An Australian play that includes a character struggling with a thesis on Virginia Woolf (#12). An investment piece that includes a long Woolf quote (#21). A Broadway play that features two Bloomsbury artists and their bedroom politics (#23). A new translation of Woolf short stories (#22). And instructions on how to date Virginia (#56). All that and more are included in the Woolf sightings that follow.

1. A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word, BBC News
   The modernist writer Virginia Woolf called letter writing “the human art, which owes its origins in the love of friends”. In our frenetic world of electronic communication, we must remember to write with thought and consideration, says historian Lisa …
2. The Weekly Yiderati: Virginia Woolf’s Rebbe, The Maus Legacy, Tony Judt, And …, Jewcy.com (blog)
   A Rabbi in the world of the famous Bloomsbury Group? Apparently so. Check out his story here. Recently, Art Spiegelman of Maus fame, published a new book entitled MetaMaus. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a book …
3. Stuart Kelly: Internet start of new chapter for old classics, Scotsman (blog)
   On 1 January this year, the works of the two most significant modern novelists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, left copyright and entered the public domain. It is the second time in my lifetime this has happened. Back in 1992, when I was still a …
4. Spring arts season offers variety of unique collaborations, Brandeis University
   From a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s stories to Afghan and Indian music residencies; a modern dance and sculpture collaboration to a celebration of the Rose Art Museum, the spring arts season features a variety of offerings to entertain and …
5. The Passionate Reader: February 3, 2012, Women’s Wear Daily (blog)
   Then there’s the fact that he was devastatingly good-looking, which can lead people to underestimate men as well as women; even Virginia Woolf bragged of skinny-dipping with him! However, Brooke never made it to the front lines — he died of sepsis at …
6. Robin Lane Fox talks about the National Trust’s success as a popular …, Financial Times
   They come to pay their respects to the garden in which Vita once made love with the novelist Virginia Woolf. Now the garden opens even earlier in March while the beds are still bare earth, “wet mud” in Jenkins’s view of them.
7. Annie Leibovitz’s Personless Photography At The Smithsonian (PHOTOS, VIDEO), Huffington Post
   She captured Sigmund Freud’s couch, Emily Dickinson’s dress and the water where Virginia Woolf drowned herself. She saw Charles Darwin’s specimen collection and Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. Her subjects ranged from the universally symbolic to the vastly …
8. Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage, Art Newspaper
   … including artists and photographers such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Smithson and Ansel Adams, and the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Annie Oakley , and a few overseas detours to explore the homes of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in England.
9. Annie Leibovitz opens new art show at Smithsonian, CBS News
   As a nod to Sontag, Leibovitz visited the home of Virginia Woolf, one of her partner’s favorite writers, where she was happy to learn such a brilliant person could have such a messy studio, she said. Andy Grundberg, guest curator for the show and a …
10. Personal Photographs by Annie Leibovitz, Without the Celebrities, Flavorwire
    Leibovitz would go to Virginia Woolf’s house, her late partner Susan Sontag’s favorite. She would see Freud’s storied couch. She would find Emily Dickinson’s last surviving dress, Georgia O’Keeffe’s pastels, and the television Elvis shot a bullet …
11. Exhibiting a photographic ‘Pilgrimage’, GW Hatchet (subscription)
    The stained table used by writer Virginia Woolf is the subject of one piece featured in ‘Pilgrimage.’ Over time the project, which now makes up the moving exhibit “Pilgrimage,” transformed into a collection featuring the relics of notable subjects, …
12. Clever, moving tale of intersecting lives, Sydney Morning Herald
    Said notebook belongs to Deb (Erica Lovell), an unhappy grad student whose thesis on Virginia Woolf hangs on her getting it back. Sensing a “New York moment” in the making, Warren suggests they meet up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of a …
13. Heloise and Abelard at Harvard, Harvard Magazine
    She had never written a libretto before, but her experience studying and writing about feminism, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce prepared her for the work. Austin built off her completed libretto, completing the opera about a year before the January …
14. How can you mend a broken heart?, Khaleej Times
    Virginia Woolf  There is no darkness without light, no knowing good without knowing bad, and love and loss are two sides of the same coin. Yet platitudes seem useless when you’re suffering from a broken heart. Losing someone you love can make you feel …
15. Madonna’s ‘WE’ With Andrea Riseborough and Abbie Cornish, New York Times
    In both that book and its film adaptation, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” serves as the pivot for three women (Woolf included) from three eras whose lives, over the course of a day, unfold in something like transcendent synchronicity.
16. Ostracism: Why It Produces Unique Voices That Can’t Be Copied, Huffington Post (blog)
    Virginia Woolf’s ongoing battle with depression, as well as the death of her mother and father, provided piercing narratives born of her view of the world through a lens of gloom and desperation to which many readers could relate.
17. ‘I was a proper nerd’, Irish Times
    I was also reading a lot of poetry by strong women like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who also had very serious subjects. I was always much older than my age.” But the songs were good and the talent was there. By the time Sandé was 16, …
18. ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ at Folger Library, Washington Post
    Virginia Woolf didn’t get a lot wrong when it came to women’s issues, but one of her most famous observations — that a fictional sister of William Shakespeare who longed to write would have been doomed to failure — was actually selling women of the …
19. Blimey, Bill Gross has been on the Virginia Woolf…, FT Alphaville (blog)
    I don’t remember much of this life, and like Virginia Woolf, nothing of the herebefore. How then, could I expect to know of the hereafter? I know at least that we all exist at and of the moment and that we make up those moments as we go along.
20. Times Food and Nightlife Guide Awards 2012, Times of India
    British novelist Virginia Woolf famously said, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” If you think of it, food wields quite some power and so, deserves recognition, too. And Tuesday night brought moments of fame for …
21. Bill Gross: Free Money Ain’t Really Free, Wall Street Journal (blog)
    But with this post we’re going to focus on some genuinely meaty thoughts from Gross in this month’s investment outlook (and frankly skip the first 400 words of his missive and depressing quote from Virginia Woolf about death.) We noted yesterday that …
22. Literary Translator Says Virginia Woolf Not Just Another Icon, STA – Slovenska Tiskovna Agencija (subscription)
    Ljubljana, 1 February (STA) – Tina Mahkota, one of the three translators of “The Mark on the Wall – Collection of Short Stories by Virginia Woolf” says in an interview with the STA that the project of translating one of the key modernist literary …
23. ETERNAL EQUINOX to Receive NY Premiere at 59E59 Theaters, Broadway World
    She became a student in UCLA’s writing program and began work on a novel about the Bloomsbury Group, a topic that attracted her interest many years before when she wrote her thesis on Virginia Woolf. After several trips to Charleston in West Sussex, …
24. Where Have All the Old People Gone?, Huffington Post (blog)
    They were my tie to my roots — on one side the crusty, frugal New Englanders, and on the other, the English-Scottish, between-the-wars generation of CS Lewis, Ralph Vaugh Williams, Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill. Dickens characters joined us at …
25. Notes and queries: What is the best last line of a novel?, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. “A couple giggled in a dark doorway. Someone started a gramophone in the middle of a record, explosively.” – PH Newby, Agents and Witnesses. Charles Boardman, Nottingham “So we beat on, boats against the current, …
26. REVIEW: Ordinary Days | Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney, Crikey (blog)
    Erica Lovell is Deb, struggling with her thesis on Virginia Woolf, bound together in a notebook, thanks to the fragile, last-legs status of her notebook computer. She’s feisty and highly-strung, traits exacerbated by the loss of her work.
27. Professor Donna, Mail Tribune
    She wrote scholarly books on Richard Hugo, Iris Murdoch, and John Synge, loved the poetry of William Yeats, and was passionate about modernist women writers, especially Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, both of whom she was fond of quoting at grand …
28. Time to update copyright law?, CNN
    This year’s class is particularly strong, as the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are now free of copyright protection. If you ever wanted to stage a puppet show of Joyce’s masterpiece “Ulysses” or set Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to music, …
29. Why aren’t there more women artists?, San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
    The obvious answer is that so many women lack access to money and power as Virginia Woolf told us years ago. In order to create, you need a room of your own. I read another great theory in a book I love called Goddesses in Every Woman.
30. Rodin’s Drawings, Huffington Post
    (Interestingly, Virginia Woolf understood this problem, perhaps because of her close friendship with the critic Roger Fry, who was also a painter. Thus in To the Lighthouse, Woolf wrote of the experimental painter Lily Briscoe that “She could see it …
31. Editorial: Roseburg Senior Center Expansion can contribute to enriched lives, NRToday.com
    Space in which to maneuver and grow seems like a reasonable request. In the days when the office was largely a male preserve, Virginia Woolf wrote of the need for women to have rooms of their own in which to produce satisfying wo…
32. College Major and Family Mental Illness, New York Times (blog)
    And the findings resonate with high-profile examples of brilliant artists who suffered from mental illness (Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain, Virginia Woolf, Edvard Munch, etc.). Prior studies have also supported the link between autism and familial …
33. How to Get High on Soil, The Atlantic
    Outside, the sky glimmers a dim, silver-gray — it’s filled with clouds that Virginia Woolf would have described as “implacable.” I have always been sensitive to such days. The dishwater light trickles through the window and infects me with malaise.
34. The Cantabrigians who turned down honours, Varsity Online
    Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf, the notable publisher and political theorist of Trinity College, said no to the offer of becoming a Companion of Honour. Martin Rosenbaum, who obtained the release of the list on behalf of the BBC, said that “for …
35. Having Trouble Getting Yourself to Write? 9 Tips, Huffington Post
    Virginia Woolf noted in her diary: “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.”
36. 10 Great Movies about “Women Finding Themselves”, Huffington Post
    Here, she plays a man and a woman who live forever, based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. Worth reading the book and watching the movie, but there is one scene in which she is running in the wet English grass in a black gown and, I think, …
37. John Walsh: Stand by your four-posters, this soap could get steamier, The Independent
    We’re promised a lesbian love affair between “straight-talking spinster” Dr Blanche Mottershead (Alex Kingston) and Lady Portia (Emilia Fox), a nod to the late-1930s romantic convergence of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.
38. From the Vaults: Albert and Orlando: Women wear the pants in “Albert Nobbs …, Austin Chronicle (blog)
    The film is Sally Potter’s free adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel in which the hero reincarnates over four centuries into the bodies of various women and men, noble-born and otherwise. Swinton wears her Elizabethan pantaloons with swagger in …
39. Ian McMillan: Cinematic memories of an evening of laughter, Yorkshire Post
    Maybe we should have left it at that, and I blame Andrew Swift for the debacle that happened in Dick’s next English lecture, the one on Virginia Woolf. It was Swifty’s idea that somebody should turn off the lights in the lecture theatre and then a lad …
40. Newnan Community Theatre Company Resource for all things theatrical, Newnan Times-Herald
    You can see the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals there as well as Virginia Woolf’s diary and walking stick.” Look for information in the upcoming months about a New York trip in January 2013. A more immediate way to get involved is to come to …
41. The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century, Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
    Virginia Woolf used a different spatial image to make a similar point in her book Three Guineas, when she talked about the importance of cultivating taste and the knowledge of the arts and literature and music. She argues that people who are so caught …
42. Working from home, The Hindu
    Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘A room of one’s own’, stressed on the need for women to have their own space to explore their writing skills. Though she was referring to women, the notion that one can flourish in an independent environment is applicable …
43. Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein, New York Times
    Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer “Richard III” to “Richard II,” or “Mrs. Dalloway” to “Orlando.” They feel at liberty to discriminate. Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; …
44. KUNC Entertainment Report, KUNC
    Bas Bleu Theatre opens If We Are Women, An intergenerational “conversation” proving, as Virginia Woolf said, “If we are women, we think back through our mothers.” Feb 5th. The show runs the 5th& 6thin 7:30 performances and a Feb 11 – 2:30pm matinee.
45. The elite achievers who turned down an honour, Cambridge News
    The publisher and political theorist Leonard Woolf, of Trinity Colllege, husband of the writer Virginia Woolf, was another Cambridge man to refuse the official glory. He said no to the offer of being made a Companion of Honour in 1966, …
46. ‘I prefer being a journalist’, Daily Sun
    I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes. Can you name some of your early …
47. Bloomsbury launches high-flying Circus, The Bookseller
    Meanwhile, New Zealand writer Emily Perkins’ The Forrests is “reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves”, telling of a woman’s life from birth to death “written in exquisite prose”. Pringle said she had “the very highest hopes” for the novel, …
48. Five Books I’d Read, Washington City Paper (blog)
    This depressing-sounding novel is about a woman with a fondness for thrift store-shopping has been compared to Virginia Woolf, which is either a plus or a red flag depending on your opinion of To the Lighthouse. My father, for example, talks about To …
49. Virginia Woolf celebrated in Westport read-athon, Westport-News
    Fast is the impetus behind the celebration of one such trailblazer — English writer, literary critic and feminist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose life was complicated by mental illness and the burden of competing in a patriarchal society that put …
50. Why the Romantics were wrong, Varsity Online
    Even if you know nothing else about Virginia Woolf, you’ve probably heard her most famous maxim: that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. Feminist concerns aside, this notorious statement seems to …
51. Curtain Call: Supremes Bow to Congressional Authority on Copyright Terms, JD Supra (press release)
    … dominant international copyright scheme under the Berne Convention but, in so doing, removed a bulk of works by foreign authors from the public domain (eg, certain symphonies by Shostakovich, books by Virginia Woolf, or artwork by Pablo Picasso).
52. Is it curbing your freedom?, Deccan Herald
    Sanya Hashmi, a student of English Honours, says, “Probably, they should rename both the place ‘Virginia’ and the writer ‘Virginia Woolf‘ as both won’t show up any results on the internet after this.” She adds that the government should consider …
53. The timeless power of the Bard, Spiked
    Virginia Woolf once wrote that ‘fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly… to life at all four corners’, and Fiennes reinterprets his source material without sacrificing the ethereal uniqueness of the text. Shakespeare’s plays, as Woolf …
54. Up and away: Nicole Kidman swaps her straight locks for a bouffant hairstyle, Daily Mail
    The actress – who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours, said recently: ‘It was kind of a necessity in the journey of my career to find these women and tell their stories. ‘I love these women that defy the odds and …
55. Tilda Swinton is ‘Kevin’s’ troubled mom, Newsday
    … Special to Newsday Scotland’s Tilda Swinton is known for compelling performances in unusual works, including: ORLANDO (1992) — Played the ageless, androgynous title role in this Sally Potter film based on the Virginia Woolf novel.
56. How to date Virginia Woolf, Christian Science Monitor
    Your grad school professor fixes you up with Virginia Woolf on a blind date. “Report back to me with a two-page paper,” he tells you. The date does not go well. You want to quit after pre-dinner appetizers, but she insists on a five-course dinner.
57. BBC Trust chairman’s speech to the Oxford Media Convention – full text, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf might have thought this sort of popular success a little too, well, middlebrow, a bit (to quote her) ‘betwixt and between’. But year by year the queues grow. When the founders of the Third Programme set out to create something …
58. Ybor exhibit focuses on famous suicides, Tbo.com
    “Like Virginia Woolf; we don’t have a portrait of her in color, so her portrait is in black and white.” All the actors resemble to some extent the person they are portraying. Their interpretation of that pre-suicidal moment was gleaned through study of …
59. EDUCATION MATTERS: Reading Through The New Year, And Beyond (Part 2), Modern Ghana
    Virginia Woolf, in the chapter, “How Should One Read a Book?” (from “The Common Reader”) suggests that “Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a [writer] is doing [is] to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and …
60. Who Runs the Literary World? These Girls!, Autostraddle
    I’m so surprised that Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Eileen Myles weren’t on this list. Radclyffe Hall, though I’m not sure if Radclyffe Hall was a trans man (zie thought all lesbians were either men trapped in women’s bodies like hirself or women …
61. Meet college student/blogger Zan Strumfeld, Albany Times Union (blog)
    This semester Disgrace by JM Coetzee and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf stood out the most. Coetzee depicts humans at their most vulnerable stages and his writing style is just so raw and honest. Woolf blew me away with her use of free indirect …
62. Supreme Court decision on copyright may not injure major opera companies …, St. Louis Beacon
    In addition to Russian composers such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky, the law also applied to paintings by Pablo Picasso, movies by Alfred Hitchcock and books by authors such as CS Lewis and Virginia Woolf. The case had been brought by …