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.
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...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bottome
In March 1928, Vita Sackville-West
and Woolf exchanged letters about a story by PB
in which Woolf
appears as the character Avery Fleming. Sackville-West, who met Bottome in Germany, noted that she wrote the story...
Textual Features
Adrienne Rich
These poems abandon AR
's former regular metres for free verse, as they abandon decorum for outspoken personal expression about the struggle necessary to be a thinking woman rather than a good girl.
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3.
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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
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...
Textual Features
Emmeline Pankhurst
Looking back on the texts of the suffrage movement, Virginia Woolf
contrasted EP
's still style
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 210-11
Textual Features
Simone de Beauvoir
SB
's next novel, Tous les hommes sont mortels, 1946 (translated into English as All Men Are Mortal, 1954), features, like Woolf
's Orlando, a protagonist who is immortal, living on from...
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
Betty Miller
BM
wrote that the military hospital in this work (written in a wartime billet at Droitwich), was one that Emanuel Miller
worked at. Her Major McRae was based on Adrian Stephen
, Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Stevie Smith
This highly unusual novel takes the form of a disconnected journal by a publisher's secretary named Pompey, an alienated but irrepressible member of the disregarded female work-force, who is clearly an alter-ego for SS
...
Textual Features
Mollie Panter-Downes
This novel has many modernist features. Nicola Beauman mentions the influence of Rosamond Lehmann
, and also palpable is that of Virginia Woolf
. The first, two-page chapter describes the Sussex village of Wealding and...
Textual Features
Dorothy Richardson
In addition to her chosen themes, DR
also charts the development of female consciousness through her literary techniques, which strongly disrupt gender, generic, and linguistic conventions. In her 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage, she recalls...
Textual Features
E. M. Forster
This novel is remarkable for its witty treatment of the philosophical conundrum of the material reality of objects (later touched on by Virginia Woolf
in To the Lighthouse) and its glorification of the chalk...
Textual Features
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
's work continually and creatively blurs generic boundaries, just as it tends to straddle the private and the public, the personal and the political. Her work is in many respects an astute negotiation of...
Residence
Stella Benson
SB
returned from China to England to receive the Femina Vie Hereuse prize for Tobit Transplanted. During the voyage she read Virginia Woolf
's The Waves.
Grant, Joy. Stella Benson: A Biography. Macmillan.
290-1
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Indiana University Press.