From the BBC Radio Drama Collection come adaptations of seven of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering modernist novels, available on CD and as a digital download.
Out since last April, each is a full-cast dramatization by such notable actors as Vanessa Redgrave and Kristin Scott-Thomas. Each includes sound effects — background chatter and the pouring of tea in Night and Day; horses’ hoofs pounding the road and trumpets sounding in Orlando; the gramophone playing, the cows mooing, and the audience clapping in Between the Acts.
The original radio broadcasts took place between October 1980 and May 2012.
The audio versions of Woolf’s novels are available in the UK and the U.S. The cost of the 14-disk CD set in the U.S. is around $30. Playing time is 11 hours and 55 minutes.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. It also marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in the U.S.
Fittingly enough, both deal with women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote.
While Woolf’s novel has often been overlooked, it is currently receiving the recognition it deserves. Nowadays it is described as “a remarkable story of two women navigating the possibilities opened up by the struggle for women’s suffrage.”
Reading and discussing Night and Day
In September of last year, Anne Fernald, professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, led a reading group on Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn that featured novelists Julie Orringer and Michael Cunningham discussing Night and Day.
According to Restless Books, the new edition of Woolf’s novel is part of a “series of beautifully packaged, newly introduced and illustrated great books from the past that still speak to our time, our place, and, especially, our restlessness. In addition to their original artwork and fresh introductions, Restless Classics brings the classroom experience to the reader with linked online teaching videos.”
Night and Day in conversation
You can also sit in on last year’s discussion of the novel held at the Brooklyn Center for Fiction by watching the video below.
Today would be Virginia Woolf’s 138th birthday. Garrison Keillor features her in today’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” a nice tribute.
But the most high profile tribute on the occasion of her birthday was in 2018, when she was honored by a Google Doodle. Created by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy, it generated a lot of publicity for Woolf, prompting a variety of birthday greetings from around the globe.
Links to a few from that year and others are below, along with Keillor’s 2020 tribute.
Jan. 25, 2018 Google Doodle in commemoration of Woolf’s 136th birthday
In 2017, the Royal Opera House asked for reader reactions to Woolf’s work in conjunction with Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works.
In 2018, the LA Times memorialized Woolf in a long article that included this sentence: “A pioneer of stream-of-conciousness writing, Woolf left behind an endlessly influential body of work,” the LA Times in 2018.
That same year, The Independentpublished Woolf quotes that pertained to various aspects of life.
The New York Times is calling Virginia Woolf a fashion muse. Why? Three reasons.
Reason 1: She inspired the Met’s Costume Institute exhibit
She is the inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s coming Costume Institute blockbuster and gala, “About Time: Fashion and Duration.” The May 7 – Sept. 7 exhibit explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future, with Woolf serving as the “ghost narrator” of the exhibition, according to the Met’s website. It will feature 160 pieces of women’s fashion from the last 150 years, and beyond.
Reason 2: She inspired an opera
Her novel Orlando is the basis of a new production at the Vienna State Opera that premiered Dec. 8, 2019, with costumes by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Fittingly, its the first opera commissioned by a woman composer in the 150-year history of the company. As Kawakubo said in The New York Times, “And also I have always been interested in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle and “Orlando” in particular because of its central concept of ignoring time and gender.”
Woolf’s connection to the fashion world is nothing new. Over the years she has inspired designers on both sides of the pond. Here are a few worth noting:
In 2008, one New York style newcomer tied a silk scarf around a worn copy of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and sent it as a stylish invitation to her fall 2008 fashion show.
In 2009, Hannah Teare, a London-based fashion stylist, created a series of five fashion shots named after Woolf.
In 2011, a number of designers created spring 2012 collections at least partly inspired by Woolf.
Woolf herself had a complicated relationship with clothing and fashion, one that has been much discussed in academic settings and online.
Catherine Gregg explores this theme in her Bloomsbury Heritage monograph Virginia Woolf and ‘Dress Mania’: ‘the eternal & insoluble question of clothes’ (2010). In it, she discusses Woolf’s “delight in clothes and interest in conceptions of fashion and femininity” as well as her sense of being an outsider when it came to fashion, as well as her loathing for its artifice (7).
More on Woolf and fashion
Since we started looking, we have noticed numerous references that connect to the topic of Woolf and fashion. Some are documented in the following posts:
Five radical women writers living in a square in a London neighborhood. The square is Mecklenburgh. The neighborhood is Bloomsbury. And one of the women writers is Virginia Woolf.
The book that tells the story of the five independent women writers who lived in Mecklenburgh Square at various times between the two world wars is Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, just published by Faber & Faber.
Besides Woolf, the women Wade discusses include detective novelist Dorothy Sayers, modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (known as HD), the maverick classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, and the economic historian Eileen Power.
The publisher’s website describes the book this way:
Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
And one reviewer called Woolf “The presiding genius of this original and erudite book,” describing her “essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ [as] provided the rallying cry, whether consciously or not, for five remarkable women, all drawn at some point in their careers to Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square.”
Glowing reviews
I plan to obtain a copy of Square Haunting and review it here. After all, Mecklenburgh Square has a special meaning for me, as it is one of the Woolf sites I visited in 2016 when Cecil Woolf, Virginia and Leonard’s nephew who passed away last June, led me on a six-mile walking tour of Bloomsbury. It was a most memorable day.
For now, though, here are a few quotes from the glowing reviews of Wade’s first book that have already been published online.
Wade’s book rises above the publishing cliches to tell a deeper story about women’s autonomy in the early 20th century, about their work and education, politics and activism. What emerges is an eloquent, pellucid, sometimes poignant study of five female intellectuals, each of whom disdained convention to fulfil their potential as thinkers and writers. – Review by Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Guardian
It is a pleasure to fall into step with the eloquent, elegant Wade as she stamps the streets of literary London. I would give a copy to every young woman graduating from university and wondering who and how to be … There is much to inspire. – The Times Literary Supplement
Wade is adept at evoking the gritty texture of the times, taking us seamlessly from the interior lives of her subjects into the world they inhabited and back again. – Ariane Bankes, Spectator
The site of the building in Mecklenburgh Square in which Virginia Woolf lived. Cecil and I paused here during our 2016 tour of Bloomsbury.
