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, 1981, p. i - xx.
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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.
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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.
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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.
This is one of the several pieces in which Orwell champions the middlebrow or non-art writing. His supreme example
Orwell, George. The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin in association with Secker and Warburg, 1984.
326
of the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when...
Textual Features
Richmal Crompton
Children are very important in RC
's adult novels. She repeatedly traces a group of characters, sometimes but not always all within the same family, from childhood to maturity or old age. Another pattern is...
Textual Features
Vita Sackville-West
Written several years before Woolf
's Orlando, this tale features a fairy who lives through eons of fairy history before settling in the dolls' house at the present day, wearing a 1920s short skirt.
Textual Features
Helen Dunmore
Her allusions often require some decoding (in The marshalling yard it is women, not cows, who board the cattle trucks).
Dunmore, Helen. Short Days, Long Nights. Bloodaxe Books, 1991.
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HD
likes to rewrite traditional stories, including Bible stories: in Annunciation off East Street...
Textual Features
Eudora Welty
This volume included sixteen reviews. Welty's review of Virginia Woolf
's A Haunted House was one of two that had to be dropped at the last moment for lack of space.
Welty, Eudora. A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews. Editor McHaney, Pearl Amelia, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
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Textual Features
Ursula K. Le Guin
The first essay, Space Crone, takes the menopause as topic. Le Guin revisits the vexed question of the gendering of language: the father tongue, the mother tongue, the effort expended to keep the literary...
Textual Features
Theodora Benson
Which Way?, another novel about love and diversions in high society, seems to imitate or even foreshadow certain effects used by Virginia Woolf
. The story is written on three levels,
Though she calls her work a memoir, ES
spends only twenty-six pages writing about Eleanor Sidgwick's childhood, and gives much of the text to the history of Newnham, before as well as during her aunt's...
Textual Features
Winifred Holtby
Like Holtby's first novel, South Riding is set in Yorkshire.Some places in the story are identifiable in life, as Kingsport is a version of Hull. The style is realistic, a rejection of the...
Textual Features
Vita Sackville-West
The story sounds eerily familiar. Its protagonist is an eternally young and beautiful fairy who has attended every famous event in fairy history, from Cinderella' s ball and Sleeping Beauty' s kiss to the creation...
Textual Features
Sylvia Plath
Plath took the idea for her meditative voices from Woolf
's The Waves. Her women speak from a maternity ward, where their experience of motherhood is mixed and their emotions tumultuous, to say the...
Textual Features
Maggie Gee
This lecture deals with various ways of being silenced: particularly, though not only, for her own gender and her own nationality. The English, she says, tend to fall silent in face of a long list...
Textual Features
Michelene Wandor
Her range of reference is wide: Milton
, Cromwell
, Virginia Woolf
, Joan Baez
, fairy tales, the Bible, and settings (as her publisher puts it) from Jerusalem to Hollywood, cafes to graveyards.
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel details the literary and romantic triangles among writer Anne Lindell (a sketch to some extent inspired by VT
herself), the former lover of aristocrat John Shorne (Sackville-West
), who is having an...
Textual Features
Mary Renault
Lesbianism had been the subject of novels in the 1920s and 30s. Virginia Woolf
's Mrs. Dalloway and Elizabeth Bowen
's The Hotel had both been criticised (the latter severely) for sympathetic treatments of emotional...