I wish I’d remembered to post this information earlier, but there are still a few days remaining to visit the Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press exhibit in Richmond. Up since Oct. 29, the exhibit ends Dec. 10.
You’ll find it at the Riverside Gallery, Old Town Hall, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond, TW9 1TP.
Held in conjunction with the Richmond Literature Festival, the exhibit celebrates a century since Virginia and Leonard Woolf began publishing in Richmond under the auspices of their small publishing house started in 1917, the Hogarth Press.
The press gave Leonard and Virginia the opportunity to self-publish and provided an important opportunity for writers and artists to showcase their work uncensored and in small print runs.
Woolf Studies Annual invites articles responding to, in dialogue with, or related to the scholarship of the late Jane Marcus for a special section of the 2018 volume.
A collection of articles from Routledge Literature journals focused on Virginia Woolf are free to access until the end of March 2017 as part of the publications’ wider Lives in Literature campaign.
Included in the collection is an article by Professor Martin Smith that was recently published in English Studies.
Virginia Woolf Talks, a new series of talks for town and gown on Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, is supported by Lucy Cavendish College and Literature Cambridge.
The series is free and all are welcome. It includes:
Dame Gillian Beer on “Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime,” Jan. 25, 2017, at 1 p.m.
Nanette O’Brien on “Prunes and Custard in the Archives: Virginia Woolf and Cambridge Food in A Room of One’s Own, March 3, 2017, at 1 p.m.
Both talks will be held at Lucy Cavendish, Library Seminar Room, Lady Margaret Road, CB3 0BU.
I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I am partial to the work of Anne Carson and Mary Oliver (and often confuse the two). It’s no surprise that both have referenced Virginia Woolf in their poems, no doubt recognizing her as the poet she was even though she never wrote a line of verse as such.
Anne Carson has written very little prose, so her story in this week’s (Oct. 31) New Yorker is a lovely gift. “Back the Way You Went” is exquisite, a tiny gem, as it questions so many aspects of existence in a daughter’s reflections on her mother.
The narrator comments on a dishtowel she’s given her mother-in-law, “printed with cartoon cameos of Bloomsbury celebrities.” She’s thinking about her flawed communication with her own mother, recently deceased, their fear of breaking the silence that’s built up between them. She asks herself, “Are other families like this? I know I’m setting the bar high, but I cannot imagine it was ever the wrong time to talk in, say, Bloomsbury.” And yet Woolf may have seen it otherwise; Carson’s narrator goes on to recall a passage from “A Sketch of the Past”:
“We are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality….”
She asks, “Was it Virginia Woolf who taught us to adore these floods of reality, without which we merely navigate a sea of convenience with other people?”
Even without Woolf, the story is stunning; with her it’s even more so, and, as always seems to be the case when Woolf is referenced in fiction, so appropriate, leading this Woolfian to think, “Well, yes, of course.”
