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.
KR
was very impressed by the occasion on which Virginia Woolf
, accompanied by Vita Sackville-West
, gave her paper A Room of One's Own to the Girton Literary Society
before its publication. She was...
Education
Mary Kingsley
She was always insecure about her lack of formal education. In Three GuineasVirginia Woolf
uses MK
's situation as an example to illustrate her thesis that the daughters of educated men received an unpaid-for...
Education
Maggie Gee
This ran to 140,000 words. Looking back, she wrote, I felt like a camel, awkwardly humping a huge top-heavy burden of words across the desert. At every step, something more truthful, wilder, simpler or more...
Education
Doris Lessing
Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott
, Dickens
, and Kipling
. She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...
Education
Eleanor Rathbone
She then, in 1892, began to study Greek under Janet Case
, later Virginia Woolf
's tutor and friend. Another point of similarity between the two authors' early educations can be seen in Rathbone's comment...
Education
Flannery O'Connor
In summer 1945 Mary Flannery O'Connor graduated from Georgia College (describing it in the yearbook as [t]he usual bunk).
Gooch, Brad. Flannery. Little, Brown and Co.
116
She applied to two universities, and the University of Iowa
offered her a scholarship...
Education
Rumer Godden
RG
's determination to become a writer fuelled a continued self-education. Books were hard to come by in India, yet she managed to find and devour recent publications: Edith Sitwell
's Troy Park and Façade...
Education
Margaret Forster
As a very small child MF
was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums.
Forster, Margaret. Hidden Lives. Viking.
121-2
At two she talked in long sentences . . . and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to...
Education
Olivia Manning
At home Olivia was encouraged to love poetry, learned to read by the time she was four, and was later subjected to piano lessons which taught her nothing. As a teenager and thinking of herself...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Education
Q. D. Leavis
All three of the Roth children had their early education at Latymer School in Hazelbury Lane, Edmonton. This was a co-educational school at which they thrived. Ian MacKillop
(biographer of F. R. Leavis) suggests...
Dedications
Ling Shuhua
The Hogarth Press
published Ling Shuhua
's memoir Ancient Melodies, with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West
. Ling Shuhua dedicated the book to Virginia Woolf
and Sackville-West, with whom she conferred at different stages...
Dedications
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
published Sissinghurst, a poem dedicated to Virginia Woolf
.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 256
Dedications
Ethel Smyth
ES
continued her autobiography in As Time Went On; she dedicated it to Virginia Woolf
, who helped her choose its title.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.