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, 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.
After Mansfield's death, Woolf
wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
qtd. in
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, 12 Apr. 2013, pp. 25-6.
25
KM
appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Reception
Adrienne Rich
She declined the award with a more pointed and particular version of Virginia Woolf
's rejection of official honours, saying the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics...
Reception
Dorothy Bussy
DB
first wrote Olivia in 1933 and then sent the manuscript to her friend André Gide
. Gide found it not very engaging
qtd. in
Caws, Mary Ann, and Sarah Bird Wright. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Virginia Woolf
hated the memoir by Marsh which appeared in the London Collected Poems. She called Marsh's image of RB
a hairdresser's block. A memoir by Maurice Brown
published at Chicago in 1927...
Reception
Margaret Oliphant
It is almost impossible to calculate MO
's lifetime earnings as an author: she used various different publishers, and borrowed money from them as well as waiting to be paid. But it seems from the...
Reception
Ann Lady Fanshawe
The 1907 edition was reviewed by the future Virginia Woolf
. Sandra Findley
wrote about ALF
under the heading Seventeenth Century Women's Autobiography in Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Francis...
Reception
Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively
wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception
Jane Austen
In 1933 there was excitement in the book-collecting world when a small collection of books that Austen had owned (by writers like Ariosto
, Goldsmith
, Hume
, and Thomson
) appeared in the catalogue...
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus, 1971.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf
, Hugh Walpole
accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
Reception
Penelope Shuttle
This was panned in the Times Literary Supplement by Jane Miller
. She saw it as overwritten, disfigured by the writer's passion for words, their sounds rather than their meanings. Never was a single adjective...
Reception
Tillie Olsen
An honorary degree from the University of Nebraska
in Lincoln made TO
remember how Woolf
portrayed academic ceremonials in Three Guineas as masculine posturing. This was one of what became a large harvest of honorary...
Reception
Mary Martha Sherwood
Virginia Woolf
's Kitty Malone in The Years has read The History of the Fairchild Family. Naomi Royde-Smith
dedicated her book on MMS
to her parents, who in the year 1884 when a bachelor...
Residence
Kathleen E. Innes
The Inneses moved to Lewes, Sussex, where George was partner in an engineering business. Here they were not too far from Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
, though there is no evidence that they ever...
Residence
Rosita Forbes
Early in the year that war broke out, RF
and her husband, Arthur McGrath
, decided to leave England and settle on the Out-Island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, a spot beside Grannie Long Pond...
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Virginia Woolf
did, however, visit EMD
, and wrote to her niece in November 1935 that Delafield lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen
; whom she adores. But she has...