Louisa Amelia Albani, whose pamphlet and companion exhibit on Virginia Woolf we featured in July, is currently holding an online art exhibition inspired by Woolf’s essay “Oxford Street Tide.” Take a look.
Online reading group
Starting Monday, Jan. 11, and running through Monday, April 12, 2021, Anne Fernald will lead a Zoom reading group dubbed “All Woolf” at the Center for Fiction, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to fiction writing. The fee is $120 for four sessions, with an additional fee charged for books. Meetings begin at 6 p.m. EST.
Online view of The Bloomsbury Look
View “The Bloomsbury Look,” Saturday, Nov. 28, at 2 p.m. via a free virtual event with author Wendy Hitchmough as she speaks live from the Charleston studio to art historian Frances Spalding. The event will include the opportunity to submit questions live, and signed copies of The Bloomsbury Look are available to purchase through the Charleston online shop. However, the link to the event is not up right now, and unfortunately the book is out of stock.
Here are links to a few resources of interest to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury aficianadoes:
On BBC Radio 4’s “Great Lives”: Listen to why James Graham is inspired by John Maynard Keynes, along with expert analysis by economist Linda Yueh.
In the LA Times: Read a quote from Woolf about writers’ neglect of food.
In Issue XXXVII of Piano Nobile’s InSight: Read about Virginia Woolf’s relationship with artist Mark Gertler.
A foundation named after Virginia Woolf: “In Woolf’s Words,” by the Hong-Kong-based company Woke Up Like This. WULT was recently heavily criticized for naming another shade in its “Face Daubs” line after Anne Frank. The company took it off the market.
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.
Anne Olivier and Quentin Bell’s home, Dower House, in West Firle in the South Downs of England is now listed on Airbnb for rental. So far, it has a five-star rating and boasts a “Bohemian atmosphere.”
The home has a well-equipped kitchen, book-lined study, large drawing room opening onto a terrace, two bathrooms, and four bedrooms, three with a queen-size bed. Inside amenities include a fireplace, free wifi, washer, iron, central heating, all bedding and linens, and TV. Free parking is available.
Outdoors, there is a walled garden and breathtaking views, as the house is situated in the heart of the South Downs National Park, just outside Firle village at the foot of the Downs.
The cost for six guests is $438 per night. Read more.
With its fascinating history and unique artistic and literary associations, staying at the Dower House is an unusually intimate and enriching experience.
Screenshot of the Dower House listing on the Airbnb website.
Wednesday, June 19, is officially Dalloway Day. And while some will celebrate on the more convenient following Saturday, the Royal Society of Literature is hosting an event on the actual day.
“Walking with Mrs Dalloway” will take place from 1:30-2:30 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery. Essayist Lauren Elkin will lead an afternoon stroll around the National Portrait Gallery, looking at selected paintings and photographs of and by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and others associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the modernist movement. Following the tour Lauren will give a short talk about Woolf.
Elkin’s most recent book Flâneuse was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
The event is free to RSL members and fellows, who can book here. Public tickets at a cost of £10/£8 will be available via the National Portrait Gallery website, beginning in early May.
