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Much planned for June 13 Dalloway Day in London

Posted in events, Mrs. Dalloway, tagged , on Tuesday 5 May 2026| 1 Comment »

Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 13, to celebrate #DallowayDay in London. Here’s the schedule. More events and Eventbrite links will be added later.

11.30 a.m.–12.30 p.m.: A Bloomsbury Walk

A sell-out crowd for the Dalloway Day event at Hatchard in 2025.

Guided by Clara Jones, participants will saunter in the streets and squares of Virginia Woolf’s beloved Bloomsbury.

Please note: the walk is available only for those with All-Event Tickets. Organizers will send ticket-holders details of the meeting place by email.

Dr. Jones is senior lecturer in Modern Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist and the forthcoming British Interwar Women Writers, and editor of an essay collection, Virginia Woolf and Capitalism.

2 – 3 p.m.: A Woolf in the Archives

In conversation with Maggie Humm, Nicola Wilson and editors from the Times Literary Supplement will discuss “Virginia Woolf: Reader and Writer'” in relation to her work as publisher alongside Leonard Woolf and as a regular critic and reviewer.

“Snapshots of Bloomsbury” by Maggie Humm

Professor Wilson is professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. Her publications include Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2019) and Recommended! The Influencers Who Changed How We Read (2025).

Professor Humm is Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. She is the author/editor of twenty books, many focusing on Woolf and the arts. Her novel Talland House, based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, won the Women’s Fiction International Impact Book Award 2024. The Bloomsbury Photographs won the American Writing Awards 2025 for photography, and her most recent book is Snapshots: Autobiography, Virginia Woolf, Writing and the Visual.

3 – 4 p.m.: Book signing, informal meet-the-authors, soft drinks & cupcakes

4 – 5 p.m.: Art, Friendship and Roger Fry

Fiona McKenzie Johnson, whose biography Roger Fry: Bloomsbury and the Invention of Modern Art has recently been published by Triglyph Books, will discuss Fry’s life as a pioneering curator and artist, and in particular his friendship with Virginia Woolf, whose own biography of him was published in 1940.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson on the doorstep of 46 Gordon Square, Woolf’s first Bloomsbury home, during Dalloway Day 2018. A blue plaque is to the right of the front door.

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New London plaque commemorates the Woolfs

Posted in The Voyage Out, tagged , , , on Sunday 2 March 2025| 3 Comments »

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, in association with the directors of the Clifford’s Inn Management Company Limited, has commissioned and installed a blue plaque on London’s Clifford’s Inn where Virginia and Leonard lived from 1912-13 following their honeymoon.

The Woolfs lived in flat 13, with Virginia writing most of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) while living there. The block of flats was rebuilt in the 1930s, but the entrance on Clifford’s Inn Passage, where the plaque is placed, is where the Woolf’s would have entered the building.

The Passage, one of the oldest alleys in London, is the route which the Woolfs would have used to go to the Cock Tavern on Fleet Street.

Other tenants in the building during the Woolfs’ residency were individuals working in law, as well as photographers, tailors, architects, and artists including both painting and sculpture. The building was also used for commercial purposes. It was home to organizations including the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, the London Typographical Society, the London Positivist Society and the Art Workers’ Guild.

When ongoing construction work in the neighborhood is finished and the Clifford’s Inn Passage undergoes renovation and tree planting, the VWSGB will hold an unveiling ceremony for the plaque.

 

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Celebrate Jacob’s Room centenary with a walk

Posted in Jacob's Room, London, tagged , , , , , on Saturday 26 February 2022| 4 Comments »

Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room 100 years ago. And since then, many readers have wandered down Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, speculating about where Jacob lived and what he would have seen.

Pillar box at the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Great Ormond Street, outside Ryman Stationery in London.

I, myself, have done just that, taking particular notice — and photos — of the classic red pillar box on the corner and stopping at The Lamb pub, which existed in Jacob’s time, for a meal.

Woolf puts London at the novel’s heart

In a piece posted on the London Fictions website, Robert Todd, member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, explores, in detail, the way Woolf puts London at the heart of her novel after Jacob reaches the age of 22 in 1909.

Woolf’s eight chapters that cover the years from 1909 on “display, amongst so much else, a vivid picture of London and Jacob’s relation to it,” according to Todd.

The London of Jacob’s Room was a young man’s world of hopes, dreams and pleasure, before responsibility is assumed.  It was also a young woman’s world, Virginia Woolf’s, after she moved to Bloomsbury in 1904.  – Robert Todd

Walking with Jacob Flanders

For that reason, Todd’s March 2020 article includes a Jacob’s Room walk, beginning with Jacob’s lodging-house on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury.

Persephone Books at 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, in 2019. The shop moved to Bath in 2021.

He puts the location of Jacob’s two-room first floor flat at #59, the former site of Persephone Books, known for reprinting neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-20th century (mostly) women writers.

With a sitting room that overlooked the street, Jacob had a view of a confectioner’s shop and the famous letter-box pictured above.

Todd’s journeys with Jacob take us beyond Bloomsbury, however. With him, we travel to Covent Garden, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, and Parliament Hill Fields.

Woolf herself lived nearby

Plaque at 38 Brunswick Square

Todd goes on to share how Woolf’s experiences while living nearby at 38 Brunswick Square influenced the sights and the action in Jacob’s Room. The University of London School of Pharmacy has stood on the site of that address since around 1936, according to Jean Moorcroft Wilson in Virginia Woolf: Life and London (1987, 2011).

Todd also speculates about how Woolf’s visits to the two rooms of friend Saxon Sydney-Turner may have influenced her descriptions of Jacob’s rooms.

A protest against war in her own voice

Jacob’s Room, of course, is not just a novel about location. As Julia Briggs notes in her biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005), Woolf’s third novel was a protest against World War I and the “shocking impersonality of its killing machine” (84).

Jacob was just one of the nearly one million British and Commonwealth soldiers who perished in that conflict. But the enormity of that loss prompted Woolf to focus on the fate of just one individual in order to make some sense of the tragic conflict, according to Briggs.

Already a pacifist, in a Jan. 23, 1916, letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davis, Woolf claimed she had become “steadily more feminist'” due to “the preposterous masculine fiction” of wartime propaganda in mainstream media (L2, 76).

Three months before the novel was published, Woolf wrote in a July 26, 1922, diary entry that she had “found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice” (D2, 186).

Publishing record and reviews

Jacob’s Room was published on Oct. 27, 1922, in an edition of 1,200 copies. Wrapped in a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, it sold for seven shillings and sixpence.

An additional 1,000 copies were printed soon thereafter, but by the end of 1923, fewer than 1,500 copies had been sold. The novel did, however, turn a small profit.

Woolf’s novel received mixed reviews. It was described as experimental, impressionist, and adventurous. It was criticized for its form and its lack of realism. It was also compared to the work of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.

In a diary entry dated Nov. 12, 1922, Woolf herself described it as “the starting point for fresh adventures” (D2, 214).

In good company

It’s no wonder that the work was compared to James Joyce’s, for Woolf’s 1922 novel was in the good company of that work and others.

James Joyce’s Ulysses, was published the same year, along with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.

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Mapping Woolf’s novels

Posted in London, novels, tagged , , on Thursday 15 October 2020| Leave a Comment »

Location is important in Virginia Woolf’s novels. And a page on the Londonist website maps the locations used in all ten of her novels. It also points out key factors about the locations.

Those points include:

  • Bloomsbury doesn’t figure all that frequently.
  • Piccadilly is her most-used location.
  • Only half of her novels are set principally in London.
  • Her novels are quite international in setting.

The map points reflect locations mentioned or visited in the following 10 books:

The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), Flush: A Biography (1933), The Years (1937), Between The Acts (1941)

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Pamphlet’s original art shines a light on Virginia Woolf

Posted in art, art exhibits, books, To the Lighthouse, tagged , , , on Thursday 2 July 2020| 3 Comments »

One day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, ‘To the Lighthouse’ – Virginia Woolf.

That quote is the inspiration for an illustrated pamphlet published last month and created by artist Louisa Amelia Albani. Titled A Moment in the Life of Virginia Woolf: A Lighthouse Shone in Tavistock Square, the booklet visually reimagines this ‘moment’ on a summer afternoon in London’s Tavistock Square in 1925.

To do so, it uses Woolf’s own words from her letters and diaries, along with excerpts from To the Lighthouse (1927).

I ordered a copy of Albani’s pamphlet last week. It hasn’t arrived from London yet, but I did get a thank you email for my order directly from Albani — an unexpected but lovely treat.

Art exhibit too

The artist also has an online art exhibition with the same title. The exhibit includes more than a dozen pieces based on Woolf. Many of them are already sold, so if you are interested in an original piece of art connected to Woolf, take a look now.

Below is a video of the project that the artist has posted on YouTube.

 

 

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