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
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
Enid Bagnold
Not surprisingly, the article came under attack from many directions. Dame Ethel Smyth
responded in the next issue of the Sunday Times: It surprises me that so brilliant an intelligence should not remember that...
Literary responses
Jane Welsh Carlyle
Virginia Woolf
declared in Geraldine
and Jane (in The Second Common Reader) that JWC
's letters owe their incomparable brilliancy to the hawk-like swoop and descent of her mind upon facts.
Woolf, Virginia, and Virginia Woolf. “Geraldine and Jane”. The Second Common Reader, Hogarth Press, pp. 186-01.
198
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Woolf
, asked to comment on this poem before publication, wrote: I think it has great merit; but so bound up with faults—cobbled, jerked, patched . . . . could she re-write? Some fluency and...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has become a sensitive barometer of feminist criticism. With its author it became the focus of Victorian women critics, including Anne Thackeray Ritchie
and Charlotte Mew
. Virginia Woolf
admired the poetry of...
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
Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...
Literary responses
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Virginia Woolf
paid tribute to ATR
's style in a review of the letters as follows: Her most typical, and, indeed, inimitable sentences rope together a handful of swiftly gathered opposites. To embrace oddities and...
Literary responses
Christina Stead
From her first discovery until this point in her career, CS
was held in high esteem by the literary worlds of London (always excepting her damning reviews in the Times Literary Supplement) and New...
Literary responses
Colette
Virginia Woolf
(who in 1936 had eagerly anticipated her reading of Mes Apprentissages) found Duoall about love and rather too slangy for her perfectly to understand its French, but what a born writer...
Literary responses
Emily Brontë
Since the early criticism which took its lead from Charlotte's biographical portrait, a biographical and hagiographic industry has arisen around all three Brontë sisters and their home in Haworth. A. Mary F. Robinson
published...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
Woolf
confessed to liking this less than Sackville-West's other novels, not being able to make the characters come alive. But this may be my fault though. . . . I suspect that my knowledge of...
Literary responses
Viola Tree
VT
was admired throughout and after her lifetime for her commanding presence, beauty, and grace. Woolf
wrote in her diary in 1926 that Tree had the great egotism, the magnification of self, which any bodily...
Literary responses
E. H. Young
Mary Ross
found in this novel a quality of humanism and the play of an intelligence which understands and accepts the emotions.
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.
313
Ironically, while The Spectator reviewer attributed to EHYtoo studious an acquaintanceship...
Literary responses
Pearl S. Buck
In her review for The New York Times, Katherine Wood
pointed out some of the parallels between these opinions on gender and those of (the recently dead) Virginia Woolf
.
Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck. A Cultural Biography. Cambridge University Press.