The author of Romantic Moderns “will share her favourite ideas and themes from Woolf’s writing on pleasure, love, sorrow, wonder and London” and guide participants “through a menu of conversation topics she has designed especially for us around Woolf’s life and work.”
The event, which begins at 7 p.m. and costs £35, takes place at Fenton House Garden. Fenton House in Hampstead, central London, is a seventeenth-century merchant’s house, garden and orchard managed by the National Trust.
Harris, a literature professor at the University of Liverpool, is currently writing a cultural history of the English weather. It will, of course, include Woolf.
Bitch magazine has taken on Virginia Woolf. Well, not the real Woolf. And not exactly “taken on.” But the feminist magazine has published an online review of Alexandra Harris’s biography of Woolf.
In the publication’s “BiblioBitch” column, writer Katie Presley calls the Harris biography “bold” for presenting Woolf’s work and life in just 10 short chapters totaling 192 pages. Read the full review: “BiblioBitch: `Virginia Woolf,’ Abridged and Alluring.”
Roy Johnson of the Mantex website is kind enough to keep Blogging Woolf posted about updates to its information about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
Here are links to recent Woolf-related book reviews:
Another book about Virginia Woolf. But this one is by Alexandra Harris, the brilliant ingenue of modernism and Woolf studies. She is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool and the author of Romantic Moderns and Virginia Woolf.
The Daily Mailcalls Harris’s Virginia Woolf a “wonderfully perceptive, unpretentious study which is pacy in style, riveting in content and perfectly accessible to the most obdurate Woolf-avoider.” What’s more, it’s eminently readable at only 180 pages and includes photos.
The review also notes Harris’s focus on Woolf’s creativity and her evolving sense of herself as a writer and says:
Every page of Harris’s insightful book is pervaded by Woolf’s passion for life, her sense of fun and her immense capacity for joy. The ‘mad genius’ and the supercilious snob with the big brain are banished.
Alexandra Harris. Her name is on my lips for good reason.
Romantic Moderns, which just won the Guardian First Book Award, arrived on my doorstep last week. I am itching to read it, but things keep getting in the way. Things like grading fall semester essays. The holidays. Prepping for spring semester. And the overwhelming desire to read something light that won’t strain my incredibly tired brain.
And now I read that Harris has been signed by Thames and Hudson to produce two more books. The first, a short biography of Woolf titled Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf, will be published in spring 2011. Yeah for that.
The second, titled The Weather Glass, will discuss the British preoccupation with weather. That made me gasp right out loud. And I am not exaggerating.
Reading of her plan to write about the British interest in weather made me realize that Verita Sriratana and I are not the only ones interested in reading the skies — as they relate to Woolf and other writers.
For her doctoral thesis, Verita is writing about weather in The Years. In Reading the Skies, I discuss Woolf’s use of weather in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. And Harris plans to begin her study with Beowulf and work her way up — hopefully to Woolf.
