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Posts Tagged ‘British Library’

We now have an official #DallowayDay

Posted in Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on Friday 16 March 2018| 10 Comments »

It’s official. Dalloway Day is the third Wednesday in June on both sides of the pond.

After years of discussion and advocacy for a day that gives Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway equal weight with James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, both the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and the International Virginia Woolf Society have designated the third Wednesday in June as #DallowayDay.

Finally, we have an officially recognized day for celebrating Clarissa Dalloway’s walk across London in Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway to “buy the flowers herself.”

This year it’s June 20

This year the third Wednesday falls on June 20, and events are already being planned on the official date and those surrounding it. Here are those we know about so far.

  • The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is getting together with Waterstones, as it did last year, to arrange a walk, discussion and talk on Saturday, June 16. It will be announced on the new VWSGB website and Facebook page, and by Waterstones as well.
  • Many members of the International Virginia Woolf Society will be together and on their way to Knole House and Sissinghurst Gardens for the pre-conference outing on June 20, the day before the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf begins. I imagine we will celebrate the day in some way and I welcome your ideas.
  • Places and Paces: Walking with Mrs. Dalloway, June 20, 4-5 p.m., at the British Library. Sponsored by the library and its Royal Society of Literature. Hermione Lee will discuss the novel’s walks and follow its paths into dreams, memories, and moments of revelation. Ticket prices range from £5 to £8 and can be booked online.
  • Dalloway Day with Sarah Churchwell, Alan Hollinghurst, Hermione Lee and Elaine Showalter, June 20, 7-8:30 p.m. at the British Library. Sponsored by the library and its Royal Society of Literature. The event will include a discussion on the significance of the novel and its effect on literary culture with Woolf’s biographer Lee; novelist Hollinghurst; literary critic Showalter, author of the seminal A Literature of their Own, and Churchwell, chair of public understanding in the humanities at the School of Advanced Study. Ticket prices range from £10 to £15 and can be booked online. Check out the RSL’s Dalloway Day page.
  • Monk’s House is holding an event on June 20, and the details will appear on the Monk’s House page of the National Trust website once they are settled.
  • The Italian Virginia Woolf Society is organizing an event dedicated to Woolf in June called “Una giornata tutta per lei” (A Day of Hers Own) on June 9 at the Casa Internazionale delle Donne, the International House of Women, the society’s home base.

Tell us about your #DallowayDay event

We urge you to add your own events in the comments section below or by sending an email to bloggingwoolf@yahoo.com, whether they are on the official date or another date. And please use the hashtag #DallowayDay in your social media posts so we can track them.

Watch out for The New Yorker

After June 20, keep your eyes out for The New Yorker magazine. A writer and editor for that publication has been in touch with Woolf societies and Blogging Woolf to discuss our plans for Dalloway Day. It turns out he is interested in traveling to England in time for Dalloway Day celebrations so he can cover it for the magazine.

His piece, if the idea is given the go-ahead, would appear in both the print and online editions, with photo coverage online. If so, this would make 2018 a banner year for dear Virginia — a Google Doodle and an official day of Clarissa’s own, covered in The New Yorker!

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Woolf resources available online from British Library

Posted in Woolf resources, tagged , , , , , , , on Tuesday 6 December 2016| Leave a Comment »

The British Library’s Discovering Literature: 20th-century website offers a number of resources to Virginia Woolf’s work. They include:

You can also find these links to other Woolf collection materials in the right sidebar of this page on the site:

  • Letter from Virginia Woolf to Frances Cornford about A Room of One’s Own, 1929
  • “Monday or Tuesday” by Virginia Woolf
  • Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
  • Vanessa Bell dust jacket for The Years
  • “Kew Gardens” by Virginia Woolf, 1919
  • “Kew Gardens” by Virginia Woolf, 1927
  • ‘Hyde Park Gate News’, a magazine by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
  • ‘The Messiah’ by Quentin Bell and Virginia Woolf
  • ‘The Dunciad’ by Quentin Bell and Virginia Woolf
  • ‘Eminent Charlestonians’, with illustrations by Quentin Bell and text by Virginia Woolf

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New Woolf work out tomorrow

Posted in Bloomsbury, books, Charleston Farmhouse, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 11 June 2013| 1 Comment »

Charleston Bulletin SupplementsThe Charleston Bulletin Supplements, Virginia Woolf’s last known unpublished work, is being published by the British Library tomorrow, the first time the Supplements have been published since they were first written in the 1920s.

Announced earlier this year, the volume includes work, written or dictated by Woolf between 1923 and 1927 and published in The Charleston Bulletin’s Supplements in collaboration with her nephew, Quentin Bell. The pieces reveal a familiar, playful side of Woolf, as they describe incidents and individuals of her family and household, including servants and members of the Bloomsbury Group. Bell provided more than 40 illustrations.

David Bradshaw’s preface to the volume makes the connection between the Supplements, with their inside jokes and absurdities, and Woolf’s novels, such as Orlando. Claudia Olk, Chair of English and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, edited the project.

“We are delighted to share these childhood newspapers from the British Library’s archives with a wider audience in a new publication. The Supplements present fantastical narrative excursions into this illustrious family’s history, evoking imaginary details and building up fictional personalities. The writer and the illustrator, aunt and nephew, are united in their dislike of seriousness and boredom and they mercilessly target shallowness and hypocrisy,” Olk said.

The hardback volume is available for £12.99 from the British Library.

Read more about the Supplements:

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New work from Woolf will be out this summer

Posted in Bloomsbury, books, Charleston Farmhouse, Virginia Woolf, Woolf Letters, tagged , , , , on Monday 11 February 2013| 4 Comments »

New work from Virginia Woolf will be out this summer. The work appeared in The Charleston Bulletin, a family newspaper founded by her Charleston Bulletinnephews, Quentin and Julian Bell, in the summer of 1923.

The vignettes, written or dictated by Woolf between 1923 and 1927 and published in The Charleston Bulletin’s Supplements, describe incidents and individuals of Woolf’s family and household, including servants and members of the Bloomsbury Group. Quentin Bell provided the illustrations.

An article in The Guardian says Woolf’s writing in these supplements shows her “affectionate, mischievous side.”

Helen Melody, curator of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, says the work is likely the last unpublished work of Woolf.

Yet Stuart N. Clarke, editor of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 5. and a member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, maintains that each issue of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin includes at least one previously unpublished letter by Woolf. They include letters to Lady Aberconway, Mrs Easdale and Winifred Holtby.  Clarke says the Bulletin will soon include a number of letters written by Woolf to Lady Colefax.

The British Library, which acquired the works in 2003, will publish The Charleston Bulletin Supplements for the first time this June.

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Listening in on Woolf and West

Posted in recordings, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 11 November 2008| 2 Comments »

spoken-wordsLet’s all thank our lucky stars for the enlightened souls at the BBC who saved eight minutes of Virginia Woolf’s recorded voice. It is the only recording of her voice that has survived from the three broadcasts she did for the BBC in the 1930s.

Now Woolf’s voice, along with those of other great writers of the 20th century, can be heard in its entirety for the first time on a three-disc set of CDs produced by the British Library called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.”

The set features the voices of 30 British writers and includes many previously unpublished recordings. Another set, “The Spoken Word: American Writers,” features 27 authors from the U.S.

When Woolf’s recordings were made, people simply didn’t keep radio broadcasts, according to Richard Fairman of the British Library. “They went out on the air and that was it; they were lost forever,” Fairman told NPR‘s Melissa Block.

“The recording of Woolf is nothing like the interviews common on the radio today,” he said.

Hearing the voices of famous authors on CD is “not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it’s not bad,” he told the Telegraph.

You can listen to Woolf talk about “Craftsmanship” in the series “Words Fail Me,” which was broadcast on the BBC April 29, 1937, here.

On You Tube, you can watch a video featuring a record spinning on a turntable that gives us eight minutes of Vita Sackville-West reading from her prize-winning poem “The Land.” The recording was made by Columbia in 1931 for the International Education Society.

You can also search the British Library’s online archive of more than 1,500 sound recordings that it has made here.

Read more in brief about the British Library CD sets of famous authors in the London Review of Books, Time and the Telegraph.

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