Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf are featured in an article about World War I poet Edward Thomas posted today on the Islington Tribune website.
Wilson, who is writing a biography of Thomas, spoke about him at an event at the Imperial War Museum on the eve of Remembrance Day. She is the author of biographies of World War I poets Isaac Rosenberg (2005) and Siegfried Sassoon (2009).
Churchill biographer Martin Wilson also spoke at the event, describing the conditions on the Western Front during the Great War.
Wilson serves as editor for many monographs in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series and the War Poets Series published by her husband, Cecil Woolf of Cecil Woolf Publishers, which is based in London.
Two new titles related to the Bloomsbury Group will be available next year from Pickering & Chatto Publishers of London.
They are:
A three-volume set of The Journals and Diaries of E M Forster, edited by Philip Gardner. The collection includes diaries, travel journals and itineraries from 1895-1970. All the diaries and journals are previously unpublished. The set will be published in February 2011 at a price of £275/$495.
The Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey, edited by Todd Avery. The volume collects Strachey’s previously unpublished essays, stories and dialogues for the first time. It includes all 15 discussion society papers from his years at Cambridge University. Scheduled for publication in June 2011, the price of the volume is £100/$180.
From a women’s studies perspective, I find some additional upcoming titles interesting:
Because I am interested in war from both an historical and a literary angle, I also took note of British Literature of World War I, a five-volume set that Pickering will publish next February. It includes newly edited novels, stories and dramas from 1914-1919.
Significantly, it focuses on writers — including women and those from the working class — who are often overlooked in literature from the period. Cecil Woolf Publisher‘s War Poets Series covers the poetry of the era.
All of these books are so pricey that I won’t be able to purchase them. But I do hope they come to an academic library near me soon.
If you are attending the Woolf conference, June 3-6 at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky., you can plan some of your book purchases in advance, including the latest from Cecil Woolf’s Bloomsbury Heritage Series.
A link on the Georgetown College bookstore’s webpage has a list of the books that will be for sale at the conference. You can order them in advance and either pick them up at the bookstore or at the conference center when you arrive.
A representative from The Scholar’s Choice will also be there with lots of wonderful books (display copies) and order forms.
My headline is a blatant come-on. I know that. But I simply can’t resist shouting out loud in cyberspace about Cecil Woolf’s appearance at the Woolf conference.
And that’s not just because he is my publisher. It’s actually because he is such a dear — and the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to boot.
I met Cecil Woolf at the 17th Annual International Conference on Woolf, which was held in 2007 at Miami University of Ohio, within driving distance of my Northeast Ohio home.
It was my first Woolf conference, and I felt slightly intimidated — despite my advanced age — as I stood by myself at the opening reception. There I was, surrounded by the brilliant Woolf scholars whose books were my friends, even though the writers themselves were complete strangers to me.
Drew Patrick Shannon, a young Woolf scholar from the Cincinnati area, sort of took me under his wing that evening. He and his friends were funny and bright, and they seemed to know everyone. One person they knew — and pointed out to me — was Cecil Woolf.
The next day, while browsing the book tables, I lingered at the one covered with artfully decorated softcover volumes published by Cecil Woolf Publishers. It was staffed by Cecil himself, and our conversation lasted right through the next conference session.
One conversation led to another, and by the time I drove home from Oxford, I had agreed to write a monograph for Cecil on Woolf and weather, a topic I had been researching and musing about for six years.
Drew, who congratulated me that day but wondered aloud what idea he could pitch to Cecil, is now writing How Should One Read a Marriage? Private Writings, Public Readings, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It will be published in Cecil’s Bloomsbury Heritage Series later this year.
So if you are on the fence about attending the conference, get off the fence and into the city. Even if you have to beg, borrow or steal the $45 for a one-day pass.
Besides all of the fabulous sessions on the conference schedule, believe this: You won’t want to pass up the opportunity to meet Cecil Woolf. You never know what may come of it.
Stop by the opening reception for the conference, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. June 4, where I will be signing copies of my monograph, Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels. Cecil will be there too.
The signing will be held in Fordham University’s Lowenstein Plaza Lobby, 113 W. 60th St. in New York’s Lincoln Center.
Two Bloomsbury Heritage monographs, including one of my own, will debut at Woolf and the City, the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf — and a third is in progress.
The monographs making their first appearance at the June 4 to 7 conference at Fordham University — and afterward — are:
Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels by Paula Maggio, number 54 in the Bloomsbury Heritage series.
Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life by Emilie Crapoulet, number 50 in the series.
How Should One Read a Marriage? Private Writings, Public Readings, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf by Drew Patrick Shannon will be published later this year.
Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life
Reading the Skies saw its first incarnation as a paper written for a graduate class taught by geology professors Dr. Alison J. Smith and Dr. Donald F. Palmer in the Master of Liberal Studies program at Kent State University. The class, which focused on the impact of climate change from the time of the Little Ice Age to the present, required that we write a weather-related paper.
I was an English major, not a science major, as an undergraduate, so I immediately searched for a literary connection. I did not have far to look.
How Should One Read a Marriage?
One of our texts was Briane Fagan‘s The Little Ice Age: Prelude to Global Warming 1300-1850. In it, he describes the frost fairs held on the River Thames during the years of the Little Ice Age. In a flash, I thought of Woolf’s descriptions of Orlando and Sasha skating feverishly across the Thames in her 1928 novel Orlando.
From there, I was on the hunt for anything written about Woolf and weather. Amazingly enough, I found nothing. Thus began my own study and analysis.
In Reading the Skies, I explore Woolf’s characteristically English fascination with the vagaries of the nation’s weather and its effect on culture. I also discuss weather’s influence on Woolf and her writing, including her theories about the role weather could and should play in fiction. Finally, I discuss how she carried out her theories in three of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando.
I invite you to pick up a copy of Reading the Skies and Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life at the Woolf conference at Fordham for the special conference price of $9. They — along with other monographs in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series — will be available at Cecil Woolf’s book display near the registration table in the Lowenstein Plaza Lobby. Here is the full conference schedule.
Then stay tuned to Blogging Woolf for news about the publication of How Should One Read a Marriage? We will announce its availability here.
