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.
The authors whom EB
wrote of for the British Council in English Novelists are (as the commission required) canonical and mostly male. She was deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf
, and wrote after Woolf's death...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Lavin
While working on her PhD dissertation on Virginia Woolf
, ML
heard someone speak of a recent visit with Woolf: it struck her forcibly that literature was after all not written by the dead.
Peterson, Richard F. Mary Lavin. Twayne.
20
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jennifer Johnston
The Gates broaches a favourite theme of JJ
's: the class and religious differences hedging in the old Anglo-Irish culture. The gates of the title are the ornate structures marking the entrance to the drive...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. M. Delafield
The diary abounds with references to contemporary literature, including several internal allusions to Time and Tide. The Provincial Lady engages in friendly rivalry over its competitions for readers and describes social encounters with the...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
The novel opens in Sandycove just outside Dublin in the spring of 1916. The first character introduced is Andrew, a young, uncertain, Anglo-Irish officer in a British cavalry regiment; his motives for going to war...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
This is the novel that most strongly anticipates the work of modernists such as Woolf
, for instance in its technology-influenced description of the workings of time and its heroine's memory: There are many disconnected...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce
), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Strachey
The novel's first published title was inspired, according to Frances Partridge
, by Virginia Woolf
's description of painter Henry Lamb
as nipped, like a man on a pier.
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
The world before is a slightly exaggerated and unmercifully satirised version of today's reality: gated communities, vertiginous inequalities, frequently mutating viruses, sadistic pornography online, and commodification of everything. True to Atwood's principles, she finds the...