Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf and Cubism

December 28, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the development of literary and visual modernism

Virginia Woolf and Cubism might seem at first a rather odd conjunction, but in fact her literary experimentation was taking place at exactly the same time as the pioneering movement in modern visual art, and it had very similar objectives. Picasso’s great breakthrough masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, and the development of his cubist works along with those of Georges Braque were created from 1910 onwards into the 1920s. This is the same period during which Woolf established herself as one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

Picasso said ‘I paint forms as I think of them, not as I see them’ which resulted in objects and sitters portrayed in a fragmented manner, from a number of different perspectives, in a series of overlapping planes – all of which the viewer is invited to recompose mentally to form a three-dimensional image, rendered on a two dimensional surface (though there were also a few cubist sculptures).

Virginia Woolf composed in a similar fashion by analysing her subject and reconstructing it from the fragments by which it was perceived, often overlapping, and in particular from a mixture of time periods which combine the fictional present with the past – often within the same sentence of her narrative.

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?

Mrs Dalloway is walking in Westminster and the first world war is over, but her appreciation of the fresh morning in June evokes memories of her youth at Bourton and the man who was in love with her, who failed to marry her, but who she will meet later on in the day.

Woolf like her exact contemporary James Joyce, sought to represent human consciousness not as a linear and well-organised set of reflections on distinct topics, but as a vibrant and kaleidoscopic jumble of thoughts, often having little connection with each other. The artistry of her rendition was to provide the links between them via the selection and arrangement of details – just as the painter chooses the fragments of an object which the viewer reassembles into the object as a whole.

Woolf’s cubism is a shifting narrative viewpoint – flashes of a person’s character as seen by other people, of shifting periods of time, and changing locations and characters, the connections between which are not explicitly revealed. The result is a narrative often described as a mosaic of fragments – which is precisely the effect for which Woolf was striving.

The similarities between a literary technique and its equivalent in painting are not at all accidental. Woolf was surrounded by painters – from her sister Vanessa Bell, to Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, and most importantly the painter and art theorist Roger Fry, whose biographer she became. It was Fry who organised the important exhibition of modern post-Impressionist painters at the New Grafton Galleries in 1910, at which Virginia Woolf famously said that ‘human character changed’.

In her study of this subject Sarah Latham Phillips offers a detailed reading of Jacob’s Room in the light of these ideas, then of Mrs Dalloway and some of the experimental short stories Woolf produced between 1917 and 1932. She makes a reasonable case for the mould-breaking story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1918) having been influenced by her sister Vanessa’s cubist painting The Conversation (which is reproduced here in full colour).

She also sees similarities between Woolf and cubist painters in their selection of everyday objects from the world around them as the raw materials of their art. For the painters, the newspaper, the glass and wine carafe on a bistro table; for Woolf the hustle and bustle of the London streets, or their exact opposite – the silent ruminations of a woman sitting in an empty room, reflecting upon ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

This pamphlet-sized publication comes from the Bloomsbury Heritage series of essays and monographs published by Cecil Woolf in London. These are scholarly productions which range over neglected or hitherto undiscovered topics in Bloomsbury culture – such as unpublished manuscripts, ceramics, gardens, bookbinding, personal reminiscences, painting, houses, and even anti-Semitism. The publisher Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and his publications do the Bloomsbury tradition honour.

Sarah Latham Phillips, Virginia Woolf as a ‘Cubist Writer’, London: Cecil Woolf, 2012, pp.43, ISBN 978-1-907286-29-2

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Virginia Woolf and the Arts

August 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

As editor Maggie Humm points out in her introduction to this huge collection of scholarly studies on Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Woolf spent her entire life surrounded by creative people of all kinds. Her father was an internationally renowned writer (on belle lettres and moutaineering), her sister was a painter, and her friend Roger Fry both a critic and an artist. Virginia Woolf visited contemporary exhibitions, travelled to museums abroad, and participated in aesthetic debates via her prolific output of essays and journalism.

The essays are grouped under headings of Aesthetic Theory, Painting, Domestic Arts, Publishing, Broadcasting and Technology, Visual Media, and Performance Arts. At their best they illuminate the fact that Virginia Woolf had original opinions and novel forms of expressing them on a variety of subjects, ranging from human behaviour to painting, urban and domestic life, social history, and the relationship between memory, consciousness, and time.

They cover topics such as Woolf’s depiction of aesthetic creation via painting (To the Lighthouse), Woolf and race [without touching on her anti-Semitism], Woolf and the metropolitan city, and Woolf and realism. Each essay is self-contained, with its own set of endnotes and bibliography of further reading.

At their worst (particularly those dealing with aesthetics and literary theory) they are little more than overblown meditations, dragging apparent meanings out of words (more/Moor/moor) where quite clearly none were intended – like schoolboy puns. They also indulge in settling of scores with other ‘critics’, rather than focusing on authentic literary criticism.

Fortunately, the collection improves as it progresses. The most interesting and effective essays are the least pretentious and the least to do with modern literary criticism in all its silliness. For instance Diane Gillespie on ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Painting’ and Benjamin Harvey on Woolf’s visits to art galleries and museums.

Though even amongst the sensible essays there are disappointments. A chapter on ‘Bohemian Lifestyles’ is not much more than a description of Woolf’s relationships with her sister Vanessa, Vita Sackville-West, and Katherine Mansfield. It doesn’t explore any truly radical behaviour – such as Vanessa’s ability to live comfortably alongside her ex-husband and his lover, her own ex-lover and his current (gay) lover, and to conceal from her own daughter the true identity of her father for almost twenty years.

But there are plenty of good chapters – one on ‘Virginia Woolf and Entertaining’, another on Woolf’s sesitivity to gardens, and an especially interesting study of ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor’ which spills over quite creatively into the Hogarth Press promotion of Russian Literature.

This leads logically enough into a chapter on ‘Virginia Woolf and Book Design’ which is like a shortened version of John Willis’s full length study Leonard and Viginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941. Patrick Collier has a good chapter on Woolf and journalism, which I wish had included consideration of her early reviews for the Manchester Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement in the period 1904-1915.

Pamela Caughie also has an interesting chapter on Virginia Woolf and radio broadcasting that cleverly points out the contradictions in Woolf’s attitude to the BBC – keen to embrace the new technology it offered in the 1920s, but perceptive enough to realise that its early Reithean paternalism was hopelessly middlebrow – a view she shared with her husband Leonard, who put his finger on an attitude which is still prevelent today:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect … knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

The essays at the latter end of the collection remind us just how au courant Virginia Woolf was with contemporary technology. She took photographs, broadcasted on the radio, and wrote about London’s underground, the telephone, the cinema, and even flying (without having done so). The irony here is that the critics explaining her avant-garde behaviour and interests are themselves locked into a mode that is terminally old-fashioned (the academic essay) almost to the point of being moribund.

This is a huge and very impressive production, but one thing struck me about it – apart from its equally huge cost. Many of the essays take a long time to make a simple point. They circle around the object of enquiry with endless qualifications and even self-refutations, all made in the spirit of ‘interrogating’ their subject. It’s as if we are being offered ‘thinking aloud’ instead of considered arguments and conclusions. Having said that, the audience at which this Woolf-fest is aimed (lecturers and post-graduates) will not want to miss out on a collection that does include studies that link Woolf to many other forms of culture beyond literature alone.

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Maggie Humm (ed), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.512, ISBN: 0748635521

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Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language

July 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Woolf as essayist, feminist, and anti-militarist

The Virgina Woolf industry continues at full capacity on both sides of the Atlantic, and this slim monograph Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, courtesy of Edinburgh University Press. Using the link between Virginia Woolf and Montaigne as essayists for her springboard, Judith Allen uses it as an excuse to write about contemporary political concerns, ranging from ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘collateral damage’, to ‘Abu Ghraib’ and anything else on the spectrum of abuses which have been the subject of lies, propaganda and deception by the press and the political class. One applauds the political sentiments of course, but one often searches in vain for a connection with Virginia Woolf.

Her basic argument is that the essay is an exploration of a topic or an idea, and because it looks at issues from a variety of perspectives, it is the enemy of totalising theories and systems. That seems quite reasonable, and it is true that both Woolf and Montaigne use the essay forms as a means of opening up and exploring ideas, comparing one thing with another, and discovering unexpected links between the past and the present.

The only other coherent argument that emerges is that Virginia Woolf uses images and metaphors of growth, change, flux, and mutability in her work – which Allen assumes are feminine strategies of writing, deliberately designed to challenge a masculine attempt to establish stasis, fixity, and permanence. This too might be a persuasive argument if it were supported by more in the way of evidence.

The problem is that her presentation suffers from some of the common weaknesses of academic writing produced to gain status or tenure – over-reliance on quotations from other fashionable academic writers, raising questions that masquerade as insights, and excessive signposting (‘this chapter wil look at …’). No sooner is a proposition launched than it is called cautiously into question. This is offered as a critical dialectic when it is not much more than a form of thinking aloud. There is also the bizarre practice of signposting the intention to consider a topic which is already under consideration. This represents a failure to control structure for which even an undergraduate essay would be marked down. She is also not averse to self-congratulatory asides:

Although no one has made any direct link between Bakhtin and Montaigne’s writings, Bakhtin’s dissertation on Rabelais, one of Montaigne’s contemporaries, entitled Rabelais and the World, quotes several of Montaigne’s essays, and my examination of their ideas regarding the relationship between reader and writer is quite illuminating

The discussion ranges from one essay to another, from essay to novel, from one critic to another critic’s view of the first and back again. The critics engaged to support her arguments are what might be called the usual suspects – Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. And the whole production has about it the spirit of a composition with one primary motivating factor – the quest for academic promotion. In terms of its style, nothing could be further from the clarity, simplicity, and authenticity of the writers she is discussing – Woolf and Montaigne.

A whole chapter is devoted to the fact that Woolf often changed the titles of her works, with accompanying large claims made for the significance of this practice – ignoring the fact that many writers do the same thing.

Judith Allen also has a curious habit of referring to the ‘narrators’ of Woolf’s essays, when there is in fact little or no evidence to support the notion of a fictional construct. The essays come to us quite simply as the thoughts and writing of Woolf herself. Her opinions are often offered in a playful, oblique, and metaphoric manner – but that’s her style: there is no constructed intermediary delivering her opinions.

The last parts of the book are largely devoted to a critique of US and UK policy in the war on Iraq. However much one might share her sentiments on this barbaric, illegal, and counter-productive invasion, they tell us nothing about Virginia Woolf except that she was a vehement critic of imperialism and also a pacifist – something I think we already knew.

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Judith Allen, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.133, ISBN: 0748636757

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Virginia Woolf authors in context

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

literature, politics, philosophy, art, feminism, criticism

The Authors in Context series examines the work of major writers in relation to their own times and the present day. This volume sets Virginia Woolf in the social, cultural, and political context of the period between 1900 and 1940, then looks at how we see her work now, from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Michael Whitworth starts with a biographical sketch of her life. He certainly knows all the details, and his outline might well propel readers who don’t already know about the troubled family life, the periods of creativity sandwiched between bouts of insanity, and the bohemian lifestyle of the Bloomsbury Group towards her famous Diaries and Letters for further revelations about this remarkable woman and groundbreaking modernist writer.

Next comes a chapter providing the political and social background to the period 1900—1940, with its important developments in women’s rights, the rise of socialism, and the gradual erosion of the British Empire. It also contains some interesting reflections on the changing nature of ‘the family’ and ‘the household’ – particularly in relation to the employment of servants.

For those interested in the creative process, Whitworth reveals how Virginia Woolf’s method of composition started by her thinking about what she wanted to say, then articulating it in verbalised sentences, then speaking the sentences aloud. Following this, she then wrote out what she had composed in longhand, typed what she had written down, then subsequently revised it – sometimes several times over.

He deals well with problem topics, such as Woolf’s anti-semitism (even though she was married to Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish in origin if not in practice) and he knows enough about her to trace the gradual rise in self-awareness about this issue in her writing.

There’s a good chapter on what he calls The Writer and the Marketplace – that is, the writer’s financial relationship with book production and publishing – both of which Woolf practised professionally.

There are some fascinating pages which steep the reader deep into the literary and ideological culture of the period, and Whitworth is a rigorous guide to the new literary techniques which Woolf was pioneering.

He deals with the philosophic questions which permeate her work: the relationship between art and life; the nature of human perception; plus subjective and objective notions of time.

There are in-depth analyses of Mrs Dalloway, Night and Day, and The Waves, and he puts his finger on one of her most important strengths – showing the political issues in daily life:

The great strength of Woolf’s narrative method is that it allows her to present social issues in their psychological aspects; long before anyone voiced the slogan ‘the personal is the political’, Woolf identified the connection. In Night and Day, she takes the idea that the ‘professions’ might include ‘marriage’ and ‘living at home’, and uses it as the bridge between personal and public

The final part of the book looks at adaptations of Woolf’s work for the screen. This includes films of To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs Dalloway, as well as the recent version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Whitworth persuasively argues that we should not expect these versions to be slavishly accurate. They are versions or interpretations which allow us to re-interpret the original or see it in a new light.

This is a book which can be read in two ways. For those who already know Woolf and her works it explores the important social, artistic, and intellectual themes which she examines, and for those who don’t, it will act as an excellent introduction. It is certainly a critical study which any lover of Woolf’s work will not want to miss.

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Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.268, ISBN: 0192802348

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Virginia Woolf biography

December 2, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a short critical study of her life and works

The life of Virginia Woolf’s is now quite well known in its main details. Quentin Bell (her nephew) produced the definitive factual biography, and there have been interpretive studies by Lyndall Gordon, John Lehmann, Alexandra Harris, and Hermione Lee amongst others. There’s plenty of scope for writing about her life because Woolf wrote so much about herself – in letters, essays, diaries, and notebooks. She was, as Elizabeth Wright claims in this new study, possibly the most self-documented writer of the twentieth century.

Wright herself adopts a generally chronological account of the life and the works, She traces Woolf’s early upbringing in Kensington where she and her siblings produced the very amusing satirical newspaper Hyde Park Gate News. On the death of her mother at only forty-eight. Woolf experienced the first of her many mental breakdowns This was followed by the death of her half-sister Stella Duckworth, both of which events resulted in her father Leslie Stephen becoming more and more emotionally dependent on her and her elder sister Vanessa.

When her father died she became an object of attentions for her half-brother George Duckworth – attentions which are now the source of much controversy. She found escape and self-expression in reading and writing, and in 1905 moved with Vanessa and her brother Thoby to 46 Gordon Square. This marked a completely new phase in her life, and she celebrated the beginnings of her independence by earning money as a reviewer for the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Once established in Bloomsbury, this was also the period of throwing off Victorian taboos – staying up late with friends discussing ideas, smoking cigarettes, using people’s first names, and even talking openly about sex. The young intellectuals who joined them for these discussions eventually became known as the Bloomsbury Group

When her sister married Clive Bell, Virginia moved with her brother Adrian to Tavistock and then Brunswick Square, and they took into their commune figures such as Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and the painter Duncan Grant. She began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia (later to become The Voyage Out and in 1912 married her house-mate Leonard Woolf – a union that Wright tactfully describes as ‘a marriage of minds rather than bodies’.

Like most of her Bloomsbury friends Virginia was opposed the First World War: she thought patriotism a ‘base emotion’. She and Leonard bought a second-hand printing press and launched the Hogarth Press as a sort of therapeutic hobby for her. But it turned out to be a great commercial success, largely because of Leonard’s good business sense and artistic judgement. More importantly, it freed Virginia from the editorial control of commercial publishers. She could write fiction in any way she pleased, and from this point onwards her work appeared under their own imprint.

In 1921 she published her epoch-making collection of experimental short stories, Monday or Tuesday which gave her the impetus and the confidence to continue her experiments into the longer literary form of the novel with Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. Around this time she also began her love affair with fellow novelist Vita Sackville-West, which although it was short-lived gave rise to the delightful fantasy biography, Orlando.

The thirties were a period of increased fame and prosperity, tarnished only by spiteful critical attacks from the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Frank Swinnerton, and the Leavises. There was one further push in experimental modernism still to come: The Waves was her attempt to combine prose, poetry, and drama.

She turned down an invitation to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College Cambridge (which her father had given in 1888) and instead directed what she had to say about these institutions of male privilege and class power into Three Guineas (1938). This was the logical development of her arguments in A Room of One’s Own and the two works now form the foundation of most modern branches of feminism.

It was certainly a productive decade. In addition to her steady stream of reviews and journalism, she produced a major critical study The Common Reader: Second Series, a long novel The Years, a play Freshwater, and even Flush, a playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog.

By the end of the decade there were less than two years left – yet despite her personal depressions and worries regarding the war, she continued writing and produced the ‘official’ biography of her friend Roger Fry (a thoroughly anodyne work) and left the much more spirited Between the Acts in proofs at her death.

The main strength of Elizabeth Wright’s short biography is that it strikes a good balance between the life and the works – and her account isn’t spoiled by any of the hysteria and gender bigotry which undermines so much critical commentary. After all, Virginia Woolf might have had psychological demons with which she struggled throughout her life, but she was also a prodigiously creative artist, an original analyst on some of life’s most fundamental issues, and a witty and popular figure amongst her friends.

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E.H.Wright, Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.144, ISBN: 1843919095

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Virginia Woolf criticism

April 24, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Virginia Woolf criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Virginia Woolf and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Frances Spalding’s illustrated study Virginia Woolf: Art, Life, and Vision for one penny.

Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis – E. Abel, University of Chicago Press, 1992. A reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf’s novels and essays.

Virginia Woolf: A Study of her Novels – T.E. Apter, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Bloomsbury – Quentin Bell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

Bloomsbury Recalled – Quentin Bell, Columbia University, 1996. Biographical sketches of all the Bloomsbury principals, including Quentin Bell’s aunt, Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf: a Biography – Quentin Bell, London: Pimlico, 1996. This prize-winning biography describes Virginia Woolf’s family and childhood; her earliest writings; the formation of the Bloomsbury Group; her marriage to Leonard Woolf; her mental breakdown of the years 1912-15; and the origins and growth of the Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist – Joan Bennett, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Virginia Woolf as Feminist – Naomi Black, Cornell University Press, 2003. An examination of Woolf’s feminist connections and writings, including her public letters and her connections with political organisations.

Virginia Woolf (Longman Critical Readers) – Rachel Bowlby, London: Routledge, 1992. An anthology of articles that conjures up the enormous richness and variety of recent work that returns to Woolf not so much for final answers as for insights into questions about writing, literary traditions and the differences of the sexes

Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf –
Rachel Bowlby, Edinburgh University Press, 1997. A collection of essays which look at Woolf in a number of new frames – as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; and as a writer on love.

Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works – Julia Briggs, London: Virago, 1994. A collection of up-to-date essays on Virginia Woolf’s novels, polemical writings, essays and short stories, which place each work in its historical and literary context.

Virginia Woolf’s Women – Vanessa Curtis, The History Press, 2007. This biography concentrates exclusively on Woolf’s close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life.

Virginia Woolf – David Daiches, Editions Poetry, 1945.

Virginia Woolf and the Visible World – Emily Dalgarno, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines how Woolf’s writing engages with visible and non-visible realms of experience, and draws on ideas from the diverse fields of psychoanalytic theory, classical Greek tragedy, astronomy, photography and photojournalism.

Virginia Woolf And Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy – Jane Dunn, London: Virago, 2001. A study of the deep and close relationship between two sisters, the influence they exerted over each others’ lives, their competitiveness, the fierce love they had for each other, and also their intense rivalry.

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading – Avrom Fleishman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. A work of formalist criticism which offers a thorough, incisive, and genuinely original analysis of Virginia Woolf’s major novels.

Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity – Ralph Freedman, , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf – Jane Goldman, Cambridge University Press, 2001. A revisionary, feminist reading of Woolf’s work, focusing on her engagement with the artistic theories of her time, and tracing the feminist implication of her aesthetics by reclaiming for the everyday world of history and politics what seem to be private mystical moments.

Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life – Lyndall Gordon, London: Virago, 2006. A biographical study that rocks back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of ‘the infinite oddity of the human position’.

Virginia Woolf and her Works – Jean Guiguet, trans. Jean Stewart, London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

Virginia Woolf – Alexandra Harris, London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. A short, readable, illustrated biography and outline of Woolf’s major works.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’: a Study in Alienation – Jeremy Hawthorn, Sussex University Press, 1975.

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir – Winifred Holtby, London: Continuum, 2007. Holtby’s careful reading of Woolf’s work is set in the context of the debate between modernist and traditional writing in the 1920s and 1930s.

A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf – Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. This acclaimed bibliography, prepared with Leonard Woolf’s co-operation, has been greatly expanded since its first publication in 1957 and the revised editions of 1967 and 1980. The fourth revised edition is the result both of the explosion of new editions of existing books, and of the appearance of much previously unpublished material.

The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End – Mitchell A. Leaska, Littlehampton Book Services, 1979.

Granite and Rainbow: the hidden life of Virginia Woolf – Mitchell A. Leaska, London: Picador, 1998. Contains new and revealing material on Virginia Woolf’s relationships with her parents and the deeper story of how she sought to create harmony out of such profound divisions.

The Novels of Virginia Woolf – Hermione Lee, London: Routledge, 2010. A a much-needed introduction to Virginia Woolf’s nine novels, written in the hope of turning attention back from the life to the fictional work.

Virginia Woolf – Hermione Lee, London: Vintage, 1997. This study moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions – the impact of Woolf’s childhood, the cause and nature of her madness and suicide, the truth about her marriage, her feelings for women, plus her prejudices and obsessions.

Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage – Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (eds), London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975. A historical survey of reviews and literary comment tracing the development of Woolf’s critical reputation.

New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf -Jane Marcus, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981.

Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf – Herbert Marder, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved – Allen McLaurin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Discusses the influence of Samuel Butler on the philosophy and especially the aesthetics of Bloomsbury, and the relationships between the writings of Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry.

Virginia Woolf (Writers and Critics) – A.D. Moody, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963.

Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject – Makiko Minow Pinkney, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. This study shows that Woolf’s most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism. Rather, it can be best seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles of a patriarchal social order.

The Unknown Virginia Woolf – Roger Poole, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. This study uses the phenomenological concept of embodiment to address the concealed intentionality that lies behind apparently deviant behaviour. It shows how Woolf’s challenge to accepted conventions of communication, in both her life and work, is an appeal for meaning.

Virginia Woolf in Context – Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, Cambridge University Press, 2012. These essays highlight connections between Woolf and key cultural, political and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender and class and the bearings of colonialism.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. New second edition of compendium which includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere

Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf – Phyllis Rose, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations – Anna Snaith, London: Palgrave Schol, 2003. This study offers a fresh understanding of Woolf’s feminism, her narrative techniques, her attitudes to publication, and her role in public debate.

Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies – Anna Snaith, London: Palgrave Schol, 2006. A guide to the ever-expanding body of criticism, written for both researchers and teachers of Woolf. It includes chapters on feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and biographical criticism.

Virginia Woolf: Art, Life, and Vision – Frances Spalding, National Portrait Gallery, 2014. Charming study illustrated with over a hundred works from public and private collections, documentary photographs, and extracts from her writings, this book catches Woolf’s appearance and that of the world around her.

The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf – N.C. Thakur, London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective – Eric Warner (ed), London: Macmillan, 1984.

Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist – Jane Wheare, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Concerns itself with Virginia Woolf’s artistry in The Voyage Out, Night and Day and The Years, where Woolf exploited and developed the realist model, finding in it the most appropriate vehicle through which to put across obliquely her own ideas about women and society.

Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context) – Michael H. Whitworth, Oxford University Press, 2009. This book includes a biography and chronology of Virginia Woolf’s life and times, historical and social background, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.

Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism – Alice Wood, London: Bloomsbury, 2015. A study that scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript, and proof documents within their historical contexts to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf’s cultural analysis during 1931-1941.

Virginia Woolf – E.H. Wright, London: Hesperus, 2011. A brief critical biography structured by childhood, Bloomsbury, 1920s, 1930s, and the final years.

Virginia Woolf and the Real World – Alex Zwerdling, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Discusses the influence of historical events, politics, and social movements on Woolf’s fiction, describes her ideology, and examines her major works.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Virginia Woolf greatest works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

fictional works – plus some film versions

Jacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.

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Mrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.

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To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.

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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

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The Waves (1931) is her most experimental and most demanding novel. Rather like her exact contemporary James Joyce, she was pushing the possibilities of the novel to their furthest limit. She abandons conventional narrative and setting altogether, and substitutes the interior monologues of six different characters. They are friends (and lovers) whose lives are revealed by what they think about themselves and each other. The monologues that span the characters’ lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset. Readers have to work out who is ‘thinking’ at any moment – but assistance is provided by patterns of imagery and fragments of repeated ideas associated with each character. Not for the faint-hearted. Read the other novels first.

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Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.

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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.

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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.

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Film versions

The Hours DVD is an amazingly successful film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s fictional take on Mrs Dalloway. Fragments of Virginia Woolf’s biography are interwoven with stories from 1950s Los Angeles and contemporary New York. It’s not a direct adaptation but a stunning interpretation of Woolf and her world, her themes, and even her narrative techniques. It is beautifully photographed, and the evocation of Woolf’s creative process is particularly impressive. Nicole Kidman creates a very sympathetic portrayal of Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore glues the plot together with a magnificent performance as a woman at the end of her tether, and Meryl Streep is a slightly over-the-top but acceptable modern Clarissa. Music by Philip Glass. This is a film which no Woolf enthusiast should miss.

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Mrs Dalloway DVD is an excellent film version of Mrs Dalloway directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris. It’s a visually low key rendering of the original, but it captures the spirit of the novel very well. Outstanding performance by Vanessa Redgrave in the principal role, and Natascha McElhone as her younger self and a young Kenneth Brannah as Charles Tansley. The screenplay was written by actor-author Eileen Atkins.

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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.

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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Virginia Woolf illustrated biography

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an introduction to her life and work

This is a best-selling book from Thames and Hudson. It’s slim, cheap, and you might almost say a little old fashioned – yet it goes on being popular year after year. And it’s easy to see why. The text is written by John Lehmann who actually worked for Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press. Indeed, at one time he even wanted to take it over and run it on fully professional lines – something which Leonard quite rightly resisted, arguing that it’s strength lay in its independence. But the real delight the book offers is a wonderful collection of pictures of Woolf and her friends who were part of the Bloomsbury Group.

More than that, it combines a lightness of touch in presenting Woolf’s biography with a very engaging introduction to each of her major works. Lehmann follows the story of Woolf’s life and her social background – an upper-middle class milieu with artistic and literary connections (Henry James was a friend of the family) self-educated in her father Leslie Stephen’s library, falling in love with other women, and then the establishment of the Bloomsbury group in Gordon Square with her brother Thoby and his Cambridge friends John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

She began her literary career, then married Leonard Woolf, who looked after her patiently through all her periods of mental and physical illness. As therapeutic activity, he even bought a printing machine which enabled them both to set up the Hogarth Press – which went on to become very successful.

Lehmann traces her literary development, from the conventional approach of The Voyage Out and Night and Day, to the artistic breakthroughs of Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, so his biography also provides and intelligent guide to her writing as well as her life.

Despite being a close personal friend of both Virginia and Leonard, he doesn’t shy away from the love-affair she had with Vita Sackville-West, linking it perceptively to his account of Orlando, which it inspired. Then his transition via A Room of One’s Own to The Waves traces her intellectual development as both a feminist and a novelist. His account of The Waves will help anyone who needs preparation for an attempt at what is quite a difficult novel.

Lehmann, rather like Leonard Woolf, thinks Three Guineas is not one of her best non-fiction works – an opinion I don’t think many people would agree with today. But the remainder of his explications and judgements are really helpful for anybody who wants to understand her work.

However, the real delight of the book is the photographs which range from her early through to her late life. They include portrait paintings, sketches made by artists such as Roger Fry and her sister Vanessa Bell, book jacket designs, and pictures of the houses where she lived and wrote.

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John Lehmann, Virginia Woolf, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp.128, ISBN 0500260265

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
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Virginia Woolf life and works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, essayist, diarist, biographer

1882. Virginia Woolf born (25 Jan) Adeline Virginia Stephen, third child of Leslie Stephen (Victorian man of letters – first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) – and Julia Duckworth (of the Duckworth publishing family). Comfortable upper middle class family background. Her father had previously been married to the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackery. Brothers Thoby and Adrian went to Cambridge, and her sister Vanessa became a painter. Virginia was educated by private tutors and by extensive reading of literary classics in her father’s library.

1895. Death of her mother Julia Stephen. VW has the first of many nervous breakdowns.

1896. Travels in France with her sister Vanessa.

1897. Death of half-sister, Stella. VW learning Greek and History at King’s College London.

1899. Brother Thoby Stephen enters Trinity College, Cambridge and subsequently meets Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. These Cambridge friends subsequently become known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which VW was an important and influential member.

1904. Death of father. Beginning of second serious breakdown. VW’s first publication is an unsigned review in The Guardian. Travels in France and Italy with her sister Vanessa and her friend Violet Dickinson. VW moves to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Other residents of this Square include Lady Jane Strachey, Charlotte Mew, and Dora Carrington.

1905. Travels in Spain and Portugal. Writes book reviews and teaches once a week at Morley College, London, an evening institute for working men and women.

1906. Travels in Greece. Death of brother Thoby Stephen. Writes a group of short stories now collected as Memoirs of a Novelist.

1907. Marriage of sister Vanessa to Clive Bell. VW moves with brother Adrian to live in Fitzroy Square. Working on her first novel (to become The Voyage Out).

1908. Visits Italy with the Bells.

1909. Lytton Strachey [homosexual] proposes marriage. VW meets Ottoline Morell, visits Bayreuth and Florence.

1910. Works for women’s suffrage. Spends time in a nursing home in Twickenham. First exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters arranged by Roger Fry.

1911. VW moves to Brunswick Square, sharing house with brother Adrian, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. Travels to Turkey.

1912. Marries Leonard Woolf. Travels for honeymoon to Provence, Spain, and Italy. Moves to Clifford’s Inn.

1913. Mental illness and her first attempted suicide. Put in care of husband and nurses.

1915. Purchase of Hogarth House, Richmond. The Voyage Out published and well received. Another bout of violent madness.

1916. Lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild. regular work for the Times Literary Supplement [whose reviews were at that time anonymous].

1917. L and VW buy hand printing machine and establish the Hogarth Press. First publication Monday or Tuesday. Later goes on to publish T.S. Eliot, Freud, and VW’s own books.

1919. Purchase of Monk’s House, Rodmell. Night and Day published. Brief friendship with Katherine Mansfield. Both are conscious of experimenting with the substance and the style of prose fiction.

1920. Works on journalism and Jacob’s Room.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf is collection of essays which addresses the full range of her intellectual perspectives – literary, artistic, philosophical and political. It provides new readings of all nine novels and fresh insight into Woolf’s letters, diaries and essays. The progress of Woolf’s thinking is revealed from Bloomsbury aestheticism through her hatred of censorship, corruption and hierarchy to her concern with all aspects of modernism.

1921. The Mark on the Wall published. VW ill for most of the summer.

1922. Jacob’s Room published. MeetsVita Sackville-West with whom she has a brief love affair. Writing encouraged by E.M. Forster, Strachey, and Leonard Woolf.

1923. Visits Spain. Works on ‘The Hours’ – an early version of Mrs Dalloway.

1924. Purchase of lease on house in Tavistock Square. Gives lecture that becomes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

1925. The Common Reader [essays] and Mrs Dalloway published. Major break with the traditional novel, its form and techniques.

1926. Unwell with German measles. Starts writing To the Lighthouse.

1927. To the Lighthouse published. Travels to France and Sicily. Begins Orlando.

1928. Orlando published – a fantasy dedicated to and based upon the life of Vita Sackville-West and her love of her ancestral home at Knole in Kent. Delivers lectures at Cambridge on which she based A Room of One’s Own.

1929. A Room of One’s Own published – essays on women’s exclusion from literary history which have become of seminal importance in feminist studies. Travels to Berlin.

1930. First meets Ethel Smyth – pipe-smoking feminist composer, who falls in love with VW. Finishes first version of The Waves.

1931. The Waves – a novel composed of the thoughts of six characters which takes VW’s literary experimentation to its natural limits.

1932. Death of Lytton Strachey. Begins ‘The Partigers’ which was to become The Years.

1934. Death of Roger Fry. Rewrites The Years.

1935. Rewrites The Years. Car tour through Holland, Germany, and Italy.

1936. Begins Three Guineas – a ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own.

1938. Three Guineas extends the feminist critique of patriarchy, militarism, and privilege started in A Room of One’s Own.

1939. Moves to Mecklenburgh Square, but lives mainly at Monk’s House. Meets Freud in London.

1940. Biography of Roger Fry published. London homes damaged or destroyed in blitz.

1941. VW completes Between the Acts, her last novel, then fearing the madness which she felt engulfing her again, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse, near Monk’s House. [Her dates of 1882- 1941 are exactly those of James Joyce.]

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Virginia Woolf non-fiction

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays, letters, diaries, lectures, biography

The Essays are a wonderful introduction to the world of belles lettres. Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction writing and literary career began in her father’s library. She read the classics whilst young, then began to write about her literary experiences, producing reviews for the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement – whose contributions were anonymous in those days. Her tastes are humane and well informed. Read her articles on Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield – and you will feel like reading the texts again immediately. She is astonishingly wide-ranging – from the Greek classics via Renaissance drama and Enlightenment journalism, to contemporary fiction. The approach is rather biographical and author-centred, but these are intelligent and gracefully composed essays which speak eloquently on literary and cultural life.

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The Letters are for specialists and the ultimate gossip trivia for Woolf fans. There really is everything from laundry bills, to dinner party recipes, and snobbish lists of people who are ‘in’ or ‘out’. Many of them read as if they were written for public consumption, and even in the gossip there is a lot of repetition. It’s interesting to note just how much of this listing and gossip-mongering is recycled in one letter after another. But this is not surprising, given the communication technology available at the time. The telephone had only just been introduced, and there were two or even three postal deliveries a day at that period. However, if they are read in conjunction with her biography, it is possible to trace the ebb and flow of her personal relationships at very close quarters. For a richer insight into the workings of her keen intellect and creative spirit, the diaries offer greater rewards.

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The Diaries are quite simply a marvellous human document. Don’t expect lots of intimate personal revelations of the kind we’re used to almost a hundred years later, but there’s a vivacity about her personal reflections which make them a wonderful reading experience. More importantly, it is here that she reveals the secrets of the creative process. She feels the beginnings of important ideas coming on like a mood or an illness. The topic swells, grows in her imagination, and sometimes takes her over like an intellectual love affair. She suffers; she struggles to express elusive ideas; she writes; and then finally the work emerges and she is exhausted with the effort. This is the nearest to the deeply creative process you are likely to come across. Of course there are lots of observations on contemporary affairs which make this an interesting historical document too. One minute it’s creative breakthroughs via metaphors or new techniques, then next it’s the Versailles Treaty and her husband Leonard’s part in it. But the real benefit (almost a privilege) is to be invited to share the private thoughts of a first class creative mind.

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A Writer’s Journal It’s no wonder that the best parts of her diaries were extracted and published separately by her husband Leonard Woolf. If you don’t have time to read the full personal chronicles, this is a very good condensation. It’s a much-quoted source in writing manuals and books on creativity. Read it alongside her fiction, and learn how the imaginative mind works. She records the first flashes of inspiration, the development of good ideas, and the links between disparate insights. You might also be surprised to learn how much self-doubt, intellectual anguish, and hard work went into her creative life.

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A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas are like the Old and New Testament of the feminist’s Bible. The first is a series of lectures she was invited to give on ‘Women and Literature’. It is here that she coins the idea of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ and considers the problems she would have faced if she had decided to become a writer. It’s a sparkling, critical, and wide-ranging expose of male privilege and the way in which women have been excluded from cultural life. If you want to start with feminist theory – particularly in its relationship to literature – this is where to begin. Ten years later she extended the feminist critique of patriarchy and privilege to a much greater extent. All parts of the English establishment are subject to an excoriating analysis which leaves them exposed as instruments of ideological dominance and cultural power. In Three Guineas she offers a scathing analysis of the pillars of English society – the Crown, the Church, the Judiciary, the Military, and the Universities. It’s a pity this is not as well known or as well read as A Room of One’s Own – because it is more searching, more incisive, more critical, and much more radical.

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On Being Ill Virginia Woolf knew a lot about illness. She suffered from repeated bouts of both physical and mental debility throughout her life. But how inventive of her to actually write about it. This is one of her lesser-known but amazingly thoughtful pieces of essay writing. It’s a philosophic meditation on the experience of illness, including even its pleasures and advantages. She also includes reflections on reading and the benefits of enforced idleness. She discusses the cultural taboos associated with illness and explores how, even though it is a more-or-less universal experience, it has been excluded from a great deal of literature. This edition has an introduction by Hermione Lee, one of her best biographers.

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Roger Fry Her biography is both a homage to a family friend and a debate with a fellow artist – particularly on the relationship between aesthetics and realism. It was an official work commissioned by the Fry family- so don’t expect any revelations, or even any mention that Fry was once her sister’s lover. She emphasises his Quaker background, his scientific training, his amazing energy in organising art events (such as the Omega workshop) and his loyalty. Much of the work is based on letters and diaries, and of course the two artists were close friends – so at least it’s authentic.

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Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

Virginia Woolf

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

the development of literary and visual modernism

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

Woolf as essayist, feminist, and anti-militarist

literature, politics, philosophy, art, feminism, criticism

a short critical study of her life and works

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

fictional works – plus some film versions

Film versions

Virginia Woolf – web links

an introduction to her life and work

novelist, essayist, diarist, biographer

Bloomsbury Group – web links

essays, letters, diaries, lectures, biography

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