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.
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.
Before writing this novel she re-read Woolf
's The Waves, which was to some extent her model, even though she believed it to be in some ways a failure.
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
81
Figes found it hard...
Intertextuality and Influence
Storm Jameson
Her published text retains the tone of her speech: it is playful and engaging, and addresses the reader directly in the second person. Jameson takes the reader through a survey of modern fiction via the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
The book opens with Eleanor on holiday with her husband, David: their first trip alone together after the years of holidaying with their three children, and a cue for mentally probing the past. Eleanor's childhood...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Anne Clifford
LAC
made a great impression on Sackville-West
and Woolf
: on the former for her family associations, on the latter for her symbolic possibilities. In Donne after three Centuries and again in her last, unfinished...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
The clever Stanley had longed for education and a wider world. Polly longs too, in vain. After Aunt Frances escapes she is briefly liberated, at sixteen, to visit the country house of a family friend...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Macaulay
Critic A. N. Wilson
has suggested that this novel exerted a significant influence on Woolf
's Orlando.
Lefanu, Sarah. Rose Macaulay. Virago.
338
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Intertextuality and Influence
G. B. Stern
GBS
opens the second Austen book with an amusing account of an interview with a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old niece who relates how she has fallen seriously in love with a dashing army officer who is her ideal...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Kazantzis
Less exotic places are also important. A Sussex lady features a chapel in Lewes, a deep / and obedient pond on the Ouse River, a garden of flowers,
Kazantzis, Judith. Let’s Pretend. Virago.
13
elm trees and rooks...
Intertextuality and Influence
Gillian Allnutt
Her poem Alien opens the section of feminist poetry and is preceded by an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's
non-fiction work Three Guineas, which reads, as a woman I have no country.GA
's text...
Intertextuality and Influence
Antonia White
Nevertheless, the desire to write persisted. While still unpublished, AW
gave her profession as authoress.
Vaux, Anna. “Biscuits. Oh good!”. London Review of Books, pp. 32-4.
32
Her biographer Jane Dunn
says Virginia Woolf
was the hero-writer of Antonia's youth.
Dunn, Jane. Antonia White: A Life. Jonathan Cape.
70
She later enlisted psychiatrists...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Daniels
Debbie is disabled, wheelchair-bound and reliant on a computerised voice to communicate. Her voice software, made in America, is programmed to substitute a rhyming word for one deemed too obscene for speech, so that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Philip Larkin
He described it as allegorical, a Virginia Woolf
-Henry Green
novel.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber.
160
Its theme, he wrote, was the relinquishing of live response to life.
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester University Press.
134
Its protagonist, Katherine, hails from somewhere unspecified in Central...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lucas Malet
The novel pursues its tangle of relationships in leisurely style, with much lengthy discussion among the characters, sometimes in heightened, near-melodramatic tones. One of the cultural markers it uses is that of books: Mrs Harvey-Noakes...