Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘events’

Learning about Vita from her cousin

Posted in events, Orlando, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, tagged , , , , on Monday 6 March 2023| Leave a Comment »

If you will be in New York City on March 15, you can learn about Vita Sackville-West from her cousin. Yes, I’m serious.

Sponsored by the Royal Oak Foundation, the first talk in an in-person lecture series will be given by Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville on March 15 at 6 p.m. (ET) at 20 W. 44th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture, which is titled “Vita Sackville-West and A Sense of Place.”

Information about the event, which I learned about from a press release, is a bit sketchy. The release did not include any information regarding cost, and the appropriate page on the Royal Oak Foundation website is not updated to include the lecture series focused on Vita. However, I did find this email address, which might be helpful for obtaining more information: lectures@royal-oak.org

About the lecture series

The lecture series will describe Vita Sackville-West’s life and illustrate the places important to Virginia Woolf’s friend and lover.

One of these places was Knole, the 365-room house in which she grew up but which she was not able to inherit due to her sex. Woolf immortalized Vita’s feelings about Knole in her 1928 novel, Orlando.

In his lectures, Sackville-West will discuss Vita’s connections to Knole, as well as Sissinghurst, a nearby castle ruin and tumbledown farm that is considered Vita’s greatest creation and most enduring legacy. Both Knole and Sissinghurst are now owned by Britain’s National Trust.

About Robert Sackville-West

Robert Sackville-West, the 13th generation of the family to live at Knole, studied history at Oxford University and went on to work in publishing. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company that, in parallel with the National Trust, runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole.

Knole House, originally built as an archbishop’s palace but given to the Sackville family in 1603.

Rooftop view of Sissinghurst Gardens

 

Read Full Post »

The Woolf Salon is back!

Posted in essays, events, Woolf events, Woolf quote, tagged , , , , , on Thursday 2 February 2023| Leave a Comment »

The Woolf Salon usually meets monthly on Zoom. Anyone can join the conversation.

After a four-month hiatus, the Woolf Salon Conspirators have announced that they are  starting up the 2023 Woolf Salon Project with Woolf Salon No. 23: “The Lives of the Obscure.”

Where and when

The discussion will take place on Zoom Friday, Feb. 17, at 3 p.m. ET (New York). Other time zones are listed below, but please double check them!

2 p.m. CT (Chicago)
12 p.m. PT (Los Angeles)
5 p.m. Brasilia
8 p.m. GMT (London)
9 p.m. CET (Paris)
11 p.m. MSK (Moscow)
7 a.m. AEDT Saturday (Sydney)

The essay and where to find it

The 23rd salon will feature a rich conversation about Woolf’s essay (from The Common Reader [1925]), “The Lives of the Obscure.”

You’ll find the essay in any copy of The Common Reader, in Vol. 4 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (pp. 118–45), and on Project Gutenberg.

How to join

Anyone can join the group, which usually meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read Full Post »

See Met Opera “The Hours” at a movie theater near you

Posted in events, Mrs. Dalloway, music, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 6 December 2022| Leave a Comment »

It has played to sold-out audiences since it premiered on stage at New York’s Lincoln Center on Nov. 22. PBS Newshour called it, “The opera event of the year.” A Variety review claimed, “it’s Woolf who’ll make you swoon.”

Now, whether we can get to New York or not, we have the chance to see the Metropolitan Opera’s version of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Hours, which was based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

See it in a theater near you

How? The opera version of The Hours is coming to theaters around the country as a Fathom event and as part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series. Tickets for this three-hour-plus event range from $18 to $24.

The live performance in English will screen at 12:55 p.m EST on Dec. 10 with encore showings at 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. EST on Dec. 14.

Search for the theater closest to your location on The Hours page on the Fathom Events website.

Trio of heroines

Soprano Renée Fleming, soprano Kelli O’Hara and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato play the roles of the opera’s trio of heroines. Kevin Puts is the composer and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts.

The opera is set in London suburb Richmond in 1923, LA in 1949, and Manhattan at the end of the twentieth century.

“The mere fact of this opera’s existence does an interesting thing: It cements ‘The Hours’ as a foundational piece of contemporary art,” according to Daniel D’Addario’s review in Variety. The Hours is on The Met stage through Dec. 15.

Rave reviews, a synopsis, and a program

You can read more rave reviews from critics, prepare for the performance by reading a synopsis, and download a program.

Woolf’s words live on through the generations, and the concerns and troubled thoughts of women echo, too, no matter how much progress seems to be made in the world outside Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa’s minds. – “‘The Hours,’ in Its Latest Adaptation, Is a Stunning Triumph for the Met: Opera Review,” Variety.

Read Full Post »

What’s on this week? Jacob’s Room Centenary Events

Posted in events, Jacob's Room, tagged , , , on Sunday 23 October 2022| Leave a Comment »

Two free events will celebrate the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) this week. And organizers Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers to join them online in marking 100 years since its first publication.

Free online seminar

What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Reflections
When: Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2:30–4:30 p.m. BST, 9:30-11:30 a.m. ESTfree online seminar
Who: Charlotte Taylor Suppé (independent scholar): “Women Must Weep: Betty Flanders and the Perils of Nationalistic Mothering;” Chris Wells (University of Sheffield): “Sexology, Bisexuality and Experimentation in Jacob’s Room;” and Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University): “Tracing Patterns in the Critical Reception of Jacob’s Room from 1922 to 2022″
More information: Get abstracts and speaker biographies.
Registration: Register by noon BST on Oct. 26 to receive a link to join the seminar.

A readathon

What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Readathon
When: Thursday, Oct. 27
How: Follow and tweet to @VWoolf100 on Twitter. Hasthag: #JacobsRoom100

One hundred years to the day from the novel’s first publication, Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers of Jacob’s Room to join in a collective reappraisal of this text. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is one of the key works of modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, but still attracts much less attention than T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Whether reading the novel for the first time or returning to it, organizers encourage students, scholars, and, in Woolf’s phrase, “common readers” to dive into this short book (or a portion of it) on Oct. 27, then tweet thoughts and reflections to @VWoolf100 with the hashtag #JacobsRoom100.

What fresh light can today’s world shed on Jacob’s Room and how can this novel speak to us today, organizers ask.

Read Full Post »

Woolfians share reminiscences of 30 years of conferences

Posted in 19th Annual Internatinal Conference on Virginia Woolf, events, International Virginia Woolf Society, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, tagged , , , , , , on Monday 24 January 2022| Leave a Comment »

One of the benefits of being a member of the International Virginia Society is receiving copies of the society’s publication, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

AnneMarie Bantzinger

The latest installment, Issue 98, is now online. It features the special topic “The First Thirty Annual (International) Conferences on Virginia Woolf,” edited by AnneMarie Bantzinger.

The collection, solicited in 2019, offers a collage of reminiscences and memories that evoke the conference experiences from multiple perspectives, those of organizers and participants.

Among them is one I wrote about the 2009 conference in New York City. I’m sharing it here.

Woolf and the City: Wow!

For a girl born in Brooklyn, transplanted to Ohio at the age of three, and engaged in a longtime love affair with both Virginia Woolf and New York, could there be anything better than a Woolf conference in New York City? I think not.

Conference organizer Anne Fernald and Megan Branch, Fordham student, at Woolf and the City

And that is why “Wow!” was my immediate reaction to Woolf and the City, the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ten years later that is still my emotional response when I think of that 2009 event, which is why I chose the New York City conference as my personal hands-down favorite among the ten Woolf conferences I have attended.

Held June 4-7 at Fordham University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and organized by Anne Fernald, the conference was the second I had attended. But it was the first one I wrote about on Blogging Woolf, the site I created in July of 2007. Now, those blog posts, including one aptly titled “In the aftermath of Woolf and the City, one word — Wow!” help me recall the high points of the conference I described as “dynamite.”

Notable scholars, authors, readers

It featured 50 panels, attracted 200 Woolf scholars and common readers from around the globe, and introduced me to notable authors I never dreamed I would meet.

Ruth Gruber at Woolf and the City

One was Dr. Ruth Gruber, who died in 2016. Ninety-seven at the time of the conference, she was known as a journalist, photographer, and the author of Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman (1935).

She shared fascinating stories of her 1930s experiences as a journalist who visited the Soviet Arctic and a writer who met Virginia and Leonard Woolf in their Tavistock Square flat.

I remember chatting with this redhead curbside as she patiently waited for the cab that would take her home.

Novel writer and keynote speakers

Susan Sellers

Another was Susan Sellers, author of Vanessa and Virginia, the novel based on the relationship between sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, which was receiving rave reviews in the US at the time. I recall her graciousness as she signed books and chatted with readers.

Others I listened to, but did not meet, included keynote speaker Rebecca Solnit, a prolific author whose work is so timely and compelling today, and Tamar Katz of Brown University who spoke about the importance of “pausing and waiting” in life and in Woolf.

From a walking stick to rock music

What else struck my fancy? Here’s the list:

  • A visit to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, where we were treated to a private viewing of pieces in the Virginia Woolf collection, including the walking stick rescued from the River Ouse after her death. Being there felt more sacred than church.
  • A performance of the 2004 play Vita and Virginia, written by Dame Eileen Atkins and directed by Matthew Maguire, director of Fordham’s theatre program.
  • A performance that combined rock-out music from an L.A. band called Princeton with dance from the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre as the group performed cuts from its four-song album “Bloomsbury” based on the lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey.
  • And, of course, the cherished presence of Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and their collection of Bloomsbury Heritage Series monographs, including my first, which debuted at that conference — Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels — making Woolf and the City extra memorable.

Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson at Woolf and the City in 2009

 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: