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, 1981, 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, 2005.
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, 1986–1994, 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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
4: 231
Well-known black and white photograph of Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), 1902. She is seen in profile, with her hair loosely caught back in a bun
Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole. This is a picture from one of Virginia Woolf's own photo albums at Monk's House which were acquired at an auction at Sotheby's in 1982 (cf. Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, p. 187), gifted in 1983 by Frederick R. Koch to the Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Libray, Harvard University, and afterwards scanned and uploaded by the library.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Dorothy Wordsworth
Virginia Woolf published an essay on DW in 1929 (reprinted in the Common Reader: Second Series, 1932). As early as 1940 (in his edition published the following year) Ernest de Selincourt wrote, Dorothy Wordsworth...
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
Woolf confessed to liking this less than Sackville-West's other novels, not being able to make the characters come alive. But this may be my fault though. . . . I suspect that my knowledge of...
Literary responses E. B. C. Jones
Virginia Woolf , reviewing the anthology along with the rest of the Adventurers All series, and supposing that Jones was a man, found it insufficiently adventurous and rather conventional, with nothing to surprise or shock...
Literary responses Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Athenæum carried a signed review for this book by Virginia Woolf , who went straight to the heart of the matter. It would be easy to make fun of her; equally easy to condescend...
Literary responses Penelope Fitzgerald
The introduction by Hermione Lee encapsulates PF 's critical approach by saying she leads us right to the heart of the matter. Her publishers boldly call the volume one of the most engaging books about...
Literary responses Hope Mirrlees
Paris was received by an appreciative audience. Before its publication Virginia Woolf described it as very obscure, indecent, and brilliant.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
During the early part of ICB 's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...
Literary responses Mary Wollstonecraft
The Vindication provoked a storm of comment and replies, in reviews (the Monthly was respectful both of her project and its execution, but the Critical, though its review was long and detailed, was scathingly...
Literary responses Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Virginia Woolf paid tribute to ATR 's style in a review of the letters as follows: Her most typical, and, indeed, inimitable sentences rope together a handful of swiftly gathered opposites. To embrace oddities and...
Literary responses Dorothy Wellesley
Leonard Woolf was for him, rather impressed with this sequence; Virginia said she approved of Wellesley's having decided to write about cats and rocks, instead of the birth of man.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
4: 198
Literary responses Ali Smith
Numbering ASamong Virginia Woolf 's most gifted inheritors,Telegraph reviewer Patrick Flanery rather effusively positioned this work as one that subtly but surely reinvents the novel, and produces fundamentally new dimensions in the literary...
Literary responses Alice Meynell
In his review for The Sphere, Clement Shorter deemed this matchless.
qtd. in
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
234
The young Woolf , too, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that AM 's essays were courageous, authoritative, and individual.
qtd. in
Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University Press of Virginia , 2000.
193
Literary responses Eliza Haywood
Into the twentieth century EH 's association with scandal and bodice-ripping continued. Virginia Woolf used her in 1916 (reviewing George Whicher 's biography for the Times Literary Supplement) as an object-lesson in the judging...
Literary responses Susan Tweedsmuir
ST later wrote that the book did not sell well, but that I was always proud and pleased to think that Virginia had liked it.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. A Winter Bouquet. G. Duckworth, 1954.
83
Literary responses Naomi Mitchison
Winifred Holtby , writing in The Bookman, ranked this novel as the most important of the year (a year that saw the appearance of Woolf 's The Waves),
Squier, Susan M., and Naomi Mitchison. “Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult”. Solution Three, Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995, pp. 161-83.
165-6
and its author as...

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