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.
SG
's literary criticism for The Lady includes a number of articles on women writers. One piece criticises Rose Macaulay
for her small range and lack of subtlety. Another praises Virginia Woolf
as a giant...
Literary responses
Stella Gibbons
As a result of this publication, Virginia Woolf
invited SG
to submit some poems to the Hogarth Press
, but nothing came of the proposal.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
50
Literary responses
Stella Gibbons
SG
's Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Femina Vie-Heureuse, worth forty pounds (as Webb
's Precious Bane had done only seven years previously). Gibbons's award was presented in June 1934.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
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...
Leisure and Society
Rumer Godden
With books hard to come by, RG
read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
207
Intertextuality and Influence
Rumer Godden
A Fugue in Time has three epigraphs: a description of the simultaneous, independent melodies present in Bach
's fugues; eighteen lines from T. S. Eliot
's still fairly recent East Coker (from Home is where...
Textual Features
Ann Gomersall
Again AG
makes use of dialect. This novel presents a more complex situation of interlocking characters than Eleonora, as well as digressive stories related by the characters. Some of these are banal, but others...
Textual Features
Catherine Gore
In this unusual book CG
seems to stand mid-way between Coventry
in Pompey, 1752 (using her canine protagonist for intimate satire on the chiefly female upper classes), and Virginia Woolf
in Flush, 1933...
politics
Eva Gore-Booth
During a Manchester by-election in Spring 1908, EGB
and Esther Roper
supported barmaids' right to work.
Lewis, Gifford. Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper: A Biography. Pandora Press.
103
Virginia Woolf
writes about the suffrage element of this by-election in The Years, through Rose Pargiter's activities...
Textual Features
Sarah Grand
Here SG
considers how mankind has progressed as a result of the woman's movement. Foreshadowing Virginia Woolf
, she roots the movement in literature, taking its beginning to be what a review called the eighteenth-century...
Textual Production
Henry Green
One attempted and abandoned novel between Blindness and Living contained a garden scene which, according the literary critic John Russell, seems to have come straight out of Mrs. Woolf
's Kew Gardens.
Russell, John David. Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag. Rutgers University Press.
12
The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine Greer
The work is divided into two parts, The Obstacles and How They Ran. The obstacles begin with Family, Love, and the Illusion of Success, and end with the Disappearing Oeuvre. This conceptual organization, as...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Griffith
For this move into fiction they chose the epistolary style in which they had already succeeded, and used their former pseudonyms: by the authors of Henry and Frances. Richard's novel was The Gordian Knot...
Privately, Virginia Woolf
was unenthusiastic about The Well. She described it as so pure, so sweet, so sentimental, that none of us can read it, and claimed that the dulness of the book is...