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.
4: 231
Well-known black and white photograph of Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), 1902. She is seen in profile, with her hair loosely caught back in a bun
Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole. This is a picture from one of Virginia Woolf's own photo albums at Monk's House which were acquired at an auction at Sotheby's in 1982 (cf. Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, p. 187), gifted in 1983 by Frederick R. Koch to the Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Libray, Harvard University, and afterwards scanned and uploaded by the library.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Catherine Carswell
Reviews were mixed. Rebecca West , reviewing the book before the libel charges, felt that CC overdid her loyalty to Lawrence.
Pilditch, Jan. Catherine Carswell. A Biography. John Donald, 2007.
142
Virginia Woolf , having at first thought the book interesting, changed her mind...
Literary responses Stevie Smith
Novel on Yellow Paper was an immediate critical success. Appreciation expressed in reviews by Naomi Mitchison and Rosamond Lehmann laid the foundations for SS 's friendships with these and other writers.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
125
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
A poet, Robert Nichols
Literary responses Marjorie Bowen
MB was admired in her own day by others who prided themselves on the popular touch in their writing: Mark Twain , Walter de la Mare , Compton Mackenzie , and Hugh Walpole , who...
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.
qtd. in
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
6: 34 and n1
Literary responses Alice Meynell
Virginia Woolf was angered by AM 's opinion that Jane Austen was a frump (and was even angrier that Meynell advised reading Sterne 's Tristram Shandy in an expurgated edition).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
2: 503
Literary responses Arnold Bennett
AB 's reviews, combined with his visibly privileged lifestyle, did not help his reputation among younger writers (such as those in the Bloomsbury Group ) as a wealthy snob or a philistine. Wyndham Lewis attacked...
Literary responses Angela Carter
Peach has argued that convenient critical labels such as magic realism can obscure the fact that AC 's non-realistic philosophical writing explores the actualities in which many of us live.
Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. St Martin’s Press, 1998.
2-4
To Peach, ACmay...
Literary responses Anthony Trollope
AT 's critical reputation fell into the doldrums a few years after his death; it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that this was a result of his autobiography's ascribing his success to sheer hard...
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 E. B. C. Jones
Virginia Woolf , reviewing the anthology along with the rest of the Adventurers All series, and supposing that Jones was a man, found it insufficiently adventurous and rather conventional, with nothing to surprise or shock...
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 Ali Smith
Numbering ASamong Virginia Woolf 's most gifted inheritors,Telegraph reviewer Patrick Flanery rather effusively positioned this work as one that subtly but surely reinvents the novel, and produces fundamentally new dimensions in the literary...
Literary responses Eliza Haywood
Into the twentieth century EH 's association with scandal and bodice-ripping continued. Virginia Woolf used her in 1916 (reviewing George Whicher 's biography for the Times Literary Supplement) as an object-lesson in the judging...
Literary responses Romer Wilson
In her diary on 3 May 1921, Virginia Woolf , who had not yet read the novel, accurately predicted that it would win the Hawthornden Prize. Six days later, she recorded her disappointment in it:...
Literary responses Alice Meynell
In his review for The Sphere, Clement Shorter deemed this matchless.
qtd. in
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
234
The young Woolf , too, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that AM 's essays were courageous, authoritative, and individual.
qtd. in
Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University Press of Virginia , 2000.
193

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