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.
Theatre historian Julie Holledge
has suggested that Craig was the model for Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Richmal Crompton
Children are very important in RC
's adult novels. She repeatedly traces a group of characters, sometimes but not always all within the same family, from childhood to maturity or old age. Another pattern is...
Friends, Associates
Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree
, also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Occupation
Nancy Cunard
Her purpose in founding the press was to publish mainly contemporary poetry of an experimental kind. Virginia Woolf
warned her that Your hands will always be covered with ink,
A play by SD
about disability, Who's Afraid of Virginia
's Sister, had its opening run at Chicken Shed
in Southgate (North London), which had commissioned it.
Elkin, Susan. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Sister?”. The Stage/What’s On/Reviews.
Aston, Elaine, and Geraldine Harris. Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners. Palgrave Macmillan.
84
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Daniels
Debbie is disabled, wheelchair-bound and reliant on a computerised voice to communicate. Her voice software, made in America, is programmed to substitute a rhyming word for one deemed too obscene for speech, so that...
Virginia Woolf
did, however, visit EMD
, and wrote to her niece in November 1935 that Delafield lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen
; whom she adores. But she has...