Share your thoughts about teaching and learning from Virginia Woolf’s essays.
I am particularly interested in how Woolf’s essays affect and influence teachers. – Beth Rigel Daughterty
Beth’s sequel looks at Woolf’s essays through a pedagogical lens. Here are the questions she poses:
What have Woolf’s essays taught you about the process of learning and/or the process of teaching?
What does she say to you about how and why we educate?
How do you use Woolf’s essays in your teaching, whether formal or informal, inside or outside the academy?
Would you be willing to share your thoughts with me (Beth) by filling out a survey or talking with me on Zoom?
Details and deadline
More details — her rationale and goal, eight survey questions, permission forms, and contact information — can be found at this link. Beth asks that respondents fill out this Google Form or email answers to woolfessaysurvey@gmail.com, preferably by August 31, 2027.
Ever gracious, Beth adds, “Thank you so much for considering my request.”
A Turkish translation of seven essays by Virginia Woolf, in progress for three years, is now out.
Edited by Mine Özyurt Kılıç, founder of the Woolf Arts Archive, the volume is titled On Writing and includes essays on different aspects of writing, along with an introduction, “Virginia Woolf as an Essayist.” Poet Kenan Yücel designed the cover.
More good news: You can order it from Blackwell’s at a price of $38.82, which includes shipping to the U.S.
What’s in the book
The most comprehensive portrayal of Virginia Woolf’s education to date
Examination of the link between Virginia Stephen’s education and Virginia Woolf’s essays
A focus on Woolf’s nonfiction and her early work
Two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time
A compilation and organization of archival material in appendices for future researchers.
According to the publisher:
This study takes up Woolf’s challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father’s library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen’s learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Part two
Rigel Daugherty is working on a follow-up volume, Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Being a Teacher. With this volume, Beth says, “I hope to clarify how her essays continue to teach and continue to encourage readers to join the literary conversation.”
About the author
Recently retired from Ohio’s Otterbein University, Beth Rigel Daugherty taught modernist English literature, Virginia Woolf, and Appalachian and Native American literature, along with many thematically focused writing courses, for 36 years.
Beth Rigel Daugherty (at far left), Leslie Hankins and Diane Gillespie presented a panel on “Portraying and Projecting Age, Ageism, and Activism” at the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, with its theme of social justice, at the University of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati in June of 2019.
Virginia Woolf wrote hundreds of essays during her lifetime. The total varies from “nearly 600” (Fernald 160) to “640,” (Rigel Daughtery 9) so it can be difficult to locate just the right essay when needed. For that reason, sometimes a slim collection of Virginia Woolf essays that focus on a specific topic is just the thing.
Here are two.
On freedom
The first is part of a 27-volume Vintage Mini collection, a Vintage Classic published by Penguin/Random House. Titled Liberty, it includes selections from A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), and the essays “Street Haunting” and “How Should One Read a Book.”
Here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes – jacket quote from Liberty (2018)
On the visual arts
The second is the twentieth volume in the ekphrasis series published by David Zwirner Books in 2021 and is a collection of Woolf’s writings on the visual arts.
Titled Oh, to Be a Painter!, the volume begins with an introduction by Claudia Tobin and includes Woolf’s longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).
References:
Fernald, Anne E. “A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century.” Feminist Studies 31:1 (2005): 158-182.
Virginia Woolf is becoming ever more popular in Turkey. Tuesday, we posted about a new platform for budding Turkish writers who have an interest in Woolf. Today, we share news of a free online event focused on Woolf and literary history that is part of the Virginia Woolf Society Turkey’s Woolf Seminar series.
What: A free online talk on “Unwriting and Rewriting History and Literary History: Woolf’s Fictions and Essays,” as part of the Woolf Seminars series of the Virginia Woolf Society Turkey.
Who: Anne Besnault, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Rouen – Normandy, France, will be the speaker.
Date: Friday, September 29 Time: 7 p.m. Turkey time or noon EST. (Please check your local time.) Cost: Free. Registration: Everyone is welcome to register and attend, using this Eventbrite link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/…/unwriting-and-rewriting…
About the talk
The aims of Besnault’s talk are:
to introduce the audience to Woolf’s historical thought, as seen from the vantage point of the past and contemporary historiographical discourses;
to offer a new vision of Woolf as a literary historian essentially interested in the textuality of history;
and to uncover the specific coherence of her history of nineteenth-century women’s literature beyond its apparent heterogeneity and contradictory impulses.
About Besnault
Besnault’s research focuses on modernist fiction and criticism, short story theory, genre and gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth century British literature, literary history, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf’s essays and fiction.
