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.
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 Olive Schreiner
The book is a landmark text. In an introduction to an edition of 1968, Doris Lessing (who first read it when she was fourteen) identified it as one of the few rare books ....
Textual Features Olive Schreiner
Tillie Olsen in 1978 pointed out a striking anticipation here of Woolf 's A Room of One's Own: what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward...
Textual Features Gladys Henrietta Schütze
The Roundabout opens with the friendship between Anne Few and Jessica Thorn, who are living together for a year in a London studio while they try to become painters (an ambition in which Jessica takes...
Literary responses Marie de Sévigné
For years MS was ridiculed for her incorrect orthography, but in fact her unorthodox spelling was modern. It was that advocated by the reformers, participants in a movement to reduce the number of unphonetic letters...
Literary responses Percy Bysshe Shelley
For generations PBS appeared the quintessential image of the Romantic poet, whose work influenced such poets as Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , Alice Meynell , Sarojini Naidu —though for some of them he was...
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 Penelope Shuttle
This was panned in the Times Literary Supplement by Jane Miller . She saw it as overwritten, disfigured by the writer's passion for words, their sounds rather than their meanings. Never was a single adjective...
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Shuttle
Time has become another favourite theme among these widely various poems. Vanity makes no reference to the earlier Breasts, but makes an implicit contrast to the bursting energy of that poem: My poor old...
Textual Features Ethel Sidgwick
Though she calls her work a memoir, ES spends only twenty-six pages writing about Eleanor Sidgwick's childhood, and gives much of the text to the history of Newnham, before as well as during her aunt's...
Literary responses Dora Sigerson
Virginia Woolf , in her review of the volume for the Times Literary Supplement, characterised DS as one of the class of poets who use poetry for offloading any personal experience, whether trivial or...
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
ES had many friendships, and there were few notables in the artistic world whom she did not meet. Her friendships were quite volatile, with frequent quarrels, sometimes caused by the practical jokes and the heightened...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Edith Sitwell
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Cultural formation Ali Smith
In 1995 Smith spoke in Caroline Gonda 's series of interviews with gay Scottish women writers, which questioned what level of community exists among them and the extent to which they believe their sexuality to...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...

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