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.
Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
's Hogarth Press
published VL
's The Poet's Eye, Notes on Some Differences Between Verse and Prose.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 283n2
Textual Production
Wyndham Lewis
Margaret Drabble
notes that in this text Woolf
is characterized as Rhoda Hyman, the Empress of High-brow London, a lanky, sickly lady in Victorian muslins with a drooping, intellect-ravaged exterior.
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Facts on File.
147
Textual Production
Stella Benson
SB
's letter-writing kept her in touch with communities of writers and was a personal lifeline during her isolated years in China. Among her correspondents were Virginia Woolf
and Sydney Schiff
(Stephen Hudson). Some letters...
Textual Production
E. B. C. Jones
EBCJ
wrote the review for the Cambridge Magazine of Virginia Woolf
's Night and Day, 1919. According to Woolf, EBCJ
did not like the novel's characters, but found Woolf to be in the forefront...
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
The Hogarth Press
published DW
's poem Matrix as number 3 of the series Hogarth Living Poets (it had been ready for Virginia Woolf
to read and and give her opinion about on 31 January)...
Textual Production
Katherine Mansfield
KM
reviewed Woolf
's Night and Day in the Athenæum (which was now edited by Murry
).
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press.
414
Textual Production
Muriel Jaeger
MJ
's first novel, The Man with Six Senses, was published by Leonard
and Virginia Woolf
at the Hogarth Press
. It deals with human evolution towards abilities currently seen as paranormal.
Virginia Woolf's...
Textual Features
Eva Figes
Her novels are not for the faint-hearted or for the reader seeking either cheerfulness or a straightforward narrative line. She works regularly with a double focus: on the one hand, the isolated moment captured in...
Textual Features
Emmeline Pankhurst
Looking back on the texts of the suffrage movement, Virginia Woolf
contrasted EP
's still style
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 210-11
Textual Features
Ursula K. Le Guin
The first essay, Space Crone, takes the menopause as topic. Le Guin revisits the vexed question of the gendering of language: the father tongue, the mother tongue, the effort expended to keep the literary...
Textual Features
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
KKD
illuminates the relationship between Tagore and Ocampo, which began in 1924 when Tagore moved to Buenos Aires to write for the daily La Nación, but her main aim is to recuperate Victoria Ocampo...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
Textual Features
Betty Miller
BM
wrote that the military hospital in this work (written in a wartime billet at Droitwich), was one that Emanuel Miller
worked at. Her Major McRae was based on Adrian Stephen
, Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Stevie Smith
This highly unusual novel takes the form of a disconnected journal by a publisher's secretary named Pompey, an alienated but irrepressible member of the disregarded female work-force, who is clearly an alter-ego for SS
...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bottome
In March 1928, Vita Sackville-West
and Woolf exchanged letters about a story by PB
in which Woolf
appears as the character Avery Fleming. Sackville-West, who met Bottome in Germany, noted that she wrote the story...