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, 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.
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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.
In the title story an invitation is issued by a couple living comfortable lives in the country to two under-privileged city six-year-olds to come and spend a day with them. The husband (originator of this...
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.
qtd. in
Peterson, Richard F. Mary Lavin. Twayne, 1978.
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Intertextuality and Influence
Gillian Allnutt
Her poem Alien opens the section of feminist poetry and is preceded by an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's non-fiction work Three Guineas, which reads, as a woman I have no country.GA's text...
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
G. B. Stern
GBS opens the second Austen book with an amusing account of an interview with a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old niece who relates how she has fallen seriously in love with a dashing army officer who is her ideal...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Baker
Penelope, a working-class woman in her thirties, determines to leave her philandering husband. Her plans to find work to support herself, however, are hampered by employers' prejudices against taking on a divorced woman with children...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Anne Clifford
LAC made a great impression on Sackville-West and Woolf: on the former for her family associations, on the latter for her symbolic possibilities. In Donne after three Centuries and again in her last, unfinished...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Macaulay
This novel is both social history and satire, covering territory similar to that of Virginia Woolf's The Years and May Sinclair's The Tree of Heaven. Like these, it traces the lives of...
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
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
Rose Macaulay
Critic A. N. Wilson has suggested that this novel exerted a significant influence on Woolf's Orlando.
Lefanu, Sarah. Rose Macaulay. Virago, 2003.
338
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...
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...