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.
In mid-1938, LS and her family left Wuhan, by then under frequent bombing by the Japanese, for the town of Leshan (where many members of Wuhan University
fled). LS's reading included Proust
's Swann's...
politics
Amabel Williams-Ellis
Among those prepared to sign were Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
.
Author summary
Julia Strachey
JS
published two novels and several pieces of short fiction during her lifetime, in the mid twentieth century. Frances Partridge
writes in her introduction to JS
's memoir that when she died, after a long...
WH
's posthumous reputation is based on her final novel, South Riding, published after her death. During her lifetime, she was better known as a prominent journalist, invited by Virginia Woolf
in February 1935...
Author summary
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
wrote prolifically and almost obsessively from her childhood in the early twentieth century. She began with poems, plays, and fiction about her family's romantic links to English history. As an adult she used these...
Author summary
Rosamond Lehmann
RL
has received less critical attention than other women modernists, especially her closest literary colleagues Elizabeth Bowen
and Virginia Woolf
. However, after the reprinting of her work in the 1980s, her seven novels, her...
Author summary
Aphra Behn
It is difficult to summarise AB
's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf
said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to...
Author summary
Anita Desai
AD
, an Indian writer of partly European descent who has lived in both England and the USA (where she is now settled), focuses her psychologically-oriented novels on the predicaments of women, immigrants and displaced...
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
77
Publishing
Elizabeth Robins
The book was rejected by several publishers before Heinemann
took it on.
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
232
One of those who rejected it in an earlier form was the Hogarth Press
, probably because it turned out too long...
Publishing
Viola Tree
Virginia Woolf
found that the production of this book required a lot of work in the closing stages from her as publisher. She received the (apparently corrected) proofs by 2 March in a state calculated...
Publishing
Julia Strachey
JS
wrote the novel while staying with her aunt Dorothy Bussy
's family at Roquebrune in France, informally separated from her first husband, Stephen Tomlin
.
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
In a letter to Ethel Smyth
on 1 March 1937, Virginia Woolf
described this work as a manuscript thrust on us.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 111
Publishing
James Joyce
In London, Harriet Shaw Weaver
wanted to publish the last episodes of the novel in The Egoist but could not find a printer willing to set the text. Roger Fry
suggested that Leonard
and...