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Posts Tagged ‘To the Lighthouse’

New film pays tribute to photo archives, Virginia Woolf

Posted in films, To the Lighthouse, tagged , , , on Monday 10 July 2023| Leave a Comment »

Kabe Wilson pays tribute to archives, as well as Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, in a newly launched film based on his creative work with modernist archives this spring.

Wilson explains that “Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey Through 100 Archives” “covers a series of archival quests about my childhood holidays, which then link up with Woolf and Bell’s own holidays, as well as their collaboration on To the Lighthouse itself, before developing into an elegy to all three,” Wilson explains.

The culmination of his residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies, the multi-media presentation centers around the story of the 10 paintings of Brighton and Sussex that Wilson produced during the 2020 lockdown period, and the exciting art history discovery that led to one of them becoming the cover image of a new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Read more about it.

More about Kabe Wilson

For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So. Set 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge.

He then turned his work into a piece of art, a 4 x 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

Centre for Modernist Studies from A. T. Kabe on Vimeo.

 

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To the Lighthouse focus of Kabe Wilson multimedia work

Posted in events, tagged , , , , , on Saturday 29 April 2023| 1 Comment »

At the 2019 Literature Cambridge course “Virginia Woolf and Gardens,” Kabe Wilson explained his art project in which he cut out the words from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to create the 145 pages of his novella Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So.

Kabe Wilson is launching a new multimedia work on To the Lighthouse at the University of Sussex on May 16.

The work “covers a series of archival quests about my childhood holidays, which then link up with Woolf and Bell’s own holidays, as well as their collaboration on To the Lighthouse itself, before developing into an elegy to all three,” Wilson explains.

The culmination of his residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies, the multi-media presentation centers around the story of the 10 paintings of Brighton and Sussex that Wilson produced during the 2020 lockdown period, and the exciting art history discovery that led to one of them becoming the cover image of a new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

A free one-day event in two parts

  • Part One: Modernist Archives Workshop at The Keep, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., with archivists, art and literary historians, followed by lunch. Includes some connections to the Bloomsbury group. Registration is essential due to space restrictions.
  • Part Two: Film Screening of “Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey Through 100 Archives,” followed by a Q & A with Wilson and chaired by Centre for Modernist Studies Directors Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf at the University of Sussex, Jubilee building, Jubilee Lecture Theatre 144, 3 p.m. – 4:30 or 5 p.m.

Get more information and register

More information is available here. Both events are free, but registration is required. Register here for one or both.

More about Kabe Wilson

Cover of the new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that features Wilson’s photo.

For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So. Set 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge.

He then turned his work into a piece of art, a 4 x 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

The cover of Woolf’s draft manuscript for “Women & Fiction,” which was the first draft of her classic feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929).

 

 

 

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Virginia Woolf’s death in The Lost Garden: “The book is the contract between you”

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , on Tuesday 29 March 2022| 1 Comment »

In her commemoration of the anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death, Paula Maggio refers to the coverage in the New York Times. This took me back to one of my favorite novels, The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys, which was a prominent example in my 2010 Bloomsbury Heritage Series monograph, Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction.

I’ve excerpted the section here:

“The Lost Garden, a story of a team of ‘Land Girls’, as the Women’s Land Army during World War II was known, begins at the time of Woolf’s death, but she nevertheless exerts a dominant influence. Helen Humphreys builds a connection with Woolf through Gwen Davis, a horticulturalist who is assigned to oversee wartime food production at a Devon farm. When Gwen is on the train out of London in March of 1941 to assume her duties, she sees over someone’s shoulder the announcement on the front page of The Times of Virginia Woolf’s disappearance and likely death:

I think of the letter I was writing in my head this morning to Mrs. Woolf. All the letters I write in my head. And now I’ve missed my chance to let her know how much I have loved her books, and to tell her that one evening, seven years ago, I think I followed her through the streets of London.

“Woolf is never far from Gwen’s thoughts. When viewing the estate at which she will be working, she notes that, ‘There is a river at the bottom of the hill. I think of Mrs. Woolf’. When one of her charges tells about her fiancé, who is missing in action, Gwen reflects that, ‘This makes me think of Virginia Woolf. Missing in action. That’s exactly what’s happened to her. She seems definitely to be a casualty of war at the moment. Like any other’.

“When Woolf’s death is confirmed, Gwen turns to the novel she treasures, To the Lighthouse. The final scene brings her clarity and closure:

There is Lily Briscoe on the lawn, trying to finish her painting… Her hand holds a paintbrush as a conductor holds a baton. This is the music of the moment, these words and images, and all of a sudden I know that it doesn’t matter whether or not it was Mrs. Woolf I followed through London that June evening seven years ago. I will never be closer to her than now. The book is the shared experience, the shared intimacy. The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.

“Woolf has been an almost tangible presence, and the physical proximity of Gwen’s earlier sighting of her seems to transcend Woolf’s death and bring comfort, maintaining the ethereal connection that is enhanced by her identification with the novels. Gwen feels a bond with Woolf, a sense that in spite of obvious differences, they shared some common sensibilities, perhaps were kindred spirits. Woolf anchors Gwen in the reality of her life while at the same time enabling her to escape it.

“The Lost Garden is so infused with Woolf, deliberately invoking both the pathos of her disappearance and death and the magnitude of her impact on one reader.”

Some of the monographs in the Bloomsbury Heritage Series from Cecil Woolf Publishers.

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Mark your calendar for Woolf Salon 15: Time Passes

Posted in events, tagged , , , on Sunday 5 December 2021| Leave a Comment »

It’s nearly time for Woolf Salon No. 15: “Time Passes” (A Reading). This time, Salon Conspirators have planned a full read-through of the hauntingly poetic middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), followed by an open discussion.

Details

Hosts: Salon Conspirators
Day: Friday, Dec. 10
Time: 3 p.m.–5 p.m. ET / Noon –2 p.m  PT / 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. Brasilia / 8 p.m. – 10 p.m. BST / 9 p.m. – 11 p.m. CEST
How to join: Anyone can join the group, which 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 — 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.

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A family memoir that links in To the Lighthouse

Posted in 18th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, books, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Tuesday 1 September 2020| Leave a Comment »

In All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, Katharine Smyth links her own story with Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Published last year, Smyth’s memoir tells the story of her own family, of discovering her parents as people, and of her father’s alcoholism and death. She does it all while weaving in literary criticism of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

By doing so, critics say she creates the perfect medium for reflecting on grief, loss, and marriage, on the way family morphs as you age, on memory and the difficulties of trying to understand who your parents are, and who they once were. Wow. That’s an armload to take on in one book.

The memoir’s title comes from the poem “Luriana Lurilee” by Charles Elton that Woolf references in To the Lighthouse.

That Gordon ties Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel to her memoir is quite fitting, as Woolf focused her work on her own parents in the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.

This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman’s loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead. –  Charlotte Gordon, The Washington Post

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