“Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys’s Embodied Writing” is the topic for the next Woolf seminar presented by the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey, featuring Eret Talviste on April 17 at 7 p.m. (Turkey time).
About the talk
Eret’s talk will focus on her new monograph Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment, and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), in which she explores how Woolf and Rhys understood writing as an embodied practice, starting with diaries, letters, and autobiographical texts, and moving into novels and short stories.
About Eret
Eret is a researcher in English Literature at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary fiction, transnationalism, feminism, and posthumanism. Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys is her first monograph.
How to attend
This is a Zoom event. Register on the Virginia Woolf Society of Turkey website. Then click on the Zoom link on the date and time posted above. Please check your time zone.
Blogging Woolf was part of a pilgrimage to Talland House in 2004. This photo depicts the front right corner of the home.
In mid-January, we reported on the most recent plan to construct a multi-million dollar flat project that would obstruct the view of the Cornwall coast and Godrevy Lighthouse from Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting and inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. We are sad to report that the plan is moving ahead, according to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.
Below is the text of a March 13 message sent by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, which helped lead the resistance effort.
Talland House planning update
”It is with regret that we report the decision of the Planning Committee of Cornwall Council this week to allow the planning application for a building in front of Talland
House in St Ives to go ahead.
“There were over 130 objections to the plan, including a handwritten letter from our President Dame Eileen Atkins. The Talland House Group, including the VWSGB and led by Polly Carter, the heritage gardener at Talland House, employed a KC who raised a legal challenge to the lawfulness of the application.
“The particular points brought by our Counsel remain unaddressed by Cornwall
Godrevy Lighthouse in St. Ives, Cornwall
Council’s legal department. They responded, but not to the points raised. Sadly, the developer can go ahead and build what will irrevocably destroy the To the Lighthouse view. BBC Cornwall supported our campaign.
“We are considering opening this up to judicial review and are exploring other options. The Talland House Group is to be formalised, and may have a website and events that celebrate the view and its importance to Virginia Woolf and her works.
“Time will be needed to re-focus our strategy, but we hope to issue more guidance as to how you can further support the campaign and all that Talland House stands for.
“Our thanks to everyone who contributed to the campaign against this development, and we will keep you updated. This story may not be over yet!”
One hundred years ago today, on Dec. 28, 1925, Virginia Woolf headed to London to join her husband Leonard after spending Christmas at Charleston.
“Monk’s House Welcome Home” by Amanda White
The Woolfs were at Charleston to avoid the inconvenience of alterations being made at Monk’s House, and they celebrated the Christmas holiday with Vanessa Bell and her children.
While there, they “spent a fascinating evening reading VW’s diary recalling early days at 46 Gordon Square” (Diary 3, pg. 53).
The Woolfs: where they were and what they did on Dec. 28
Except for 1925 and 1926, the Woolfs spent their Christmas holiday at Monk’s House from 1925 through 1940. As noted in Virginia’s diaries, here is where they were and what they did on Dec. 28 of those years.
1925: 52 Tavistock Square, London
1926: The Woolfs return to 52 Tavistock Square, London after spending Christmas with Ka and Will Arnold Forster at Eagle’s Nest, Zennor in Cornwall (D3, 119).
1927: Monk’s House
1928: No mention
1929: Monk’s House, where the Keynes’ arrive in their Rolls Royce to pay a visit and stay overnight, wrecking Virginia’s “perfect fortnight of silence” (D3, 276).
1930: Monk’s House, where Virginia suffers from influenza and is in bed “with the usual temperature, & cant use my wits or, as is visible, form my letters” (D3, 340).
1931: Monk’s House, where Virginia notes that their “3 black swans came” to visit (D4, 57).
1932: Monk’s House, where Virginia is working on Flush (D4, 134).
1933: Monk’s House, where Virginia’s writing lodge is ready for her use (D4, 266).
1934: No mention
Virginia Woolf’s Writing Lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex
1935: Monk’s House, where Virginia begins a new book for her diary, after finishing the “last revision of the last pages of The Years” and wonders if she will “ever write a long book again–a long novel that has to be held in the brain, at full stretch–for close on 3 years?” (D4, 360).
1936: Monk’s House, where Virginia works on the proofs — “the galleys” — of The Years (D5, 44).
1937: Monk’s House, where Leonard took to his bed with a temperature before heading to London to see his doctor (D5, 122).
1938: Monk’s House, where she is writing Pointz Hall and keeps track of the reception of Three Guineas (D5, 193).
1939: Monk’s House, with snow and a hard frost on the 28th, allowing Virginia to skate on Dec. 31 (D5, 252).
1940: Monk’s House, where on the last Dec. 28 of her life, Virginia “rode across the downs to the Cliffs. A roll of barbed wire is hooped on the edge. I rubbed my mind brisk along the Newhaven road. Shabby old maids buying groceries, in that desert road with the villas; in the wet. And Newhaven gashed. But tire the body & the mind sleeps” (D5, 347).
It was three years ago that Elisa Bolchi emailed me to ask if I would contribute a chapter to the project originally dubbed “Worldwide Woolf.” I was surprised. I was honored. I was ecstatic. And of course I quickly emailed a “Yes.”
Now this follow-up to The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature (2021), edited by Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pajak and Catherine W. Hollis, is out. So I am here to tell you more about this volume and its wonderful editing by Bolchi, Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Alice Davis Keane, Monica Latham, Sayaka Okumura, and Mine Özyurt Kılıç.
About the book
Besides a general introduction, Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives kicks off with a special foreward — the republishing of Brenda Silver’s essay “World Wide Woolf,” in print for the first time.
The volume’s 31 chapters are divided into three sections that analyze the cultural mediation that has shaped how readers and viewers worldwide encounter Woolf’s images and works today.
The three sections:
Producing Woolf: Editing, Translating, Publishing
Thinking through Woolf: Legacy and Contemporary Influence
New Woolf, New Critical Perspectives
Research areas covered: rewriting, translation, dance, photography, fashion, contemporary art, digital humanities and drama
Areas represented by its writers: five continents including Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America and 14 regions, including the U.S., Brazil, France, Italy, Turkey, Germany, the UK, Spain, Lithuania, Egypt, Israel, Japan, China and the Philippines.
More details
Pages: 488 Illustrations: 33 black and white
How to buy it
It is available at Edinburgh University Press. At $195 for a hardback or digital copy, the volume is pricey — as are most academic publications — so urge your institution’s library to purchase a copy. However, EUP offers a launch discount of 30 percent with the code NEW30 at checkout. I cannot guarantee the code is still viable, but it is worth a try.
About my chapter
My chapter, “Woolf on the World Wide Web: Creating a Community of Common and Scholarly Readers through Blogging Woolf,” is Chapter 31, the last in the volume. In it, I build on Silver’s insights as I explore the history of the blog, including its editorial content and its readership.
I also discuss its ability to foster collaboration among Woolf scholars and readers, as well as online and personal relationships.
I have written about Virginia Woolf and fountain pens and her ink preferences before. But today I learned of a new discovery that links Woolf even more strongly to the everyday work of the Hogarth Press, thanks to her use of purple ink.
First page of The Hours notebook 2 (purple ink). Courtesy of SP Books
Nicola Wilson of the University of Reading and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a digital project that debuted at the 2017 Woolf Conference and focuses on the Hogarth Press, posted this note to the VWoolf Listserv:
We have recently found evidence of Woolf’s purple pen in the Hogarth Press archives up to Feb 1940 – on the stock cards! Taking account of the figures? This is very exciting as it gives a real indication of Woolf’s presence at the Press and corroborates the kind of information on figures she tracks in the diaries.
Purple ink and the Hogarth Press
Esther Folkersma made the discovery while working with Danni Corfield to clean, sort, and organize the Hogarth Press stock cards as part of her research internship with MAPP. The Hogarth Press stock cards indicate where the stock of a specific book was being held, when the entity received the stock and how many copies they received, how many copies were issued, the number of copies printed at what date, the number of bound copies, and the balance in sheets.
“As more and more purple appeared under our sponges, brushes, and scalpels, and as the colours became more pronounced, Woolf’s presence in these cards grew,” Folkersma wrote in a post on the MAPP blog.
“The scale of Woolf’s handwriting in these stock cards surprised me, as her presence in the press, at least in a material sense, is often difficult to find, even though the significance of her role in the press has always been undeniable, especially as seen through her own diary entries.”
Folkersma explains that “the abundance of Virginia Woolf’s purple ink readily found on a majority of the Stock Value Cards illustrates her involvement in the press to an extent beyond what I had even gathered from her diaries. These very utilitarian cards show how involved Woolf was in the more administrative operations behind the scenes.”
Purple ink and The Hours (Mrs. Dalloway)
According to Mark Hussey, Bloomsbury scholar and author, “most of The Hours (‘Mrs Dalloway‘) holograph is in Woolf’s favored purple ink, with some in black and a little in blue. Her corrections on the American proof are also in purple ink.”
In 2019, SP Books published a gorgeous edition of the handwritten manuscript of what would become Woolf’s famous 1925 novel, allowing anyone who could obtain a copy to see that many of the pages were written in purple ink. I did and wrote a post about it.
Purple ink a chapter, a letter, and a diary entry
Folkersma also recommends reading Ted Bishop’s chapter “Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf?s Inks” from Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2018), the selected papers from the 2017 conference.
And she mentions two Woolf quotes — one from a letter and one from a diary
This ink is Waterman?s fountain pen ink. Cheap, violet, indelible. (Which sounds as if I were paid to write their advertisements). – from a 1923 letter to Dorothy Brett
The degradation of steel pens is such that after doing my best to clip & file one into shape, I have to take to a Waterman, profoundly though I distrust them, & disbelieve in the capacity to convey the nobler & profounder thoughts.” – from a 1918 Diary entry
Roundtable participants at the 2017 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf sit below a screen showing a digitized ledger sheet from the Hogarth Press. Note the purple ink.
