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Last week, we brought you news of a Virginia Woolf exhibit in New York City. This week, we bring you news of the arrival of a Woolf and Bloomsbury exhibit in Rome.

The exhibit, “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: Inventing Life,” opened in Rome Oct. 26 and will be at the National Roman Museum Palazzo Altemps through Feb. 12, 2023.

The exhibit is housed in five rooms of the Palazzo Altemps, each corresponding to a different section. It begins with a space dedicated to the meetings of Woolf and the Bloomsbury group at 46 Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury district of London, where Virginia and Vanessa Stephen met with group members such as John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant. Other spaces in the exhibit reconstruct the history of the Hogarth Press and recall the six years of the Omega Workshop.

Edited by Woolf scholar Nadia Fusini in collaboration with playwright and performance artist Luca Scarlini, the exhibit is a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house, created in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London and with the support of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society., which also sponsored an all-night reading of Woolf on Nov. 5.

The Palazzo Altemps is a fitting choice for the exhibit, as it once hosted a library collected between the end of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as prestigious nineteenth century literary salons.

Tickets for the exhibit can be purchased online.

Above: the exhibition catalog published by Electa, which is constructed as an intimate diary, a notebook of notes and memories.

Updated 14 February 2023

Thanks to the New York Public Library, we have a good reason to visit New York City — the exhibit “Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind,” which opens today and runs through March 5, 2023.

The library’s first major exhibition to focus on Woolf since 1993, this biographical exhibit of more than 100 items provides an intimate view of the author’s life and creative process, using her personal notebooks and diaries, family photographs, and unpublished letters.

The free exhibit is drawn entirely from the library’s holdings, one of the most important collections of Woolf’s writings in the world.

The focus and tickets

Tightly focused on her life and creative process, the exhibit explores the production of several novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The exhibit includes sections on nonfiction and the Hogarth Press, as well as the development of Vanessa Bell’s dust jacket designs.

Woolf’s diary is woven through the exhibit, and its main sections will be bookended by smaller introductory and legacy sections.

Located in the smaller Wachenheim Gallery of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St., the exhibit includes materials primarily from the William Beekman Collection, along with a few recent acquisitions. These include Bell’s original drawings for To the Lighthouse and minor unpublished letters.

Tickets are no longer required. The exhibit closes 15 minutes before the building closes.

The materials

Materials related to “Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind” are from the well-known Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, including:

  • William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle
  • Virginia Woolf Collection of Papers
  • Duckworth-Hills Papers

There’s more to see

If you make the trip to the NYPL, be sure to take in the library’s first-ever permanent Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures. There you will see these Woolf-related items:

    • Virginia Woolf’s walking stick
    • Portraits of Virginia Woolf and her father, Leslie Stephen, from Violet Dickinson’s photo album
    • Diary entry by Woolf from November 1918
    • Letter from Virginia Woolf to David Garnett (1922)

Now Open! Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures from The New York Public Library on Vimeo.

To help celebrate the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has gathered some online resources. We share them here, with thanks to the VWSGB.

  • Read Jacob’s Room
    Read the 1960 Hogarth Presss edition on Internet Archive.
  • Read “The unconventional novel”
    Read “The Unconventional Novel,” a review of Jacob’s Room, published in The Guardian, 3 November 1922 and republished 20 July 2002.
  • Participate in the VWoolf100 Centenary Readathon
    Tweet your thoughts on Jacob’s Room to @VWoolf100 with the hashtag #JacobsRoom100. Read more.
  • Take Jacob’s Walk
    VWSGB member Robert B. Todd on Jacob’s London; includes “Jacob’s Walk.”
    Read more.
  • Listen to the Virginia Woolf Podcast from Literature Cambridge
    “100 years of Jacob’s Room,” with Karina Jakubowicz, novelist Susan Sellers and King’s College Cambridge archivist Peter Jones. Read more and listen.
  • Read the guest blog post from Literature Cambridge
    Jacob’s Room: A Novel without Heroes:” a guest blog post about a lecture by Alison Hennegan from 12 December 2020.
  • Read “Comparing Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Beethoven’s Third
    By Urmila Seshagiri, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics Jacob’s Room (2nd edition, OUP, 2022, on the Oxford University Press blog.
  • Read an introduction to the novel
    This introduction to Jacob’s Room is by US writer and teacher Danell Jones.

Peter Jones, fellow of King’s College, and Karina Jakubowicz

Add another celebration of the centenary of the publication of Jacob’s Room (1922) to the list. This time, it is Literature Cambridge’s new Virginia Woolf Podcast.

Join Karina Jakubowicz as she visits King’s College, Cambridge and speaks with Susan Sellers, Woolf scholar and novelist, and Peter Jones, King’s College Fellow, for the first episode of season two of the Virginia Woolf Podcast.

In the podcast, we get a sense of where some of the Bloomsbury members lived in Cambridge, and we explore the novel’s relationship with death, memory, and the Great War.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Two free events will celebrate the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) this week. And organizers Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers to join them online in marking 100 years since its first publication.

Free online seminar

What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Reflections
When: Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2:30–4:30 p.m. BST, 9:30-11:30 a.m. ESTfree online seminar
Who: Charlotte Taylor Suppé (independent scholar): “Women Must Weep: Betty Flanders and the Perils of Nationalistic Mothering;” Chris Wells (University of Sheffield): “Sexology, Bisexuality and Experimentation in Jacob’s Room;” and Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University): “Tracing Patterns in the Critical Reception of Jacob’s Room from 1922 to 2022″
More information: Get abstracts and speaker biographies.
Registration: Register by noon BST on Oct. 26 to receive a link to join the seminar.

A readathon

What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Readathon
When: Thursday, Oct. 27
How: Follow and tweet to @VWoolf100 on Twitter. Hasthag: #JacobsRoom100

One hundred years to the day from the novel’s first publication, Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers of Jacob’s Room to join in a collective reappraisal of this text. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is one of the key works of modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, but still attracts much less attention than T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Whether reading the novel for the first time or returning to it, organizers encourage students, scholars, and, in Woolf’s phrase, “common readers” to dive into this short book (or a portion of it) on Oct. 27, then tweet thoughts and reflections to @VWoolf100 with the hashtag #JacobsRoom100.

What fresh light can today’s world shed on Jacob’s Room and how can this novel speak to us today, organizers ask.