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.
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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.
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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.
This novel has many modernist features. Nicola Beauman mentions the influence of Rosamond Lehmann
, and also palpable is that of Virginia Woolf
. The first, two-page chapter describes the Sussex village of Wealding and...
Textual Features
Dorothy Richardson
In addition to her chosen themes, DR
also charts the development of female consciousness through her literary techniques, which strongly disrupt gender, generic, and linguistic conventions. In her 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage, she recalls...
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Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
's work continually and creatively blurs generic boundaries, just as it tends to straddle the private and the public, the personal and the political. Her work is in many respects an astute negotiation of...
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E. M. Forster
This novel is remarkable for its witty treatment of the philosophical conundrum of the material reality of objects (later touched on by Virginia Woolf
in To the Lighthouse) and its glorification of the chalk...
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Mollie Panter-Downes
MPD
's short fictions render the mindscapes of individuals reacting to wartime conditions.
Lestage, Gregory, and Mollie Panter-Downes. “Preface”. Good Evening, Mrs Craven, edited by Gregory Lestage and Gregory Lestage, Persephone Books, p. vii - xxiii.
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However, her formal emphasis on concrete, action-driven character and plot developments contrasts with Virginia Woolf
's multi-layered, internal narratives. Editor Gregory Lestage
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Marjorie Bowen
MB
credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson
's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson
's Miriam and...
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Mary Lavin
It has been said to show traits of Clarissa Dalloway and other fictional portraits by Woolf
.
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.
Thomas Kilroy
quotes it as proving the truth of ML
's statement that her stories often...
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Ngaio Marsh
The first of her travel articles includes a paean to the pleasures of travel itself, the adventure of setting out, as if for some enchanted fairyland.
Lewis, Margaret. Ngaio Marsh: A Life. Chatto & Windus.
41
Another remarked on the inexplicable popularity of New...
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Zadie Smith
Chapters in this novel are headed with terms from mystical Judaic or Kabbalistic worship. The dustjacket of the first London edition bore in gold letters the words Fame! I'm gonna live forever! (from Alan Parker
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Eudora Welty
This volume included sixteen reviews. Welty's review of Virginia Woolf
's A Haunted House was one of two that had to be dropped at the last moment for lack of space.
Welty, Eudora. A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews. Editor McHaney, Pearl Amelia, University Press of Mississippi.
xiii
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Harriet Martineau
HM
here repeatedly stresses various forms of privilege
Martineau, Harriet. Life in the Sick-Room. Edward Moxon.
65
enjoyed by invalids, not least being an acute perceptiveness of the life around them in which is revealed the good of human hearts, the heavenly deeds...
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Olive Schreiner
Tillie Olsen
in 1978 pointed out a striking anticipation here of Woolf
's A Room of One's Own: what of the possible Shakespeares
we might have had who passed their life from youth upward...
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Rose Macaulay
This is her sole historical novel and the only one to reflect her long-standing interest in the seventeenth century. Set between October 1640 and May 1641, the period of the Long Parliament, the novel portrays...
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Gladys Henrietta Schütze
The Roundabout opens with the friendship between Anne Few and Jessica Thorn, who are living together for a year in a London studio while they try to become painters (an ambition in which Jessica takes...
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Doris Lessing
The varied stories in this collection include the delightful and the disturbing. Three tales about the London parks, of Leaves, words, people, shadows, whirled together towards autumn and the solstice,