The Charleston Festival is back — in person — beginning yesterday and running through May 29 at Charleston in Firle, Sussex.
The festival is the main fundraising event for the longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group.
Of particular interest to Bloomsbury scholars is Sunday’s program with Alex Jennings and Jonathon Pryce. At 5:30 p.m., the actors will do a live reading of “The Love Lives of Lytton Strachey,” revealing “a playful and uncensored portrait of a queer universe, shared in glorious candid detail with trusted friends,” according to the website.
In this week’s Woolf sightings, we have more on The Dalloway, the new “lesbian-leaning” restaurant opened by a simpatico model in New York City (1 and 2). We also have a link to the article “The Education of Virginia Woolf” that appears in the current issue of The Atlantic, which is rapidly being passed around Facebook (8).
180 Minutes With Kim Stolz, New York Magazine “She was never really able to be comfortable in her skin. Knowing the struggles that Virginia Woolf went through, it’s an ode to her and a thank-you to her,” Stolz says, taking stock of the now rollicking scene. “But Amanda will tell you she just …
Victorian Bloomsbury, By Rosemary Ashton, The Independent
When Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa moved into 46 Gordon Square in 1904, in what Henry James had described as “dirty Bloomsbury”, the family was appalled at the young women’s choice of this profoundly unfashionable district of London, and …
Browbeaten by a new cultural subspecies, Sydney Morning Herald
Neither highbrow intellectuals or lowbrow plebs, the middlebrow copped a pasting as far back as the 1940s from writer Virginia Woolf, who described them as ”of middlebred intelligence … in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life …
‘Looking for Transwonderland,’ ‘Route 66 Still Kicks,’ and More, New York Times
This season’s travel books abound with journeys inspired by literary lions — a trip to a Greek island in pursuit of the teachings of Epicurus, a hike along the river where Virginia Woolf died, an excursion to the birthplace of the Nigerian writer Ken …
At Your Service: The Birth of Privates on Parade, The Arts Desk
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism …
The Education of Virginia Woolf, The Atlantic
Born into the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy, Virginia Woolf—whose set included some of the kingdom’s most illustrious families, many of its finest writers and painters, its greatest poet, its most brilliant economist—could …
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The Waves – Virginia Woolf The Waves is a novel (first published in 1931) by Virginia Woolf. The book is a narrative in Woolf’s infamous stream-of-consciousness style. Here, Woolf gives into experimentation, as the six friends are lulled–drawn with …
Video of the Day: Is the “Crazy Artist” Stereotype True?, SF Weekly (blog)
An ear here, a life there: Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath each had their own way of dealing with mood disorders. In her new graphic novel, cartoonist and storyteller Ellen Forney asks an important question: For artists, are mental …
“Queering Woolf,” the special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (Issue 82, Fall 2012), edited by Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt, has been posted to the Virginia Woolf Miscellany website at this link.
If you are a member of the International Virginia Woolf Society and have not been receiving the hard copy of the Miscellany, you should contact Lynn Hall, membership coordinator, to verify that you have paid your dues and that your current mailing address in the database is correct.
Woolf scholars, oft known as Woolfians, cannot be easily divided into two camps when it comes to gender studies.
According to Madelyn Detloff of Miami University, there are no hard and fast lines drawn between ‘lesbian and gay studies’ Woolfians and ‘queer studies’ Woolfians.
She made her point during a recent discussion about the topic on the VWoolf Listserv.
The discussion was kicked off by a question from Ann Marie Lindsey, student at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a student in Mary Ann Caws’ Art and Literature in Bloomsbury course, Lindsey asked how current queer studies scholars view Virginia Woolf and/or the Bloomsbury set.
The resulting conversation became a bit heated at times. But in between, the following contributions to a bibliography on the topic were offered by participants.
Julie Taddeo, “A Modernist Romance? Lytton Strachey and the Women of Bloomsbury.” Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings. Eds. Harrison and Peterson (1997).
Tirza Latimer and Jane Marie Garrity. “Queer Cross Gender Collaborations.” The Cambridge Gay and Lesbian Companion to Literature. 2010.
Robert Martin and George Piggffford, eds. Queer Forster. U of Chicago Press. 1997.
Christopher Reed. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
____. “Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties.” Genders 11 (1991): 58-80.
____. “Making History: The Bloomsbury Group’s Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity.” Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History. Ed. Whitney Davis. Binghamton: Haworth Press, 1994. 189-224.
Georgia Johnston. The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein. 2007.
Brenda Helt. “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Expected publication date: 2010.
Kathryn Simpson. “‘Queer Fish’: Woolf’s Writing of Desire Between Women in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway.” Woolf Studies Annual 9 (2003). 55-82.
Erica Delsandro, “‘Myself—It was Impossible’: Queering History in Between the Acts.” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007). 87-109.
D. A. Boxwell, “‘In the Urinal’: Woolf Around Gay Men.” Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker & Laura Davis (Pace UP 1998). 173-78.
David Eberly, “Talking it All Out: Homosexual Disclosure in Woolf.” Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference. Ed Vara Neverow-Turk & Mark Hussey (Pace UP 1993).
