Blogging Woolf

News of 6 Dec. 2007

 

Call for papers: Woolf studies and periodicals

For the 18th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Pat Colliers is seeking papers for a panel that looks at ways of bringing the insights and methodologies of recent work in early 20th century periodical studies to bear on the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Get the details.

News of 26 Nov. 2007

 

Attention members of IVWS: Call for Panel Topics for MLA 2008

Bonnie Kime Scott, president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, announces that members of the society are invited to submit a panel topic for the next MLA Convention in 2008, which will be held in San Francisco. Proposals are due Dec. 10. Get the details.

News of 21 Nov. 2007

 

Vanessa is Bloomsbury belle in one-woman show

In Bloomsbury Bell, playing at Lyon & Turnbull, Broughton Place, Edinburgh, on Nov. 23 -24, Kara Wilson uses her skills as a writer, painter, and actress to tell the story of Vanessa Bell’s reactions to her sister Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941. Read more.

News of 8 Nov. 2007

 

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.

Woolf letters offered at auction in London

Anyone with £7,000 to £10,000 to spend and the flexibility of traveling to London next Wednesday might be interested in auction news sent to the VW Listserv today.

But if you can’t be at Christie’s King Street London location next week, you can still view the auction offering and bid online. Read more.

 

News of 30 Oct. 2007

Invitation to submit papers to Selected Papers from “Voyages Out, Voyages Home”: The Eleventh Annual Conference on VW 

Guest editors Jane de Gay and Marion Dell invite submissions to the Selected Papers from “Voyages Out, Voyages Home”: The Eleventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, which was held in Bangor, North Wales, June 13-16, 2001. The volume will be published by Clemson University Digital Press.  Read the full story.

 

News of 22 Oct. 2007

 

More of Woolf’s Essays in progress

Stuart N. Clarke sent news about The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volumes 5 and 6 via the VW Listserv. Here’s the scoop:

• Volume 5 is with Random House UK, with a publication date of January 2009 planned.
• Clarke proposes that Volume 6 will include an appendix of additions and corrections to Volumes 1-5.
• Readers can send additions and corrections that identify the following:
  • sources of “recalcitrant” quotations
  • errors in Woolf’s texts, however trivial

Clarke says contributors will be thanked in the Acknowledgements. He can be contacted via e-mail.

 

News of 2 Oct. 2007

“Listen Again” to part two of The Waves on BBC Radio

Background voices. The narrator’s voice. A clacking typewriter. Trains clattering over tracks. A ticking clock. Birdsong. Wind. And the inevitable heavy lapping of the waves.

All of these sounds bring Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to life on the BBC Radio broadcast that aired last month. Part two of the two-part drama aired Sunday, Sept. 30, and is available on the BBC Radio Web site’s Listen Again page through Oct. 7. Just click on “The Classic Serial” link.

News of 21 Sept. 2007

 

Low cost Selected Papers available while supplies last

Pace University Professor Mark Hussey announces that copies of Virginia Woolf and Communities, Volume 8 of Selected Papers from the Annual Conference onVirginia Woolf, are available for the cost of shipping from Pace University Press, while supplies last.

Edited by Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis, the book was published by Pace UP in 1999. It includes papers from the 1998 conference sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society.

U.S. residents should send a check for $3. Those who live outside the U.S. should send a check for $6. The fee covers the cost of shipping the book. There is no charge for the book itself.

Send your check, with a note indicating you wish to purchase Selected Papers Volume 8, to:

Pace University Press
41 Park Row, Room 1510
New York, NY 10038

Colby College professor retires

Woolf scholar Professor Susan McIlvaine Kenney retired this summer from Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She began teaching at Colby in 1968 and published five books — mysteries and memoirs — and about two dozen short stories. She taught English composition, creative writing, and literature.

She is a scholar of the life and literature of Virginia Woolf, and she served as director of the creative writing program and chair of Colby’s humanities division.

News of 17 Sept. 2007

The Waves on BBC Radio Sunday

BBC Radio will broadcast Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Sunday, Sept. 23, at 3 p.m. London time. The program is this week’s edition of “The Classic Serial.”

The hour-long opening episode follows the six main characters from infancy to university and then out into the real world, according to BBC Radio 4.

Dramatised and directed by Terence Davies, it stars Janet Suzman, Jon Cartwright, Geraldine James, Anna Massey, Peter Guinness, Jane Lapotaire and Don Warrington.

The program is available on the BBC Radio Web site Listen Again page for seven days after the broadcast. Just click on the “The Classic Serial” link.

News of the broadcast came from M.E. Foley via the VW Listserv.

News of 25 Aug. 2007

IVWS extends deadline for Woolf paper proposals

The International Virginia Woolf Society announces a deadline extension to Sept. 4, 2007, for proposals for the society’s Woolf panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture. The conference will be held at the University of Louisville, Feb. 21-23, 2008.

Read more.

News of 24 Aug. 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.

News of 22 Aug. 2007

 

Call for papers: Essays on untold stories of the Hogarth Press

Helen Southworth, assistant professor of literature of the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon, has issued a call for papers for a collection of essays on the Hogarth Press that she is compiling.

The collection is tentatively titled Forthcoming from the Hogarth Press: How Leonard and Virginia Woolf Shaped Twentieth Century Publishing.

Southworth says the edited volume will appear in advance of the centenary of the founding of the Press in 2017.  The editor is looking for essays that highlight the innovative quality of the Hogarth Press with a look at the following:

• stories of some of the lesser known artists and their cover art,
• stories of some of the press workers,
• stories of some of the lesser known authors, and
• essays on overlooked titles by well known authors who published with the Hogarth Press.

Southworth says the goal of the collection is to move beyond and complement J.H.Willis’s 1992 history, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers : The Hogarth Press, 1917-41, the only book-length study to date.

She expects the collection to assess the impact the Hogarth Press had on the careers of those connected with it who are usually overlooked. It will also deal with the broader issue of how the Hogarth Press shaped book production over the course of the 20th century.

Essays focused on individual authors or groups of authors/artists/texts, etc. are encouraged.  Of particular interest is work that highlights archival sources, work which makes use of the now established Hogarth Press archives at Reading University and at Washington State University, for example, as well as author/artist/publisher specific collections.

Also welcome are essays which engage with recent critical work on literary/artistic modernism and publishing and the marketplace, bibliographical environment, networks, celebrity, censorship, and archive studies.

The call for papers asks that themes address (but are not limited to):

• risks that the Woolfs took in terms of possibilities of censorship
• innovations in cover art and other aspects of printing and book marketing
• the Woolfs’ relationships with English provincial writers and with writers from the colonies
• the Woolfs’ engagement with new ideas in the sciences, popular culture, peace studies, fashion, cinema, etc.
• the Woolfs’ collaboration with press workers and with patrons
• the translations the Woolfs themselves engaged in and those they published at the press
• the Hogarth Press in the archives
• the portrayal of the Hogarth Press in contemporary fiction
• the Hogarth Press’ role in a specific author’s, artist’s, press worker’s careers

• the relationship of the Hogarth Press to other presses of the period

Completed essays of 20-25 pages, double spaced, (MLA style preferred), along with queries and suggestions, should be sent to Helen Southworth, Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1293.

Deadline for paper submissions is Feb. 15, 2008.

News of 16 Aug. 2007

 

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.

News of 13 Aug. 2007

Wordsworth publishing affordable Woolf hardcover

Virginia Woolf will be among the first four authors featured by discount paperback publisher Wordsworth Editions in a new series.

The Wordsworth Library Collection will feature deluxe illustrated, cloth-bound editions of classic fiction, including The Selected Works of Virginia Woolf, which will be released Sept. 1 at a price of £9.99. Its 1,024 pages will include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

Woolf will be in good company. Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde are the other authors who will be featured this fall in the new series, which offers colored pages, gold tooling, and an inset color plate on the front cover. The company bills the collection as “an ornament for any bookshelf, and a perfect present” and plans an initial print run of 6,000 per title.

News of 10 Aug. 2007

 

Big Ben silenced until September

Lucky for Mrs. Dalloway that it was June 1924, not August 2007, when she went out for her famous walk. Otherwise, the “leaden circles” that mark time in Virginia Woolf’s novel by the same name, would be missing.

Big Ben, the famed London bell that sounds the hour and chimes the quarter-hours at Britain’s Houses of Parliament, will go silent for four to six weeks, beginning tomorrow at 8 a.m., according to news reports. The clock is undergoing scheduled repairs in time for its 150th anniversary in 2009.

Freezing snow, fierce storms, and World War II bombing raids by German Lutwaffe have failed to silence the clock since it was installed in July of 1859. The clock has slowed several times, but never stopped, except during scheduled repairs.

Big Ben was silent only once in Woolf’s lifetime — in 1934. Makes me want to search her diary to see if she mentioned missing it.

Other silent repair periods for the London landmark came in 1956 and 1990. This is the first time since 1956 that both the hourly and quarter-hour sounds will be silenced at the same time.

News of 9 Aug. 2007

 

Writer on Woolf named to Miami U professorship

Mary Jean Corbett, a professor of English and affiliate in women’s studies has been named the John W. Steube Professor at Miami University, site of the 17th International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

Corbett’s research interests focus on 19th century English and Irish writing, feminist and postcolonial theory, and women’s writing. She has published widely, including Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870 and “Performing Identities: Actresses and Autobiography” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre.

Corbett’s specific link to Woolf is this: Her current book project is Family Likeness: Sex and Marriage within the Family in Women’s Fiction from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf.

News of 7 Aug. 2007

Fourth volume of Woolf essays coming soon from Harcourt

In response to a query on the VWoolf Listserv, Lindsey Smith of Harcourt Trade Publishers reports that Volume IV of Woolf’s essays, edited by Andrew McNeillie, is in production and will be out soon. She promises to send a message out to the Woolf list when the volume is available. We’ll share that news here as well.

News of 4 Aug. 2007

BBC broadcasts of note

Jean Moorcroft Wilson on Siegfried Sassoon

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, author and lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London, turned up at the 17th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf a day late. She had a good reason. She was busy making a June 7 appearance on the BBC Program, “In Our Time.”

Author of a two-volume biography of Siegfried Sassoon, Moorcroft Wilson joined two others on the program to discuss his role as a poet, as well as the conflict inherent in his dual role as war hero and war protestor during World War I. Listen to the broadcast. Find out more about Sassoon.

Woolf reviewed two of Sassoon’s works for the Times Literary Supplement — one in 1917 and one in 1918. She also met him socially during the 1920s. Despite inviting him to write for the Hogarth Press, none of his work was published by the Woolfs’ publishing house.

Woolf herself on the power of words

On 29 April 1937, Woolf shared her own thoughts on the changing character and power of the English language via BBC radio.  Listen to “Words Fail Me,” which the BBC describes as an “eulogy to words.” It is the only known recording of Woolf’s voice.

More about Woolf and her circle

 Listen to more about the Bloomsbury circle on the BBC:

• Jane Brown on the influence of Virginia Woolf’s early landscapes
• Virginia Woolf’s Women
• Nigel Nicolson on Vita Sackville-West

News of 1 Aug. 2007

Books of note

Alison Light explores world of upstairs, downstairs

The literary world across the pond is buzzing with reviews of Alison Light’s new book, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, which is due out next month. In it, she explores the ‘sordid’ power struggle between Virginia Woolf and her live-in cook, Nellie. Read an excerpt in The Guardian or a posting on the Hesperus Press blog.

Links sent to the VWoolf Listserv from Stuart Clarke offer several additonal suggestions. Read The Independent‘s review of the book. Get the skinny from the Sunday Times online. Or connect with Susan Goldman’s perspective, as published in her online literary magazine, textualities.

Two Bloomsbury reviews to peruse

The Bloomsbury Group: Illustrated Biographical Notes and Sketches by Frances Spalding. Read the 2007 review by Roy Johnson.

Among the Bohemians: Unconventional Ways of Living: 1900—1940  by Virginia Nicholson, daughter of Quentin Bell. Read the review.

News of 31 July 2007

Briefs from the 17th conference:
Look for VW & London in pocket form & Web site

Cecil Woolf, Leonard Woolf‘s nephew, traveled to Oxford, Ohio, for the 17th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference this June. He charmed everyone. I should know; he charmed me too.

By the end of the Saturday evening banquet, he was surrounded by Woolfians of all ages. Dressed in their packable party best, Woolfians were toasting him, planting kisses on his cheek, posing for photos, and pushing calendars at him for autographs. He cheerfully accepted all.

Anne Fernald gives a lovely account of Cecil’s touchingly humorous pre-banquet speech. In it, the amazingly chipper 80-year-old talked about his experiences with both Leonard and Virginia, who died when he was 14.

I will just share two bits of news he mentioned earlier in the conference.

• He is considering publishing his wife, Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s, Virginia Woolf, Life and London: A Biography of Place as a small softcover volume in his Bloomsbury Heritage series.
• He predicts that his publishing house, Cecil Woolf Publishers, located at 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP, will soon have its own Web site.