Virginia Woolf collection online.
Posted in Woolf sightings | Tagged Lives in Literature, Routledge Literature, Virginia Woolf | Leave a Comment »
Editor’s Note: The following post was provided by Virginia Woolf scholar Beth Rigel Daugherty. She wrote this recommendation of a 2017 immersive course in Cambridge on Virginia Woolf, organized by Trudi Tate and Ericka Jacobs, after attending the summer 2016 session.
Woolf’s Rooms is one of two immersive summer courses on Virginia Woolf organized by Literature Cambridge in July 2017 at Homerton College, Cambridge. Each will include lectures, supervisions, and excursions.
Newnham College Hall
If the 2016 summer five-day course on Woolf is any indication, Beth says, “those seeking mental food in the summer of 2017 will find it delightful and stimulating.
Here is Beth’s testimony:
From the time we arrived on the afternoon of July 17 to the time we left on the morning of July 23, the accommodations and grounds at Homerton College sheltered us comfortably amid garden-lined walks; the meals, many of them prepared by the Cambridge Cookery School next to Homerton, provided us with healthy and beautiful food; the reading list, some novels and a few essays, gave us intellectual anchors, and the Cambridge experience, supervisions and all, kept us busy thinking and talking.
We focused on a different Woolf text each day by way of a lecture, a supervision, and an extra event or excursion of some kind. We read “How Should One Read a Book?” and “Leslie Stephen,” A Room of One’s Own, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and dipped into The Waves.
We listened to Susan Sellars, Trudi Tate, Alison Hennegan, and Gillian Beer. We went to Girton and Newnham Colleges, visited Bloomsbury where we saw the inside of 46 Gordon Square and visited the British Museum, and travelled to Grantchester for tea and a talk by Claire Nicholson on Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke. We got handouts, bibliographies, and maps.
We enjoyed hearing Susan Sellers read from Vanessa and Virginia and Claire Nicolson talk to us about the women’s colleges in the Girton room where Woolf talked to the young women there, a room lined with incredible embroidered panels done by Lady Julia Carew in the nineteenth century. We learned about Newnham traditions and book collections from Development Director Penny Hubbard and the current Librarian Debbie Hodder, and we saw and learned about the Bloomsbury art lining the rooms on the 3rd floor of 46 Gordon Square from art historian Claudia Tobin.
Claudia Tobin in Tavistock Square, London
The supervisions were particularly interesting for those of us unfamiliar with the Cambridge and Oxford style of education. In the hour-long sessions, three or four participants asked questions about or commented on specific textual passages of their choice with a faculty member, thus combining close reading with discussion.
Participants talked with each other and with the supervisor about the meaning of particular words or phrases, about the historical or cultural context of the passage for Woolf, readers at the time, and us, and about the connection of such passages to the work and Woolf’s writing as a whole. Heady stuff!
Also, the blend of intensity and freedom during the course was just right – every day, we had several hours of free time for reading, conversation, naps, or travels into Cambridge city centre. Plus, the whole incredible week was topped off by a formal dinner and an amazing presentation by Kabe Wilson, who has an MPhil in English from Cambridge. Using every single word used by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, Wilson has created an original text about a mixed-race woman student struggling against Cambridge’s (and Woolf’s) exclusion of her, Of One Woman or So by Olivia N’Gowfri. (See more about Kabe Wilson.
What really made the week, though, were the people. Twenty-one of us came from around the world: Japan, Israel, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Canada, Scotland, England, and the US. We viewed Virginia Woolf through very different lenses and perspectives, and we had come to Virginia Woolf through very different texts and from a variety of subject areas. When we introduced ourselves on the first day by describing how we first met Woolf, only a few of us mentioned school; several described near-conversion experiences; and all spoke movingly about those initial encounters, our memories of when passion for her work ignited.
We were common readers, students, and a sprinkling of academics; we were young, middle-aged, and retired; we were women and men. But we were united in our love of Virginia Woolf’s language and work, our open curiosity, our hunger to learn more.
It was an extraordinary week, begun with some trepidation and uncertainty and ending with intellectual bonding and camaraderie. Trudi and Ericka had thought of almost everything, and when they hadn’t, they responded quickly to questions or concerns. We were supported in a lovely venue and by a clear framework, and we were challenged by lots of questions (many of them reverberating still) and the injunction to read, re-read, and re-think, to keep consulting the text, to see Woolf and her texts again and again.
Trudi and Ericka solicited all kinds of feedback about how they could improve the course, so some of the details for the 2017 Virginia Woolf in Cambridge will surely change. But you can count on their making every effort to create a warm, welcoming, and supportive environment for engaging with Woolf and her work next summer, when the theme will be Woolf’s Rooms. Do consider becoming a student at Cambridge for a week – you’ll be glad you did!
Posted in Virginia Woolf | Tagged Beth Rigel Daugherty, Erika Jacobs, Literature Cambridge, Trudi Tate, Woolf Courses, Woolf's Rooms | Leave a Comment »
Today would be Leonard Woolf’s 136th birthday. Take a look at these entries from Virginia’s published diaries, made on his birthday from 1921 through 1940. Then scroll down for photos of a commemoration to Leonard at Great Elm.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf on their wedding day in 1912.
Friday 25 November 1921:
“L’s 41st birthday; & he has just caught a mouse in his hands. . . L. has been dismissed & taken on in another capacity by the same post; & now, this afternoon, he has ben sketching a plan to Green, who is strnded, by whih she may become our secretary. The Hogarth Press, you see, begins to outtgrow its parents.” – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, P. 144.
Sunday 25 November 1928:
“Leonard’s 48th birthday. We were at Rodmell, where all has fallen into our hands, rapidly, unexpectedly: on top of the field we et a cottage, & Percy [Bartholemew] is ‘ourman’. – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, P. 207.
Monday 25 November 1929:
“I merely add idly (ought I not to be correcting To the Lighthouse) that the difficulties with Nelly are to avoid an apology. She has weakened, & is now all out to catch us weakening. She wished L. many happy returns this morning.. . . I broadcast; & poured my rage hot as lava over Vita. She appeared innocent–I mean of telling H[ilda] M[atheson]. that I could easily cut my Brummel to bits. . . And then in a hurry to Rodmell, where the roof is on, & the floor stretched with planks. The bedroom will be a lovely wonderful room what I’ve always hoped for. – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, P. 267.
Saturday 25 November 1933:
“L’s birthday. Off to see the Sickerts with a view to writing; see his letter. Dear me. This comes however after a lull: I mean they’re sitting in Kensington Gds & I want a breath before I go on to Kitty’s Party” – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, P. 190.
Wednesday 25 November 1936:
“L’s birthday. Lunch with Clive. The Princess, a waxy solid handsome lady with kind eyes. Not formidable. Ros. eddy Ld Berners. Talk all very brilliant. The usual sense of having done with that when it was half over. And the different changes of light. The intimacy. Then the superficiality. Very cold. An eyeless grey day The same subjects recur. Sybil. Ld. B’s jokes, the same. Ros. muffled & tentative. I, rather too erratic. The P[rincess]. out of things. And I must lunch with her & Ethel tomorrow.” – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, P. 36-7.
Friday 25 November 1938:
“Li’s birthday — 58? But I open this, to note, at the foot of the last pessimistic page, in 2 minutes, the fact that pessimism can be routed by getting into the flow: creative writing. . . A fine cold day: L’s birthday.” – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, P. 189.
The village of Great Elm is the site of the rectory where Leonard Woolf often stayed with his university friend Leopold Campbell Douglas and his wife. It is also the site from which he set out to propose marriage to Virginia Stephen.
So when volunteers began fundraising to join Great Elm to the cycle route to Bath, they bought a brick to commemmorate his connection to the village. This has now been incorporated into an ornamental flight of steps beside the route.
The flight of steps near Great Elm Rectory
Posted in Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf | Tagged Frome, Great Elm, Leonard Woolf's birthday, Virginia Woolf t-shirt | Leave a Comment »
Virginia Woolf Talks, a new series of talks for town and gown on Virginia Woolf and her 
The series is free and all are welcome. It includes:
Both talks will be held at Lucy Cavendish, Library Seminar Room, Lady Margaret Road, CB3 0BU.
Posted in events | Tagged A Room of One's Own, Dame Gillian Beer, Literature Cambridge, Nanette O'Brien, The Waves, Virginia Woolf | 1 Comment »
There’s a new Woolf zine in town. And it’s apparently called Woolf Zine.
A tweet brought the publication to Blogging Woolf’s attention and drove me to its website. There I learned that the publication “aims to inspire new thinking around Virginia Woolf, through bringing together academic, creative and non-traditional responses to her work and life.”
The zine is looking for illustrations, articles, arguments, creative work, narratives, poems, questions, queries, collages, short essays, stories, case studies, fan fiction and more to fill its first issue, due to be published Dec. 1.
The zine will be hand printed and distributed to universities across the UK and America. Those who contribute will also get a free download link so they can print one at home.
We need illustrations, essays, fiction and thought provoking pieces! Get involved: woolfzine@gmail.com #callforsubmissions #callforartists
— Woolf Zine (@WoolfZine) November 15, 2016
Posted in 21st century Woolf, Woolf and periodicals, Woolf online | Leave a Comment »
