Several Virginia Woolf/Modernism-related items here, all gleaned from Facebook friends who teach Woolf in the college classroom.
Elisa Kay Sparks and her students are building an iPad app called WoolfPlace that will provide maps, histories, references, pictures, links and videos for different sites in Woolf’s life and works.
Anne Fernald’s students are blogging about Woolf as part of the undergraduate Woolf elective course Fernald is teaching at Fordham University this spring. You can find their posts at 3504 Woolf. Fernald kicked off the course by playing Florence and the Machine’s “What the Water Gave Me.”
Also from Fernald is the news that Faber has launched a new “Wasteland” app that includes the full text of the poem, a variety of audio readings (including two by T.S. Eliot himself, and one by Viggo Mortensen), plus a video rendition.
Of the 50 Woolf sightings spotted in the last 11 days, nine mention Florence and the Machine’s new song inspired by Woolf, “What the Water Gave Me.” It’s on their Ceremonial album. Other sightings mention Woolf portraits, Woolf novels, Woolf quotes and more — including take-offs on her famous phrase, “a room of one’s own.”
Florence And the Machine
Matter of space, Deccan Herald
The incomparable Virginia Woolf had cut right to the heart of the truth when she proclaimed that writers –— she was speaking of mainly female and hence, disadvantaged writers — needed a place to call their own, to be able to mine their creativity and …
Author’s signature included in sale, This is The West Country
A St Ives lighthouse visitor book that features the childhood signature of Virginia Woolf is going under the hammer. The book, from Godrevy Lighthouse, has a guide price of £3000 to £5000 and contains 159 signatures from 1859 to 1934. …
The Lives of A Novelist, Wall Street Journal
Woolf’s suicide and her final words, like almost her every act and statement, have been the subject of much analysis and speculation. The most comprehensive account of her life, Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” (1997), is also the best. …
Artistic relations: how family portraiture changed through the ages, The Guardian
Eworth’s fixity may be precisely what Vanessa Bell, in the couples and kinship section, was trying to avoid in her portrait of her sister Virginia Woolf, painted around 1913. The writer is found seated in an armchair, crotcheting, and her facial …
Literature: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Varsity Online
Who once described herself as “the only true heir to Virginia Woolf”, and has been variously accused of arrogance, absurdity and genius. Her first, semi-autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, published in 1985, won the Whitbread Award …
Florence and the Machine’s Ceremonials Delivers, Huffington Post
Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones to drown herself. In a melancholy, velvety voice,Florence sings about mortality and the feminine connection to the earth. As the song goes on, the music only gets more and more intense, the song ending …
Florence & The Machine, Oswegonian
The first single “What the Water Gave Me” references a Frida Kahlo painting and the suicide of Virginia Woolf alongside the burden of Atlas, an ancient Greek titan. Early press reports quoted Welch saying her second album would be a musical treatise on …
Review: Florence and The Machine’s Ceremonials, The Daily Tar Heel (blog)
By Thompson Wall | The Daily Tar Heel Virginia Woolf, the infamous author and poet who drowned herself in a river by her home, is the inspiration of Florence and The Machine’s second album, Ceremonials. The album tells the story of a “sinful” woman …
Florence + the ‘Ceremonials’, New University Online
After the struggle for peace narrated in “Shake It Out,” this track is a tale of acceptance of fate that manages to remain ambiguous, with clear references to Virginia Woolf’s suicide. There was always a risk that with the bigger sound this album …
The Magnet Tribune: Hear Say: Coldplay Comes Back with Electricity and …, my.hsj.org
In the first single off the album, “What the Water Gave Me,” there is a heavy, haunting song that is inspired by English writer Virginia Woolf (to tell you what part of Woolf’s life inspired the song would ruin things so run off and Google it if you’re …
Florence + the Machine’s ‘Ceremonials’ Shoots to No. 1 on the U.K. Charts, PopCrush
Welch has said the tracks on the record have been inspired by everything from the death of Virginia Woolf to the effects of a hangover. “Literally, a song can be about seven different things,” she explained. “I do think of songs almost as collages of …
Review: Florence Welch still an incredible artist, Daily Eastern News
In an interview, Welch said this track is a swan-song for late author Virginia Woolf and her death by drowning. Florence howls and she rampages with the voluptuous vocals she has become known for. And, similar to Woolf, listeners are pulled into the …
Disc of the Week: For Florence, bigger isn’t always better, Globe and Mail
The lyrics hint at a watery suicide à la Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare’s Ophelia, as portrayed in John Everett Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite portrait. Water and air are Welch’s symbolic elements, just as earth and fire belong to another current singer with …
Flo & co. go slicker on sophomore album, “Ceremonials”, UNCW Seahawk
Still, the song retains the trademark grandeur of the band; harp plucks, soaring choir, melodramatic lyrics referencing the Greek god Atlas and British author Virginia Woolf. Even more obviously indebted to American musical traditions is “Lover to …
Emeli Sandé: I’m not cool … I want to reach everyone, The Sun
Well-read, her favourite writers being Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, she’s very vocal about the poor standard of lyrics today. She says: “I always wonder why pop can’t be more poetic. Why do we have to sacrifice lyrics to be catchy? …
A historical building of one’s own, UVU Review
Virginia Woolf has argued that all women really need is a modest income, a little bit of time and a room of one’s own to experience inspiration and freedom. She could not have been more correct. On a campus of 32000 students, I’ve got an identification …
‘Pilgrimage’: Annie Leibovitz Visits Darwin, Woolf, Emerson, and Freud, The Atlantic
The quest took her to such fascinating locales and pockets of cultural history as Charles Darwin’s cottage in the English countryside, Virginia Woolf’s writing table, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home, Ansel Adams’s darkroom, Emily Dickinson’s only surviving …
In Her Latest Project, Annie Leibovitz Focuses On What Matters, NPR (blog)
Instead, her book Pilgrimage is a quiet collection of scenes and objects that matter to her: Emily Dickinson’s dress, the Niagara Falls in Ontario, Virginia Woolf’s bedroom. “I needed to save my soul,” photographer Annie Leibovitz recently told The New …
PG Wodehouse’s disgrace can’t hide the greatness of his work, The Guardian (blog)
Do we change our views about Virginia Woolf when we discover that she was a terrible snob who wrote some fairly nauseating things about the British working man? And, finally, does it disable PG Wodehouse’s claims to greatness that he had no grasp of …
Ten questions for an author: Ethna McKiernan, Minneapolis Star Tribune (blog)
… conferred at a time when the only other Americans awarded this were JFK and Robert Frost; a framed picture of some first-issue stamps from the Irish post office; and a framed thingie of Virginia Woolf quotes that came from a calendar I loved in the…
Pacifists and feminists, The Oxford Times
Virginia Woolf, for one, detached herself from the war. She recorded seeing “the faces of our rulers in the light of the shellfire. So ugly they looked — German, English, French — so stupid.” She was a frequent visitor to Garsington Manor, …
Off the wall look at changing lives, The Star
Amongst the works on display will be William Hogarth’s A House of Cards from 1730; Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and their daughter Ann by Henry Walton; Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers from 1934; and Vanessa Bell’s portrait of her sister Virginia Woolf dated …
Photos from famous author biographies, USA Today
Look through photographs from four new literary biographies: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin, And So It Goes, Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields, Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett and Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris. …
On Fiction by Virginia Woolf – review,The Guardian
By John Dugdale by Virginia Woolf This collection of four essays, all but one from the 20s, improves markedly as it goes along. The first, “Hours in a Library” (implictly an ample private one), dates from 1916 and could be the work of a Downton Abbey …
Other Israel Film Festival: ‘Torn’ and ’77 Steps’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
“As a woman, you have your own space to create, to live, to make love, to hate, to be what you want to be,” she said, invoking Virginia Woolf. “For now it’s my apartment in Tel Aviv and I’m happy for that.” Click to login and write a letter to the …
The Greatest Gossip, The Atlantic
He is probably the last in a line of haute vulgarizers that runs from Dr. Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, Virginia Woolf, VS Pritchett, and Wilson. A generation of high-minded general readers (remember them?) looked to Updike essays to teach them about …
Chick lit vies for top book awards, Irish Independent
It was Virginia Woolf who decided that what every woman writer needed was a room of her own. These days it would be a bathroom floor, glass of Chardonnay in hand, screaming, ‘OMG! I’m turning 30’. The 1996 arrival of Bridget Jones’s Diary launched a…
V review: Downton Abbey, The Guardian
Lady Cora deciding she’s a lesbian and having an affair with Virginia Woolf. Lady Edith rushing off to Germany to befriend Hitler in jail. Lady Sybil joining the IRA. Lady Mary deciding that she’s actually Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas. …
Drunken antics, Diamondback Online
It’s not like Virginia Woolf, where you’re rereading the same sentence for 10 minutes, and you’re like, ‘What the f—’s going on?’ You can’t do that for a screenplay, or a newspaper or a website.” Co-writer Jesse Herrmann joked that Elijah the Prophet …
Let’s work on connecting future dreams with reality, The Coloradoan
It’s not that I’m saying that I didn’t gain anything from those four years of papers on Virginia Woolfand midterms on modern American poetry and so much procrastination and widening of eyes. Workshop after discussion after roundtable forced me to …
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE Review, Twitch
Dark like Virginia Woolf, or a Nick Cave album. Elizabeth Olsen gives one of the year’s breakout performances as the young girl of the title. After living a radical life apart from society on a farm with a group of self-sustaining misfits, …
“The Journals of Spalding Gray,” edited by Nell Casey, Washington Post
And, most ominously, he speculated on why Virginia Woolf killed herself: “she could only write about living . . . but was not living it. She was outside of it all the time.” Gray committed suicide in January 2004 at age 63. He had been talking about it …
Ten Books on Delhi You Should Read, Wall Street Journal (blog)
It took the intervention of fellow novelist Virginia Woolf to get this novel published: Its British publishers originally deemed the novel too subversive. The events in the novel begin in the summer of 1911, the period when Old Delhi was still known as …
Alchemy of silence, The Asian Age
One author who understood silences was the great English novelist Virginia Woolf. Silence, for Woolf, was not just part of a woman’s statement of being; it was integral to her writing style. Silence provided the rhythms between language and space, …
A secular enchantment, Le Monde Diplomatique
Levine’s awe when watching the flight of a red-tailed hawk over an apartment building in New York (or the reader’s awe when contemplating the bœuf en daube served by Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse) are moments that fulfil, …
Parting words of ‘wisdom’, Inquirer.net
Virginia Woolf, author Our answer: Yes, this material world is cruel and miserable, because it isn’t our real home. Don’t give up and don’t lose hope, because we have a wonderful home to return to. We are eternal souls temporarily held in deteriorating …
NEW DVD RELEASES, GoErie.com
The 2002 film, which co-stars Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep, is a brilliant adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and seamlessly delivers a complex plot about three generations of women influenced by writer Virginia Woolf.
The unheralded genius of the genius’s sister, Washington Examiner
Virginia Woolf, in her famous polemic “A Room of One’s Own,” imagined the fate of a fictional sister of William Shakespeare. Judith Shakespeare might have been as talented as her now-legendary brother. But without the opportunities open to him …
Passionate story of love and life in Kidderminster, Kidderminster Shuttle
The play, adapted from the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville -West by the celebrated actress Eileen Atkins, charts the extraordinary relationship between them, using their words in which they speak of every day life, friends, …
Vita Sackville-West
Of course artists often go mad – it’s part of the job, Telegraph.co.uk (blog)
Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, Ernest Hemingway are three who swung between euphoria and gloom. There are degrees in these matters. Woolf and Lowell were genuinely – certifiably – mad at various points in their life, Hemingway only at the end, …
Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland show, The Guardian
Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel …
Culture flash: St Paul’s Cathedral, The Guardian “It swells like a great grey bubble,” wrote Virginia Woolf admiringly in a 1930s essay. For Charlotte Brontë, its dome was “a solemn, orbed mass, dark-blue and dim … While I looked, my inner self moved.” Magnificent as it is, St Paul’s architectural …
Virginia Woolf’s Real First Name Revealed!, Patch.com According to the website: “Christine was inspired by the author Virginia Woolf, whose first name was Adeline, and her belief that women need their own space to feel supported and productive.” All I know is, when I was a brand new mom, I craved a place …
Three things pop out at me from this week’s list of Woolf sightings. The first is the mention of Virginia in a story about young female artists who represent “unmentionable” female body parts in their work. See #22.
The second is the mention of Woolf’s use of the word “scrolloping,” an item that drew the recent attention of the VWoolf Listserv. See #7.
The third is a new song about Virginia Woolf. It is one of 13 cuts on a new album due out Nov. 7 by Florence + The Machine. The song’s title, “What the Water Gave Me,” comes from a 1938 oil painting by Frida Kahlo. See #17-21 and listen to the song below.
Thought-Provoking Highbrow Magazine Launches, MarketWatch (press release) Virginia Woolf once described a highbrow as “…the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.” “It is that pursuit of an idea that inspires us at the magazine to critique and analyze …
Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, Movie City News Virginia Woolf defined the middlebrow reader as “betwixt and between,” devoted not to art for its own sake but to “money, fame, power, or prestige.” In other words, the middlebrow is not quite as smart as the true highbrow and not as spirited as the …
Much ado about nothing, Boston Globe
That would not necessarily be a difficulty: Think of Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Mr. Richard Savage,” or the many marginal yet unforgettable subjects in Virginia Woolf’s “Common Reader.” Yet unlike the treatment of his parents in “Basil Street,” …
A fascination with real lives, Boston Globe
I admire Virginia Woolf, but I’m not sold on her novels. I’d rather read her diaries, journals, and letters. Henry James – finally a man – I love him. Last year I read “What Maisie Knew.” I was relieved that I understood it. James is hard. …
MEMOIR: A fun and gossipy look at British bluebloods, Minneapolis Star Tribune
He shows the ties between Beckett’s illegitimate daughter by Keppel, novelist Violet Trefusis, and Violet’s lesbian lover, poet Vita Sackville-West, then links them both to Virginia Woolf. He manages, too, to find a long association between Vita’s …
OMG, the charabanc has been plutoed, Telegraph.co.uk
But I am likely to need help with Samuel Beckett’s use of “athambia”, or Virginia Woolf’s of “scrolloping”. In any case, predictions about what will last are risky. In 2007 Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary chose “pod-slurping” as its word of the year. …
The New Atheism, The Guardian
Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Camus – and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee – have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief; …
The dentist & Dr. Seuss, Boston Globe
“But it’s like minor works by Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. They may be minor, but they’re the minor works of a genius,” Nel said. In order to bring these stories to a fresh audience, Cohen first needed to prove his own credibility. …
Bridge Views: Grounded in 1980, Patch.com
“If you want to learn point-of-view, read Henry James; if you want to learn irony, read Jane Austen; if you want to learn what Hell smells like, read John Milton; if you want to understand the importance of using punctuation, read Virginia Woolf—she …
Interview: Lynne McTaggart, Author of The Bond, Blogcritics.org (blog)
Twentieth century writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, but also so-called ‘new journalists’ – Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote – who wrote non-fiction using fictional techniques. My heroes in journalism were …
Why women are enjoying being home alone, The Age VIRGINIA WOOLF thought every woman writer needed a room of her own. But many women are now opting for an entire home of one’s own. Women are twice as likely as men to live alone for more than a decade, and report greater levels of …
Florence + The Machine, new album due Nov 7, Street North East (blog)
It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps into it, and of course Frieda Kahlo, whose painfully beautiful painting gave me the title.” ‘What The Water Gave Me’ it’s available now on iTunes.
This week in new music, FasterLouder
For a tune named after a Frida Kahlo painting and featuring reference to Virginia Woolf it still has festival anthem written all over it. Let’s hope we get to see her again this summer. James Blake and Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon met at this year’s South …
Florence And The Machine Reveal New Track, RTT News
While speaking about the track with NME.com, Florence Welch revealed that the track was inspired by the story of writer Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by drowning. It also shares a title with a painting by legendary Mexican artist and feminist …
Hear Florence and the Machine’s new song ‘What The Water Gave Me’ – audio, NME.com
The track is named after a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and has also been part inspired by the death of author Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in a river by filling her coat pockets with stones. You can see Florence working on the album …
The naming of parts: a new frankness about vaginas, Evening Standard
Chicago created 39 place settings for famous female “guests” – including Sappho, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf – with labias rising up out of the plates themselves. The new craft-led work is as much about playfulness as a po-faced “comment” on …
Orlando, St George’s West, Edinburgh, The Independent
Adapting Virginia Woolf’s fantastical novel, which follows the title character through four centuries and a sex change, is no mean feat. It has the potential to be epic, but Darryl Pinckney’s script for theatre company Cryptic goes in …
A ‘World of Taste’ hits Rishon Letzion, Ha’aretz
By Elka Looks Tags: Israel culture Virginia Woolf once said, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” After attending Rishon Letzion’s ‘World of Taste’ fair, I could not agree more. Over twenty of Israel’s leading …
Tale of loss and friendship cuts to the quick, Independent Online
Today, she is Senior Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the distinguished biographer of TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and, most recently, the acclaimed poet Emily Dickinson. …
How One Book Changed My Life, Huffington Post
I have most all of Virginia Woolf’s books on one shelf. There are books by Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, John Irving and dozens of other favorite authors. There is my friend Peg’s wonderful novel, “Spinning Will. …
Fill up your shelves at the Locust Grove book sale! [Books], Louisville.com
My own personal finds from past sales have included titles from Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. And, of course, no shortage of Shakespeare. Tax deductible book donations will also be accepted at any time …
Stigma should be removed from mental illness, Cincinnati.com
Provided Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Eugene O’Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Carrie Fisher, Mike Wallace, Patty Duke, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta-Jones – all talented and gifted individuals, …
Book festival: Andrew O’Hagan, Edinburgh Festivals
Last night’s topic was landscape, which Bakewell addressed with Olivia Laing, author of To The River, a meditation in travel, nature and history along the course of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941. ..
Offerings from Edinburgh’s International Book Festival, STV Local
At 7 pm she’ll be reading from her book To the River, the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over 60 years after Woolf’s death, Olivia Laing walked the river from source to sea. …
ED2011 Theatre Review: Sailing On (ShadyJane), ThreeWeeks News
It revolves around a girl’s poignantly suppressed memory coming to light with the help of a pretend Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. Though beautifully enacted and adeptly enhanced by the use of multimedia, it was not the performance itself that most stood …
Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights: Bronte vs Bronte, Telegraph.co.uk Virginia Woolf once said that, in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë had gigantic ambition that was summed up by the sentence “You the eternal powers…” but she didn’t know how to finish it. I think there’s something in that. For me, Wuthering Heights is …
Robert Fulford: Postmodern love?, National Post (blog)
Books appeared under otherwise identical titles about Nietzsche, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf, St. Augustine, Jesus and many more. Postmodernism, while it no longer so freely speaks its name, remains the operative principle beneath much of contemporary …
ED2011 Theatre Review: Orlando (Cryptic), ThreeWeeks News
Adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel, this production is especially adept in its synthesis of Woolf’s linguistic virtuosity with contemporary sound and projection techniques. Although the show’s pace lags occasionally, Judith Williams impresses with a …
A New Life of EM Forster, Xtra.ca
While his contemporaries were DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury circle and Christopher Isherwood, a new generation of Americans also longed to meet him. People such as artist Paul Cadmus, actor William Roerick and painter Jared French …
Play’s a slap in face for parents, Macedon Ranges Weekly
She says the play is like “Virginia Woolf on steroids” and audiences will experience a “rollercoaster of emotions. It’s a fun play and it disintegrates into madness!” Ms Boyd said it had already received much praise from the Melbourne theatre network. …
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