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Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’

Woolf’s “On Being Ill”: from Instagram to published book

Posted in art, art exhibits, books, essays, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 14 May 2024| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf’s numerous experiences with illness led her to write the essay On Being Ill, published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. Inspired by this work and the  coronavirus, Norwegian typesetter Ane Thon Knutsen has turned her spontaneous homage to the essay into book form.

Here’s how it came about.

In March of 2020, as lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, Ane already had two other projects focused on Woolf under her belt — A Printing Press of One’s Own and The Mark on the Wall.

Working from her private letterpress studio at home, Ane started a third. She printed one sentence from “On Being Ill” on one sheet of paper every day. Her project ran from March 23 to Aug. 29, 2020, and she shared those pages on Instagram. She also shared her thoughts about the project with Blogging Woolf.

Through this process, she shaped a diary in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed for research on pandemics by creating an artist book.

The book merges Woolf’s sentences with with my reflections on covid, pandemics, isolation, escaping reality through literature, waiting, time, art, love, protests, feminism, typesetting, printing, family, small stuff, big stuff. – Ane

The publication also contains reflections on teaching during the pandemic in the spring of 2021, along with insights and works by master’s students in graphic design and illustration at The Oslo National Academy of The Arts, using Woolf’s essay as a mirror for their own pandemic experiences.

The digital book edition

With an introduction by Mark Hussey, the book is available as a digital book edition of 150. It is now available through several independent bookshops, which are handling distribution. They include the following:

Copies will also be available at the 33rd Annual International Woolf conference in June.

Support and gratitude

The publication is supported with research funds from The Oslo National Academy of The Arts. Graphic design was done by Tiril Haug Johne and Victoria Meyer.

Ane expresses special thanks to the Oslo National Academy of the Arts Class of 2022: Araiz Mesanza, Embla Sunde Myrva, Kristine Lie Øverland Emil Holmberg Lewe, Ruth Emilie Rustad, Nicolo Groenier, her former professor Alan Mackenzie-Robinson, former president of the International Virginia Woolf Society Dr. Benjamin Hagen, the Woolf community, her husband Truls and her son Pil.

Ane Thon Knutsen in her home printshop with a volume of On Being Ill, her pandemic project originally shared on Instagram.

About Ane Thon Knutsen

Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.

Ane Thon Knutsen at her exhibition “Printed Works: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf” at the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jun3 8-11, 2023.

She also debuted her installation, “Printed Words: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf,” at University Archives and Special Collections at the Florida Gulf Coast University library during the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia  Woolf and Ecologies, June 8-11, 2023.

In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapted a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories. The exhibit focused on Woolf’s poetic short stories “Blue” and “Green.” The printed pages were collected and are being stored in book form in FGCU Bradshaw Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

More coming up

In addition, Ane will display another installation, Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” May 16 – June 11 for the 33rd International Virginia Woolf Conference. The adaptation of Woolf’s short story consists of 1,514 letterpress-printed sheets of kozo.

According to Ane, it is an “organic book allowing you to walk through the pages, like insects in a flowerbed.”

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Novel ties Leonard Woolf’s war struggles to Covid pandemic

Posted in books, events, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , on Saturday 20 May 2023| Leave a Comment »

This Devastating Fever, a new novel by Sophie Cunningham, follows the story of novelist Alice Fox and her struggles to write about Leonard Woolf as he deals with what he and Virginia would do if Hitler invaded England.

The novel, shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, links Leonard and Virginia’s past dilemmas to those of the present, as Alice deals with the COVID-19 pandemic.

About the author and the talk

Cunningham, a member of the Order of Australia for her literary contributions and the author of nine novels, spent 15 years writing her latest.

If you can get to Sydney, Australia, you can hear Cunningham talk about her novel at Castle Hill Library 11 a.m. – noon on May 27, as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Complex, darkly funny and deeply moving,– a dazzlingly original novel about what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can find comfort and answers in the past.

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Share your room of your own for International Women’s Day

Posted in A Room of One's Own, events, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, tagged , , , , on Monday 1 March 2021| Leave a Comment »

International Women’s Day is Monday, March 8, and the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has put out a call that draws attention to the current plight of working women and connects it to Virginia Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929).

With women’s employment taking a huge hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the VWSGB is asking us to share a photograph of a room of our own — if we are lucky enough to have one.

Women, work, and the pandemic

The pandemic has affected women’s work lives in drastic ways. The BBC is calling it a “shecession” and cites these facts:

  • Globally, women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s.
  • In the U.S., unemployment has intensified the most for those employed in personal care and food service jobs, where women predominate.
  • One in four women surveyed said they were thinking about reducing or leaving paid work due to the pandemic.
  • Those disproportionately affected in the U.S. include black women and Latinas.
  • Some subgroups are squeezed even more, like mothers of young children and mothers without partners or relatives.

In addition, recent projections estimate that employment for women may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024—two full years after a recovery for men, according to Fortune.

The pertinence of A Room of One’s Own

So the British society has turned its attention to Virginia Woolf’s eternally pertinent feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, a text the society writes, “Now more than ever . . . is acutely relevant given that women’s work is being so squeezed and undervalued, and space is at a premium in family homes and elsewhere during life under lockdown, with working and schooling taking place in the home.”

Share your room of your own or your thoughts about the essay

So here’s the charge: Share photos of your own Room of One’s Own, if you are lucky enough to have one, or your reflections on Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own and what it means to you. The society will share contributions on its social media pages.

And on March 8, check the VWSGB social media accounts:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/VWSGB
Instagram: @virginiawoolfsociety
Twitter: @VirginiaWoolfGB

 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

 

Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House, 2019

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Virginia Woolf fans read Proust during a pandemic

Posted in coronavirus, Proust, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Wednesday 8 April 2020| 1 Comment »

The New York Times reports that about half the world is in lockdown, due to COVID-19. So is now the time to read Proust? Some say yes. Others say no.

Drew Shannon’s Modern Library set of Proust

One naysayer is Suzanne Moore of The Guardian. She writes, “I never managed Proust in pre-virus days, so don’t saddle me with him now, for God’s sake.”

Others say yes. In fact, a Facebook group formed by Elisa Kay Sparks and dubbed “The Woolf Pack Reads Proust” has taken on Proust as a pandemic reading project. It has 29 members from around the globe.

Woolf on Proust

Woolf herself read Proust. Here’s what she had to say about him:

Last night I started on Vol 2 [Jeunes Filles en Fleurs] of him (the novel) and propose to sink myself in it all day. [. . . ] But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures?theres something sexual in it?that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann” – Letter to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922 (Letters II 525)

My great adventure is really Proust. Well–what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped–and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance?  One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical–like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses. – Letter to Roger Fry, 3 October 1922 (Letters II 565-6)

Resources for reading Proust

Founding member Benjamin Hagen, who is also heading up the 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance, which has been postponed until 2021, has added a number of resources to the group page.

They include:

Hagen, assistant professor of 20th-Century British and Anglophone literature at the University of South Dakota, also posted this drawing and comment to the group page on April 6. He is also blogging about his experience.

Me [Ben Hagen] trying (with not too much success) to map out connections between topics / themes from last week’s reading.

Focusing — or not — on Proust

Hagen has made much more progress than I have, bless him. I must confess that the farthest I have gotten with reading Proust is locating the first volume on my bookshelf and dropping it on my desk. There it sits, unopened and unread.

The inability to focus on the task at hand is common at this time, no matter what we are doing. Here’s a quote shared to the group Facebook page by Gill Lowe, who said of her own reading of Proust: “I started. But I just can’t concentrate…”.

Proust on illness

It is illness that makes us recognise that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. – The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

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Pass time during the pandemic with Virginia Woolf brain teasers

Posted in coronavirus, events, tagged , , , , on Sunday 5 April 2020| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf readers and scholars around the globe are coming up with creative ways to fill the time as they shelter at home during the current coronavirus pandemic.

  • A Norwegian typesetter is setting a sentence a day from On Being Ill.
  • Members and followers of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society are posting photos of themselves reading Woolf and reading her letters aloud via video.
  • And now, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is sending its members 100 questions about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury — a few at a time. “There’s no prize, just a sense of satisfaction, perhaps even smugness, if you get them all right,” states the society’s email.

The first five brain teasers from the Big VW Quiz

Play along by answering these questions:

1) When was Virginia’s play Freshwater first performed?

(a) April 1933

(b) November 1934

(c) January 1935

d) December 1936

2) Where was it performed?

3) What year did Virginia first meet Vita Sackville-West?

4) What was Virginia’s first piece of published shorter fiction (as defined by Susan Dick in “Complete Shorter Fiction”)?

5) In which years were the first and second Post Impressionist exhibitions?

Join up

If you’d like to join the society to get the remaining 95 questions, you can find out more on the VWSGB website’s membership page.

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