Blogging Woolf

Of the 50 Woolf sightings spotted in the last 11 days, nine mention Florence and the Machine’s new song inspired by Woolf, “What the Water Gave Me.” It’s on their Ceremonial album. Other sightings mention Woolf portraits, Woolf novels, Woolf quotes and more — including take-offs on her famous phrase, “a room of one’s own.”

Florence And the Machine

1. Matter of space, Deccan Herald
   The incomparable Virginia Woolf had cut right to the heart of the truth when she proclaimed that writers –— she was speaking of mainly female and hence, disadvantaged writers — needed a place to call their own, to be able to mine their creativity and …
2. Author’s signature included in sale, This is The West Country
   A St Ives lighthouse visitor book that features the childhood signature of Virginia Woolf is going under the hammer. The book, from Godrevy Lighthouse, has a guide price of £3000 to £5000 and contains 159 signatures from 1859 to 1934. …
3. The Lives of A Novelist, Wall Street Journal
   Woolf’s suicide and her final words, like almost her every act and statement, have been the subject of much analysis and speculation. The most comprehensive account of her life, Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” (1997), is also the best. …
4. Beware the caveman: Men are no longer happy to hide away in a shed, now they …, Daily Mail
   By Jenny Bennett VirginIa Woolf wrote of every woman’s need for A Room Of One’s Own. But now it’s men who are brandishing the slogan and putting a door between themselves and the rest of the house. The chaps have long had their potting sheds …
5. Artistic relations: how family portraiture changed through the ages, The Guardian
   Eworth’s fixity may be precisely what Vanessa Bell, in the couples and kinship section, was trying to avoid in her portrait of her sister Virginia Woolf, painted around 1913. The writer is found seated in an armchair, crotcheting, and her facial …
6. Literature: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Varsity Online
   Who once described herself as “the only true heir to Virginia Woolf”, and has been variously accused of arrogance, absurdity and genius. Her first, semi-autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, published in 1985, won the Whitbread Award …
7. Florence and the Machine’s Ceremonials Delivers, Huffington Post
   Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones to drown herself. In a melancholy, velvety voice,Florence sings about mortality and the feminine connection to the earth. As the song goes on, the music only gets more and more intense, the song ending …
8. Florence & The Machine, Oswegonian
   The first single “What the Water Gave Me” references a Frida Kahlo painting and the suicide of Virginia Woolf alongside the burden of Atlas, an ancient Greek titan. Early press reports quoted Welch saying her second album would be a musical treatise on …
9. Review: Florence and The Machine’s Ceremonials, The Daily Tar Heel (blog)
   By Thompson Wall | The Daily Tar Heel Virginia Woolf, the infamous author and poet who drowned herself in a river by her home, is the inspiration of Florence and The Machine’s second album, Ceremonials. The album tells the story of a “sinful” woman …
10. Florence + the ‘Ceremonials’, New University Online
    After the struggle for peace narrated in “Shake It Out,” this track is a tale of acceptance of fate that manages to remain ambiguous, with clear references to Virginia Woolf’s suicide. There was always a risk that with the bigger sound this album …
11. The Magnet Tribune: Hear Say: Coldplay Comes Back with Electricity and …, my.hsj.org
    In the first single off the album, “What the Water Gave Me,” there is a heavy, haunting song that is inspired by English writer Virginia Woolf (to tell you what part of Woolf’s life inspired the song would ruin things so run off and Google it if you’re …
12. Florence + the Machine’s ‘Ceremonials’ Shoots to No. 1 on the U.K. Charts, PopCrush
    Welch has said the tracks on the record have been inspired by everything from the death of Virginia Woolf to the effects of a hangover. “Literally, a song can be about seven different things,” she explained. “I do think of songs almost as collages of …
13. Review: Florence Welch still an incredible artist, Daily Eastern News
    In an interview, Welch said this track is a swan-song for late author Virginia Woolf and her death by drowning. Florence howls and she rampages with the voluptuous vocals she has become known for. And, similar to Woolf, listeners are pulled into the …
14. Disc of the Week: For Florence, bigger isn’t always better, Globe and Mail
    The lyrics hint at a watery suicide à la Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare’s Ophelia, as portrayed in John Everett Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite portrait. Water and air are Welch’s symbolic elements, just as earth and fire belong to another current singer with …
15. Flo & co. go slicker on sophomore album, “Ceremonials”, UNCW Seahawk
    Still, the song retains the trademark grandeur of the band; harp plucks, soaring choir, melodramatic lyrics referencing the Greek god Atlas and British author Virginia Woolf. Even more obviously indebted to American musical traditions is “Lover to …
16. Cancer biography competes with four novels on Guardian First Book award shortlist, The Guardian
    … Book award winners including Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith and last year’s triumphant writer Alexandra Harris, who won for her non-fiction title Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. …
17. Emeli Sandé: I’m not cool … I want to reach everyone, The Sun
    Well-read, her favourite writers being Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, she’s very vocal about the poor standard of lyrics today. She says: “I always wonder why pop can’t be more poetic. Why do we have to sacrifice lyrics to be catchy? …
18. A historical building of one’s own, UVU Review
    Virginia Woolf has argued that all women really need is a modest income, a little bit of time and a room of one’s own to experience inspiration and freedom. She could not have been more correct. On a campus of 32000 students, I’ve got an identification …
19. ‘Pilgrimage’: Annie Leibovitz Visits Darwin, Woolf, Emerson, and Freud, The Atlantic
    The quest took her to such fascinating locales and pockets of cultural history as Charles Darwin’s cottage in the English countryside, Virginia Woolf’s writing table, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home, Ansel Adams’s darkroom, Emily Dickinson’s only surviving …
20. In Her Latest Project, Annie Leibovitz Focuses On What Matters, NPR (blog)
    Instead, her book Pilgrimage is a quiet collection of scenes and objects that matter to her: Emily Dickinson’s dress, the Niagara Falls in Ontario, Virginia Woolf’s bedroom. “I needed to save my soul,” photographer Annie Leibovitz recently told The New …
21. PG Wodehouse’s disgrace can’t hide the greatness of his work, The Guardian (blog)
    Do we change our views about Virginia Woolf when we discover that she was a terrible snob who wrote some fairly nauseating things about the British working man? And, finally, does it disable PG Wodehouse’s claims to greatness that he had no grasp of …
22. Ten questions for an author: Ethna McKiernan, Minneapolis Star Tribune (blog)
    … conferred at a time when the only other Americans awarded this were JFK and Robert Frost; a framed picture of some first-issue stamps from the Irish post office; and a framed thingie of Virginia Woolf quotes that came from a calendar I loved in the…
23. Pacifists and feminists, The Oxford Times
    Virginia Woolf, for one, detached herself from the war. She recorded seeing “the faces of our rulers in the light of the shellfire. So ugly they looked — German, English, French — so stupid.” She was a frequent visitor to Garsington Manor, …
24. Off the wall look at changing lives, The Star
    Amongst the works on display will be William Hogarth’s A House of Cards from 1730; Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and their daughter Ann by Henry Walton; Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers from 1934; and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister Virginia Woolf dated …
25. Photos from famous author biographies, USA Today
    Look through photographs from four new literary biographies: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin, And So It Goes, Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields, Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett and Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris. …
26. St. Kate’s Newswire :: St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN :: News and Events, College of St. Catherine
    “It’s always hard to come up with your favorites,” says Lupori, who often is asked that question. Still, she is quick to name three authors — Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf — whose work has pushed her intellectually throughout ..
27. On Fiction by Virginia Woolf – review,The Guardian
    By John Dugdale by Virginia Woolf This collection of four essays, all but one from the 20s, improves markedly as it goes along. The first, “Hours in a Library” (implictly an ample private one), dates from 1916 and could be the work of a Downton Abbey …
28. Other Israel Film Festival: ‘Torn’ and ’77 Steps’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
    “As a woman, you have your own space to create, to live, to make love, to hate, to be what you want to be,” she said, invoking Virginia Woolf. “For now it’s my apartment in Tel Aviv and I’m happy for that.” Click to login and write a letter to the …
29. The Greatest Gossip, The Atlantic
    He is probably the last in a line of haute vulgarizers that runs from Dr. Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, Virginia Woolf, VS Pritchett, and Wilson. A generation of high-minded general readers (remember them?) looked to Updike essays to teach them about …
30. The Morgan Is Showing Rare Books, Manuscripts, Music & Americana, Antiques and the Arts Online
    Austen also appears in Virginia Woolf’s notebook from 1931 that includes a heavily revised draft of “A Letter to a Young Poet,” first published in the Yale Review in 1932. Two classic American melodies, “New Yankee Doodle,” 1798, and “The One Horse …
31. Chick lit vies for top book awards, Irish Independent
    It was Virginia Woolf who decided that what every woman writer needed was a room of her own. These days it would be a bathroom floor, glass of Chardonnay in hand, screaming, ‘OMG! I’m turning 30’. The 1996 arrival of Bridget Jones’s Diary launched a…
32. V review: Downton Abbey, The Guardian
    Lady Cora deciding she’s a lesbian and having an affair with Virginia Woolf. Lady Edith rushing off to Germany to befriend Hitler in jail. Lady Sybil joining the IRA. Lady Mary deciding that she’s actually Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas. …
33. Drunken antics, Diamondback Online
    It’s not like Virginia Woolf, where you’re rereading the same sentence for 10 minutes, and you’re like, ‘What the f—’s going on?’ You can’t do that for a screenplay, or a newspaper or a website.” Co-writer Jesse Herrmann joked that Elijah the Prophet …
34. Let’s work on connecting future dreams with reality, The Coloradoan
    It’s not that I’m saying that I didn’t gain anything from those four years of papers on Virginia Woolfand midterms on modern American poetry and so much procrastination and widening of eyes. Workshop after discussion after roundtable forced me to …
35. MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE Review, Twitch
    Dark like Virginia Woolf, or a Nick Cave album. Elizabeth Olsen gives one of the year’s breakout performances as the young girl of the title. After living a radical life apart from society on a farm with a group of self-sustaining misfits, …
36. “The Journals of Spalding Gray,” edited by Nell Casey, Washington Post
    And, most ominously, he speculated on why Virginia Woolf killed herself: “she could only write about living . . . but was not living it. She was outside of it all the time.” Gray committed suicide in January 2004 at age 63. He had been talking about it …
37. Everything Happens Today’ from Jesse Browner wraps around a meal: New in …, Plain Dealer (blog)
    As in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” the meal preparation gives Browner a way into his protagonist’s head, as Wes makes connections between Buddhists and butchers. Occasionally this results in overlong Proustian passages, but when Wes contends with…
38. Ten Books on Delhi You Should Read, Wall Street Journal (blog)
    It took the intervention of fellow novelist Virginia Woolf to get this novel published: Its British publishers originally deemed the novel too subversive. The events in the novel begin in the summer of 1911, the period when Old Delhi was still known as …
39. Alchemy of silence, The Asian Age
    One author who understood silences was the great English novelist Virginia Woolf. Silence, for Woolf, was not just part of a woman’s statement of being; it was integral to her writing style. Silence provided the rhythms between language and space, …
40. A secular enchantment, Le Monde Diplomatique
    Levine’s awe when watching the flight of a red-tailed hawk over an apartment building in New York (or the reader’s awe when contemplating the bœuf en daube served by Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse) are moments that fulfil, …
41. Parting words of ‘wisdom’, Inquirer.net
    Virginia Woolf, author Our answer: Yes, this material world is cruel and miserable, because it isn’t our real home. Don’t give up and don’t lose hope, because we have a wonderful home to return to. We are eternal souls temporarily held in deteriorating …
42. NEW DVD RELEASES, GoErie.com
    The 2002 film, which co-stars Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep, is a brilliant adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and seamlessly delivers a complex plot about three generations of women influenced by writer Virginia Woolf.
43. The unheralded genius of the genius’s sister, Washington Examiner
    Virginia Woolf, in her famous polemic “A Room of One’s Own,” imagined the fate of a fictional sister of William Shakespeare. Judith Shakespeare might have been as talented as her now-legendary brother. But without the opportunities open to him …
44. Passionate story of love and life in Kidderminster, Kidderminster Shuttle
    The play, adapted from the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville -West by the celebrated actress Eileen Atkins, charts the extraordinary relationship between them, using their words in which they speak of every day life, friends, …
    

    Vita Sackville-West

45. Of course artists often go mad – it’s part of the job, Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
    Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, Ernest Hemingway are three who swung between euphoria and gloom. There are degrees in these matters. Woolf and Lowell were genuinely – certifiably – mad at various points in their life, Hemingway only at the end, …
46. An Inside Look at Book Publishing & Literary Marketing in a Digital World, PR.com (press release)
    Can you picture Virginia Woolf logging in to her Twitter account to see how many followers she currently has or to calculate her number of Facebook “likes?” Miss Woolf oftentimes wrote manuscripts in beautiful cursive on parchment paper, and then went…
47. Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland show, The Guardian
    Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel …
48. Culture flash: St Paul’s Cathedral, The Guardian
    “It swells like a great grey bubble,” wrote Virginia Woolf admiringly in a 1930s essay. For Charlotte Brontë, its dome was “a solemn, orbed mass, dark-blue and dim … While I looked, my inner self moved.” Magnificent as it is, St Paul’s architectural …
49. A Portrait of Charles Dickens as a Young Experimental Novelist, Huffington Post
    His novels emphasized vision: Virginia Woolf noted that “His people are branded upon our eyeballs before we hear them speak, by what he sees them doing, and it seems as if it were the sight that sets his thoughts in action. …
50. Virginia Woolf’s Real First Name Revealed!, Patch.com
    According to the website: “Christine was inspired by the author Virginia Woolf, whose first name was Adeline, and her belief that women need their own space to feel supported and productive.” All I know is, when I was a brand new mom, I craved a place …

Read Full Post »