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.
HGW
published the earlier parts of The Outline of History, which has an important presence in Woolf
's last novel, Between the Acts.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
34
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press.
McKillop, A. Brian. The Spinster and the Prophet. Macfarlane Walter and Ross.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
133
In the years after the war she formed her important...
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...
Leonard Woolf
was for him, rather impressed with this sequence; Virginia
said she approved of Wellesley's having decided to write about cats and rocks, instead of the birth of man.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 198
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Dorothy Wellesley
The basic organization of Deserted House: Poem Sequence goes forward unaltered from its form as a separate volume, but Horses strangely becomes the last item in Trilogy II: Wine, and both Fire and Matrix...
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
The Hogarth Press
published DW
's poem Matrix as number 3 of the series Hogarth Living Poets (it had been ready for Virginia Woolf
to read and and give her opinion about on 31 January)...
Publishing
Dorothy Wellesley
The Hogarth Press
published DW
's poetry volume Jupiter and the Nun; she was not entirely satisfied, because she had wanted it out for the New Year. This was the last volume that the
Education
Fay Weldon
Fay attended another progressive establishment, the co-educational Burgess Hill School
, which she found absurd, not only noisy and disorderly but actively anti-academic. The best thing about it was being taught English briefly by the...
Textual Production
Beatrice Webb
BW
sent to Leonard
and Virginia Woolf
something which was probably a draft version of her second volume of autobiography, published after her death as Our Partnership.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
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
Beatrice Webb
Woolf
, reading an early draft, called it a diary and said it would be a great pity to cut any of it. I was extremely interested and amused throughout, and this is a good...
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
In September 1917, HSW
agreed to serialize James Joyce's Ulysses in The Egoist, paying him an advance of £50. But when her printers, the Complete Press
saw the first episode (Telemachus) they...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
Critically, MAW
has not fared well since her death, despite her immense popularity in her lifetime and the seriousness with which her contemporaries read her. She was quickly cast as more Victorian than Edwardian...
Timeline
1925: Leonard and Virginia Woolf published Edwin...
30 May 1929: Labour came in twenty-six votes ahead of...
National or international item
30 May 1929
Labour
came in twenty-six votes ahead of the Conservatives
in the first general election with full women's suffrage: the prospect of voting by women under thirty brought the demeaning nickname of the Flapper Election....
20 September 1929: In an Evening Standard article, Supreme Gift...
Women writers item
20 September 1929
In an Evening Standard article, Supreme Gift Denied to Women, James Laver
wrote that women did not reach the first rank as creative artists—though he did allow greatness to Virginia Woolf
.
1931: Margaret Llewelyn Davies edited a collection...
November 1933: An exhibition was held of the urban-domestic...
Building item
November 1933
An exhibition was held of the urban-domestic paintings of modern realist Walter Sickert
; Virginia Woolf
attended.
1935: M. G. Ostle edited The Note-books of a Woman...
Women writers item
1935
M. G. Ostle
edited The Note-books of a Woman Alone, selections from the diary of Eve or Evelyn Wilson
, who lived alone and wrote in seclusion.
21-25 June 1935: The First International Congress of Writers...
National or international item
21-25 June 1935
The First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (an anti-fascist event urging the responsibility of writers to their society) was held in Paris.
1 October 1935: At the Labour Party's annual conference Ernest...
1946: Critic Erich Auerbach published, in German,...
Writing climate item
1946
Critic Erich Auerbach
published, in German, the influential study which became in its English translation, 1953, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. He wrote it at Istanbul, as a Jewish refugee...
By December 1952: Woodcut-engraver Gwen Raverat, née Darwin,...
Women writers item
By December 1952
Woodcut-engraver Gwen Raverat, née Darwin
, published Period Piece, her extremely popular memoir of her Victorian childhood in Cambridge; by 1975 it had sold 120,000 copies in Britain alone.
Texts
Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. Editor McNeillie, Andrew, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Editor Dick, Susan, Hogarth Press, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth. Hogarth Press, 1942.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia, and Virginia Woolf. “The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Collected Essays, Harcourt Brace and World, 1967, pp. 4: 73 - 5.
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press, 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”. Twentieth Century Literature, edited by Susan M. Squier and Louise DeSalvo, Vol.
25
, No. 3/4, pp. 237-69.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1980.
Woolf, Virginia. The Pargiters. Editor Leaska, Mitchell A., New York Public Library; Readex Books, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Scholar’s Daughter”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 214, p. 52.
Woolf, Virginia. The Second Common Reader. Hogarth Press, 1932.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Symbol”. London Review of Books, Vol.
7
, No. 11, p. 6.
Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Duckworth, 1915.
Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Hogarth Press, 1975.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1931.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1980.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves: The two holograph drafts transcribed and edited. Editor Graham, J. W., University of Toronto Press, 1976.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Hogarth Press, 1937.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Hogarth Press, 1979.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Hogarth Press, 1990.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”. The Death of the Moth, edited by Leonard Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1942, pp. 154-7.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, 1938.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, 1986.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press, 1927.