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Woolf sightings worth noting and disputing

Posted in To the Lighthouse, VWoolf Listserv, Woolf Letters, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , , on Wednesday 24 September 2014| Leave a Comment »

Here are several Woolf sightings worth a read. And the second one is generating some heat on theVWoolf Listserv.

1. Maggie Gee explains how she came to write Virginia Woolf in Manhattan in The Guardian, Sept. 19, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan2014.

2. “Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and a Case of Anxiety of Influence” in the New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2014.

This essay is generating lively discussion on the VWoolf Listserv, with writers questioning author John Colapinto’s assertion that Woolf’s lighthouse imagery in To the Lighthouse was borrowed from Wharton.  As Linda Camarasana put it, “Makes me want to tell him to read ‘Reminiscences’ and ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ Surely he should at least acknowledge Woolf’s youth, trips to St. Ives, the haunting sounds of the waves, Julia’s death, and Stella’s death as the most obvious influences on To the Lighthouse.”

Another dispute is prompted by this line of Colapinto’s: “Though I can find no record of Woolf having read The Age of Innocence, it seems unlikely that she would have failed to read Wharton’s most famous and celebrated book, if for no other reason than she would have been curious about the first novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer.”

According to Stuart N. Clarke, Woolf acknowledged  receipt of a copy of The Age of Innocence in an uncollected letter to publishers Messrs Appleton & Co. on 18 Nov 1920. The letter was published in the January 2011 edition of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. In that issue’s accompanying note, Stephen Barkway discusses Woolf’s published comments on Wharton  and Wharton’s irritation.

3. Review of Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut, a fictional biography of E.M. Forster in the Washington Post, Sept. 18, 2014, that includes “lightly fictionalized” accounts of meetings with Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

4. London photos: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway book bench on the Flickfilosopher blog, Sept. 18, 2014. For more, see Close-up views of the Mrs. Dalloway bench and This summer, take a seat on the Mrs. Dalloway bench

5. Professor’s new book explores theories of place in the Bowdoin Orient, Sept. 12, 2014. The People, Place, and Space Reader, a new anthology dedicated to scholars writing about the ways in which people inhabit the space around them, includes an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own.

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Woolf sightings: To the Lighthouse — in print, in film, on stage

Posted in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Friday 10 August 2012| Leave a Comment »

It’s summer, and the livin’ is easy, so maybe that’s why To The Lighthouse is in the limelight in this week’s Woolf sightings.

First, several blog posts (2-4) discuss The Guardian article that includes Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse among the top 10 most difficult books. Second, a New Yorker blog post (6) mistakenly includes the assertion that Woolf’s novel is among “literature’s great unmade movies,” ignoring the 1983 made-for-TV movie directed by Colin Gregg. Third, the novel inspires the theme of a theatre festival for British young people (15).

  1. Tucsonans share picks for summer reads, Arizona Daily Star
    A good summer getaway.” Karen Falkenstrom, director, Odaiko Sonora, Japanese drumming ensemble. • What she’s reading: “The Voyage Out” by Virginia Woolf. “Woolf is a master of well-wrought descriptive language and has an extraordinary sensitivity for …
  2. 10 hardest books should push us, The Periscope Post
    I’ve read three – Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, which I have been re-reading intermittently this year; Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of A Tub, although it was a fair while ago; and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, the inclusion of which has caused …
  3. The world’s most difficult books: how many have you read?, The Guardian (blog)
    Nightwood by Djuna Barnes; A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift; The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson; Finnegans Wake by James Joyce; Being and…
  4. The Top 10 Most Difficult Books, Publishers Weekly
    To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even …
  5. Book News: Drinking Poetically, Programming in Verse, New Yorker (blog)
    Reviving the dwindling reputation of Thomas Browne, a Renaissance author who inspired Melville, Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf. A recipe for the “particularly insidious punch” Robert Penn Warren made to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday.
  6. Literature’s Great Unmade Movies, New Yorker(blog)
    Jane Smiley selected Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”—surely a challenge to any filmmaker. She saw Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as stars. For John Updike, “La Princesse de Clèves” by Mme. De Lafayette, offered “a succession of moonlit scenes” in …

    To the Lighthouse, 1983 movie directed by Colin Gregg

  7. 3 Amazing Literary Pilgrimages (PHOTOS), Huffington Post (blog)
    Did Clarissa Dalloway kiss Sally Seton, smelling the fresh flowers and green summer grass, in the same garden where Virginia Woolf sat, writing her story? Unfortunately, to humanity’s and to my own great dismay, we may never ask Mrs. Woolf this …
  8. Walking Tour of London’s Literary Pubs, Travel Agent
    Neither was a famous drinker, but it was in the company of Charles Dickens andVirginia Woolf that the capital’s first literary pub crawl set out from the Writers and Artists Bar in the basement of the Fitzroy Tavern (16 Charlotte Street, W1), in …
  9. Blu-ray Review: ‘Orlando’ (rerelease), Cine-Vue
    Released on Blu-ray for the very first time courtesy of UK distributor Artificial Eye, Sally Potter’s lavish 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s century-spanning novel Orlando marked the arrival of British actress Tilda Swinton onto the international …
  10. Competition: Win Sally Potter’s re-released ‘Orlando’ on Blu-ray, Cine-Vue
    Potter’s dazzling adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel is the tale of the apparently immortal Orlando, who begins an epic quest for love and freedom in the court of Elizabeth I as a man and completes the search 400 years later as a woman. This journey …
  11. Motherhood Does Not Make Every Woman a Better Writer (Or a Better Person …, xoJane
    But to project what-ifs onto women like Jane Austen — or Virginia Woolf, or Charlotte or Emily Brontë, or any number of women authors from history who dared sacrifice motherhood for writing — and then to suggest that the experience of biological …
  12. Reviving Thomas Browne, an Expert on Oblivion, New York Times
    Virginia Woolf said he paved the way for all psychological novelists, and Borges, who translated him, once described himself as just another word for Browne (and for Kafka and Chesterton). Browne was a reverent Christian who professed to care more …
  13. The Heroine in the Drawing Room, Wall Street Journal
    If a woman wrote the same text, it would just be…a domestic novel.” Virginia Woolfwrote much the same in “A Room of One’s Own”: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the …
  14. Heads Up: ‘NW’, The Independent
    Insider knowledge Smith took inspiration from another great female novelist who hymned our capital:Virginia Woolf. At BookExpo America Smith said in an interview that Woolf “kept her going”, as a “good example of a forward-thinking and yet consistently …
  15. Porthleven hosts international youth theatre festival, This is The West Country
    The theme of lighthouses was chosen because of its versatility and the fact it had been inspirational to many artists such as Virginia Woolf, whose classic novel ‘The Lighthouse’ was based on the lighthouse in Godrevy. Mrs Parish said: “’Lighthouses’ [as a …
  16. DVD Review: The Forsyte Saga Collection, Blogcritics.org (blog)
    Writing at a time when new ideas about what literature ought to do were changing and writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were looking to these new horizons, Galsworthy’s work seemed to many to be looking in the wrong direction. He was behind the …
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