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Woolf sightings: Missing Clarissa Day

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged on Saturday 23 June 2012| Leave a Comment »

Even though Woolfians declared June 21 Clarissa Day, this week’s crop of Woolf sightings include no media mentions of that first-time event.
Instead, my daily Google alerts were swamped with links to stories mentioning the Edward Albee play, all of which — as always — I have omitted from my listing. What’s left are just 30 sightings, despite the fact that it has been more than two weeks since I posted the last Woolf sighting, Riches include Woolf and the Jubilee of her time.
  1. The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey, Wired News (blog)
    Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square—which lets anyone accept credit …
  2. An Introductory Feminist Reading List, ThinkProgress
    A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf: Woolf is arguing for educational access and economic independence as necessary preconditions for women who want to …
  3. ‘Marsales’ has fallen off the anglo map, Montreal Gazette
    Long-limbed and sharp-nosed, she looked like an older version of Virginia Woolf. Joan loved art, history and nature – her walls were filled with Victorian ..
  4. The changing face of cosmetic surgery, Sydney Morning Herald
    ”Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing up. … eyes are wide and bright and your forehead is raised in astonishment: ”but why didn’t Virginia’s feet get sore?
  5. Joydeep Roy-Bhattachara’s ‘The Watch’ recasts ‘Antigone’ in …, Buffalo News (blog)
    … internationally-heralded new novel “The Watch” published by Hogarth Press–the venerable literary press founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf–that …
  6. Sophie wins prestigious writing prize, Bromsgrove Advertiser
    The prize is run by Newnham College in Cambridge in honour of the writer Virginia Woolf, one of the college’s most famous alumni. It is designed to give …
  7. Grosvenor Square, Tavistock Square: Odes to Political Correctness, American Thinker
    If hard copies of the papers and theses churned out annually on Virginia Woolf could float and were laid end to end, you could walk from Greenwich Village to …
  8. Theatre: Plough Plays, Varsity Online
    Strolling into the favourite village of Richard Brooke and Virginia Woolf, we are greeted with the magical sight of what seems to be a congregation of …
  9. Rainy tales, Daily News & Analysis
    My favourite monsoon read is To The Light House by Virginia Woolf.The stream of consciousness technique incorporated makes it very dreamy and surreal.
  10. Shakespeare’s Sister Presents Summer Play Reading Series, 6/18-8 …, Broadway World
    Beth’s play has premiered in Europe and we’re excited to share the story of Virginia Woolf and her sister with American audiences. Finally, we’ll end the evening …
  11. Doing up your study your way, Times of India
    No, not the kind that Virginia Woolf had referred to but a small, quiet room where you can spend some time with your favourite books away from the madness of …
  12. Alison Bechdel III (The Bat Segundo Show), Reluctant Habits
    Subjects Discussed: Attempting to ratiocinate on four hours of sleep, Virginia Woolf’s diary entries, Virginia Woolf’s photography, To the Lighthouse as surrogate …
  13. 24-hour intellectual capital, Times Higher Education
    … said the title of the festival had been inspired by his own research on novels such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – both of which …
  14. Famous Writers’ Retreats: The Rooms Where Classics Were Created, Huffington Post UK

    The Lodge, as shown on Huff Post U

    It’s surrounded by the world-famous, romantic garden and was where Vita Sackville-West (close friend of Virginia Woolf) did most of her writing. IMAGE: National Trust John Hammond Hidden at the bottom of Irish playwright Shaw’s garden was a rotating …

  15. Paris’ Village Voice Is Closing Huffington Post (blog)
    It is full of character: its eclectic collection includes not only the latest English novels, but also such relatively esoteric perennials as John Mepham’s Virginia Woolf, Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man, and the wonderful mysteries of Fred Vargas.
  16. The Sound of a Sentence, New York Times (blog)
    What do you notice about the relationship between music and meaning in this passage, from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”? …the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts ..
  17. Fear no more the heat of the sun, Calcutta Telegraph
    Consider Mrs Dalloway walking the streets of London on a Wednesday in June, 1923, in that eponymous novel by Virginia Woolf. The sights and sounds of London swirled around her as she went out to buy flowers for her party. Yet her mind tunnelled to the…
  18. Is literature elitist? Of course it is, Daily News & Analysis
    Virginia Woolf recognised this ages before any of us when she said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Q: What’s the worst thing anyone has ever said about you? A: A review of Ancient Promises, which gleefully …
  19. Hay Festival 2012: Street style, Telegraph.co.uk
    Virginia Woolf introduced us to Orlando, one of the world’s more elegant cross-dressers. Hemingway gave us Brett, “damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s.
  20. Antigonick by Anne Carson – review, The Guardian
    Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Brontë, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try “The Glass …
  21. ‘The Chaperone,’ by Laura Moriarty, New York Times
    Familiar as this seems — staid Midwestern matron confronts permissive urban world, ineffable longings stir — Moriarty’s plot appears at first to provide an opportunity for exploring what happens when, as Virginia Woolf put it, “Chloe likes Olivia …
  22. Today’s Page: June 8th, Iran Book News Agency
    She translated Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” over a 10-month period in 1937. In 1951 she published, in France, the novel “Memoires d’Hadrien”, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great …
  23. Herstory Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West Wrote Words, Wooed Women, WantedWoolf, Autostraddle
    The Way We Were Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West, by Sawyer Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Virginia Woolf. That ought to be about 99% of you feministas. Now keep your hand raised if you’ve heard of Orlando, the novel she wrote about her lesbian lover …
  24. Hat Fair fun, Daily Echo
    Meanwhile ShadyJane’s Edinburgh Fringe hit show of 2011, Sailing On, comes to a local ladies toilet near you for an evening in the company of Ophelia and Virginia Woolf (tickets from Theatre Royal Winchester). Dutch company Close Act will bring a new …
  25. Tahmima Anam on complicated literary heroines, Telegraph.co.uk
    Fragile, sexually ambiguous, and with her heart in the past, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. Yet she sparkles with life, prompting her old lover to note her presence, simply and repeatedly: “there she was”.
  26. One Last Day at BEA: Jimmy Fallon, Kirstie Alley, and More Jokes About Fifty …, Vulture
    If her last novel, On Beauty, was an homage to EM Forster, this one owes a debt to Virginia Woolf. And it redeems a history of writing books that she feels didn’t turn out quite right. “I’ve never really been able to get the book on the page that I had …
  27. Like the chevalier, we are all cross-dressers now, Evening Standard
    Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, he spent the first half of his life a man, the second as a woman. Once a stooge of Louis XV in his personal secret police, he was later part of the French mission to the court of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia.
  28. Summer of love stories, Chico News & Review
    Bechdel is a literary wonder, effortlessly weaving together strands like the history of psychoanalysis, the novels of Virginia Woolf, mother-daughter rivalry and her personal love trials, with a mixture of self-effacement and wit that never rings false …
  29. Elizabeth Bowen in European modernism and the awakening of Irish consciousness, OUPblog (blog)
    Although undeservedly neglected, her writings have a central place in the emergence of European modernism, alongside those of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and TS Eliot. The Heat of the Day (1949) remains one of the most powerful fictional renderings of …
  30. Meet the Staff at Highbrow Magazine: Q&A With Writer Mike Mariani, Highbrow Magazine
    Authors: Vladimir Nabokov, JD Salinger, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, Hunter S. Thompson, Lewis Carroll, it goes on. Artists (filmmakers): Terrence Malick, Henry Selick, Quentin Tarantino, ..

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“Clarissa Day” reading

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, VWoolf Listserv, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , on Wednesday 20 June 2012| 4 Comments »

Woolfians, in a lengthy VWoolf Listserv discussion, have deduced (I use the term loosely) that June 21 just might be — or at least the Woolfers have deemed it so — “Clarissa Day,” that day in June on which Mrs. Dalloway takes place, the Woolf counterpart to Joyce’s Bloomsday on June 16. I’m not going to recap the evidence, but rather I’ll do what I usually do, which is to talk about a book I’ve just read.

I think I first saw An Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi mentioned here, in one of Paula’s weekly lists of Woolf sightings in the media. As a circadian novel (one taking place in a single day), it was compared to Mrs. Dalloway — as all such novels are — in its own book jacket and in reviews, including one by Margot Livesey. Of course I had to read it.

The narrator is Clare (!) Moorhouse, an American living in Paris, married to an English diplomat, Edward. Her life is full of social responsibilities, and tonight she’s having an important, politically-charged dinner party. She goes through the day preparing for the party, with flashbacks to her past and the love of her youth, the Irish firebrand Niall. Niall was the dangerous one; Edward is the safe and reliable one. Sound familiar? What about the flowers, you ask?

Of course, she could have called in an order to the florist, but as with the asparagus, choosing them herself was better.

The drama and intrigue in Clare’s life would have set Clarissa’s heart racing; there’s far more than country-house dallying in her past, and it becomes its own a highly-charged story. But you can see the pattern, the hints, the loose outline conforming to type. It doesn’t matter whether you see a Woolf behind every tree or not–Korkeakivi’s first novel is a valiant effort and a good read. Put it on your list for summer!

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