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.
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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, 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 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
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,
Jenkins, Elizabeth. “Hon. Theodora Benson”. Times, No. 57452, p. 8.
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each of...
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Edna O'Brien
There are three characters in this text: Woolf
herself, appearing both in her youth and in maturity; The Man (who represents now her father Leslie Stephen
and now her husband Leonard Woolf
); and Woolf's...
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Anne Stevenson
In the title-poem, each of five stanzas ends with a version of the first closing lines: we thought we were living now, / but we were living then.
Stevenson, Anne. Selected Poems, 1956-1986. Oxford University Press.
128
These we, it seems, are...
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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...
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Sarah Grand
Here SG
considers how mankind has progressed as a result of the woman's movement. Foreshadowing Virginia Woolf
, she roots the movement in literature, taking its beginning to be what a review called the eighteenth-century...
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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...
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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...
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Eva Figes
Her novels are not for the faint-hearted or for the reader seeking either cheerfulness or a straightforward narrative line. She works regularly with a double focus: on the one hand, the isolated moment captured in...
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Anne Manning
A recent critic, pointing to the theological correctness of the way the fictional Askew accepts her burden of martyrdom, classes this work with other sectarian, Protestant Reformation novels.
Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “Reviving the Reformation: Victorian women writers and the Protestant historical novel”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
DR
's pieces for Vanity Fair include Women and the Future: A Trembling of the Veil Before the Eternal Mystery of La Giaconda [sic], and Women in the Arts: Some Notes on the Eternally...
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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...
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Ketaki Kushari Dyson
KKD
illuminates the relationship between Tagore and Ocampo, which began in 1924 when Tagore moved to Buenos Aires to write for the daily La Nación, but her main aim is to recuperate Victoria Ocampo...
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Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...