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Virginia Woolf among 10 most collectible female authors

Posted in books, Virginia Woolf, women, tagged , , , , on Sunday 17 September 2023| Leave a Comment »

We all know the gender gap exists in the publishing world. For example, one study shows that books by female authors make up only a small percentage of collectible books priced at $500 or more. Nevertheless the work of Virginia Woolf is highly collectable. She is among the 10 most collectible female authors at AbeBooks.

Here is the list of the 10 most collectible female authors posted on the AbeBooks website:

  • Jane Austen
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Ayn Rand
  • Harper Lee
  • Agatha Christie
  • Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot
  • Beatrix Potte
  • Toni Morrison
  • Mary Shelley
  • J.K. Rowling

The data

AbeBooks.com analyzed a random sample of their sales for collectible books priced $500 or more. The company was dismayed to learn that only 4.8 percent of those books had been written by women.

“We had expected to see an imbalance but not one of such significance,” noted the website.

The reason for the imbalance is the long history of male privilege that gives men priority for the public sphere, including publishing, while women are relegated to the domestic sphere.

“There are simply fewer female authors of significance across the past 500 years of publishing. Many female writers wrote anonymously or privately published their work. Most simply did not even have the opportunity to become published authors,” according to AbeBooks.

Woolf broke the rules to become an important figure in modernist literature and feminism in general. Her novels –Mrs Dalloway(1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) – are landmarks in 20th century literature. Her success is all the more remarkable since she struggled with mental illness for most of her life. A Room of One’s Own (1929) might be her most important work, this essay argues that women writers need their own space in a literary world dominated by men. -AbeBooks

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Learn about Woolf, women writers online via Literature Cambridge

Posted in events, Literature Cambridge, Woolf Courses, tagged , , , on Wednesday 23 March 2022| Leave a Comment »

Last time, I wrote about the online programs offered to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, thanks to the pandemic. Today, I must also grudgingly thank the pandemic for the wide selection of online sessions featuring Woolf and other women writers that are offered by Literature Cambridge for the second year in a row.

Second Virginia Woolf Season

The first group of sessions are those remaining in the Second Virginia Woolf Season. Each offers an hour-long lecture by a Woolf scholar, followed by an hour of discussion. Each of the following sessions has a theme and focuses on one book by Woolf.

  • Saturday 26 March 2022, 6 p.m. BT – Tea and Tradition: Night and Day (1919),

    Ellie Harrison lecturing on Woolf via Zoom

    with Ellie Mitchell. Live repeat session.

  • Saturday 9 April 2022, 6 p.m. BST – Books and Libraries in Three Guineas (1938), with Claire Davison
  • Sunday 10 April 2022, 6 p.m. BST – Woolf and Androgyny: A Room of One’s Own (1929), with Alison Hennegan. Live repeat session.*
  • Sunday 8 May 2022, 6 p.m. BST – Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell, with Mark Hussey
  • Saturday 11 June 2022, 6 p.m. BST – Mrs Dalloway from Bond Street to Westminster, with Claire Nicholson.

British Summer Time: Please note that clocks in Britain move ahead one hour on Sunday 27 March 2022.

Woolf’s Houses summer course

The path behind the Monk’s House gate

Literature Cambridge’s annual summer course resumes this year with a live online course on Woolf’s Houses, 25-29 July 2022. Literature Cambridge hopes to resume the in-person Woolf Summer course in July 2023.

Women Writers Season

Woolfians might also be interested in the last few lectures in the Women Writers Season on Vita Sackville West, Radclyffe Hall, and Elizabeth Bowen. Dates are April 2, April 16, and May 7.

Members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain are welcome to book sessions at the student price. Per session: £23 students, VWSGB members, CAMcard holders £28 full price

T-shirts like these may be available when Literature Cambridge holds its first in-person summer course since 2019 in July of 2023. The topic will be Woolf’s Women.

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@LitCamb focuses on women writers through December

Posted in events, women, Woolf Courses, tagged , , on Saturday 4 September 2021| Leave a Comment »

Elizabeth Bowen

Literature Cambridge’s season on brilliant women writers of the early twentieth century continues through December, with four more online sessions scheduled.

The Women Writers Season focuses on writers in English, with most based in Britain. It provides the opportunity to discover some wonderful writers who are not read today, and to study them with leading scholars.

Each online study session has a live lecture with a leading scholar and a seminar on Zoom.

Here are the details:

  • Trudi Tate on Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935). Saturday, 18 September 2021, 10 a.m. BT. Please note that this time is different than those of the other sessions. Lit Cambridge hopes to repeat this lecture at 6 p.m. at a later date. Book here.

    Katherine Mansfield portrait by Anne Estelle Rice

  • Claire Davison on Winifred Holtby, Land of Green Ginger. ‘Life’s Adventure’: Winifred Holtby and Post-Suffrage Feminism. Saturday, 23 October 2021, 6 p.m. BT. Book here.
  • Isobel Maddison on Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Von Arnim: Complementary Cousins. Saturday, 13 November 2021, 6 p.m. BT. Book here.
  • Claire Davison on Katherine Mansfield and the Russians. Saturday, 11 December 2021, 6 p.m. BT. Book here.

Cost

The cost of each session ranges from £26 at full price to £22 for students and members of pertinent societies.

 

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Study women and Woolf with @LitCamb online

Posted in Woolf Courses, tagged , , , on Thursday 8 July 2021| Leave a Comment »

Once again, Literature Cambridge is offering a wide array of online courses featuring Virginia Woolf and other renowned women writers who were her contemporaries. Read on for the details.

Women Writers Season

Go online to study a range of Woolf’s wonderful contemporaries. Authors on the list include Elizabeth Bowen, Winifred Holtby, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosamund Lehmann, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville West, and many others — a full dozen in all.

The season focuses on writers in English, with most, but not all, based in Britain. Many of the authors included are not read widely today.

This is a great opportunity to discover some wonderful writers, and to study them with leading scholars.

Each online study session has a live lecture with a leading scholar and seminar on Zoom.

The season runs from June to September 2021. Get the details.

Virginia Woolf Season

The second Woolf Season starts in October 2021, runs through May 2022, and studies most of Woolf’s major works in detail. It includes live online lectures and seminars with leading scholars. Get the details.

The first season which explored Woolf’s major works in consecutive order, began in October 2020 with The Voyage Out (1915) and ran through June of this year with Between the Acts (1941).

Each two-hour class via Zoom was taught by a Woolf expert from the UK and featured a one-hour original lecture followed by a question and answer session.

Summer Wednesdays

As requested, some popular past sessions will be repeated on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. British Summer Time during July and August. Topics include:

Special rates for members

Members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain can book at the student rate for Woolf sessions.

Karina Jacubowicz is just one lecturer in Literature Cambridge’s online courses on Virginia Woolf via Zoom.

A Literature Cambridge Zoom room

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The Secret Sisterhood of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

Posted in books, Katherine Mansfield, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on Monday 19 March 2018| 1 Comment »

Female friends are special. I often wonder what I would do without them. So I like to take note of stories about longtime women friends.

This was particularly true during the past week. Knowing that today I was on the blog tour schedule to publish a review of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, stories of women’s friendships kept popping out at me.

I’ll share just two of them before adding the promised review.

Akron Beacon Journal article featuring the lifelong friendship of two women, now 94 and 100.

Women friends on a local level

Yesterday, the front page of my local newspaper featured such a close friendship.  It told the story of two women — one black, one white — who led a Girl Scout troop in an all-white community back in 1954 and became fast friends, as did their daughters.

Women friends on a national level

Last week, a lecture I attended by Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (2016) spoke of the importance of women’s friendships throughout U.S. history. She also emphasized how those intimate friendships sustained and supported women when their marriage relationships, often entered into solely for financial reasons, did not.

Women’s literary friendships

Women writers had sustaining friendships with female friends, too. But as  Margaret Atwood says in her foreward to A Secret Sisterhood, female literary friendships have often been overlooked.

Midorikawa and Sweeney bring them into the limelight in their 2017 book, A Secret Sisterhood. Now out in paperback in the UK, it explores the “secret sisterhoods” entered into by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. My focus will be on the book’s final section, whose three chapters explore the ambivalent friendship between Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

Woolf and Mansfield: friends or foes, cat or mouse?

Anyone who studies Woolf knows that there is much discussion of the love-hate relationship between Woolf and Mansfield. In Secret Sisters, Midorikawa and Sweeney bring it into clear focus.

They are careful to describe the complicated relationship between the two, showing us how and why Woolf considered Mansfield both her “bitter opponent and beloved friend — unrivaled by any other” (260). They use excerpts from letters, diaries and more to compile a detailed timeline that clarifies the relationship without oversimplifying its nuances.

The authors follow the relationship between the two writers from its spring 1917 beginnings in Mansfield’s humble Chelsea flat, where Woolf offered Mansfield the opportunity to have her work published with the newly formed Hogarth Press, to the news, delivered by Woolf’s maid Nellie Boxall in January 1923, that Mansfield had died.

In between, Midorikawa and Sweeney document the ups and downs of their professional alliance, as well as their personal relationship. Among them are Garsington gossip, the rivalry between the two to use the Garsington garden as the setting for a short story, and the ways they supported each other’s literary careers while engaging in creative competition.

We also get an inside view of Mansfield’s ill health and financial challenges, Woolf’s mixed feelings about Mansfield’s work, and the insecurities each woman had about the other as both a trusted friend and literary sounding board.

A Secret Sisterhood lays out the intimate inner workings of the friendship and competition between Woolf and Mansfield, setting theories and rumors to rest and illuminating a relationship characterized by a “rare sense of communion” (250) that has interested their readers for decades.

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