Christie’s is selling Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1867 photo of Julia Jackson Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s mother, at auction.
The famous portrait, an albumen print mounted on board, is signed and dated and is priced at between $60 and $80K.
Another portrait of Julia Jackson, as photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron
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The International Virginia Woolf Society is once again running the Angelica Garnett Undergraduate Essay Contest/Prize in honor of Virginia Woolf and in memory of Angelica Garnett, writer, artist, and daughter of Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.
The contest is open to any undergraduate as well as anyone within one year of completing the undergraduate degree.
Essays can be on any topic pertaining to Woolf’s writings. Essays should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words in length, including notes and works cited, with an original title of the entrant’s choosing
Essays should be submitted with the application by June 30 and will be read and judged by the four IVWS officers: Ann Martin, Alice Keane, Drew Shannon, and President Kristen Czarnecki.
The winner will receive $200, and the winning essay will be published in the following issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
Posted in essay competition, International Virginia Woolf Society | Tagged Angelica Garnett Undergraduate Essay Contest, Essay contest, International Virginia Woolf Society call for papers, Virginia Woolf | Leave a Comment »
Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, known for its interesting history, is in the online and physical exhibit of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, titled “Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work.”
Carefully assembled over 45 years by noted bibliophile, activist and collector Lisa Unger Baskin, the collection includes more than 8,600 rare books and thousands of manuscripts, journals, ephemera and artifacts, including Woolf’s desk.
Baskin Unger acquired the desk from Colin Franklin, and it became one of “the most iconic items” in her collection, which is described as one of the largest and most significant private collections on women’s history. The desk now in Duke University’s possession is apparently Woolf’s original stand-up desk with its legs shortened to suit Olivia Bell.
The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University acquired Unger’s collection around 2015, catalogued it, and has now launched an exhibition at Duke that will travel to New York’s Grolier Club from December 11, 2019, through February 8, 2020.
Entire exhibition @500yearsofwomenswork@DukeLibraries @binghamctr is now online. https://t.co/BbTYr9NYbO
— Lisa Baskin (@lisabaskin) March 1, 2019
Posted in commodification, events | Tagged Duke University, Five Hundred Years of Women's Work, Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, Olivia Bell, Virginia Woolf's desk | Leave a Comment »
Was Virginia Woolf a feminist? Sometimes she identified as such. And sometimes she didn’t. But Google searches on her name today, International Women’s Day, make it clear that in the eyes of today’s world, she was, indeed, a true feminist.
London’s feminist mural featuring Virginia Woolf
Eight hours ago, from the other side of the pond, Woolf scholar and novelist Maggie Humm reported that there were 27.7 million references to Woolf on Google today, International Women’s Day, a day first celebrated in 1911, during Woolf’s lifetime. A few moments ago, that number had risen to 29.2 million. Those numbers are nearly double those of less than two years ago.
No wonder. Online references to quotes and books for the day include Woolf’s, and blog posts mention her as well. The Norwegians have even named her a tail fin hero in honor of the day.
The number of search results for Woolf’s name varies over time and has been on the rise since I began noting it in 2007.
That year, a Google search on Woolf’s name resulted in 2.4 million hits, according to Jane Wood in “Who’s Afraid That Feminism is Finished? Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Commodification,” published in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany 73 (2008) (22-24).
My search two and a half years later, on 27 June 2009, came up with 2.7 million results. Three years down the road, on 10 May 2012, nearly 4.1 million hits resulted. And five years after that, on 12 May 2017, my search showed a whopping 14.9 million hits, a 520 percent increase in 10 years. And now 29.2 million hits less than two years later. I can’t help wondering how high that number will go.
Interest in Woolf on a day identified with feminism is fitting, as Woolf has become an iconic feminist in both pop culture and academic circles, despite the fact that she had contradictory feelings about identifying as such.
Her views about feminism — as a concept and as a label — were changeable. Woolf herself did not consistently identify as a feminist. The word “feminist,” for example, shows up infrequently in her private and public writing but it does appear just often enough to indicate her complicated and changeable attitudes about identifying as one.
And when the word does show up in her diaries and letters, it always appears in connection with politics and war, paralleling the way feminism and anti-militarism are linked throughout the history of the women’s peace movement.
In a 23 January 1916 letter to lifelong friend and fellow feminist and pacifist Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Woolf notes her growing feminism in response to the Great War and its coverage in the popular press:
I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer—without some vigorous young woman pulling us together and marching through it (L2 76).
In a 17 October 1924 diary entry, she considers making a feminist response to a political brouhaha covered in the popular press. But this time she speaks of her own feminism in the past tense. She notes,
If I were still a feminist, I should make capital out of the wrangle” (D2 318).
Five years later, in the same month that she publishes her openly feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf clearly expresses the conflict she feels about being identified as a 
While her text bravely makes a long public argument about the inequities between the sexes – and makes it with what she describes as “ardour and conviction” – she is privately insecure about how the book will be received if she is identified as an advocate for womankind. She frets that her friends will respond with only evasion and jocularity. She worries that the book has a “shrill feminine tone.”
She is concerned she “shall be attacked [by critics] for a feminist” (D3 262). If she is subject to such attacks, though, she has a self-protective strategy steeped in stereotypically feminine behavior at the ready. She will simply dismiss the book as “a trifle” (262).
In a letter to pioneering suffragette and composer Ethel Smyth dated 15 April 1931, Woolf mentions listening to “two love lorn young men” who “caterwaul—with an egotism that, if I were a feminist, would throw great light on the history of the sexes—such complete self-absorption: such entire belief that a woman has nothing to do but listen” (L4 312).
Woolf’s reluctance to be branded as a feminist even while she is writing a feminist tome shows up again in 1932 as she is working on Three Guineas. In a diary entry dated 16 February, she speculates about a title for a book that she is “quivering & itching to write.” What should she call it, she wonders? She suggests a title, “Men are like that.” But she immediately scraps that idea as “too patently feminist” (D4 77).
For more on this topic, see my essay, “Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?” in Virginia Woolf Writing the World: Selected Papers from the Twenty-fourth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, 2015, edited by Pamela L. Caughie and Diana L. Swanson, and published by Clemson University Press.
Posted in 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, feminism, Virginia Woolf | Tagged feminism, International Women's Day, Virginia Woolf, Woolf online | 4 Comments »
Editor’s Note: These DallowayDay events are dedicated to Cecil Woolf in memory of his passing.
Join Waterstones and the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain for the third annual celebration of 
The day in London will start at Waterstones Gower Street. Participants will follow in the footsteps of the Bloomsbury group on their home turf, then look at how Mrs. Dalloway has been adapted for stage and ballet, while later exploring queerness in the Bloomsbury circle and beyond.
All-event tickets include the walk and are limited to 25. However, the panel events (including refreshments) can be booked separately.
2 p.m.: Emma Woolf, an author in her own right and the daughter of Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who wrote Virginia Woolf, Life and London: A Biography of Place, will lead a Queer Bloomsbury walk. Note: Due to her father’s passing, Emma will no longer be leading the walk.
3:15 p.m.: Tea and cake in the yard: homemade cake from a Bloomsbury recipe
Jean Moorcroft Wilson on the doorstep of 46 Gordon Square, Woolf’s first Bloomsbury home, during DallowayDay2018.
4 p.m.: Adapting Mrs. Dalloway discussion panel with Thomas Bailey and Hal Coase, director and adapter respectively of the recent Mrs. Dalloway play at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney and Uzma Hameed, dramaturge for Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works for the Royal Ballet. Chaired by Lucy Scholes, literary critic and reviewer
5:15: Wine & nibbles, which includes a Nino Strachey book signing
6 p.m.: Queer Bloomsbury discussion panel with Nino Strachey, author of Rooms of Their Own: Eddy Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and head of research at the National Trust; Stuart N. Clarke, independent scholar, editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and of many of Woolf’s works, including Orlando: The Holograph Draft. Chaired by Maggie Humm, emeritus professor of Cultural Studies, University of East London, and author/editor of a number of books about Woolf and Bloomsbury.
7:30 p.m.: DallowayDay2019 closes
8: p.m.: Waterstones Gower Street closes
Book through the Waterstones website.
Posted in Virginia Woolf | Tagged #DallowayDay, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Nino Strachey, Rooms of Their Own, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, Waterstones | 2 Comments »
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