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.
Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Harvard University Press.
1
Reception
Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET
has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception
Mary Martha Sherwood
Virginia Woolf
's Kitty Malone in The Years has read The History of the Fairchild Family. Naomi Royde-Smith
dedicated her book on MMS
to her parents, who in the year 1884 when a bachelor...
Reception
Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively
wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception
Susan Hill
This novel won the Whitbread Literary Award for fiction for 1972.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
14
Critic Michele Murray
called it a thoroughly created piece of work . . . wrought of language, built not from any personal experience,...
Reception
Vita Sackville-West
Woolf reported reading the novel all in a gulp with pleasure in bed; very well done I think.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
St John Ervine
responded unsympathetically to news of this novel's existence, suggesting that the world had enough novelists already. Aren't there far too many women novelists and not enough good cooks?
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
ix
Having read it...
Reception
Adrienne Rich
She declined the award with a more pointed and particular version of Virginia Woolf
's rejection of official honours, saying the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics...
Reception
Eva Figes
An interview with EF
appears in Olga Kenyon
's Women Writers Talk, 1989, and she is one of those whose work is included in Bryan Cheyette
's anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and...
Reception
Katherine Mansfield
After Mansfield's death, Woolf
wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, pp. 25-6.
25
KM
appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Reception
Dorothy Richardson
DR
thought less of Woolf
's writing, and disliked juxtapositions of their work by critics. In 1937 she refused requests from Life and Letters Today and the London Mercury to review Woolf's The Years because...
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press.
228
Her own summary of her career, however, was that she tried...
Reception
Ling Shuhua
LS's memoir is at the centre of her body of writing. From the start of her exchanges with Bell
and Woolf
, LS sent them drafts of it, written in English. She conveyed her appreciation...