By the second week of March, the sale of jigsaw puzzles soared, due to coronavirus quarantines. With puzzle companies closed, as they were not considered essential businesses, puzzles became scarce and prices went up.
I was one of the many who searched online to find puzzles that looked like fun and wouldn’t break the bank. I found a few. But I never thought I’d find any that included Virginia Woolf. Today I did.
Puzzling Woolf
First, there’s the EuroGraphics Famous Writers 1000 Piece Puzzle, which features Woolf smack dab in the middle of 75 other famous writers. Its finished size is 19.25″ x 26.5″ and the cost is $29.79.
Second, there’s the Re-marks Bestsellers Panoramic 1000 Piece Puzzle, which includes covers of many best-selling books, including two of Woolf’s — Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway. It measures 17″ x 9″ and the cost is $17.99.
I bought both for my collection of Woolf items.
Getting in Woolf’s head
You can also get inside Virginia Woolf’s head — and put it together — with the Virginia Woolf Paper Craft Model. This pocket-size item describes itself as “The Head is a Puzzle.” It includes eight model sheets and 22 precut puzzle pieces you assemble by connecting tabs. I’m skipping this one.
Literature Cambridge has had a great response to its new Online Study Sessions, launched due to the coronavirus, and has responded by scheduling additional sessions.
Below is the schedule of those still to come. It includes those focused on Virginia Woolf, as well as other authors. The cost is a bargain at £22 full price and £18 for students and CAMcard holders.
Upcoming Online Study Sessions
Sunday 17 May: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. 1: After the War, with Trudi Tate. 18.00 BST
Saturday 6 June: Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. 2: Women and Education with Alison Hennegan. 18.00
Saturday 13 June: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. 18.00 BST
Sunday 28 June: Katherine Mansfield, Selected short stories. 18.00 BST
Saturday 22 August: Angela Carter, stories from The Bloody Chamber. 18.00 BST
Sunday 6 September: Clothing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 18.00 BST
Saturday 12 September: Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime, with Dame Gillian Beer. 18.00 BST
Most sessions will be held at 18.00 to 20.00 British Summer Time / 19.00 Central European Summer Time. Some sessions will take place at 10.00 am British Summer Time, for the benefit of people in different time zones, but students are welcome to book any session, wherever they are in the world. Check the web page for updates.
NOTE: BST (British Summer Time) is five hours ahead of EST (Eastern Standard Time) and eight hours ahead of PT (Pacific Time).
Literature Cambridge hopes to offer an introductory session on The Waves soon. If there is enough interest, they will offer it twice: once at 10.00 am and again at 18.00 pm BST. Date to be confirmed.
Online Study Session format and booking
Each Online Study Session has a live lecture via Zoom, followed by a moderated seminar discussion. The session lasts about 100 minutes, but please allow two hours. Details are available online.
Literature Cambridge looks forward to being together again in person for ‘real life’ Study Days. These will take place at a new venue, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.
Safety permitting, these will resume on 19 September 2020 with a full day (11.00 am to 5.30 pm) on Woolf’s comic novel, Orlando (1928).
The program also has Study Days and half-days planned on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jane Austen’s Emma, D. H. Lawrence’s poetry and novellas, and more.
A table full of Literature Cambridge T-shirts at the program’s 2018 summer course on Virginia Woolf’s Gardens
Featuring articles, reviews of new books, and a guide to library special collections, Woolf Studies Annual is the premier academic journal on the life, work, and times of Virginia Woolf.
Here’s what you’ll find in the 26th volume:
Josh Phillips’s transcription of part of the holograph manuscript of The Years, which provides a new take on that novel’s relationship to Three Guineas, enabling further exploration of Woolf’s complex creative processes.
Catriona Livingstone’s reading of Woolf through the lens of science fiction, which provides a fresh and provocative look at some well-known texts
Sebastian Williams providing insightful observations into Woolf’s Bioethics in “Animals and Dependency in ‘The Widow and the Parrot.’”
Reviews by Elizabeth Outka, Celia Marshik, and more.
Literature Cambridge has good news for those who live at a distance from the University of Cambridge: Its upcoming Study Days are moving online. The intensive but accessible sessions will be held via Zoom, due to the coronavirus.
Each session has a lecture and seminar with a leading scholar and will last approximately 100 minutes. Organizers recommend that you allow two hours for each class, just in case they run a bit longer.
LITERATURE CAMBRIDGE ONLINE STUDY DAYS
Study Day: To the Lighthouse: The Mother in the Garden
Date and time: Saturday 9 May, 6–8 p.m. British Summer Time; 7–9 p.m. Central European Time
Join Lit Cambridge for an intensive evening studying one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest novels. Based on Woolf’s memories of childhood summers by the sea, To the Lighthouse is a powerfully moving account of love, art and loss.
Lecture and a seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Date and Time for other time zones: Sunday 10 May 2020 (Repeat class)
Lit Cambridge will repeat the topic on 10 May, for the benefit of people in Japan, Australia, and similar time zones. But you are welcome to book, wherever you are. This will be a live lecture and seminar, via Zoom.
10.00-12.00 British Summer Time
11.00-13.00 Central European Time
18.00-20.00 Tokyo Time
19.00-21.00 Melbourne time
21.00-23.00 New Zealand Time
Study Day: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Date and time: Sunday 24 May, 6–8 p.m. British Summer Time; 7–9 p.m. Central European Time
An intensive evening studying Virginia Woolf’s memorable novel set on a single day in London in 1923. Mrs Dalloway traces the joys, sufferings, and memories of two very different characters: Clarissa Dalloway, married to a Conservative Member of Parliament; and Septimus Smith, a former soldier who is suffering from shell shock.
Lecture and seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, who has a chapter on Mrs Dalloway in her book, Modernism, History and the First World War .
Congratulations to Kristin Czarnecki, current president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, on the publication of her memoir—The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. While the book focuses on Kristin’s unique story, the fact that Virginia Woolf is an important part of Kristin’s life makes Woolf germane to her personal narrative as well.
Her parents named their firstborn Kristin for the fictional Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. The child died tragically at age three. Eight years later, after having another daughter and a son, they had a daughter whom they named Kristin.
Her mother told her they loved the name: “We didn’t name you after her.” But the fact of it and the need to understand and adapt to this unusual circumstance have weighed heavily on Kristin throughout her life.
Of bonds and memories
The word necronym refers to a name shared with a dead sibling. A not uncommon occurrence during times of high infant mortality, it’s unusual now, and some believe the second bearer of the name might be haunted by it. Kristin establishes her groundwork early: “Have I been haunted? By the thought of my parents’ grief, yes. By having the name, no.” She adds that she and the first Kristin have shared “a very close conspiracy,” citing Virginia Woolf’s description of her bond with her sister Vanessa.
Kristin explores her motivations and actions and how they relate to the first Kristin. Her speculations—“Who can pinpoint why we are the way we are. And who’s to say our memories bear any relation to the way things actually were?”—recall Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past” when she questions the reliability and volatility of memory.
Woolf writes in “Sketch” of her childhood days at St. Ives: “If life has a base that it stands upon; if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.” Kristin in turn recalls happy childhood summers in Rockport, Massachusetts: “In the impact upon us of summers by the sea, Virginia Woolf and I are kindred spirits.”
Laying things to rest
We read memoirs to learn about others’ lives and to reflect on our own. Two things impressed me from reading this book. One, at a personal level, the question of how I or anyone would have felt in Kristin’s circumstances. The other is my interest in the construction of memoirs.
Conjuring Woolf’s “I now and I then” Kristin has managed to draw from two aspects of herself, the child who grew up under this considerable weight and the curious scholar who explores every nuance. She distances herself when she consults and absorbs the relevant literature, piecing it into the fabric of the story.
Just as Woolf claimed to have laid her parents to rest after writing To the Lighthouse, so Kristin considers her memoir in a similar way. It was something she needed to do, and the process opened up valuable channels of communication with her parents and siblings. She’ll never forget the first Kristin, but now, perhaps, she can move on.
