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.
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.
Written several years before Woolf
's Orlando, this tale features a fairy who lives through eons of fairy history before settling in the dolls' house at the present day, wearing a 1920s short skirt.
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel details the literary and romantic triangles among writer Anne Lindell (a sketch to some extent inspired by VT
herself), the former lover of aristocrat John Shorne (Sackville-West
), who is having an...
Textual Features
Vita Sackville-West
The story sounds eerily familiar. Its protagonist is an eternally young and beautiful fairy who has attended every famous event in fairy history, from Cinderella' s ball and Sleeping Beauty' s kiss to the creation...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Mary Renault
Lesbianism had been the subject of novels in the 1920s and 30s. Virginia Woolf
's Mrs. Dalloway and Elizabeth Bowen
's The Hotel had both been criticised (the latter severely) for sympathetic treatments of emotional...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Anne Manning
A recent critic, pointing to the theological correctness of the way the fictional Askew accepts her burden of martyrdom, classes this work with other sectarian, Protestant Reformation novels.
Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “Reviving the Reformation: Victorian women writers and the Protestant historical novel”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
DR
's pieces for Vanity Fair include Women and the Future: A Trembling of the Veil Before the Eternal Mystery of La Giaconda [sic], and Women in the Arts: Some Notes on the Eternally...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Robins
This wide-ranging and somewhat disjointed work, explicitly addressed to women (These pages are not addressed to the masculine mind),
sets out the dangers of assuming that gender equality has now been achieved...
Textual Features
W. H. Auden
It is no wonder than that Auden is an entertaining critic, with a penchant for the gnomic whether in titles (his essay on detective stories is called The Guilty Vicarage; his essay on Kafka
Textual Features
Willa Cather
Here she complains that the modern novel has been taken over by [t]he property-man, by an obsession with the vivid presentation of material objects.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf.
Plath took the idea for her meditative voices from Woolf
's The Waves. Her women speak from a maternity ward, where their experience of motherhood is mixed and their emotions tumultuous, to say the...
Textual Features
Ethel Sidgwick
Though she calls her work a memoir, ES
spends only twenty-six pages writing about Eleanor Sidgwick's childhood, and gives much of the text to the history of Newnham, before as well as during her aunt's...
Residence
Stella Benson
SB
returned from China to England to receive the Femina Vie Hereuse prize for Tobit Transplanted. During the voyage she read Virginia Woolf
's The Waves.
Grant, Joy. Stella Benson: A Biography. Macmillan.
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Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Indiana University Press.