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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.

Email your contribution to marielleoneill88@hotmail.com

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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London in Bloom launches today, introduces a breath of spring in a troubled time

Posted in books, coronavirus, gardens, London, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 17 March 2020| Leave a Comment »

The temperature was 34 degrees and a light dusting of snow covered the ground when my copy of London in Bloom by Georgianna Lane arrived in my Ohio mailbox several weeks ago.

With its cover photo depicting pale pink roses draping a doorway, arching over a window, and filling the basket of a matching pink bicycle parked out front, the book introduced a welcome breath of spring into my life that day. We need that even more now.

Turning from fear to beauty

The coronavirus has infected our globe, and many of us are sheltering at home, attempting to stave off the ugliness of anxiety. So there is no better time to open a book full of the floral beauty of London, Virginia Woolf’s favorite city.

London in Bloom is the third and final book in Lane’s Cities in Bloom series, published by Abrams. To capture the images that fill it, she spent many early morning hours photographing the floral beauty and architectural detail of England’s capitol before residents and tourists clogged the streets, sidewalks, and parks. I daresay she would find that task easier now.

On “Tea and Tattle”

I first heard of the book on episode 27 of Francesca Wade’s “Tea and Tattle” podcast. Wade describes it as “most beautiful guide to the city’s parks, gardens, florists and hotels and should be on any London-lover’s shelf!”

Much like Woolf, a lover of gardens who incorporated them into her life and into her work, the author shares her affection for London’s gardens in her Introduction to the book:

Perhaps not surprisingly, my most memorable London experiences have been inextricably interwoven with gardens… the open spaces of London have seeped into my consciousness, awakened my imagination, and become part of me” (7).

From parks and gardens to floral displays

London in Bloom is divided into four sections:

  • parks and gardens
  • floral boutiques
  • market flowers and
  • floral displays.

Each is introduced by a page or two of text that shares Lane’s thoughts and experiences, then filled with gorgeous photos of flowers and architectural details — brickwork, tile-work, doorways — that enhance them.

Whimsical touches are also introduced in the form of light cotton floral print dresses in a shop window, teacups and cake on a tea table, and London’s trademark red phone booth and double decker buses.

Beauty and practicality

Despite some touches of red, the theme throughout is pastel — from flowers to buildings to cover pages. But the book includes the practical, as well as the beautiful.

The back section gives us instructions on creating our own London-style bouquet, a field guide to London’s spring blooming trees and shrubs, and an introductory guide to springtime blooms throughout the city.

London in Bloom provides delectable refreshment for the eye and the soul in our troubled times, whether you are a lover of flowers, a fan of London, or just in need of a bit of balm.

 

 

 

 

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COVID-19 postpones this year’s Virginia Woolf conference until 2021 #vwoolf2020

Posted in 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, coronavirus, events, tagged , on Monday 16 March 2020| 1 Comment »

Dear all,

After conferring with Amy Smith (the 2021 Woolf Conference organizer) and the ACVW Steering Committee, the Program Committee for #vwoolf2020 has decided to postpone this summer’s conference until next summer. Profession and Performance will now take place June 2021 (specific dates TBD). After conferring with her administration, Amy Smith has confirmed that she will now organize the 2022 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

We are so grateful to Amy (the best) as well as to the Steering Committee for their support during this strange, troubling time.

Anyone who had a proposal accepted for Profession and Performance will be automatically accepted next year. We’re still working out new dates, so you may have to wait a bit to know whether or not you will be able to attend. Please refrain from letting us know whether you’ll be attending (or not) until we get firm 2021 dates settled. Of course, if you have any questions for us, we’re happy to hear from you, and we’ll answer them as best we can!

Know that we will be reopening the CFP later this year, so if you would like to submit a differentproposal than the one you originally submitted, you will be free to do so at that time. We realize that your projects may look very different in a year’s time.

This is not an easy email to write or to share, but please know that we feel this is, absolutely, the right decision. Whether or not the spread of COVID-19 has been mitigated by June (we’ll see), it seems unthinkable to ask people to pay for registration or book travel now when so many travel bans, curfews, and other policies limiting social interaction are in place. Stay safe, practice social distance, and flatten that curve. We hope to see many (if not all of you!) in Vermillion, SD in June 2021.

Sending love,

Ben (and the rest of the South Dakota Woolf Pack)

—

Benjamin D. Hagen, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

Assistant Professor | 20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature

University of South Dakota | Department of English

Dakota Hall, Room 212 | 414 E. Clark St.

Vermillion, SD 57069 | United States

 

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