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, 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 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.
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
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
Margaret Atwood
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...
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
Muriel Box
MB
's film comedy The Truth About Women (the film she felt personally significant to me above all others,
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Forster
Insofar as this novel tells the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
through a previously disregarded witness, it invites comparison with Woolf
's Flush. But for Forster this is a side-issue. More important is endowing...
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
Muriel Box
MB
's writing career was fuelled by an early admiration for Shaw
, Joyce
, and especially Woolf
. A Room of One's Own had such an impact on her within a few years of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rumer Godden
A Fugue in Time has three epigraphs: a description of the simultaneous, independent melodies present in Bach
's fugues; eighteen lines from T. S. Eliot
's still fairly recent East Coker (from Home is where...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
AO
calls this book a mixture of scientific fastidiousness and poetic licence.
Oakley, Ann. Telling the Truth about Jerusalem. Basil Blackwell.
9
Her introduction, which is sub-titled the Snows of Seinäjoki,
Oakley, Ann. Telling the Truth about Jerusalem. Basil Blackwell.
3
both uses snow as a metaphor (for imaginative beauty, lovingly described...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Her influence on Virginia Woolf
is incalculable. ATR
was a model from within the Stephen family of an independent and money-earning woman writer. Her prose, in particular the impressionistic imagery and associative diction of her...
Intertextuality and Influence
U. A. Fanthorpe
With this volume, says UAF
, I entered the different world of S. Martin's, Lancaster, and of France; and I was just beginning to have things to say about the condition of women...