Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Virginia Woolf
-
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.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Education
Rumer Godden
RG
's determination to become a writer fuelled a continued self-education. Books were hard to come by in India, yet she managed to find and devour recent publications: Edith Sitwell
's Troy Park and Façade...
Education
Toni Morrison
Chloe Wofford (later TM
) followed her BA with an MA in English Literature from Cornell University
, with a thesis on suicide in Virginia Woolf
and William Faulkner
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
As a very small child MF
was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums.
Forster, Margaret. Hidden Lives. Viking.
121-2
At two she talked in long sentences . . . and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to...
Education
Q. D. Leavis
All three of the Roth children had their early education at Latymer School in Hazelbury Lane, Edmonton. This was a co-educational school at which they thrived. Ian MacKillop
(biographer of F. R. Leavis) suggests...
Education
Dorothy Brett
Brett proved an exceptional Slade student. She received first prize for figure painting in her final year. She particularly drew the attention of two of her instructors, Henry Tonks
andFrederick Brown
. She was...
Education
Q. D. Leavis
Queenie also was known for her bookish habits: her tastes ran especially to Henry James
, along with the journals the New Statesman, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, and Time and...
Education
Ann Quin
Yet at this time books discovered in the public library taught her the possibilities in writing: Greek and Elizabethan dramatists. Dostoievsky (Crime and Punishment and Virginia Woolf
's The Waves . ....
Education
Fay Weldon
Fay attended another progressive establishment, the co-educational Burgess Hill School
, which she found absurd, not only noisy and disorderly but actively anti-academic. The best thing about it was being taught English briefly by the...
Education
Helen Dunmore
While HD
was growing up she read a lot of Russian fiction and poetry.
McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer.
McCrum, Robert. “The Siege is a novel for now”. The Observer.
The books that she read, she says, made me, as a person...
Education
Kathleen Raine
KR
was very impressed by the occasion on which Virginia Woolf
, accompanied by Vita Sackville-West
, gave her paper A Room of One's Own to the Girton Literary Society
before its publication. She was...
Dedications
Ethel Smyth
ES
continued her autobiography in As Time Went On; she dedicated it to Virginia Woolf
, who helped her choose its title.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
She wrote most of it while on a walking tour in the Dolomites with her husband in July, and dedicated it to Virginia Woolf
.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 116n2, 131
It was reprinted by November 1944 with...
Dedications
Ling Shuhua
The Hogarth Press
published Ling Shuhua
's memoir Ancient Melodies, with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West
. Ling Shuhua dedicated the book to Virginia Woolf
and Sackville-West, with whom she conferred at different stages...
Dedications
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
published Sissinghurst, a poem dedicated to Virginia Woolf
.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.