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.
The world before is a slightly exaggerated and unmercifully satirised version of today's reality: gated communities, vertiginous inequalities, frequently mutating viruses, sadistic pornography online, and commodification of everything. True to Atwood's principles, she finds the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Diana Athill
Part two, introduced by some comment on the nature of the relationship between writer and publisher, provides sketches and stories of many of the authors whom DA
worked with. Though she does not belabour the...
Leisure and Society
Lady Cynthia Asquith
From the 1920s onwards, while keeping up her work for Barrie and gradually becoming a writer herself, LCA
remained a society woman much of whose time was occupied with hairdressing, shopping for clothes, social appointments...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her motive (when she decided to undertake this work, two years before it was published) was not money but pleasure: writing a novel makes me feel so much more alive—though she felt deterred by...
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...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Gillian Allnutt
According to The Feminist Companion, Beginning the Avocadoexemplifies GA
's imagistic precision in poems about war, women writers (Virginia Woolf
, Sylvia Plath
) and the act of writing..
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.
Textual Features
Gillian Allnutt
In the poemWhy NotGA
ponders the relationship between women's writing, the ambiguity of language, and the seduction of suicide. The speaker (presumably GA
) imaginatively places herself in the subject-position of Virginia Woolf
Friends, Associates
Rose Allatini
Virginia Woolf
, who gives no indication of having met RA
herself, recorded satirically how in February 1919, after the appearace and prosecution of Despised and Rejected, Lady Ottoline Morrellswooped down upon Allatini...
Literary responses
Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...