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.
Taylor, Debbie. “Interview with Helen Dunmore”. Mslexia, Vol.
12
, pp. 39-40.
39
The work was a fine first novel by a sure hand, observed the unsigned Times reviewer; HD
's poetic incandescence also compared favourably with Virginia Woolf
's style.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
267
Literary responses
Rebecca West
Virginia Woolf
judged it to be in a different and higher league than the novels of Hugh Walpole
, although produced, like ornamental porcelain, according to a convention which was tight and affected and occasionally...
Literary responses
Enid Bagnold
Not surprisingly, the article came under attack from many directions. Dame Ethel Smyth
responded in the next issue of the Sunday Times: It surprises me that so brilliant an intelligence should not remember that...
Literary responses
Ethel Smyth
Woolf
reported that she liked it very much: Now and again it wobbled but righted itself.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 81
Literary responses
Jane Welsh Carlyle
Virginia Woolf
declared in Geraldine
and Jane (in The Second Common Reader) that JWC
's letters owe their incomparable brilliancy to the hawk-like swoop and descent of her mind upon facts.
Woolf, Virginia, and Virginia Woolf. “Geraldine and Jane”. The Second Common Reader, Hogarth Press, pp. 186-01.
198
Literary responses
Romer Wilson
RW
's novels, tackling the complex philosophical and social issues that faced people in European countries in the years after the Great War, have been largely, if not entirely, forgotten. Her death at thirty-nine years...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
As Rebecca W. Crump
's guide to publications on CR
to 1973 reveals, her high reputation persisted after her death—she stood, according to Katharine Tynan
' article Santa Christina in 1912, head and shoulders above...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
There was a widespread feeling that VSW
had been too circumspect and scholarly. Virginia Woolf
told Vita that she found the book solid, strong, satisfactory
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 49
, but wished she had allowed herself a...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has become a sensitive barometer of feminist criticism. With its author it became the focus of Victorian women critics, including Anne Thackeray Ritchie
and Charlotte Mew
. Virginia Woolf
admired the poetry of...
Literary responses
Alice Meynell
In his review for The Sphere, Clement Shorter
deemed this matchless.
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House.
234
The young Woolf
, too, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that AM
's essays were courageous, authoritative, and individual.
Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University Press of Virginia .
193
Literary responses
Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...
Literary responses
Ethel Smyth
Reviewing it in the New Statesman, Woolf
wrote: Can be strident, she is never sentimental.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 137n1
Literary responses
Colette
Virginia Woolf
(who in 1936 had eagerly anticipated her reading of Mes Apprentissages) found Duoall about love and rather too slangy for her perfectly to understand its French, but what a born writer...
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.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs
observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf
reported that she read it like a shark swallowing mackerel. I think its [sic] far better than Saint Joan, more masterly and controlled. She added: It must be a bestseller into the...
