Imagine, if you will, a Barbie doll made to represent Virginia Woolf. Well, Mattel did more than imagine it. Mattel was ready to produce one. Luckily, Woolf’s estate objected.
“We all agreed, over our dead bodies,” said Woolf’s great niece, Virginia Nicholson, who spoke at the recent Cheltenham literature festival, according to The Guardian.
The doll was prim, dressed in Victorian garb, with hair in a bun and a tiny copy of Mrs. Dalloway in her hand.
One might think that the Virginia Woolf Barbie would have been among good company. Mattel has produced and sold commemorative Barbies of Maya Angelou, Billie Jean King, Helen Keller, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Jane Goodall and Queen Camilla. And just last week, Mattel announced the first Diwali Barbie.
This is not the first time Virginia Woolf has been connected to Barbie. When Greta Gerwig’s film named after the iconic doll came out in 2023, I wrote a post detailing what I saw as “The connections between Barbie and Virginia Woolf” — from Gerwig herself to NPR.
Below is information from their Facebook post of Sept. 29.
Although recently known as the Dowager Countess, Violet Crawley, in the TV series “Downton Abbey” (2000–15), Smith played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s play “Virginia” in 1981. She won her third Evening Standard Theatre Award for her performance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, beginning January 29, 1981.
In that same year the play script was published under the Hogarth Press imprint, with photographs of Maggie Smith and Virginia Woolf on the cover.You can see pictures from the book and the programme below.
July 4 pre-conference events at King’s College include a visit to the King’s Archives and a panel discussion on ‘Virginia Woolf: Creative Engagements’ with contemporary writers and artists speaking about their multi-media engagements with Woolf’s writing. The conference itself runs July 5-8 and will be held at the University of Sussex.
Co-organisers are Helen Tyson (Sussex), Clara Jones (King’s) and Anna Snaith (King’s).
We are delighted to bring the Annual Virginia Woolf Conference back to the UK and to two sites – King’s College London and the University of Sussex – with such strong Woolfian connections. – Helen, Clara and Anna
Overview
Virginia Woolf practised a politics of dissent. From her pacifism, deeply held through two World Wars, to her feminism, Woolf continually wrote back to power. She urged transgression and trespass and ‘thinking against the current’, as she wrote in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid‘).
Dissent takes many forms in her oeuvre from the overt politics of her major essays to her novelistic defamiliarizing of patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist society. Narratologically, too, her writing swerves and undercuts: its experimentation a form of dissident aesthetics.
The organisers of the 34th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference invite paper, panel, workshop and exhibitions proposals that engage with the theme of ‘Woolf and Dissidence’. They seek to foster conversations about the nature and contexts of Woolf’s
Monk’s House sitting room
dissidence or that of her predecessors, contemporaries and inheritors. What are the limitations of her politics? In what ways did she conform?
In the centenary year of the publication of Mrs Dalloway it is fitting that the 34th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference returns to the UK and to two locations with strong Woolfian connections: King’s College London, where Woolf studied as a teenager, and to Sussex, home to Monk’s House and Charleston.
The conference theme also honours the history of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, founded by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, at the University of Sussex. The Centre’s pioneering work in sexuality and queer studies provides a fitting context for the Woolf conference.
Possible topics
Possible topics could include exploration of Woolf, her contemporaries and the following:
political, sexual, gender dissidence: then and now
organisational, institutional or networks of dissent
aesthetic or artistic dissent
religious dissent
radical, activist or mainstream publishing
revolution and activism (in relation to race, gender, sexuality, ecology)
convention, orthodoxy or conformity (political, social, literary, aesthetic)
dissident readings of Woolf
This list is only a starting point, and organizers encourage all ideas and approaches including transdisciplinary, transhistorical and collaborative work.
Who can submit and possible formats
Organizers welcome submissions from academics, readers, students of Woolf and for:
individual papers (1500-characters abstract)
panels or roundtables (3000-characters abstract)
interactive workshops (3000-characters abstract)
exhibits or posters (including digital and material) (3000-characters abstract)
a non-traditional (dissident?) form of presentation (3000-characters abstract)
How to apply
Please apply via the submission form on the conference website at:. https://woolf2025uk/cfp/Deadline: 29 November 2024.
Questions?
Please direct queries to: virginiawoolf2025@gmail.com
Stairway in the Virginia Woolf Building at King’s College, London. In 2017, a Virginia Woolf exhibit was at the top of the stairs, complete with a life-sized wax statue of Woolf. Read more.
The London-based group the Oslo Twins have a new single titled “Sally” that is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
The 3-minute song, produced by band members Claudia Vulliamy and Eric Davies, has been described as “pulsating.” Named the “Record of the Day” on Sept. 2, it was also described as “a gorgeous affair, touched with yearning and melancholia.”
Set during Clarissa Dalloway’s party, the song features Sally, Clarissa’s longtime friend, as they are reunited at her London party on a fine day in June.
Here’s how Vulliamy explains the creative process:
“It wasn’t easy fitting the words ‘Mrs Dalloway’ into the rhythm of a pop song….Sometimes when you’re drinking with people you’ve known for years, you get struck by an overwhelming awareness of the passage of time. Parties can feel like this, which is why I connected the lyrics to Mrs Dalloway, the titular character in Virginia Woolf’s novel.
“The central character organises a party full of people from her past and becomes wistful. Sally is the name of a character in the novel, an old friend – or old flame – of the protagonist, who reflects on when they were teenage girls with big ambitions.”
The Oslo Twins will perform “Sally” when they appear at The Waiting Room in London on Nov. 22.
Oh, Sally, you have read my mind. Some things we never have to say. – lyrics from “Sally” by the Oslo Twins
On Sept. 17, 1911, Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf enjoyed their first unchaperoned date together. On that occasion, they walked from Firle to Alfriston for tea.
A few days earlier, on Tuesday, Sept. 14, Virginia sent Leonard a postcard in advance of his visit. It read:
A fly will be at Lewes for the 11.6 on Saturday. Desmond MacCarthy and Marjorie Strachey are coming by some train, I think. Please bring no clothes.
The Alfriston bookshop, which was named one of the seven best browsable bookshops in the UK, is marking the occasion with a relaxed, low-key tea-time gathering at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17, at The Star Inn.
You’ll be able to order from The Star’ s afternoon menu, which offers tea, scones, and finger sandwiches, as well as cocktails and bubbly.
The afternoon will include a discussion of the life and works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, whose work changed the course of literature and politics.
Tea drinkers will be free to share their thoughts about the pair and their lives — from Leonard’s gardening to Virginia’s printing to his political writing to her novels.
Alfriston is a lovely village set in the foot of the East Sussex Downs. It is on the banks of the Cuckmere River and the sea, and the magnificent Seven Sisters chalk cliffs are within walking distance.
