Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Virginia Woolf
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Standard Name: Woolf, Virginia
Birth Name: Adeline Virginia Stephen
Nickname: Ginia
Married Name: Adeline Virginia Woolf
Thousands of readers over three or four generations have known that Virginia Woolf was—by a beadle—denied access to the library of a great university. They may have known, too, that she was a leading intellect of the twentieth century. If they are feminist readers they will know that she thought . . . back through her mothers and also sideways through her sisters and that she contributed more than any other in the twentieth century to the recovery of women's writing.
Marcus, Jane. “Introduction”. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus, Macmillan, p. i - xx.
xiv
Educated in her father's library and in a far more than usually demanding school of life, she radically altered the course not only of the English tradition but also of the several traditions of literature in English.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde. Columbia University Press.
2
She wrote prodigiously—nine published novels, as well as stories, essays (including two crucial books on feminism, its relation to education and to war), diaries, letters, biographies (both serious and burlesque), and criticism. As a literary journalist in a wide range of forums, she addressed the major social issues of her time in more than a million words.
Woolf, Virginia. “Introduction; Editorial Note”. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, pp. vols. 1 - 4: various pages.
ix
She left a richly documented life in words, inventing a modern fiction, theorising modernity, writing the woman into the picture. She built this outstandingly influential work, which has had its impact on both writing and life, on her personal experience, and her fictions emerge to a striking degree from her life, her gender, and her moment in history. In a sketch of her career written to Ethel Smyth
she said that a short story called An Unwritten Novelwas the great discovery . . . . That—again in one second—showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press.
415
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Jenkins
Pernel Strachey
was then Principal of Newnham. EJ
, as secretary of the college literary society, was privileged to invite Edith Sitwell
to address the society, and to meet and entertain the great poet.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
21
Friends, Associates
Naomi Royde-Smith
Woolf
, going to a party there on 5 June 1921, disliked Royde-Smith and her world at first sight. Never did I see a less attractive woman than Naomi. . . .I fixed her with...
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
105
Frances Partridge
writes that JS
was generally judged by them to be a lively and...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Bowen
EB
loved Oxford (where she and her husband spent ten years) and became a social success there. She met and became friends with John
and Susan Buchan
, and it was through them that she...
Friends, Associates
Edith Somerville
Somerville and Smyth
became close friends, and visited and travelled together, though biographer Maurice Collis
thinks that Smyth
expected a sexual relationship where Somerville did not.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
She claimed that although she felt healthy while pregnant, breast-feeding inclined her towards depression.
Cornford, Hugh et al. “Frances Cornford 1886-1960”. Selected Poems, edited by Jane Dowson and Jane Dowson, Enitharmon Press, p. xxvii - xxxvii.
xxxii
Her children later recalled her as invalidish and suffering from a lack of energy and robustness.
Cornford, Hugh et al. “Frances Cornford 1886-1960”. Selected Poems, edited by Jane Dowson and Jane Dowson, Enitharmon Press, p. xxvii - xxxvii.
xxxii
She required nurses...
Health
Jane Ellen Harrison
JEH
had been diagnosed with leukaemia by the summer of 1927. Mirrlees nursed her through this last illness.
Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford University Press.
303-4
In February 1928 Virginia Woolf
met with Harrison for the last time. She described her in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Philip Larkin
He described it as allegorical, a Virginia Woolf
-Henry Green
novel.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber.
160
Its theme, he wrote, was the relinquishing of live response to life.
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester University Press.
134
Its protagonist, Katherine, hails from somewhere unspecified in Central...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce
), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Strachey
The novel's first published title was inspired, according to Frances Partridge
, by Virginia Woolf
's description of painter Henry Lamb
as nipped, like a man on a pier.
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon.
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester University Press.