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, 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.
This is the novel that most strongly anticipates the work of modernists such as Woolf
, for instance in its technology-influenced description of the workings of time and its heroine's memory: There are many disconnected...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Anne Clifford
LAC
made a great impression on Sackville-West
and Woolf
: on the former for her family associations, on the latter for her symbolic possibilities. In Donne after three Centuries and again in her last, unfinished...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
The clever Stanley had longed for education and a wider world. Polly longs too, in vain. After Aunt Frances escapes she is briefly liberated, at sixteen, to visit the country house of a family friend...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce
), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Strachey
The novel's first published title was inspired, according to Frances Partridge
, by Virginia Woolf
's description of painter Henry Lamb
as nipped, like a man on a pier.
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Intertextuality and Influence
Gillian Allnutt
Her poem Alien opens the section of feminist poetry and is preceded by an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's
non-fiction work Three Guineas, which reads, as a woman I have no country.GA
's text...
Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage”. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol.
3
, No. 1, pp. 19-31.
28
uses its feminist theories in The Subjection of Women. Virginia Woolf
quotes from it in A Room of One's Own.
Webb, Val. Florence Nightingale: The Making of a Radical Theologian. Chalice.
102
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Kazantzis
Less exotic places are also important. A Sussex lady features a chapel in Lewes, a deep / and obedient pond on the Ouse River, a garden of flowers,
Kazantzis, Judith. Let’s Pretend. Virago.
13
elm trees and rooks...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mollie Panter-Downes
Nevis Falconer, an English woman writer who feels that anyone must be unintelligent who did not know who Virginia Woolf
was,
Panter-Downes, Mollie. My Husband Simon. Robert McBride.
15
is unable to cope with domesticity and household chores when she marries Simon...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Quin
In her short autobiographical article Leaving School—XI, AQ
mentions having been writing stories since the age of seven to entertain myself.
Quin, Ann. “Leaving School—XI”. London Magazine, Vol.
new series 6
, pp. 63-8.
64
Her urge to write was fostered by her discovery of Dostoyevsky
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Following Michael Field
, many twentieth-century, lesbian-identified writers treat Sappho
as a crucial precursor. She became a figure for modernism with the work of HD
and Virginia Woolf
. The Lavender Nation
was named from...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Daniels
Debbie is disabled, wheelchair-bound and reliant on a computerised voice to communicate. Her voice software, made in America, is programmed to substitute a rhyming word for one deemed too obscene for speech, so that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Antonia White
Nevertheless, the desire to write persisted. While still unpublished, AW
gave her profession as authoress.
Vaux, Anna. “Biscuits. Oh good!”. London Review of Books, pp. 32-4.
32
Her biographer Jane Dunn
says Virginia Woolf
was the hero-writer of Antonia's youth.