Two digital resources on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group were recently made available online.
The entire volume of Issue 50 (2008) of the Journal of the Short Story in English, on Woolf’s short fiction, is now online
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, a rare book and manuscript dealer in New York City, recently published a digital catalog of Bloomsbury materials to its website. Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, and The Bloomsbury Group contains more than 150 first editions, association copies, letters and more. Other materials available from this source are:
Anyone who attended Woolf and the City had the opportunity to meet Ruth Gruber, the amazing journalist and photographer who met Virginia and Leonard Woolf back in the 1930s. Gruber was also ahead of her time when she wrote Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman. Scroll down to #22 to read about her milestone 100th birthday.
Ruth Gruber at Woolf and the City in 2009 wearing the commemorative conference t-shirt
After the side suits, think about trumps, Post-Tribune
Virginia Woolf, an English writer who is regarded as a leading modernist literary figure of the last century, said, “On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.” At the center of many bridge agonies sits an unobservant player …
Secretly Seeking Solitude: A Woman’s Need for Time Alone, Huffington Post (blog)
As Dr. Phil says, “Ya gotta name it to claim it,” and Virginia Woolf most certainly did. Her speeches that turned into the seminal and necessary essay A Room of One’s Own codified a woman’s need for time to herself. She brought the idea to the surface …
Thou shall not kill … except in this case, easttennessean.com (subscription) Virginia Woolf has a way with words. Over 70 years after her death, there remains an intense relevance in her work. One of Woolf’s best essays, entitled “Professions for Women,” references the heroine of a rather sexist narrative poem, The Angel in the …
The Truth Behind Tim Hudak’s Homophobic Flyers, DigitalJournal.com (press release)
The page cited in the PC flyer is a list of “Significant International” gay and lesbian individuals, including Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Virginia Woolf and Harvey Milk. PC Claim: “Reclaim Valentine’s Day and celebrate sexual diversity [with a] …
Something brewing beneath transphobic ads in Ontario, rabble.ca (blog)
As for cross-dressing, the… page cited in the PC flyer is a list of ‘Significant International’ gay and lesbian individuals, including Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Virginia Woolf and Harvey Milk.” The flyer (like McVety’s ad) is a litany of …
The Genius of Free Governments, Huffington Post (blog) … distributors that listed early films of Fellini and Hitchcock have had to delete them from their catalogs; bookstores that offered cheap editions of Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, HG Wells, and Virginia Woolf have pulled them from the shelves. …
The Sharpest Beach Bums You’ll Ever Meet, Brooklyn Rail
It’s not that Wark’s lack of a compelling narrative structure makes slogging through the book an occasionally arduous experience; writers like Virginia Woolf can dispense of narrative completely and still craft engrossing literature. …
PadGadget Weekly App Series – Apps for Outdoors Experience, PadGadget
This app includes such tales as “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf, “The Door in the Wall” by HG Wells and “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allen Poe. This app really offers a great collection of short stories that will keep everyone entertained on …
Johanna Skibsrud: The writer, the prize, the year after, Globe and Mail
Skibsrud names Virginia Woolf’s most challenging novel, The Waves, as a major source of inspiration for her own work, which likewise demands concentration from readers. “A lot of times people don’t want to pay that attention,” she said. “I don’t know. …
The Future of Feminism by Sylvia Walby, Bookslut
The Future of Feminism will not win any prose awards, and it does seem time for a reminder that Virginia Woolf penned analytic and polemic texts that were all the stronger for their style. Nonetheless, Walby avoids the opacity of most academic prose, …
The hipster rules, OK?, Times LIVE
They claim to like writers with loaded names such as Virginia Woolf, Voltaire and Chomsky. They drink beer, are coffee connoisseurs, smoke Lucky Strike or Camel, don’t use deodorant, listen to bands that nobody has ever heard of. …
Literature and food join forces at İstanbul’s 3rd Tanpınar fest, Today’s Zaman
British author and self-confessed childhood bookworm Mark Crick’s witty work “Kafka’s Soup, A History of World Literature,” delivers 14 recipes in the writing styles of famous writers from Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen. Germany’s Jasmin Ramadan also …
Kidman, Watts to record bedtime stories, Sydney Morning Herald
Kidman will read Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse while Watts will read Summer by Edith Wharton. Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in The Hours. Hollywood stars Samuel L Jackson, Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway, Colin Firth, Meg Ryan, …
Kate Winslet And Other Stars Lend Their Voices to Audible Books, Shockya.com
The company has enlisted the help of some well-known voices to record such novels as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Being There from novelist Jerzey Kosinski, and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Per The Hollywood Reporter, …
Audiobooks with star appeal, xmediaonline – Exeposé Virginia Woolf’s famous Twentieth Century novels are amongst those being recorded. Kidman, who portrayed Woolf in the Oscar winning film The Hours, will be reading the 1927 novel To the Lighthouse while Annette Bening is recording Mrs Dalloway which …
Celebrities lend voices to bedtime stories, Silentnight Beds
Nicole Kidman will be responsible for reading Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse, as Naomi Watts records Summer by Edith Wharton. It recently emerged that the Jurys Inn chain of hotels was launching an e-book reader loan service for the convenience of …
Hollywood stars give voice to their favourite novels in audiobook boom, The Guardian
STARRING ROLES Some of the Hollywood actors confirmed to take part in the series: Annette Bening Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Jennifer Connelly The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Colin Firth The End of the Affair by Graham Greene Samuel L Jackson A …
Guest opinion, Aspen Times
We examined a variety of social issues raised by the voices of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Carson and Martin Luther King. We honestly conversed about our own journeys as we opened up the writings of contemporary authors Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates and …
In Supreme Court Argument, a Rock Legend Plays a Role, New York Times
The affected works included films by Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, books by CS Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso. Jimi Hendrix joins a growing list of artists cited by the court. ..
US defends copyright law for famous foreign works, Jerusalem Post … adopted by Congress to comply with an international treaty, that restored copyright protection to foreign works, including films by Alfred Hitchcock, paintings by Picasso, symphonies by Stravinsky and books by CS Lewis and Virginia Woolf. …
The symphony and the novel – a harmonious couple?, The Guardian
Certainly, western literature had its own sustained modernist moment, but while Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others may have responded with fidelity to the death of the old gods by fashioning a prose fiction that dealt with the phenomenon of …
The Human Spirit: Ruth Gruber turns 100, Jerusalem Post
Her thesis was about the feminism of a then little-known British writer: Virginia Woolf. In Germany, she loved das Land der Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers, but abhorred the dark side. An inborn reporter, she attended a Hitler rally …
Manifestations of modernity the new era and transitional societies, NL-Aid
Seminal Bloomsbury-member Virginia Woolf expressed the hope at the beginning of the Twentieth century that ‘[a] political and social movement that give hope (……)’ would emerge. Indeed said epistemic community materialized, fostering and nurturing …
Send Men The Bill — They Made The Mess, Hartford Courant Virginia Woolf once wrote, “As a woman, I have no country … as a woman, my country is the whole world.” Unlike Woolf, I do have a country. One of which I am very proud. One that I now feel represents me and treats me like a citizen, something I think …
How to stay married, Macleans.ca
In 1929, Virginia Woolf famously wrote of the need for women to have “money and a room of one’s own” to create art. In 1954, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles Lindbergh, wrote Gift From the Sea on a summer retreat from her husband and children, …
Virginia Woolf, Financial Times
In part because of its brevity, Alexandra Harris’s study of Virginia Woolf brings home how late in life she wrote her well-known works. In rapidly scanning the years, Harris emphasises how many were lost to self-doubt and illness, but also how only …
Tip Sheet for the Week of October 10, 2011: For Pleasure, Publishers Weekly
In 1928, Virginia Woolf announced her intentions in her journal to take a “writer’s holiday,” a break from the heavy business of midwifing modernism to write something swift and light and pleasurable. Of course, “swift, light, …
Film: To the Lighthouse, Varsity Online
by India Ross Despite the hewing of the film industry with this blunt axe of a contention, in the case of her modernist masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, and its lame 1983 made-for-TV adaptation, Virginia Woolf was right on the money. …
Go Go Gogi, Tehelka
If you set up a parody of Virginia Woolf’s reportedly fraught relationship with her cook, this scene would be it. Gogi has no interest in cooking. She wasn’t brought up to think that she had to fake a love for domesticity in the way Woolf was. …
Alison Bechdel, A.V. Club Chicago
There’s also some Virginia Woolf and some other literary stuff, but mostly the quotations in this book are about psychoanalysis. AVC: Your childhood journals played a huge role in Fun Home. Are they also a big part of Are You My Mother? …
Review by Rudy Oldeschulte, Metapsychology Virginia Woolf Examining oneself through other individual’s life stories, that is, through biography or memoir, or through conversations that one is engaged in during the day or evening – and re-examining those glimpses of our experience in our quiet …
Police and Poetry, The Atlantic
“So life is simply from minute to minute of horror,” he wrote to Virginia Woolf. For the most part, he gave up trying to write poetry. “It is no use squeezing a dry sponge and it is no use trying to work a tired and distracted mind,” he wrote Gilbert …
BP Learned Mission, Antiques and the Arts Online … general fiction (some signed), biography (some signed), works in Hebrew, fiction by Twain, Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, Sherwood Anderson, and others, travel and adventure, poetry (some signed), limited editions, and children’s literature. …
Everywhere Man, The Atlantic … is said by the editor and translator of the volume, Laird M. Easton, to be one of the greatest ever written, “comparable in its stature to those of Samuel Pepys, André Gide, Henri Frédéric Amiel, Beatrice Webb, or Virginia Woolf. …
Review: Evanesence runs gloom into the ground on new album, Reuters
Maybe Lee is suffering through one of the most tumultuous marriages this side of “Virginia Woolf,” or perhaps she’s still drawing emotional fuel from her feud with the disgruntled former band members who reassembled as We Are the Fallen. …
And Now Some New Music From the Ladies: Feist, Bjork and More, Autostraddle
The first single release “What the Water Gave Me” references a Frida Kahlo painting, Virginia Woolf and Greek mythology and with that adorable goofy dancing in the video, WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW! Second single “Shake It Out” is stunning, …
Readers’ tips: literary locations, Travel Agent
Bedbury Lane, Freshwater Bay, 01983 752500, farringford.co.uk Esmeballard Godrevy Lighthouse, St Ives Though Virginia Woolf set her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse in the Hebrides, it was inspired by childhood holidays at St Ives in Cornwall – pure white …
The Old Wives’ Tale (Modern Library #87), Reluctant Habits
In 1923, Virginia Woolf got nasty with an essay entitled “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: “he is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there.” And many seemed to believe her. …
About That “Last Chance” Written in the Sky Last Night, Bowery Boogie (blog)
“When, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a crowd gathers to piece together skywriting, the spectacle unites disparate groups, as they cluster together to find meaning in the urban landscape. I am looking for folks to become a part of it by taking …
Women’s emancipation started with 1911, China Daily
By Li Yinhe (China Daily) In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, known for her biting criticism of gender discrimination, describes how a woman like her was denied entry into a university library without the supervision of a man. …
Depp To Produce Biopic Of Dr. Seuss, Lez Get Real
Very few writers lead lives interesting enough to warrant a biographical feature film, unless they suffer from bouts of depression and kill themselves like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, or harbor unnatural thoughts about small children like Charles …
The great disconnect of social media, The Coloradoan
I packed up some things I didn’t really need like a curling iron and some Virginia Woolf books and I left some things I really did need like my friends and family. Instead of calling every day or week, I contented myself with learning about their lives …
Green; it’s not breezy, Bay View Compass
Takal’s Genevieve is very much like a heroine of a Virginia Woolf story. She’s fragile, neurotic, and her fine intelligence fails to protect her from her perverse imagination. In an interview with Amarelle Wenkert, Takal said she wrote Green “literally …
The Stranger’s Child by Allan Hollinghurst, Toronto Star
The novel is rich in allusions to works as diverse as Brideshead Revisited, EM Forster’s The Longest Road, and To the Lighthouse (Cecil is loosely based on Bloomsbury Group member and friend of Virginia Woolf’s Rupert Brooke), as well as more …
Why IKEA’s ‘Manland’ is Swedish for emasculated baby-men, Globe and Mail
In the essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote of the necessity of privacy and money for a truly fulfilling creative life – each tough to come by for women of her time. She described walking past a library at Oxford in contemplation: “I thought …
Description of two courses focusing on peace and war taught by Sally Ruddick
A memorial gathering of Sally Ruddick’s friends, admirers, and family will be held Saturday, Oct. 29, at 2 p.m. in the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South in Greenwich Village.
Ruddick, who died March 20 at her home in Manhattan at the age of 76, was the author of “Private Brother, Public World” in Jane Marcus’s New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf and drew extensively on Woolf in her landmark bookMaternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989).
Ruddick was a professor of philosophy and women’s studies for nearly 40 years at the New School for Social Research.
The International Virginia Woolf Society is issuing a call for proposals for the Virginia Woolf panel at the 2013 Modern Language Association Conference in Boston Jan. 3-6.
The proposal garnering the most votes from the IVWS will be part of the 2013 MLA conference program. The runner-up will be submitted by the IVWS to the MLA as a second panel, which MLA may or may not approve. IVWS voting on the proposals will be completed in November, so as to meet MLA deadlines. A call will then go out to the society for papers to be submitted for the panels.
A panel proposal should include:
A 35 word description (word count includes title)
The name(s) and contact information of the proposed organizer(s).
Submit to Georgia Johnston by email at IVWSociety@gmail.com or U.S. mail at Georgia Johnston, Department of English, Adorjan 127
Saint Louis University, 3800 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63108.
Electronic submission is strongly preferred. Email submissions should have Woolf MLA 2013 in the subject line.
Deadline: Monday, Oct.31, 2011, for the receipt of panel proposals.
To propose your own special session outside of the IVWS process, please visit the MLA website.
In some ways, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is about voices. Voices from the past. Voices from the present. Voices of the novel’s main characters. Voices of those passing by. Voices of war and voices of peace. Sometimes the voices seem to drift. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they warm you. Sometimes they stop you cold.
I was in the front row at last Saturday’s show. And like others who have reviewed the play written by Ellen Mclaughlin, I found myself overwhelmed by the power of Woolf’s words, the way they transformed the stage, and the way the stage adaptation made them ever more luminous and lyrical.
The starkly simple set features a mottled blue floor and wall with the words “Fear no more.”
Like many readers of Woolf, I have read her 1925 stream of consciousness novel multiple times and have written about it as well. So I wouldn’t have thought that a staged adaptation of the novel could keep me spellbound, could make me wonder what might happen next, could bowl me over with its emotional power. But that’s exactly what this production did.
Others have already done an excellent job of reviewing Septimus and Clarissa, commenting on its superb acting; its excellent blend of music, ambient sound and dialogue; its relevant anti-war message; and the way it captures the spirit and meaning of Woolf’s novel.
So I will do something a bit different here. I will talk about how another group of voices — the many voices of the performers, directors, writer and crew — shaped what appeared on the Baruch stage this fall.
The after-show conversation
I learned a bit about the shaping process at an after-show conversation held on stage Saturday evening. It was headlined by best-selling author and Barnard professor of English Mary Gordon. She settled in on stage with Rachel Dickstein, director; McLaughlin, who wrote the script and played the title character; Tommy Schrider, who played Septimus; and Miriam Silverman, who played both Lucrezia and Elizabeth Dalloway.
Mary Gordon, Rachel Dickstein and Ellen Mclaughlin
The shaping process was a long one that involved multiple workshops, with each workshop adding or subtracting things from the production up until the play’s formal opening in September. And everyone involved played a part that went beyond the one acknowledged in the formal program.
The actors, for example, helped work out the choreographed movements they make while voicing Woolf’s lyrical words in song, choreography that changed as the play progressed.
They also collaborated on the set design. When Dickstein brought a batch of large rectangular frames to the set, thinking they might add something interesting to the production, the actors experimented with them until they worked. And in the final production, three of the frames are moved around on stage, almost like dancing partners, to represent a changing array of doors and windows, with people going out and through and around them.
The idea for the moveable staircase itself, the most prominent element in the set design, came from Dickstein and set designer Susan Zeeman Rogers, but the actors suggested ways of using it, as well as other set pieces and props. Actor Schrider, a Septimus of power and emotional force, did improvisations on another staircase before the large black metal staircase became a part of the final set design. The large black metal staircase is a focal point throughout the play, as it serves as a platform for Mrs. Dalloway as hostess and both a battlefield and suicide site for Septimus.
Miriam Silverman and Tommy Schrider among the rose petals that drift over guests during the party scene
The significance of a house within a house
Also on the simply set, stark stage throughout the play are three white wooden houses about four feet high. They are rolled around the set on wheels to symbolize Clarissa’s country home of Bruton as well as the homes she and other characters see along the streets of London.
But one of the three is special, and here is where director Dickstein gives voice to her child self. She recalled encountering an elaborately detailed furnished dollhouse as a young girl, one that she could never afford. It was a memory and an image that stuck in her mind, and she asked set designer Zeeman Rogers to create a more modest version of such a house — Clarissa’s London house — for the play.
The Clarissa Dalloway dollhouse
The interior of this lit-up house, complete with the novel’s characters as free-standing paper dolls, is revealed during the scene that recreates Clarissa’s party. The symbolism of the dollhouse opening up to reveal its interior to the audience just as Clarissa opens her home to her guests has a certain magical charm with subtle but significant meaning.
