Blogging Woolf

In memoriam to Virginia Woolf

It was 67 years ago today, March 28, 1941, that Virginia Woolf left behind Leonard, Monk’s House, and two suicide notes and walked across the Sussex Downs. Read more.

Poet and novelist with Bloomsbury ties dead at 91

Paul Roche, the poet and novelist who conducted a long-term relationship with Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant, died Oct. 30 at the age of 91. Read more.

News of 24 August 2007

The passing of Woolf bibliographer B.J. Kirkpatrick

Anyone who ever consulted a Virginia Woolf bibliography would be likely to recognize the name B. J. Kirkpatrick. News of her May death came late to the Virginia Woolf Listserv. It arrived today.

Read more.

The passing of noted scholar Julia Briggs

Julia Briggs, noted Virginia Woolf critic and biographer, died at about 6:30 a.m. Aug. 16 in the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, England. She had been in a coma for a week.

She was the author of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, the groundbreaking 2005 biography of Woolf that focused on her writing life. Read a BBC interview with Ms. Briggs in which she discusses An Inner Life. She also wrote a volume of criticism called Reading Virginia Woolf, which was published in 2006.

Ms. Briggs was the general editor of the highly successful Penguin Virginia Woolf, which included Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own. She edited Night and Day for the series. 

Ms. Briggs also wrote Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924, and This Stage-Play World, about the Elizabethan theatre. She was an expert on children’s literature and co-edited Children and Their books : a Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie.

She was a contributor to Cambridge Collections Online as well.

Ms. Briggs was a professor of English literature and women’s studies at De Montfort University in Leicester, England.  She served as chair of the faculty higher degrees committee and taught courses on Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, twentieth-century and post-colonial literature.  Her research interests included Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists, women’s writing in early modern England and late-nineteenth and twentieth century literature.

Read the obituary in The Independent and a thoughtful tribute by Anne Fernald on her blog Fernham. In addition, Alison Light wrote a lovely tribute for The Guardian.