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.
RM
's Catchwords and Claptrap, another volume of essays, was published by Leonard
and Virginia Woolf
at the Hogarth Press
.
Woolmer, J. Howard, and Mary E. Gaither. A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1946. Woolmer/Brotherson.
42
Bensen, Alice. Rose Macaulay. Twayne.
93-4
Textual Production
Katherine Mansfield
The Woolfs were eager to publish it. Virginia
, who had encouraged Mansfield to get it finished,
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
wrote of it in her diary: It has the living power, the detached existence of a work of...
Textual Production
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Textual Production
Eavan Boland
EB
alluded in the title of her poetry volume A Woman Without a Country to Virginia Woolf
's outsider pronouncement: as a woman, I have no country.
McAuliffe, John. “Rare playfulness marks Eavan Boland’s fine new collection”. The Irish Times.
Textual Production
Henry Green
One attempted and abandoned novel between Blindness and Living contained a garden scene which, according the literary critic John Russell, seems to have come straight out of Mrs. Woolf
's Kew Gardens.
Russell, John David. Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag. Rutgers University Press.
12
The...
Textual Production
Helen Dunmore
HD
's many other writings include reviews (of both poetry and fiction), introductions (to the poems of Emily Brontë
, the stories of D. H. Lawrence
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
, and a study of...
Textual Production
Susan Hill
Jacob's Room is Full of Books, which followed on 5 October 2017,
mixes observations of nature and seasonal change (herons, moles, swifts) with desultory opinions, many of them about books and authors. No link...
Textual Production
Katherine Mansfield
KM
left at least fifteen stories unfinished. The final book which she planned—and which she intended to be her first mature and fully-conceived work—was never written; nor were the novels which she meant to write...
Textual Production
Phyllis Bottome
PB
published a collection of short stories, Strange Fruit, one of which concerns an imaginary meeting between herself and Virginia Woolf
.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Editors DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell A. Leaska, Hutchinson.
275
Textual Production
Susan Tweedsmuir
This was one of a series conceived by Hilda Matheson
, during the desperate conditions of the second world war, offering information about Britain and its colonies (this series was a smaller subset of Britain...
Textual Production
Jackie Kay
JK
wrote one of the two introductions for the Vintage
classics edition of Virginia Woolf
's Between the Acts; a second introduction was written by academic Lisa Jardine
.
For this move into fiction they chose the epistolary style in which they had already succeeded, and used their former pseudonyms: by the authors of Henry and Frances. Richard's novel was The Gordian Knot...