Harchards new edition of Mrs. Dalloway filled one of the shop’s windows.
Dalloway Day celebrations are taking place across the globe this month, as Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway marks its centenary. Today I have a report from Dalloway Day in London, held June 28 at one of my favorite London bookstores, Hatchards in Piccadilly.
The event, held in collaboration with the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, featured two panels. The first was led by Maggie Humm and featured Maggie Gee, author of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Michelle de Kretser, author of Theory and Practice.
The second included Vara Neverow, editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, interviewing Mark Hussey about his new book, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel. Sarah Hall facilitated the question and answer period.
A book signing was then followed by champagne, sweets, and live music as Mrs. Dalloway’s Party got into full swing.
The three books by the authors on the first panel.
Michelle de Kretser reads a passage from her new novel while Maggie Humm looks on.
Standing to project Virginia’s voice, Maggie Gee reads from her novel.
Maggie Gee and Michelle de Kretzer sign their books.
Vara Neverow, Mark Hussey and Sarah Hall are ready for their panel at Hatchards.
It was a sell-out crowd for the Dalloway Day event at Hatchards.
Live music from the 1930s and ‘40s added to the ambience.
Guests at Mrs. Dalloway’s party came from near and far — London, Boston, Antwerp, Italy, Germany, and more.
Today, May 14, marks the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, with 1,500 copies sold within a month of its publication.
A reader favorite
Woolf’s fourth novel, set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, elicited a variety of responses after its publication.
As Mark Hussey explains in Virginia Woolf A to Z (1995), the novel has not only held the attention of critics over the years, but “with To the Lighthouse, has probably generated more commentary than any other of Wolf’s fictions” (175).
The novel, lauded for its use of interior monologue, as well as its poetic language, is a reader favorite. It is certainly one I have picked up and read at various stages of my life during the last 50 years, always finding some new insight into Clarissa, along with some new connections between Clarissa’s thoughts and life and my own.
Links to follow in celebration of the centenary
Here are some links to articles and events noting this milestone, thanks to Vara Neverow, professor of English at Connecticut State University and editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
I am reporting on the absolutely fabulous, amazing, and incredible 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf hosted by the brilliant and scintillating Julie Vandivere and her devoted co-conspirators, including the intrepid and undaunted Erica Delsandro as well as the ever-present, deeply wise and dedicated Megan Hicks and Emma Slotterback and everyone else who worked so hard to create something so memorable and durable — a conference that is a gift to marvel over and recall with great pleasure.
Cecil Woolf, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Vara Neverow at #WoolfConf15
The conference was truly a work of art in every possible sense. It was as if every piece of the conference was curated and placed exactly where it was supposed to be. (And Thursday evening at the conference also included an actual and truly lovely art exhibit/art competition where attendees imbibed delicious beverages and snacked on heavenly hors d’oeuvres while chatting and mingling and looking at the works.)
Brilliant papers, panels, plenaries
The papers, panels and plenaries were all inspiring and dynamic and brilliant. The opening reception was gracious and intimate. Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson arrived at the conference on Thursday with numerous copies of Bloomsbury Heritage Series pamphlets.
Bloomsburg itself was beautiful, as was the university campus, and the restaurants in the town were delightful. The performance of Septimus and Clarissa, with the playwright, Ellen McLaughlin, taking the part of the older Clarissa, was stupendous, and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, which followed the performance, offered an abundance of tasty tidbits as well as hilarious opportunities for the attendees to try on a variety of vintage hats, activities resulting in many, many photographs. The food at the conference was abundant and delicious. At one break, mounds of whipped cream, fresh strawberries and sponge cake were served.
And the banquet itself was nourishing for both the mind and body, a wonderful chance for creating new friendships and spending time with those one sees so rarely. Jean Moorcroft Wilson interviewed Cecil Woolf at the banquet in a wonderfully playful but also quite substantive fashion — one of the many high points of the conference. And, as always, the Virginia Woolf Players read from Woolf’s works as the closing event of the gathering.
Ashley Michler, undergraduate at Bloomsburg University, presents her paper.
Bonding near and far
The shuttle bus to and from Newark gave Woolfians coming from afar a chance to bond with each other on the journey. And the weather was, of course, perfect.
To have so many Woolfians gathered in one place is always a peak moment of the year for me and, I am sure, for many others. To also have at the conference, in keeping with its inclusive title, so many scholars who study Woolf’s female contemporaries was a superb new feature and one that clearly will influence future research and create new connections among the various interwoven webs that connect Woolf to other modernists.
That there were so many new faces was particularly lovely. The newcomers ranged from the modernist scholars to the high-school students who presented their papers with aplomb and confidence and from the graduate students who had never before attended this conference to the common readers who are always most welcome to join the Woolfian pack. Rumor has it that the annual Woolf conference is the very best first conference for graduate students because it is the most nurturing, and I can’t say I was surprised. But this one was particularly open to a range of participants.
Conference participants had the opportunity to add their written tribute to Jane Marcus in a special journal.
Reflections on two scholars
In addition to all the ebullient excitement of the conference, there was also a time of reflection. At the Thursday evening reception, Jane Marcus was remembered. Linda Camarasana, Mark Hussey, Jean Mills, J. Ashley Foster, and Suzette Henke all spoke and shared with those present their memories of a formidable and magnificent Woolfian who, among her many achievements as a teacher and a friend and a scholar was bold enough to challenge the conventional perception of Woolf as an aesthete and a mad woman and was among those scholars who brought Woolf’s work and her feminism, socialism and pacifism into focus in ways that will continue to endure. Jane Marcus’s landmark works include Art and Anger: Reading like a Woman and Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy.
Also remembered at the conference with sorrow and gratitude was Shari Benstock, some of whose most familiar works are Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900-1940, Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre and the co-edited A Handbook of Literary Feminisms. These two women truly shaped the way we read Woolf and her contemporaries. I was very glad that both were acknowledged.
Finally, for those of you who want to share your remembrances of Jane Marcus and Shari Benstock, I encourage you to send me your recollections for The Virginia Woolf Miscellany. I will be compiling these contributions to a section of a future issue. Remembrances of all aspects of the conference itself are also very welcome.
I am deeply grateful to all those who worked so hard to make this unforgettable conference possible. This was a truly stellar labor of love, and one that will always be cherished by those who attended.
In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf began to collect newspaper clippings about the relationships between the sexes in England, France, Germany and Italy. She pasted these clippings into scrapbooks that became the foundation from which she developed two of her works — her novel The Years (1937) and her pacifist-feminist polemic Three Guineas (1938).¹
In 1983, Brenda Silver produced the foundational work on these manuscript materials when she published Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks, a volume that summarized more than 40 volumes of Woolf’s notes, including those compiled during the 1930s. Because Silver’s work covers such vast territory, it can be described as “a dated list of the contents of each of the notebooks.” As a result, it gives us an inside look at what Woolf was reading as she was writing her novels and essays.
Although it is out of print, hard copies of Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebookscan be obtained from second-hand sellers and libraries. Now Woolf scholars and common readers everywhere can once again obtain access to the notebooks Woolf used when writing Three Guineas through the Three Guineas Reading Notebooks website. The password-protected site requires users to purchase an annual subscription. To do so , send an email to Vara Neverow.
What the site gives subscribers is online access to fragile archival material that one would be forced to travel to England to access. Included are digital images of three of Woolf’s reading notebooks that are part of the University of Sussex’s Monk’s House Papers.
According to Neverow, Merry Pawlowski conceived the concept of preserving these documents digitally in the 1990s. Pawloski and Neverow worked together on the project and originally launched a website created and hosted at California State University, Bakersfield until last year. The website has now been transferred to Southern Connecticut State University.
In addition to the Three Guineas Reading Notebooks, two digital volumes of selected papers from Woolf conferences are also available at the site, and neither is password-protected:
Woolf: Across the Generations: Selected Papers from the Twelfth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (2002)
Back to Bloomsbury: Selected Papers from the 14th Annual Conferences on Virginia Woolf (2004)
Both are downloadable as PDFs at no cost.
¹This is briefly discussed in Mark Hussey’s Preface to Harcourt’s annotated edition of Three Guineas (2006).
