Are you a member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain? If so, join an online reading of “Bloomsbury in Love.” If not, consider joining so you can participate in this free member-only online event in celebration of Valentine’s Day.
Who: The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain What: “Bloomsbury in Love,” an evening of readings by members from works by Virginia Woolf and her friends. When: Wednesday 19 February 2025, 5:30 p.m. GMT or 12:30 p.m. EST How: Via Zoom. If you are a society member you should have received the Zoom login details via email. If not, you can join here.
Want to read your favorite passage?
The society is looking for people who would like to read out a favorite passage on the topic of love (in its many forms) from a Bloomsbury novel, diary, letter, essay, or other piece of writing. All you need to do is introduce the piece, with a brief word about its context, and then read it out to other members. Readings should be four or five minutes long, including your introduction.
If you would like to do a reading, please email: onlinevwsgb@gmail.com by Wednesday 12 February, with details of what you would like to read. If it is a diary entry or letter, please include the date; if a section from a longer piece of writing, please include the first and last lines.
If you have ever wanted to review details of the changes Virginia Woolf made in the various editions of Mrs. Dalloway, they are now available for free online, thanks to the efforts of Edward Mendelson of New York’s Columbia University.
On his webpage, “Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway: Texts and Scanned Images,” Mendelson provides links to searchable scanned PDF images of four early printings of Mrs. Dalloway and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions.
The four early printings include:
Two editions of Woolf’s novel that were published on the same day, May 14, 1925 — the British edition by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, with a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell and the American edition by Harcourt, Brace & Company, with the same Vanessa Bell just jacket;
the second impression of the British edition, published by the Hogarth Press in September 1925;
the third impression of the British edition (the “Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf”), published by the Hogarth Press in September 1929 and reprinted without change in 1933; and
the Introduction to the Modern Library reprint of the American edition, dated June 1928.
Mendelson scanned the four textually-significant editions of Mrs. Dalloway listed above and posted the scans, together with texts extracted from the scans, on his site. Also on the site is a PDF that compares the texts of the first American and first British editions. Mendelson claims it is “easy to see the differences within the text, rather than by consulting a table of variants.”
The page also includes notes on Virginia Woolf’s revisions in the later Hogarth printings, and some notes on the texts of current editions.
Mendelson notes that “the scans are of less than ideal quality” because he is a first-time book scanner using lower quality scanning equipment and the battered and damaged copies of the early editions that he found affordable.
It is Virginia Woolf’s 143rd birthday. But I am not the only one thinking of her today. Here are a few photos and posts being shared by others online in honor of her Jan. 25, 1882, birthday.
Annual Birthday Lecture
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain hosts an annual lecture in honor of Woolf’s birthday. This year’s, held today, featured Eleanor McNees speaking on “Double Vision: Woolf’s Reading of Hardy and Meredith Through Leslie Stephen’s Eyes.”
Eleanor McNees is pictured cutting Virginia’s birthday cake, decorated with a photo of a young Virginia with her father, Leslie Stephen, at the Annual Birthday Lecture sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. McNees’s topic was “Double Vision: Woolf’s Reading of Hardy and Meredith Through Leslie Stephen’s Eyes.”
Artist pamphlet on Virginia Woolf in the city
Artist Louisa Albani’s new beautifully illustrated pamphlet, “Virginia Woolf in the City: Oxford Street Tide,” became available today, in honor of Woolf’s birthday.
More Facebook posts noting Woolf’s birthday
French magazine cover features Woolf
This magazine cover photo was posted on Facebook today in honor of Woolf’s birthday. It is not clear when the issue was published, but the cover story features Woolf.
It has been a cold January, and the last few days have plunged us into a deep freeze in Ohio, where I live. So there is no better time to think about summer and to begin making plans to attend Literature Cambridge’s Virginia Woolf Summer Course 2025 with its theme of “Virginia Woolf: Writing Life.”
Register for this summer’s Literature Cambridge course on Virginia Woolf: Writing Life, either live online or in person in Cambridge.
The course will run twice — live online first, then in person in Cambridge, England, later. Here are the details from Trudi Tate of Lit Cambridge.
About the course
How does one write a life — a fictional life or a real life? The 2025 summer course will look at the real and imaginary lives in five of Woolf’s most brilliant novels.
Literature Cambridge summer students at a lecture.
We will explore how Woolf writes the lives of her great fictional characters: Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, Mrs. Ramsay, the six characters in The Waves (1931). We will study how she uses, and challenges, the traditions of biography in Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933). We will think about Woolf’s own life as a writer, and what that meant. And we will do a reading of her only play, Freshwater, which takes a comical look at the lives of her Victorian forebears.
The course is based on five books which we will study in close detail, one book per day. Each day, there is a lecture and a supervision (tutorial), plus talks and discussions. In Cambridge there are also visits to colleges, two communal dinners, and more.
Lectures
• Trudi Tate, Life and Death in Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Ellie Mitchell, To the Lighthouse (1927): Writing from Life, Writing to Life
• Karina Jakubowicz, The Life of Orlando (1928)
• Claire Davison, The Ripple of Life in The Waves (1931)
• Alison Hennegan, Writing Flush (1933)
The news is out on both sides of the pond. The Times Literary Supplement and NPR report that two poems Virginia Woolf wrote for her niece and nephew were discovered in a folder at a university library in Texas.
Sophia Oliver, a lecturer of modernism at the University of Liverpool, found the poems at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive library at the University of Texas at Austin, while doing research on Gertrude Stein. Oliver went on to poke about in the Woolf files and spotted the poems at the back of a folder of letters to her niece, Angelica Bell.
The poem for Bell is titled “Angelica” and the piece for her nephew, Quentin Bell, is titled “Hiccoughs.” Oliver estimates that both were written after 1927.
Below are photographs of the TLS article that Jane Goldman posted to Facebook. She is a poet and reader in A vant-garde poetics and creative writing at the University of Glasgow. Thank you, Jane!
