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.
ST
describes in her memoirs the rituals of London balls and entertainments, into which as a young girl she came out (and into which, to the fascinated amusement of Virginia Woolf
, she later brought...
Leisure and Society
Rupert Brooke
He belonged to the group dubbed by Virginia Woolf
the neo-pagans, who believed in the outdoor life, vegetarianism, and nude bathing.
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 ....
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
This novel was not a popular success. Reviews were mostly negative, although there were some flattering comments scattered among the criticism. New Republic termed the book excellent, but the Times Literary Supplement called it disappointing...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wordsworth
Virginia Woolf
published an essay on DW
in 1929 (reprinted in the Common Reader: Second Series, 1932). As early as 1940 (in his edition published the following year) Ernest de Selincourt
wrote, Dorothy Wordsworth...
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
Some commentators, including Vera Brittain
, felt this essay too clearly reflected the influence of Virginia Woolf
.
Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus.
133
Critic Ruth Siegel
commends it as displaying the assertiveness characteristic of Lehmann's expository prose, which could...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Pilgrimage and its author have been grouped with various other writers and literary methods, particularly with Virginia Woolf
, James Joyce
, and Marcel Proust
, who set out to explore and record linked elements...
Literary responses
Susan Tweedsmuir
ST
later wrote that the book did not sell well, but that I was always proud and pleased to think that Virginia
had liked it.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. A Winter Bouquet. G. Duckworth.
83
Literary responses
Anna Steele
The Academy wrote about Lesbia through an extended equestrian analogy, picking up on a scene where Lesbia, on a runaway horse, is rescued by her future husband. It notes that there are a number of...
Literary responses
Joseph Conrad
Initial reviews were unfavourable. Several years after its publication, Virginia Woolf
described the novel as a rare and magnificent wreck.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Literary responses
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Athenæum carried a signed review for this book by Virginia Woolf
, who went straight to the heart of the matter. It would be easy to make fun of her; equally easy to condescend...
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
Virginia Woolf
wrote in strict confidence that she thought the poems not very very [sic] good; but interesting; prose poems; not good enough and difficult to sell of course.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 34 and n1
Literary responses
E. H. Young
One review discerned a possible influence from Dorothy Richardson
, but thought EHY
(whom it supposed to be male) a saner person than Richardson (whom it knew to be female).
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
27
, No. 3, pp. 303-31.
316-17
Virginia Woolf
(who had...
Literary responses
Mary Russell Mitford
John Kenyon
wrote in 1833 to tell MRM
of the delight taken by himself and his brother in her tolerant and humanizing pen.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 145
Her reputation as a financially successful author brought her unwelcome...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
To varying degrees, critics have valued VH
's recollections of artistic contemporaries more than her style or other aspects of the memoirs. In a brief review in the Nation and Athenæum on 20 March 1926,...