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, 1981, 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, 2005.
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, 1986–1994, 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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
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
Sappho
Following Michael Field
, many twentieth-century, lesbian-identified writers treat Sappho
as a crucial precursor. She became a figure for modernism with the work of HD
and Virginia Woolf
. The Lavender Nation
was named from...
Intertextuality and Influence
Doreen Wallace
In this book DW
strikes out against the stream of consciousness method in fiction. I turn the pages of James Joyce
, Dorothy Richardson
and Virginia Woolf
(Philistine that I am) in the vain hope...
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
Monica Furlong
MF
herself supplies an introduction explaining the book's intention to address the narrower question of women's ordination and the broader question of the full evaluation of women within the Christian
community.
Furlong, Monica. Feminine in the Church. SPCK, 1984.
1
She deals briefly...
Intertextuality and Influence
Violet Trefusis
Broderie Anglaise may be read as the last of a variously-authored trilogy of novels featuring references to the affair between VT
and Vita Sackville-West
, following Vita's Challenge and Virginia Woolf
's Orlando (1928), both...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Ellen Harrison
However, JEH
's most famous and explicit reappearance is in Virginia Woolf
's A Room of One's Own, a text which evolved from a series of lectures that Woolf—Harrison's friend, admirer, and publisher—gave at...
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
Olivia Manning
Hamish Miles
, an editor of the magazine, became her lover and an important career influence. Though he rejected the novel manuscript she first submitted to him at Cape
(and refused point-blank to introduce her...
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
Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Daniels
Debbie is disabled, wheelchair-bound and reliant on a computerised voice to communicate. Her voice software, made in America, is programmed to substitute a rhyming word for one deemed too obscene for speech, so that...
Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage”. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol.
3
, No. 1, 1991, pp. 19-31.
28
uses its feminist theories in The Subjection of Women. Virginia Woolf
quotes from it in A Room of One's Own.
Webb, Val. Florence Nightingale: The Making of a Radical Theologian. Chalice, 2002.
102
Intertextuality and Influence
Eva Figes
Before writing this novel she re-read Woolf
's The Waves, which was to some extent her model, even though she believed it to be in some ways a failure.
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing, 1989.
81
Figes found it hard...
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...