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Posts Tagged ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Screenshot of the Woolf-inspired Instagram account, “Kendine Ait Bir Oda”

A new writing platform for budding writers interested in Virginia Woolf aims to be a beacon for Woolfian writing in a language other than English. “Kendine Ait Bir Köşe” (“A Corner of One’s Own”) calls for writers, junior scholars, journalists and artists to submit their Woolf-inspired essays, stories, poems, letters, and memoirs in Turkish.

Drawing on the idea Woolf shares in Three Guineas (1938):  “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world,” “A Corner of One’s Own” serves as an archive for Woolfian writing in the Turkish language, according to founding editor Professor Mine Özyurt Kılıç.

Submissions should be on the current theme offered by the platform and are limited to about 500 words. For more information, contact Mine Özyurt Kılıç at mozyurtkilic@gmail.com.

The platform was launched following the “Virginia Woolf in Turkey” project in January, which was supported by the British Council.

Where to find it

You can find the project on host Yasemin Bahloul Nirun’s  Woolf-inspired Instagram account. The podcast itself, “Kendine Ait Bir Oda” (“A Room of One’s Own”), can be found at @kendineaitbirodapodcast via Substack on social media and in audio format on Spotify, Apple and Google podcasts.

The project offers a “room” for writers by sharing the best essay in text. Previous winners who wrote Woolfian essays inspired by A Rooms of One’s Own (1929) and To the Lighhouse (1927) are available on these platforms. The writer of the first essay, Tuğba Duzak, has translated her piece and shares it here with the international Woolf community.

Pursuit

By Tuğba Duzak

Before reading Virginia Woolf’s novel, lighthouses, for me, have been the symbol of hope and new opportunities. Considering the generic function of the lighthouses, it was second nature to think of them as a light of life. The light emanating from the lighthouse, connecting a sailor, who was desperately trying to find their way, to life has always filled me with an indescribable joy. That is why, for me, the symbol of hope has always been lighthouses. Nevertheless, when I read Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, that belief turned upside down. The lighthouse, which is used as a symbol of unattainability in the book, destroyed the symbolism I had built in my mind with what can be called a childish naivety, and left a huge disappointment in its place. I had no light to lead my sailor home safe and sound anymore. I lost the way home, and to myself.

My thoughts might sound a bit sombre, given that nobody likes losses. But, are they really that bad, just because we do not like them?

Lately, losing is a notion that I have been pondering over a lot. It is an action that happens independently of the person, with our hands tied. We cannot lose something on purpose, actually, the ignorance of the person creates the state of being lost, for that reason, it is as if it always evokes despair in humans.

Sometimes we lose someone we love. Rather than saying “She died.” we say, “We lost B.” I wonder why we do that. Whose feelings do we take into consideration when we say, “lost”? We lost her, yeah. Traffic accident. Yeah, it’s hard, she was married. No kids, no. Yeah, we lost her.

Lost, as if we could find them, if we look for them, flesh and blood. As if not dead but hidden. Here you have humans, people who cannot give up on their hopes even in death. This persistent disregard of death, an inevitable part of our lives, makes me feel bitter inside. I think I find the saying “losing time” interesting the most. How do we lose time? Let’s say we did, how do we get back the lost time? Can we do it? It is hard to give an answer. Even though we are aware that time cannot be regained, why can’t we accept this and find proper expressions? The hollow denial we have saddled this remark with astounds me greatly. It is comical to lay the responsibility of our self-deception on these two words.

Nevertheless, I still like this term, losing, as it is an indication of the expectation in humans; and because the act of losing harbours the possibility of finding as well. We lose our way, our belongings, and sometimes ourselves. Then our pursuit begins. Even if we know we cannot find it, we tediously rummage around everywhere, in the hope of finding it. We find our pen, which got lost two weeks ago, under the bed; somehow, it rolled over there. Then we sit down, and continue to find ourselves from where we left off in empty pages. We write. Finding the words buried in hidden depths again, we embrace them. We catch them as if playing hide-and-seek, tagging them triumphantly. We continue to advance in the hope of reaching the meagre light spreading from the lighthouse on the corner of our minds.

April, 2023

Editor’s Note:

Mine Özyurt Kılıç is the co-creator and organizer of the Woolf-related event series, “A Press of Ones’ Own: Celebrating 100 Years of Hogarth Press (Harvard U)  and Virginia Woolf in Turkey and 100 Years of Literary Modernism (1922-2022),” which included translation and printing workshops, a Woolf inspired exhibition of Turkish contemporary art, and author meetings. She has designed and taught the first all-Woolf BA and MA course in Turkey, and she organized the first-ever Dalloway Day in Turkey in June 2021 where she commemorated and introduced Suzanne Bellamy and Susan Stanford Friedman to the Turkish speaking Woolf community.

Yasemin Bahloul Nirun’s podcast series has created an inspiring room by promoting young women who make their living through producing works in arts and culture. Since its debut in 2021, there have been nearly 30 interviews with young musicians, curators, artists, filmmakers, journalists, businesswomen, all of which are available on social media platforms. She has recently organised a writing workshop series in the footsteps of Julia Cameron’s The Artists’ Way.

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Want to stay in a Bloomsbury bedroom dedicated to Virginia Woolf that is also on the site of a home formerly occupied by Virginia and Leonard Woolf? Maybe you can.

The site of the building at 37 Mecklenburgh Square in which Virginia Woolf lived.

The Woolfs lived on the top floor at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, during the London blitz from 1939-1940, according to Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woolf Life and London: Bloomsbury and Beyond (1987/2011).

Now on that site is the William Goodenough House, which is part of Goodenough College. It has one student-style bedroom dedicated to Virginia, and each year that room is allocated to a literary student who, upon arrival, finds a copy of A Room of One’s Own on their bedside table.

Naida Babic was a student at Goodenough College in 2021. She recently met up with College Director Alice Walpole and friends to install a framed copy of one of her poems outside the room dedicated to Woolf, next to Woolf’s commemorative plaque.

She contacted Blogging Woolf to tell us about it and directed us to a story posted on the college website, where you can read the poem she wrote.

She explains: “I was living at Goodenough College while completing the last term of my MA Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck University, London. I wrote my poem “In the Hand of Virginia” during my poetry module.”

To commemorate the occasion, Maggie Humm, emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of East London and the author or editor of 14 scholarly books and two novels, as well as Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf’s Society of Great Britain, gave a lecture on “The Photography of the Writer Virginia Woolf and Her Sister, the Artist Vanessa Bell.”

Maggie Humm talks about Woolf’s photography and how it relates to her writing at Dalloway Day 2018 at Gower Street Waterstones.

 

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Living in the U.S., I am not always able to listen to BBC broadcasts. But I could — and did — give a listen to a new one on the Radio 4 show “In Our Time.” It discusses Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own (1929).

In the 42-minute program, Melvyn Bragg and guests Hermione Lee and Michele Barrett discuss Woolf’s classic and oft-quoted essay about women and literature that contains the famous line: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

The discussion also involves:

  • how Woolf’s views in A Room of One’s Own are reflected in her 1928 novel Orlando,
  • the precursors to Room, Woolf’s 1928 lectures at Newnham and Girton colleges, the latter of which she attended with Vita Sackville-West,
  • Woolf’s ideas about the lecture as a form,
  • women’s roles as figures in literature rather than writers of literature,
  • Woolf’s invention of Shakespeare’s sister,
  • Room’s humor,
  • Room’s legacy,
  • and more.

Hermione Lee is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and Michele Barrett is emeritus professor of modern literary and cultural theory at Queen Mary, University of London.

Listen now.

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At the 2019 Literature Cambridge course “Virginia Woolf and Gardens,” Kabe Wilson explained his art project in which he cut out the words from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to create the 145 pages of his novella Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So.

Kabe Wilson is launching a new multimedia work on To the Lighthouse at the University of Sussex on May 16.

The work “covers a series of archival quests about my childhood holidays, which then link up with Woolf and Bell’s own holidays, as well as their collaboration on To the Lighthouse itself, before developing into an elegy to all three,” Wilson explains.

The culmination of his residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies, the multi-media presentation centers around the story of the 10 paintings of Brighton and Sussex that Wilson produced during the 2020 lockdown period, and the exciting art history discovery that led to one of them becoming the cover image of a new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

A free one-day event in two parts

  • Part One: Modernist Archives Workshop at The Keep, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., with archivists, art and literary historians, followed by lunch. Includes some connections to the Bloomsbury group. Registration is essential due to space restrictions.
  • Part Two: Film Screening of “Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey Through 100 Archives,” followed by a Q & A with Wilson and chaired by Centre for Modernist Studies Directors Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf at the University of Sussex, Jubilee building, Jubilee Lecture Theatre 144, 3 p.m. – 4:30 or 5 p.m.

Get more information and register

More information is available here. Both events are free, but registration is required. Register here for one or both.

More about Kabe Wilson

Cover of the new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that features Wilson’s photo.

For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or SoSet 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge.

He then turned his work into a piece of art, a 4 x 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

The cover of Woolf’s draft manuscript for “Women & Fiction,” which was the first draft of her classic feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929).

 

 

 

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Martin Riker’s protagonist in The Guest Lecture is Abby, an economist who has been denied tenure at her university for publishing a book about Maynard Keynes that is deemed derivative.

Because of her book’s popularity outside academia, she’s been invited to present a lecture to a lay audience. In a hotel room the night before, she’s preparing her talk in an imaginary conversation with Keynes himself.

She will discuss his “bohemian arty side,” so that the audience:

will depart having learned something about the Bloomsbury group, some bits and bobs of history. For example, the bizarre and wonderful factoid that Keynes was housemates with Virginia Woolf. They were friends and she at some point claimed to be jealous that he could do what she did—write beautifully—but she couldn’t do what he did—economics, politics.

Abby describes her office at home as:

A writing room. A reading and thinking room. A ‘room of one’s own’—which was my first Virginia Woolf book, incidentally, and remains a favorite example of how a conceptual argument—in this case about female autonomy, living your own life—can also be a practical argument, in a way Keynes probably appreciated.

I found the novel entertaining and educational, philosophical and thought-provoking. It’s interesting how Maynard Keynes has shed the stereotypical image of the serious and sober intellectual, as his colorful life and provocative views are explored in fiction here and also in E.J. Barnes’s Mr. Keynes’ Revolution and Mr. Keynes’ Dance and in Susan Sellers’ Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story.

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