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.
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.
Virginia Woolf
read this novel soon after its publication, with fascinated disapproval. She felt that MAH
had energy and ability, and the wits to construct the method of telling a story, but that she had...
The book came out five years after the Sexual Offences Act in Britain decriminalised many homosexual practices there, and three years after the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York marked the start of Gay Liberation...
Literary responses
Romer Wilson
This book garnered RW
much praise. The Times Literary Supplement printed a rave review which concluded, the whole book is a tour de force as a reconstruction of a creative artist's intense hunger for more...
Literary responses
Elinor Mordaunt
This received the accolade of a warm welcome in the Times Literary Supplement from the highly critical young Virginia Woolf
. The novel confirmed her sense that EMtakes a very high place among living...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
Woolf
found the book full of nooks and corners which I enjoy exploring . . . . gives the sense of your being away, travelling, not in any particular geographical country: but travelling far away...
Literary responses
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
EPL
's involvement in the militant suffrage movement was necessarily controversial: contemporaries both lauded and reviled her. In her diary Virginia Woolf
described EPL
's style of public speaking in 1918 with some disdain. I...
Literary responses
Rose Macaulay
Potterism was both popular and favourably reviewed. For years it remained RM
's best-known work. She later felt it was rather jejune and too much of a tract. I feel I hammered away with a...
Literary responses
Mary Butts
Although her work received mixed reviews, MB
was generally recognized as an important if eccentric literary figure during her lifetime, and she was highly praised by other modernist writers, including Ezra Pound
, Marianne Moore
Literary responses
Beatrice Webb
The Times reviewer praised the fullness, the intimacy, and the extraordinary range of this diary, its power of observation, gift of expression, and freedom from egotism.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(26 February 1926): 8
Reading it the following year,...
Literary responses
Ethel Smyth
Woolf
reported that she liked it very much: Now and again it wobbled but righted itself.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
6: 81
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
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
Marie de Sévigné
For years MS
was ridiculed for her incorrect orthography, but in fact her unorthodox spelling was modern. It was that advocated by the reformers, participants in a movement to reduce the number of unphonetic letters...
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,...