Love art? Love Woolf? Love a beach vacation? Visit St. Ives.
Seven years ago, I spent a delectable two days in the Cornwall town where Virginia Woolf spent her summers as a child. I still dream of going back. It truly is a magical place.
Today’s piece in The Daily Mail will give you lots of details about art on display, art lessons, and other sights in St. Ives.
Places to see include:
Talland House, where Woolf spent her summers until she was 12 years old
I also recommend browsing in the local charity shops. At St. Julia’s Hospice Charity Shop, I found treasures ranging from a collection of German hiking staff shields to framed prints of the English countryside to books with full-color photos of English sites — all for a pittance.
My goal is to post a compilation of Woolf sightings every week. But the weeks keep getting longer. This time there are 10 days between the last compilation and this one. Can this be attributed to summer time? I think so.
Scroll down to sighting #16 to read a brief about this year’s 20th Charleston Festival, which runs through May 29.
Facets of Virginia Woolf, The Hindu Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a widely acclaimed novelist, short-story writer, essayist, feminist, critic and publisher, needs little introduction to students of world literature. Her attitude towards life and literary vision were …
To The River, Financial Times
Although Virginia Woolf – the book’s guiding spirit – drowned here, Laing acknowledges that “such waterways are 10 a penny in these islands”. That doesn’t stop this local river providing an exemplar for all confluences that traverse the British Isles. …
The top 10 books of all time, MinnPost.com Virginia Woolf called this Victorian masterpiece and detailed portrait of provincial English life “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Martin Amisand Julian Barnes have both cited it as perhaps the greatest novel in the English …
Open thread: What are the great unread books?, The Guardian (blog)
(“I don’t like it” is not a substantial criticism, but it is a good reason not to read it–a better reason than Virginia Woolf’s too-oft-quoted snobby criticism.) The same is true of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest and The Recognitions, …
‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce, TheCelebrityCafe.com
Like his contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Joyce was committed to portraying the human mind as it is, and in real life, our thought process is often splintered and disjointed, not clean and straightforward the way it’s presented in …
Summer reading: The big list, Los Angeles Times
Also in Sunday’s pages, book critic David L. Ulin remembers his summer reading: Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. And Jessica Gelt weighs in with a summer reading memory of her own: Virginia Woolf.
Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in London cleaned, Zee News
Tavistock Square’s other features include a bust of writer Virginia Woolf and a cherry tree commemorating the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. …
NY Public Library turns 100, not just with books, Wall Street Journal
Five hundred people spent the night at the library using a smartphone app to search for artifacts such as the cane found after Virginia Woolf drowned herself and the taxidermied paw of Charles Dickens’ cat. For the centennial gala Monday, LeClerc said …
House of Exile by Evelyn Juers – review, The Guardian
One group of contemporaries in particular – James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf – suffered a unique apprehension of their generation’s fate. This sombre tableau is the subject of Evelyn Juers’s enthralling book. by Evelyn Juers Juers, ..
Book review: To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface, Scotsman
But the Ouse will forever be bound up with Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its murky waters one cold March day 70 years ago. Laing’s passages about the beauty and precision of Woolf’s prose are echoed in her own use of language for the landscape …
Wish You Were Here: England on Sea by Travis Elborough – review, The Guardian… sceptical to have time to dwell on the misty light, the fading ornamental balustrades, the trim white fences orthe sopping esplanades which have been lyrically evoked by artists such as Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, John Piper and Benjamin Britten. ..
The girl who cried Woolf, Irish Times Rather than stay at home and despair, she set off to a river best known for its connection with Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. The outcome is a quasi-confessional meditation-cum-travelogue of immense charm, personal observation and historical fact. …
Exiles from a devastated world, Irish Times At one point Nelly finds a parcel containing a new slip that Virginia Woolf had bought in Wertheim department store and lost on the street in the snow while on a visit to Berlin. In a cafe Virginia asks the waiter to bring her a Schwarzwälder tart like ..
Top writers at literary festival, West Sussex Today Charleston was the meeting place of a remarkable group of progressive individuals, including Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and TS Eliot. Spokeswoman Philippa Rowson said: “The Festival was founded in 1989 …
What if it were ‘Mr. Dalloway’? Book covers revisited, Los Angeles Times How would Virginia Woolf’s feminist classic “Mrs. Dalloway” change if it were “Mr. Dalloway”? Would it be all about going to work on the day of a party? Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”) is transformed to “Le Beau et La Bête …
V V: Michel Montaigne: In defence of the human, Business Standard His attractions have led writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and Andre Gide — Frampton’s Cat is a popular introduction to Montaigne’s Essays that should get the serious common reader to look into them. …
10 of the best books set in London, The Guardian Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster and Virginia Woolf brilliantly describes a day in her London life, stepping out on a glorious summer morning, Big Ben striking in the background. “For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, …
A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf,Los Angeles Times The book was “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf. The extended essay is based on a series of lectures on women and fiction that Woolf gave in 1928 at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. In examining the lives of female writers, …
Benjamin Rivers’ Sense of Snow, Torontoist In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes a woman’s entire life through the course of events that occur in a single day. In a similar way, Benjamin Rivers’ comic Snow captures a sense of Toronto focusing only on a single street: Queen Street West. …
The cover of Benjamin Rivers' Snow
Thrifty Flair: Books create character and charm, yourhome.ca It’s easier to find what you want because Sylvia Plath actually comes before Virginia Woolf on the shelves, but if I really want something and can’t find it locally, I’ll purchase it online from an independent store. Even when you factor in the cost of …
Jason Reed/Reuters, The Atlantic Then, as an antidote to law school, I read through Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, with a sense of revelation. But Roth’s voice remains more resonant for me, a reminder that neither ideology nor the bounds of sex and gender need limit empathy, …
Sarah Winman – in her own words, New Zealand Herald Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway. Ian McEwan: Atonement. Elizabeth Bowan: Death of the Heart. Graham Greene: Brighton Rock. Andrea Levy: Small Island… I could go on! When’s your second international bestseller due? (No pressure…) Luckily, I don’t have…
MSO Concludes Season with Afternoon of Favorites, Atlantic Highlands Herald His song cycle from the Diary of Virginia Woolf earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. Valentino Dances is an orchestral suite from his 1994 opera The Dream of Valentino, about movie star Rudolph Valentino. The suite features accordion and …
VIEWS: A new future for LGBT books, Windy City Times I wrote Winter Eyes because back in college, I was profoundly inspired by a scene in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. Someone asks a would-be writer kind of books she wants to write and she says, “I want to write a novel about Silence …
Oslo, August 31st, Variety After an unsuccessful morning of the Virginia Woolf variety, Anders travels to Oslo for a job interview at a magazine. Arriving early, he has time to visit some acquaintances, starting with his best friend, Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), with whom he used …
Reblogged from Samuel Pepys by The Morgan: What happened to the diary?, Capital New York Then there are those who publish their own diaries, like the authors William Burroughs and Anaïs Nin, and those whose diaries were published posthumously, like Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams, illuminating their writing processes as well as their ..
Oh, the Stuff Those Lions Guard, New York Times Also on view are the walking stick of Virginia Woolf’s that her husband found floating in a river four days after she drowned herself and Beethoven’s sketches as he worked on the Scherzo of the “Archduke” Trio. But what ties the library’s research …
Natalee Caple: Resisting borders, National Post (blog) Virginia Woolf famously wrote about how writing and freedom were linked for women because of the dematerial nature of the text. In contrast to painting, sculpting, or (in the present day) filmmaking all the materials necessary to write are cheap and …
Canton resident a voice for young writers, Foothills Media Group Crowe enjoys reading poetry by Barbara Ras, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche and WS Merwin, and prose by Edwidge Danticat, Charlotte Bacon, Virginia Woolf and Lydia Davis. Crowe began the mastery of her writing at the Greater Hartford Academy for the…
The astronaut who learned how to see, Christian Science Monitor (blog) When I visited him at his home in Houston in 1996, he showed me shelves filled with well-worn, annotated books ranging from St. Augustine to Virginia Woolf. When he sat in an evening literature class at the University of Houston, he kept three ...
Agincourt Will Be Directed By Michael Mann, FilmShaft.com The film is being developed independently by Luc Roeg, the producer behind the frankly beautiful Virginia Woolf adaptation ‘Othello’, and the script is being penned by Benjamin Ross. If Roeg is smart he’ll bring Cornwell onboard as a consultant for the …
Mental illness, privilege and the myth of ‘success’, The Scavenger Meanwhile, the mystifying thoughts, habits and behaviours of many creative types who are now deceased (everyone from Winston Churchill to Virginia Woolf) is often ascribed to the work of bipolar disorder in post-mortem diagnoses. …
Library speed-dating event unfolds slowly, TheDay.com Caitlin brought “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, a book she admitted she disliked when she read it in high school. She had borrowed it from the library to see if an older, more mature version of herself might like it better. If you ask me, …
While reading several blogs last week, I discovered something many of you probably already know — that the British edition of Country Living magazine is widely available in the U.S.
I headed over to my local Border’s to pick up a copy of the May issue and later spent some weekend time tucked up in my reading nook contemplating my imaginary life in the English countryside.
This Bloomsbury-inspired lampshade is pictured on Page 107 of the May 2011 issue of Country Living.
While there, I discovered a “Bloomsbury lampshade” pictured in the south Somerset home of young couple Chris and Angela Stanford. To be more accurate, I suppose it should really be called a “Bloomsbury-inspired lampshade.”
A quick Google search located an interesting site with lots of Bloomsbury-inspired products, from lampshades to kitchen cupboards. The designer says she carries forward the vision of the Omega Workshops.
Jane Garrity sent me the link to Cressida Bell’s lovely website. As the daughter of Quentin Bell and the granddaughter of Vanessa, Cressida is certainly influenced by Bloomsbury style, but she carries it out in a way that is all her own. I fell in love with her truly unique silk shawls and scarves. A visit to her London studio requires an appointment, but Jane says it is worth it.
And of course, there is always Charleston’s online shop for a limited selection of Bloomsbury goods.
The cover price of an individual issue of Country Living is $7.99, but the less expensive alternative is a subscription via Amazon at $74 for 12 issues. But if you subscribe, be patient. It takes 12 to 16 weeks before your first issue will arrive.
On a regular basis, members of the VWoolf Listserv post queries. Jane Garrity, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, recently asked for tips about resources for Katie Mitchell’s Waves, her 2006 multi-media stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel.
Today, she sent an email sharing the “wonderful suggestions” she received. I am posting them here, along with a National Theater video about the production itself.
The book, Waves, sold by the National Theater bookshop, contains many great photographs and the text of the production.
You can listen online to a Platform event podcast in which director Katie Mitchell discusses the production.
A resource pack on Waves by the National Theater’s Discover Department is available for free download. Download this file: Waves_workpack.pdf.
A research pack containing photocopies of the programme, approximately 10 national newspaper reviews and a small selection of production shots is available to purchase from the Archive for £7.00 (VAT and international postage included). To order, contact Suzanne Doolin, the National Theatre Archive Assistant, at sdoolin@nationaltheatre.org.uk.
Garrity also wrote that, “According to Suzanne Doolin, no visual recording of Waves is available now–though this is being discussed. She writes:`It is seldom that we release recordings commercially – filming a show to the standard expected by a group, or home viewing public, is an expensive business and is beyond our standard production budgets. Such filming must be carefully weighed with the fact that the works are created for a live and relatively intimate audience, cameras alter the nature of a performance.
“`We have made a number of commercial releases in the past in partnership with commercial distributors, and you’ll be pleased to know we are exploring the technicalities of an ‘educational release only’ phase as an initial step. With the huge popularity of NT Live, we are also considering the potential for later DVD sales of such broadcasts, however there are numerous legal, and artistic implications which must be navigated amongst the many involved groups and this is something which takes time.'”
Doolin said the National Theatre Archive holds visual recordings of all NT productions from mid 1995 onwards that are made available to view in the archive upon appointment.
Read more about the Mitchell production of Waves on Blogging Woolf:
Granta, the British magazine of new writing, has published online Helen Dunmore’s introduction to a new paperback edition of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, which is part of the Orange Inheritance Collection.
In the following quote, Dunmore captures one reason why I love Woolf so much. Her introduction includes many more.
Each time I return to To The Lighthouse I’m struck by something that I haven’t noticed before: a flash of description, a moment of double-edged intimacy between two characters, a touch of sensory experience so immediate that it brings a shiver.
Online access to the To the Lighthouse introduction is available in conjunction with Granta’s new summer issue, The F Word.
