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Virginia Woolf selected essays

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

non-fiction meditations from a great novelist

Virginia Woolf selected essays is a completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which she thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic – on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life.

Virginia Woolf Selected EssaysShe writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments at the time. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups – reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art. She believes that the essay is an expression of the individual vision, but it is interesting to note how much of her own expression is couched in generalizations addressed in the first person plural – “We feel .. this and that”. I was reminded of George Orwell who whilst railing against generalizations and stereotypes was quite happy to fall into the trap of devising his own – as in ‘What is Englishness?’.

It’s also true to say that a lot of her argument is conducted in extended similes and metaphors. These give the essays unquestionable elegance, but they also allow her to hide behind these rhetorical flourishes. They often conceal a paucity of concrete examples to back up her arguments.

It’s a subtle and seductive method, because it draws any unwary reader into accepting unfounded generalizations without their realising it. Her judgments are sound whilst she is in the safe traditions of earlier centuries, but when it comes to her contemporaries – well. “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”

But her analysis of reading fiction (‘How Should One Read a Book?) is truly inspirational. In it, she argues for a totally sympathetic submersion in the writer’s work, followed by an equally severe judgment in which each work is held up for comparison against the finest of its kind.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it … It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

‘The New Biography’ is her thoughtful response to the subject, prompted by her reading of Harold Nicolson’s excellent and much under-rated Some People. She is astute enough to spot that he was onto something quite new (and what a shame it is that he didn’t produce some more writing of this kind).

A companion piece to this essay is ‘The Art of Biography’, a meditation on Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Elizabeth and Essex, arguing that the former is more successful because Strachey stayed within the confines of known facts, whereas in the latter he invented them, and turned the book into a work of artistic imagination – whereupon it failed by straying outside the ‘rules’ of biography.

‘On Being Ill’ is a reflection on the fact that illness, although a common human experience, is hardly present in literature as a subject. It was written before she read Marcel Proust, but it also dances around the subject of what literature we read (and cannot read) when ill.

‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ expresses her ambiguous political notions but her personal sympathy with a movement which her husband Leonard Woolf had enthusiastically supported, along with the Co-Operative movement. She knows perfectly well that she is privileged, a ‘lady’, but it doesn’t stop her entering imaginatively into the lives of Mrs Burrows from Edgebaston and Mrs Philips from Bacup – delegates to a conference she attended.

The collection ends with essays on contemporary life and culture. There’s an extraordinarily prescient reflection on the end of Empire prefigured by an account of a thunderstorm at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924; a meditation on the art of the cinema (1926) in which she correctly predicts that its time was yet to come; and a riveting account of flying over London in an aeroplane which perfectly demonstrates her imaginative skill – since she had never done any such thing.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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David Bradshaw (ed), Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.244, ISBN 0199212813


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Essays, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf short stories

March 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, synopses, commentaries, and study resources

This is an ongoing collection of tutorials and study guides featuring the short stories of Virginia Woolf. The earliest story dates from 1906 and the latest from 1940, written for American Vogue magazine shortly before her death. They are presented here in alphabetical order of title. The list will be updated as new titles are added.

Virginia Woolf short stories   A Haunted House
Virginia Woolf short stories   A Simple Melody
Virginia Woolf short stories   A Summing Up
Virginia Woolf short stories   An Unwritten Novel
Virginia Woolf short stories   Ancestors
Virginia Woolf short stories   Happiness
Virginia Woolf short stories   In the Orchard
Virginia Woolf short stories   Kew Gardens
Virginia Woolf short stories   Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf short stories   Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf short stories   Phyllis and Rosamond
Virginia Woolf short stories   Solid Objects
Virginia Woolf short stories   Sympathy
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Evening Party
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Introduction
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Lady in the Looking-Glass
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Legacy
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Man who Loved his Kind
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Mysterious Case of Miss V
Virginia Woolf short stories   The New Dress
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Shooting Party
Virginia Woolf short stories   The String Quartet
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Symbol
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Watering Place
Virginia Woolf short stories   Together and Apart


Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words


Study resources

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Virginia Woolf short stories Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle

Virginia Woolf Concordance Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf’s works

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources


Writing app

Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Further reading

Red button Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Nicholas Marsh. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button John Mepham, Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Natalya Reinhold, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Michael Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Kew GardensKew 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.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner 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’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
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More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf web links

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

Virginia Woolf web links 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 web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links 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.

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

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

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

Virginia Woolf web links 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.

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


Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Virginia Woolf - Companion - book jacketThe 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. This book explores the immense range of social and political issues behind her search for new forms of narrative.

© Roy Johnson 2005


Virginia Woolf – web links
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Virginia Woolf – life and works


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf, Web links

Virginia Woolf’s Women

July 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of major figures in her life

Virginia Woolf’s Women is a study of the principal females in Virginia Woolf’s life and the influences they may have had in shaping her views of the world. It begins naturally enough in her early home life. Vanessa Curtis argues that Virginia Woolf inherited suffering, illness, and self-deprecation from her grandmother Mia and her mother Julia Stephen whose saintly beauty was cut short by an early death when Woolf was only thirteen. In this environment she also had direct personal contact with the concept of ‘the angel of the house’ against which she was later to argue. Its author Coventry Patmore was a visitor to the house as a friend of her grandmother.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Julia Stephen

Following Julia’s death, Woolf’s older step-sister Stella Duckworth became a surrogate mother to the seven children of the Stephen family. But no sooner was she established in this role than two events snatched away her comforting presence – first her marriage to Jack Hills, and then immediately following the honeymoon, her sudden death.

Curtis traces echoes of these events in The Voyage Out and Night and Day and even the much later To the Lighthouse. Of course it is legitimate to see elements of biography expressed in the fiction – but it is not a legitimate practice to read back from fiction as a valid source of biographical information. More legitimately, Curtis attributes Woolf’s scepticism about the prospects of successful heterosexual love to this trio of family martyrs.

The next major figure is her elder sister Vanessa (Bell), who took over from Stella as head of the household. The two sisters had a very close relationship, yet one which occasionally spilled over into rivalry. Vanessa was a liberating factor in organising the family’s move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after their father’s death. She also remained closely alongside Virginia when she sank into periods of depression and near-madness.

The two sisters established weekend homes near each other in Rodmell and Charleston in East Sussex, and they shared a common circle of friends amongst the various members of the Bloomsbury Group. The roles of care-giver and invalid were only ever reversed on the occasion of Vanessa’s collapse when her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Even Bloomsbury enthusiasts might not recognise the importance in Woolf’s life of the next figure – Violet Dickinson – a six foot tall upper class woman (seventeen years older) who was a lifelong supporter and Woolf enthusiast. It was Dickinson who first introduced her to newspaper and magazine editors – which enabled her to establish herself as a reviewer and a journalist.

Curtis speculates about the exact nature of the relationship between the two women, her uncertainty reflected in the fact that she calls it Woolf’s “first emotional and physical love” whilst admitting that there is no evidence of any physical connection between them. Her summing up is probably more accurate – a ‘warm-up’ for the later relationship with Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf’s relationship with Ottoline Morrell does not reflect well on her in terms of sincerity, or moral integrity. Like many of the other artists and writers who accepted Morrell’s generous hospitality at Garsington Manor, she repaid it by scoffing and making fun of the hostess behind her back.

He relationship with Katherine Mansfield was of a different order. The two writers circled round each other, both of them aware that they were literary rivals, yet respectful of each other’s work. They chose similar topics to write about, and for a while even had similar literary styles. They shared a profound scepticism about heterosexual males, and both wrote cautious tales of Sapphic desire. Following Katherine Mansfield’s early death in 1923, Woolf expressed the wish that she had been closer to her rival.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Dora Carrington

A whole chapter on Dora Carrington fails to establish any significant influence on Woolf herself, despite uncovering many similarities between them as creative artists. The two women were simply rivals for the friendship of Lytton Strachey, to whom they were both attached – and Carrington won hands down on that attachment, for which she paid with her life.

Curtis has more success, understandably, with Vita Sackville-West. The history and nature of their affair is well known – an affair facilitated by the fact that neither of them had sexual relationships with their own husbands. There is a detailed tracing of the ups and downs of the emotional tensions between them, but the account ignores opportunities to consider any possible mutual influence as writers.

This is a loss, because at the time their relationship, Sackville-West was at the height of her fame as a writer, and she was actually published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But by way of compensation Curtis does acknowledge and discuss Vita’s significance as the inspiration for Orlando.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Virginia Woolf with Ethyl Smyth

The most extraordinary figure is saved for last. Ethyl Smyth was a pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer, who by the time she met Woolf was seventy-three years old, stone deaf, and sporting an enormous ear-trumpet. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the much younger writer, and although this feeling was only weakly reciprocated Curtis makes a reasonable case for her influence on Woolf’s work as a writer.

The first influences were Smyth’s radical feminism, her support for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and her struggles to find acceptance as a female creative artist in a musical world which was dominated by men (as it still is). Curtis points out that these topics, which Woolf discussed with Smyth, found their way directly into the bombshell polemic Three Guineas. And the other influence was that Woolf introduced musical notions of composition and form, particularly into her later works.

There are no surprise revelations in these studies: most of the information will be well known to Bloomsbury enthusiasts, and Woolf’s life has been worked over thoroughly by any number of biographists. But as a general introduction to the social and intellectual milieu of the period it’s an excellent piece of work, well illustrated, and supported by a full scale critical apparatus.

Virginia Woolf's Women Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf's Women Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


Vanessa Curtis, Virginia Woolf’s Women, London: Robert Hale, 2002, pp.224, ISBN: B00KXX3TCU


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s-head Publishing

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press

Woolf’s-head Publishing was produced to coincide with the exhibition of Hogarth Press publications which ran from February to April 2009 at the library of the University of Alberta, Canada. It’s not only a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It’s typeset in Caslon Old Face, which Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf used when they first set up the Hogarth Press on a table in their dining room in 1917.

Hogarth Press The book’s dust jacket is printed on thick, richly textured paper with some of the exuberantly patterned papers originally used by the Press. It also features both of the woolf’s-head logos used by the Press, designed by Vanessa Bell and E. McKnight Kauffer. Even the interior pages of the book are coloured, using tints and washes which are a tonal echo of the original designs.

Many of the book jacket illustrations by Vanessa Bell are already quite well known. But there are others by John Banting, Kauffer, and Trekkie Parsons (Leonard Woolf’s ‘lover’ after Virginia’s death) which illustrate the wide and imaginative range of visual approaches the Woolfs took for the presentation of their publications.

However, it’s difficult for book jackets of this kind not to look rather dated today, almost a hundred years after their first appearance. But what definitely do not look dated are the richly patterned papers Leonard imported from Czechoslovakia and Japan for the volumes of poetry. These look as visually fresh today as they did at the time.

The authors represented stretch from the famous names who made the Press such a commercially successful venture – T.S.Eliot, Freud, Woolf, Vita Sackville-West – to people who have since disappeared into literary obscurity – Ena Limebeer, R.C.Trvelyan, and Virginia’s sixteen-year-old discovery Joan Adeney Easdale.

There are also what author and exhibition curator Elizabeth Gordon describes as ‘surprises’ – books ‘less commonly associated with the Hogarth Press’. These include a Canadian poet, a Bengali biography, translations of German poetry, (reflecting Leonard’s internationalism) and even a diet book.

Quack! Quack!The other Press publications upon which the collection focuses are those by Virginia Woolf herself – all illustrated by her sister Vanessa Bell. There are also examples of the polemical essays published in the 1930s, which included arguments against Imperialism and in favour of feminism (of which Leonard was a champion). A short series of public letters even included ‘A Letter to Adolf Hitler’ by Louis Golding.

Best-sellers include Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), William Plomer’s detective thriller The Case is Altered (1932) and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it has started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press, Alberta (CA): University of Alberta, 2009, pp.144, ISBN: 9781551952406


More on biography
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Bibliography, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf, Woolf's Head Publishing

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