The project recreates personal libraries held by writers, philosophers, politicians, etc. who have passed away. If possible, it includes a full catalogue of their books, including all bibliographic details to allow for easy searches and a quick book comparison between the members’ accounts.
Colm Guerin recently completed the Woolfs’ library based on the records held by the Washington State University and the Harry Ransom Center. Both facilities obtained their collections after Leonard’s death with the purchase of books from Trekkie Parsons and Cecil Woolf.
Each entry includes the details of any inscription, signature, or dedication made to or from the Woolfs, including the details for Sir Leslie Stephen’s books, which were obtained by Virginia after his death. Guerin said that to the best of his knowledge, it is now the most complete resource for searching the Woolfs’ substantial collection.
Guerin plans to make additions to the account, including a tagging system, reviews of publications written by Leonard and Virginia, and additional uploads of dust jackets published by the Hogarth Press.
A permanent link to this resource is included in the right sidebar. It is titled “Woolf Library” and is located under the heading “Woolf Resources.”
Leslie Stephen and his brother will be the topic at the next English Association’s series of Fellows’ events at Wolfson College, Oxford, on Saturday, June 22, at 2 p.m. Hermione Lee will speak on “Brotherly Biography.”
Beginning with Leslie Stephen’s life of his brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, the talk will explore the relationship between autobiography and biography when siblings write each others’ life stories.
Lee’s lecture will be followed by High Tea in the College Buttery.
Tickets, which must be purchased in advance, include admission plus High Tea. Prices range from £15 to £20.
Her book, The Ministry of Thin: How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out of Control, waspublished June 3. She is also the author of An Apple A Day: A Memoir of Love and Recovery From Anorexia. Her eponymous column is published by The Times.
Emma wrote about her Great Aunt Virginia in a May 25 piece in The Mail in which she shares her father’s reminiscences about Virginia, along with quotes from letters, diaries and biographical material regarding her aunt’s illnesses and eating habits.
Why Doesn’t Mrs. Dalloway Get a Day of Her Own?, Slate Magazine
This year, a handful of literary folk in London celebrated another modernist masterpiece, Virginia Woolf’s slender Mrs. Dalloway—which also takes place on a single day in June—by taking a walk around London. They walked “in the spirit of Bloomsday …
10 things we learned from the London 2014 menswear collections,The Guardian
Meadham Kirchhoff’s collection, inspired in part by Virginia Woolf’s gender-blending novel Orlando, had twisted cute accessories – rubber carrier bags covered with brightly coloured felt animals – that will definitely have female fans too. Sharing a …
Guess who’s coming to dinner, South China Morning Post In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf devotes the entire book to describing a house party. In the 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the taboo subject of interracial marriage is dealt with at one of Hollywood’s most memorable suppers. Dinner parties …
Virginia Woolf: The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, The Guardian
In late 1923, Virginia Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway. She had got to the “mad scene” in Regent’s Park; it was intense and disturbing work. But there were all sorts of other things going on in her life, and here is one of them: she was collaborating …
Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell’s Charleston Bulletin supplements – in pictures, The Guardian
When the 13-year-old Quentin Bell asked his aunt, Virginia Woolf, to contribute to a magazine he was putting together for his family it was the beginning of a collaboration which lasted for five years. Take a look at some of the highlights from the …
Couture presentsher Senior Novel, Morning Sentinel
These presentations are the culmination of intensive research and writing on a major English-language novel and are required of all senior English majors in order to satisfy degree requirements. Couture passed her presentation on Virginia Woolf’s
Still a long way to go to full equality, This is Nottingham But, as novelist Virginia Woolf told female undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, having the vote was not enough. . To achieve equality, women needed both financial independence and “space”. This underlines the continuing tension hindering …
Room of his own: Man caves thrive San Jose Mercury News
Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf argued that a woman needed a room of her own. What would she say now that it’s men who are demanding more than a workbench in the corner of a cluttered garage? “Men are actively pursuing retreat spaces in their …
Rare TS Eliot book under hammer Littlehampton Gazette
The book was published by the Hogarth Press, a private press founded by Eliot’s friends Leonard andVirginia Woolf, with the type thought to be hand-set by Virginia. It is an edition of about 460 copies. It was donated to Oxfam by Colin Cohen who was …
‘I will not recommend this book to anyone, not even my enemies’: The Internet … New York Daily News (blog)
Using Amazon and Goodreads as its sources, “Love Reading, Hate Books” aggregates one-star reviews of everyone from Virginia Woolf (“I really didn’t care if they made it to the lighthouse or not”) to Beowulf (“Did the ideas of holes in the plot never …
Karen Russell: All fiction is autobiographical,Salon
Those are the kinds of authors that Karen Russell admires (she cites Flannery O’Connor and Virginia Woolf among them), and it’s the kind of writer she happens to be. Russell has been hailed for her “original voice” ever since she published her first …
Beat Generation brought to life in new show, Kent News
Their last production was Because Of The Moon, a play about Virginia Woolf. The play focuses on the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, whose lifestyles and work was based on drugs, sex …
Odd Type Writers, Huffington Post
As a young writer Virginia Woolf preferred to stand while she wrote. Her desk was three and a half feet tall. Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew, concluded that the habit was spurred by sibling rivalry. Woolf’s sister Vanessa was an artist who painted at an …
A tale of ordinary madness, The Independent
My early heroines had been Sylvia Plath and her Bell Jar, Virginia Woolf before The Hours, andWinona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted. Their breakdowns were a rite of passage for the posh, liberal and bohemian. These were my poster-girls (and they were …
Soldier’s Home, Wall Street Journal
Post-traumatic stress disorder, what was once known as shell shock or battle fatigue, has been memorably depicted in fiction—from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to William Wharton’s “Birdy” to Philip Caputo’s “Indian Country.” Yet because these …
Room to write, World Magazine Virginia Woolf insisted that in order for a woman to write she needed money and a room of her own. So upon graduating from college, I set out to make a room of my own to write in. I chose an available space in the top of the family shed that had …
What We’re Reading, New York Times (blog)
The Guardian: Virginia Woolf’s great-niece, a recovered anorexic, suggests that her aunt also had from the disease. This adds yet another layer of poignancy and complexity to a woman who once wrote, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one …
Book News: Amazon’s Bubbles, Semicolon Rap, New Yorker (blog) Virginia Woolf’s great-niece says that she believes her great-aunt suffered from anorexia. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Leo Braudy on the new documentary “Plimpton! Starring George Plimptonas Himself” and Plimpton’s “tantalizing blend of …
Virginia Woolf was anorexic, claims great niece, The Guardian Virginia Woolf‘s great niece has suggested that her great aunt suffered from anorexia nervosa. Emma Woolf, who has written a memoir of her own recovery from the eating disorder, says she experienced a “painful moment of recognition” when she saw a …
Did great-aunt Virginia Woolf have anorexia? Her great niece, a former …, Daily Mail
However, it was during Virginia’s third breakdown in 1913, aged 31, less than a year after her marriage to the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf, that signs of anorexia become apparent: ‘The most difficult and distressing problem was to get Virginia…
iHeart Locket Digitally Protects Your Girls’ Diary, Techlicious (blog)
From Virginia Woolf to DJ Tanner, keeping a diary has long been a rite of passage for girls. Now, a company named DanoToys is trying to bring the diary into the 21st century with the iHeart Locket, a Bluetooth-powered necklace that unlocks a journaling …
Parallels and paradoxes in Israeli artist’s one-woman group show, Haaretz
In this part it is possible to see some of her most beautiful and important works, among them “The Circle by Virginia” (1975-1976), which refers to Virginia Woolf and appears in two versions (two-dimensional and three-dimensional), and the work …
Review: Kate Tempest at Lyric 2013, ForgeToday
Tempest Kate Tempest is an act who truly encompasses what Lyric is all about; alternative and thoroughly modern. Tempest cites her key influences as including Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Wu-Tang Clan. A cacophony of literary references mixed with …
Eat That, Galanos, Drift | Perspective(s) in surfing
Using Ernest Hemingway’s reflective line as a title and the words of Virginia Woolf and local surf pro Alan Stokes in voice over ‘EAT THAT, GALANOS’ peeks at man’s nocturnal relationship with the ocean and as surfing as an inconsequential by-product of …
The Trials Of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami – review, The Guardian
Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness – a gloomy account of the struggles of a “congenital invert” that even sympathetic writers such as Virginia Woolf struggled to defend artistically – was put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act in 1928 …
Krista: Making a case for the classics, Cincinnati.com
Contemporary romance writer Debbie Macomber may fill two shelves while literary giant Virginia Woolfis, alas, still searching for some room of her own. Now, no one loves Dostoyevsky more than a library, and if you request a classic, it will be sent to …
The Woman Upstairs, By Claire Messud, The Independent
Nora finds inspiration in sharing a studio with her and begins working on a series of miniature rooms of iconic women artists on the edge – Emily Dickinson visited by “the angelic muse, her beloved death”,Virginia Woolf at Rodmell writing her suicide …
Pierrot Lunair, Huffington Post
Wayne’s Pierrot Lunaire assumes that the New York School that it constantly refers to is the center of everyone’s world: a world in which Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf interact with Mae West, Patty Duke and Diana Vreeland through the lens of a newly …
Jezebelcalls outVice‘s Women in Fiction issue for its distasteful fashion spread that features models reenacting the suicides of famous female writers.
In the photos, the authors — including Virginia Woolf — are styled and posed to depict the times of their deaths. The title of the spread is “Last Words.”
The online Vice article was to appear in this month’s fiction issue of the popular news and culture magazine, which is based in the US. But after an outcry from commentators and mental health groups, the company took the feature offline late yesterday afternoon and issued an apology, according to today’s Independent article.
Perfect storm of criticism
Other writers and bloggers responded disapprovingly as well. And the heavies weighed in with a full storm of criticism:
In a related bit, ABC News reported on a class that analyzed some of history’s most famous last words, including those of Adolph Hitler, Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain.
The talk among academics
Finally, here are quotes from the discussion regarding the offending fashion spread and the 2002 film The Hours from the VWoolf Listserv:
“I’m just wondering of those who oppose this, are you equally offended by the portrayal of the same event in The Hours?”
“Apart from VW, the characters in The Hours were fictional, and VW’s death was decades ago, whereas Iris Chang’s family and loved ones probably are still very much processing their grief over her suicide. The image of her was breathtakingly insensitive and offensive to me for that reason.”
“It seems to me that there is a perhaps slight but nonetheless significant difference between the depiction of suicide in *The Hours* (film) and this project insofar as* The Hours *attempted to portray Woolf’s life and (perhaps to a lesser extent) her battle with mental issues before portraying her suicide whereas the Vice Magazine project shows readers only the moment of suicide itself. Although perhaps the Vice spread also contained some information about the authors and their lives? I would argue that neither work did a very good job of portraying mental illness (particularly not when it came to Woolf herself). Unless there was a significant written component to the Vice piece that I’m not aware of, it seems to me that the Vice Magazine project uses suicide as a jumping-off point for an exploration of aesthetics (if I were to be generous) or (if I were to be less generous) as a point of provocation rather than exploring the deep and complex health issues that led these authors to suicide.”
“There is no comparison. The VICE spread is using suicide to sell fashion and in doing so it glamorizes and aestheticizes female bodies in pain. It also takes our attention far away from the amazing work all of these women accomplished. You would think that in an issue announcing itself as covering Women’s Fiction that the work would be their concern. Whatever you want to say about Michael Cunningham and/or the film version of his novel The Hours, he isn’t guilty of promoting suicide to sell shoes and vintage attire!”
This video offers a fascinating inside look at Charleston Farmhouse, also known as “Bloomsbury in the Country.”
It includes an interview with Virginia Nicholson — who calls the home “nicely messy” — and offers lovely views of the gardens and the countryside.
Nicholson is the author of Millions Like Us, Singled Out and Among the Bohemians and is the daughter of Virginia Woolf’s nephew and biographer Quentin Bell.
