Blogging Woolf

Woolf sightings: Print media

• “Stuck in the Middle with Middle-aged Me” by Jane Shilling, Irish Times – Jan. 29, 2011
  “Virginia Woolf said as much about 80 years ago, writing in her diary: `I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness; but only reached now in middle age.’ It may seem odd to quote Woolf on the subject, but a rational apprehension of the basis of happiness and a capacity to live that knowledge are quite distinct, and Jane Shilling turns to Woolf frequently in her new memoir about navigating the terrain of female middle age.”
• “When the Stars’ Stars Align for Life-changing Love” by Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post – Jan. 29, 2011
  “When the Nazis were marching across Europe, Leonard and Virginia Woolf made a suicide pact: If England was taken, they’d retreat to their garage with enough morphine to kill them both.”
• “The Moore You Get, the More You Want“ by Monika L. S. Robbins, The Harvard Crimson – Jan. 28, 2011
  “For her second task, Moore had to cheer up Virginia Woolf, played by Brandon J. Ortiz ’12, by chasing her around the stage and tickling her in a tickle fight.”
• “Small Island by Andrea Levy“ by John Mullan, The Guardian – Jan. 15, 2011
  “Virginia Woolf used it – in a manner that turned narration into a form of introspection – in The Waves.”
• “Unafraid of Virginia Woolf by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed – Jan 12, 2011
• “Assange Accusers Must Show Their Faces“ by Naomi Wolf, Sydney Morning Herald – Jan. 7, 2011
  “Borrowing from a poem by Coventry Patmore, Virginia Woolf labelled the ideal of womanhood in this period ”the angel in the house”: a retiring creature who could not withstand the rigours of the public arena.”
• “Anonymous Was a Woman‎“ by Fred R. Shapiro, Yale Alumni Magazine – Jan 5, 2011
• “A Universe in Bloom” by Adam Nicolson, New York Times – July 5, 2010
• “Allow me to take this moment to re-introduce myself as myself,” Lassen County Times – June 29, 2010
  “Fun fact — not only is the new sports editor a woman, this sports chick carries a copy of Virginia Woolf in her purse for entertainment. “
• “The Rise of Hugely Insufferable Women” by Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle – June 23, 2010
  “See, long was it believed, via some utopian/naive vision held by “enlightened” men and women alike, that if and when the feminist movement — all three waves of it, really, from Virginia Woolf to Betty Freidan, bell hooks to riot grrls — finally started to get everything it desired, there would surely be some wonderful sea change in the culture …”
• “Provence: The Secret Cote d’Azur“ by Ferne Arfin, The Telegraph – June 20, 2010
  “It’s where Sir Winston Churchill learnt to paint and where Virginia Woolf wrote memorably about a family afternoon on the rocks overlooking the bay.”
• “How the study of feminism somehow led to life as an au pair“ by Keren Moran, Bognor Regis Observer – June 17, 2010
  “In both, feminist ideologies continually cropped up and I became a student of Simone de Beauvoir, Germain Greer and Virginia Woolf.”
• “In Praise of Tough Criticism“ by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, The Chronicle of Higher Education – June 13, 2010
• “How to be Idle and Blessed“ by Jeffrey Davis, Psychology Today – June 11, 2010
• “How Old Can a ‘Young Writer” Be?” – by Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times – June 9, 2010
  “Virginia Woolf entered her prime in her 40s.”
• “Death of a Civil Servant“ – by Lev Grosssman, Believer – May 2010
• “Movie Review: ‘Motherhood” – Manhattan Mom, Burning Home Fires at Both Ends” by A.O. Scott, New York Times – Oct. 23, 2009
  “Watching “Motherhood,” in which Uma Thurman plays a Manhattan mom juggling kids, dog, marriage and blogging duties, I could not help but recall some of the many distinguished literary explorations of similar predicaments: “A Room of One’s Own,” by Virginia Woolf“
• “Great literature knows no bounds – in time or place“ by Sarah Churchwell, The Independent – Oct. 8, 2009
• “The Power of the Past: How Historical Fiction Has Regained Its Gravitas“ by Jerome deGroot, The Guardian – Sept. 30, 2009. “Historical writing was influential and important through the 19th and early 20th century, with Virginia Woolf’sOrlando (1928) a gender-warping twist on the format.”
• “The Write Place,” New York Post – Sept. 24, 2009
• “Around the Houses” by Lis Smith, The Australian – Sept. 19, 2009
• “In Praise of Secondhand Books,” The Guardian – Aug. 5, 2009
• “`Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books,'” said Virginia Woolf. “`They have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.'”
• Letter: “Virginia Woolf and the Memoir,” The New York Times – Aug. 2, 2009
• “Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living by Declan Kiberd,” by Kevin Jackson, The Sunday Times – June 7, 2009
• “Virginia Woolf was sniffy, too.”
• “Orwell’s 1984 Sixty Years On“ by Andrew Johnson, The Independent – June 7, 2009
• “Conversations in the Dark“ by Navtej Sarna, The Hindu – June 7, 2009
• “Stage Dreams,”Jerusalem Post – June 4, 2009
• “The Poetic Virtues of Morrissey,”The Times – May 23, 2009
  “His lyrics allude to Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Graham Greene, Keats and Yeats, to name but a few.
• “Unhappy birthday?”, The Guardian – May 22, 2009
  “All are titles stolen from the big-mouthed bard’s own songs; fitting tributes to a man who has spent the last three decades plagiarising ideas from Warhol and Virginia Woolf…”
• “Letters: Double blow for poor mothers,”The Guardian – May 22, 2009
  “Feminists Josephine Butler, Eleanor Rathbone and Virginia Woolf would be horrified that a parliament with more women MPs and ministers than ever has launched this attack on mothers and others with the least, during a deep recession.”
• “Missing pieces,” Margaret Drabble, Mail & Guardian – May 12, 2009
  “Virginia Woolf’s father went in for mountaineering and public groaning”
• “Scottish pioneer of war nursing,”The Scotsman – May 11, 2009
  “(After the war, Dr Rendel would count Virginia Woolf and others in the infamous Bloomsbury Set among her patients).”
• “Life Support: How to handle illness,”The Independent – May 11, 2009
  “The famously well-balanced Virginia Woolf penned an essay in which she claimed that illnesses such as flu were so emotionally disturbing that they should have taken their place “with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature”.
• “The Big Ben Dissidents,”The Guardian – May 11, 2009
  “‘Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, ­irrevocable,” wrote Virginia Woolf.”
• “The magic of Gabriel García Márquez,”LA Times – May 3, 2009
  “He tracks down accounts of Gabo’s early forays into journalism, his passion for Virginia Woolf“
• “Thirsty interview Pamela Ditchoff, author of Mrs. Beast,” Stay Thirsty Media Inc., May 1, 2009
  “Pamela Ditchoff:  My strongest literary influence is Virginia Woolf. The first time I read her novels was the first time I could hear and feel a soundtrack. That’s too simple. Woolf’s novels are lyrical in language. The reader experiences not only the underlying psychological and emotional motives of her characters, but the auditory and visual impressions that encompass her characters. The Waves blew me away and I still return to it once a year.”
• “William Nicholson: A different class of storyteller,” The Telegraph, April 30, 2009
  “It’s no surprise that Nicholson, who has a double first in English from Cambridge, is well versed in the literary greats, including his wife’s great-aunt and namesake, Virginia Woolf.”
• “Back to Mango Street: After 25 years, novel still builds bridges,” The Tribune – April 29, 2009
  “Sandra Cisneros had not yet been introduced to the writings of Virginia Woolf when she began her remarkable novel “A House on Mango Street,” but she instinctively understood that desperate longing for a space, a place, a room of one’s own.”
• “Eileen Chang’s Fractured Legacy,” Asia Times Online – April 29, 2009
  “Chang is revered as China’s first truly modern writer. Her sensibility could be described as the acute social and motional observation of Cao Xueqin (author of Dream of the Red Chamber) filtered through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf.”
• “Rowena gives art her sole,” Star – April 28, 2009
  “One of the pairs details writer Virginia Woolf’s relationship with husband Leonard and lover Vita Sackville-West…Ms Woolf’s shoes are filled with small porcelain stones in a sad reminder of the stones with which she weighed her coat down before drowning in a river.”
• First females at Wittenberg made the grade, got room of their own,” Tom Stafford – Springfield News-Sun, March 30, 2009
• “Living to work, or working to live,” Rose Hoare – Star Times, March 29, 2009
  “By piling up masses of details, de Botton achieves a certain world view, something he says he gleaned from reading a Virginia Woolf essay from the 1930s called The Docks of London.”
• “Spare us earnest icons. Please just give us the glam,” Barbara Allen, The Guardian, March 29, 2009
  “Are we supposed to be impressed by the aching worthiness of the gay icons exhibition recently announced by the National Portrait Gallery? . . . Instead, we get Nelson Mandela, Virginia Woolf, poet Maya Angelou . . . “
• “Spice of life: How writers evoke the past through food,” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – The Independent, Feb. 21, 2009
• “The End of the Jew as Metaphor,” Vivian Gornick – The Jewish Quartlery, Winter 2008  –  Number 212.
  “Virginia Woolf had once complained that she couldn’t find the words to make an English sentence that would describe what illness felt like to her, because as an Englishwoman she was constrained from taking liberties with the language.”
• “Questions about Sex and Writing,” Christopher Tayler – The Guardian, Feb. 21, 2009
  “`No one expected Virginia Woolf to write about the Munich agreement,’ he said in 2001″
• “Floral Tribute,” Robin Lane Fox – Financial Times of London, Feb. 21, 2009
  “She confronted its pervasive effects and complained, acutely, that they were not addressed in the airy fiction of her contemporary, Virginia Woolf.”
• “Women’s Studies,” Chris Bergeron – The Metrowest Daily News, Feb. 20, 2009
  “As if expressing the sensibilities of Virginia Woolf and Jane Doe through the methodology of Joseph Cornell’s “magic boxes,” this exhibit succeeds because its insights and revelations remain accessible.”
• “Multi-task to make masterpieces,” Greg Marshall – Park Record, Feb. 20, 2009
  “Virginia Woolf famously wrote that to produce fiction, a woman must have a room of her own.”
• “Book Review: The Wilderness,” by Samantha Harvey – The Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2009
  “The Wilderness bills itself as a novel about a man who’s losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, but it’s far more — or less — than that. It’s closer to Virginia Woolf’s meditative novels than anything else I can think of.”
• “An Economic Bright Spot in New Hampshire,” John Motyka – The New York Times, Feb. 20
  “It was Keynes — a Cambridge intellectual and a friend of Virginia Woolf — who was the indisputable star of the Bretton Woods conference, despite the waning of Britain’s fortunes as the war drained its wealth.”
• “To Virginia Woolf,” Sunshine LeMontree – Electica Magazine, 13:1, Jan-Feb. 2009.
• “What to do if smart becomes the next sexy,” Kevin Horrigan – Dallas Morning News, Jan. 28, 2009.
  “Here are some – just some – of the books in Columbia’s Core Curriculum: The Iliad, Homeric Hymns, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Histories of Herodotus, Oresteia, Oedipus the King, Medea, History of the Peloponnesian War, The Aeneid, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the Bible’s books of Genesis and gospels of Luke and John, and Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse.”
• “Comedy is king — and queen — in production of Woolf’s ‘Orlando’” – Chuck Graham – Tucson Citizen, Jan. 28, 2009.
• “Women are left to pick up the pieces in broken Britain,” Rosemary Goring – The Herald, Jan. 27, 2009
  “Anxiety over women’s vulnerability is running so high that courses are on offer with titles such as ‘Recession-proofing Your Career’. One pragmatic coach writes that ‘in a twist on Virginia Woolf’s adage that every woman needs a room of her own, I believe that every woman needs a stash of money of her own’. “
• “‘Freshwater’: Madcap smothers Virginia Woolf’s sole play“ – International Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 2009
  Find more links here.
• “The Two Vs: Friends to the End“ – Jakarta Post, Jan. 25, 2009
  “Before The L Word dared loudly speak its name, and before Ms. Lohan took to public shows of affection with her girlfriend, then so-called Sapphists fell in love and lived their lives. One of the most famous couples of the 1920s’ literary world was Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.”
• “‘Fulfilling our share of the creative task’: Virginia Woolf’s ode to reading“ – National Post, Jan. 22, 2009
• “Virginia Woolf debuts on New York’s stage“ – NY1, Jan. 21, 2009
  This posting includes a video clip of the Freshwater production.
  Find more links here.
• “Writers in Paradise keynote speaker Stewart O’Nan finds his themes among many influences” – St. Petersburg Times, Jan. 11, 2009
  “O’Nan cites more traditional writerly inspirations as well — Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, William Maxwell, Anton Chekhov — but, he says, he writes often about `endurance.’”
• “Imperfect Union“ – The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2009
  Review of Alison Light’s book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants
• “Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag” – Review, LA Times, Jan. 11, 2009
  “Don’t expect a literary document such as Virginia Woolf’s diary or the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Sontag isn’t practicing being a writer here.”
• “Who Forgot Canadian Lit?” – Financial Post, Jan. 9, 2009
  “My own literary education was saturated with the austere modernism of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and yet I can’t condemn the Common Reader in this country for feeling that much literary Canadian fiction is an emotionally thin and bitter brew. “
• “Lark and Termite by Jayne Ann Phillips” – Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 9, 2009
  “Phillips plumbs the depths of consciousness with potent and poetic language that recalls Virginia Woolf. And like Woolf, she finds magic in the overlaps.”
• “A Berliner’s Portraits of People and Her Familiar, and Foreign, Home“ – New York Times, Jan. 7, 2009
  “Starting in 1935, when André Malraux enlisted her to document the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, she left behind memorable portraits of Louis Aragon and Vita Sackville-West, Boris Pasternak and Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (the last two in color, when color film was still new). “
• “The Author’s Voice“ – Newsweek, Jan. 3, 2009
  “Virginia Woolf’s musings on language—the only surviving tape of her voice—appear here, spirited but starchy: `Only after the writer is dead do his words to some extent, only to some extent, become disinfected, purified of the accidents of the living body,’ she says.”
• “It’s Christmas … so let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” –Irish Independent, Dec. 28, 2008
  “It’s the kind of Great Frost that Virginia Woolf wrote about in her novel Orlando, when birds in flight dropped dead from the sky with cold and the rivers froze to a depth of 20 feet.”
• “Your View: The flour of our youth —  a reminiscence” – SouthCoastToday.com, Dec. 27, 2008
  “ I know now that my mother loved the solitary time baking gave her. It offered an excuse to detach from the world, from the dog and my father and me, and make something her own. It’s what I do when I write, when I close my office door and leave my children and husband on the other side. “A room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf called it. Space to make something beautiful.”
• “Link between reader and author inspires Salon.com co-founder“ – Online Arizona Daily Star, Dec. 24, 2008
  “Your ideal brain food? `The capacity of great critics to inspire is often underrated. I like Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf and James Wood.’”
• “Susan Hill: Open a new festive chapter with stories to celebrate“ – Yorkshire Post, Dec. 23, 2008
  “Diaries and collections of letters are good for that, so I have the three-volume The Diary of Francis Kilvert, the 19th-century Herefordshire parson, and the Letters of Virginia Woolf so that I can plunge headlong into Bloomsbury.”
• “Endless invention” – The Telegraph, Calcutta, Dec. 12, 2008
  “But more intriguing than this enduring quality is another destiny, which befalls the work of art as soon it is completed — as in the final lines of Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse, when Lily Briscoe, the painter, realizes that she has had her `vision’.”
• “A modern Victorian“Review of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life–The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 12, 2008
  “Entrance would be gained, however, and toward the end of his biography [Paul] Mariani gives us a nice glimpse of [Robert] Bridges’ venerable dotage, when he was visited by Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley — not because those two modernists wished to see the laureate himself, but rather because they wished to see “the Hopkins manuscripts” in the laureate’s possession.
• “Conversation piece,” The Australian, Dec. 12, 2008
  “Writers from Jonathan Swift to George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf to Wilde wrote about or had a knack for clever, elegant conversation; for these people, conversation was a performance. “
• “Virginia Woolf’s Scribbled Notes,” Megan Buskey – The Economist, Dec. 12, 2008.
• “A second take on`Australia’” – The Daily Princetonian, Dec. 11, 2008
  “At the very least, it offers the universal pleasure of seeing Virginia Woolf and Wolverine sharing a passionate kiss or two.”
• Frank & Ernest cartoon – Dec. 9, 2008
• “At mall, a dark cave of underwear” –Hartford Courant, Nov. 30, 2008
  “`Intellectual freedom depends upon material things,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929. `That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.’ The surfeit in the dark cave of Gilly Hicks cannot be what Virginia Woolf meant.”
• “The full effect of words” –The Daily Star, Lebanon, Nov. 29, 2008
  “Working with text is old hat for Khoury. For example, `Dream She Is’ is based on the poems of Jacques Aswad, and she has also worked with the writing of Virginia Woolf … `Then I discovered Virginia Woolf, ’says Khoury, `and I became crazy about language to the point of being sick. I think Woolf is a composer too. I was obsessed with the effect of putting two words together, the rhythm they create and the feeling inside.’”
• “Good art from bad times“ –LA Times, Nov. 27, 2008
  “Virginia Woolf is often depicted as a dreamy, effete snob, agonizing all day over a single adjective while sipping tea — but her tough-minded view of art would make her right at home with the shot-and-a-beer crowd. To create art, she knew, you need more than inspiration. More than drive. More than talent.”
• “The Horror of Dirt: Virginia Woolf and Her Servants,” Elaine Blair – The Nation, Oct. 29, 2008
• “Writers’ Rooms: Virginia Woolf,” Hermione Lee – The Guardian, June 13, 2008
• “Virginia Woolf Fever” – New York Times Review of Books, April 20, 1978