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The Common Reader first series

October 12, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series is a famous collection of essays by Virginia Woolf that explore the rich history of literature and English writing from the classical period to what was the present day of 1925 when the book was first published. The essays had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Atheneum, the Nation, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, and in America in the Dial, and the New Republic. The publication proved so successful that it led to another collection (second series) in 1932.

The Common Reader first series

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

Virginia Woolf had been writing essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews ever since her earliest work had appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1905, and this present compilation reflects both the depth and the wide range of her interests and her literary education. Although she never had what we would now call formal schooling, she had educated herself, via access to the private library of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, who was an eminent Victorian man of letters and the first general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had read the classics, the Elizabethans, novelists of the eighteenth century onwards, and was up to date with contemporary fiction. It perhaps helped that Thomas Hardy and Henry James were friends of the family.

She begins with a formidable piece on the Paston Letters and Chaucer, vividly re-imagining medieval English history in a manner she was later to make famous in her own novel of fictional biography Orlando (1927). ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is not just an appreciation of classical literature, it is also a discussion of what distinguishes it from and defines the essence of post-Renaissance literature that is so much closer to us.

The essays are arranged in chronological order of subject – from medieval literature to Joseph Conrad – but there is no reason why they should be read in this order. They were written at widely different times and for a variety of audiences. But it has to be said that the spirit that pervades them all is remarkably consistent. Her writing is poised, fluent, humane, and distinctly non-academic. She takes her definition of the common reader from Samuel Johnson:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he has come by, some kind of whole— a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

A review of Hakluyt’s Voyages is the springboard for reflections on exploration which become an analysis of Elizabethan prose styles. And she is not over-reverential. She explains cogently why many minor Elizabethan plays are so bad and even boring – because their authors were operating in a different cultural medium than obtains in the modern world.

She repeatedly compares the way ‘we’ see things (writing in the early twentieth century) to the way writers have seen them in the past. Montaigne revelling in the diversity and contradictions of life; John Evelyn calmly recording the events in a torture chamber. She throws off perceptive remarks on nearly every page: ‘the late plays of Shakespeare … are better read than seen’ and ‘the second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces’.

Sometimes she takes creative liberties. An essay written to commemorate two-hundred years since the publication of Robinson Crusoe becomes a detailed examination of Moll Flanders and Defoe’s other novels, all of which she sees as the foundation of modern realism.

Similarly, a volume of Jane Austen’s juvenilia is the occasion for an appreciation in which she shows how a great novelist’s technique actually works:

she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat.

Woolf makes a spirited explanation of the essence of Russian literature – which had only recently been made available in English at the time of her writing. There is discussion of the apparently inconclusive endings of Chekhov’s stories; the restless and chaotic soul-searching of Dostoyevski; and the sharp-eyed observations of Tolstoy.

There is even an essay about the nature of essays themselves, which she insists should not be heavy, didactic, or composed of polysyllabic prose. This is a piece from which Max Beerbohm emerges triumphant: ‘the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style’.

A tribute to Joseph Conrad plays interestingly with the relationship between Conrad the author and Marlowe his regular first person narrator and it ends with the provocative notion that it is the early novels – Youth, Lord Jim, and Typhoon – that will survive as Conrad’s highest achievements, whilst the later works – Chance, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes – will be seen as curiosities. It might have seemed so in 1924 when this essays was written, but my guess is that most serious (if not common) readers of Conrad will today think just the opposite.

But she anticipates such arguments – acknowledging that each generation will make its own review of the literature handed down to it – and since this collection is almost a hundred years old, still in print, and still being discussed, we have every reason to say that it has assumed the status of a classic.

© Roy Johnson 2015


Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Volume 1, London: Vintage Classics, 2003, pp.288, ISBN: 009944366X


The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series The Common Reader first series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader first series The Common Reader first series – Amazon US

The Common Reader first series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
The Common Reader first series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader first series The Common Reader first series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader - first series


The Common Reader first series – complete contents
  • The Common Reader
  • The Pastons and Chaucer
  • On not knowing Greek
  • The Elizabethan Lumber Room
  • Notes on an Elizabethan Play
  • Montaigne
  • The Duchess of Newcastle
  • Rambling round Evelyn
  • Defoe
  • Addison
  • Lives of the Obscure–
    1. Taylors and Edgeworths
    2. Laetitia Pilkington
  • Jane Austen
  • Modern Fiction
  • “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”
  • George Eliot
  • The Russian Point of View
  • Outlines–
    1. Miss Mitford
    2. Dr. Bentley
    3. Lady Dorothy Nevill
    4. Archbishop Thomson
  • The Patron and the Crocus
  • The Modern Essay
  • Joseph Conrad
  • How it strikes a Contemporary

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

The Common Reader first series 1925 – The Common Reader first series

The Common Reader first series 1932 – The Common Reader second series

The Common Reader first series 1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

The Common Reader first series 1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

The Common Reader first series 1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

The Common Reader first series 1958 – Granite and Rainbow


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


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Literary studies, The essay, Virginia Woolf

The Common Reader second series

December 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series (1935) is a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, the second to be published in her own lifetime. It followed on the success of The Common Reader first series which was published in 1925. Sales of the first volume had surprised both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard working together at their own enterprise, The Hogarth Press.

Common Reader second series

first edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell

The amazing thing is that whilst Woolf was producing all her great novels of the English modernist period, she was also a very productive journalist. This collection includes critical essays, journalism, and book reviews that had previously appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro.


The Common Reader second series – commentary

Following the pattern established in The Common Reader first series the essays are arranged in chronological order by subject. The volume begins with a study of Elizabethan writers and ends with an appreciation of Thomas Hardy – who was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen. This collection also includes the much-quoted essay “How Should One Read a Book?” in which Woolf offers some profound reflections on the relationship between reader and text. In the first instance her advice appears deceptively simple:

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”.

But it turns out that these instincts and this reason are to be based on a very wide reading experience indeed – of novels, biography, history, and poetry. And the experience itself will be multi-layered, for each book must be compared with others of the same kind, and will finally be judged against the best of its kind. And this is not offered in any spirit of elitism – because she fully realises that much of what we consume as readers will be fairly trivial:

The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of … fleeting moments in the lives of man, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish reading, you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder.

At their best these essays combine a high degree of erudition with the enthusiasm of a writer who is a great lover of literature but who also wants her opinions to be read. Her study of John Donne is part biography, part practical analysis and also an explanation of why he is so ‘modern’ after three hundred years. She explains the relationship between the subjects of his poems and the audience or individual patrons for whom he was writing. She also traces his acceptance of contradictions in himself and life in general which makes him appeal to modern sensibilities.

An essay written on the occasion of the death of Thomas Hardy in 1928 is a survey of his entire work as a novelist. It reveals her deep appreciation of his talent as a creator of powerful human dramas, a countryman and self-taught scholar with poetry at his fingertips, Even though Hardy was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s family she is not at all sycophantic in her judgements. She sees flaws in Jude the Obscure (overly pessimistic) and is even critical of his style.

Her article on Robinson Crusoe is not only an appreciation of the novel in the context of a history of the English novel, but also a meditation on fiction and biography. She takes a topic, brings a great deal of literary erudition to bear upon it, but then relates the topic to a much larger cultural context – as well as generating sparkly digressions that show her to be a passionate reader herself.

The range of her interests is quite breathtaking. There are articles on Swift, on Laurence Sterne, Lord Chesterfield, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Gissing, and on George Meredith, who in her own lifetime had sunk from untouchable fame to a writer who nobody read any more. [Today his critical reputation is more or less extinct.]

It is certainly true that the pace and tone of the literary essay was significantly different one hundred years ago when these examples were composed. Writers even as well informed and technically skilful as Woolf were given license to ramble and generalise in a manner that would not generally be permitted today. But in the essay form she demonstrates a profound cultural intelligence to which the occasional flights of fancy are an acceptable and very stylish bonus extra.

© Roy Johnson 2015


The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader second series


Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader second series, London: Mariner Books, 2003, pp.336, ISBN: 0156028166


The Common Reader second series – contents
  • The Strange Elizabethans
  • Donne After Three Centuries
  • “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”
  • “Robinson Crusoe”
  • Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”
  • Swift’s “Journal to Stella”
  • The “Sentimental Journey”
  • Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son
  • Two Parsons
    1. James Woodforde
    2. The Rev. John Skinner
  • Dr. Burney’s Evening Party
  • Jack Mytton
  • De Quincey’s Autobiography
  • Four Figures
    1. Cowper and Lady Austen
    2. Beau Brummell
    3. Mary Wollstonecraft
    4. Dorothy Wordsworth
  • William Hazlitt
  • Geraldine and Jane
  • “Aurora Leigh”
  • The Niece of an Earl
  • George Gissing
  • The Novels of George Meredith
  • “I Am Christina Rossetti”
  • The Novels of Thomas Hardy
  • How Should One Read a Book?

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

The Common Reader first series 1925 — The Common Reader first series

The Common Reader second series 1932 — The Common Reader second series

The Death of the Moth 1942 — The Death of the Moth

The Moment 1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

The Captain's Death Bed 1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

Granite and Rainbow 1958 — Granite and Rainbow


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


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

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf

November 26, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all Woolf’s shorter fiction. She wrote many of these stories as experimental sketches or exercises in which she developed new techniques for prose fiction and the art of story-telling. The majority of the stories were written between 1917 and the early 1930s – a period which also saw the creation of her most famous modernist novels. The series is an on-going compilation and is shown here in alphabetical order. Dates given are for first publication.

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Haunted House   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Simple Melody   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Summing Up   — (1944)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   An Unwritten Novel   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Ancestors   — (1923)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Happiness   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   In the Orchard   — (1923)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Kew Gardens   — (1917)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Moments of Being   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Monday or Tuesday   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Phyllis and Rosamond   — (1906)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Solid Objects   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Sympathy   — (1919)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Evening Party   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Introduction   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Lady in the Looking-Glass   — (1929)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Legacy   — (1940)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Man who Loved his Kind   — (1944)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Mark on the Wall   — (1917)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Mysterious Case of Miss V   — (1906)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The New Dress   — (1927)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Shooting Party   — (1938)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The String Quartet   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Symbol   — (1930s)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Watering Place   — (1941)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Together and Apart   — (1944)


Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo 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.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (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’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US
 

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


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 – 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.

© Roy Johnson 2014


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


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

The Death of the Moth

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Death of the Moth (1942) is the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be published after the success of her earlier collections The Common Reader first series and The Common Reader second series. Early preparations were made by Virginia Woolf herself, and then it appeared one year after her death, edited by her husband Leonard Woolf.

The Death of the Moth

He explains in his introduction that the essays had previously appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman & Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, the Listener, the New Republic, and Lysistrata. He also goes on to point out that Virginia Woolf took immense care with even the shortest and least important of her essays and book reviews – often producing up to eight versions of a text before she was satisfied.

At the point of assembling this collection Leonard Woolf thought that the totality of Virginia’s finished essays and reviews had been located, edited, and published. But subsequent researches and retrievals from newspaper archives were to produce the later collections The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).


The Death of the Moth – critical commentary

The brief essay that gives this volume its title illustrates perfectly her gift for spinning literary gold out of straw. The subject is trivial and mundane – a moth fluttering against a window pane. But she observes it as a philosopher who uses the image to reflect on the most fundamental force of nature – the struggle between life and death.

She also draws out the complexities in apparently simple things – such as the words we use to speak and write. In an essay called ‘Craftsmanship’ – which was built from a radio broadcast for the BBC in a series called ‘Words Fail Me’ – she reflects on the volatility of language and our difficulties in pinning down meaning. The following Youtube illustrated audio clip gives an extract from the broadcast:

In some pieces, such as ‘Evening Over Sussex’ she not only explores the complexities of expressing her appreciation of the countryside but she also weaves into the verbal landscape her reflections on the nature of multiple personalities which construct the individual sensibility making such observations.

Three reviews of Henry James – two memoirs and the letters – almost take on the famous style of her author-subject – the long sentences, baroque syntax, and complex metaphors that his fans so admire and his detractors bewail. She dwells mainly on his relationship with England and his not-uncritical admiration for its traditions, through which she expresses her own reverence for James as a figure representing a bygone age.

Her literary criticism is of a kind that hardly exists any more. In an extended study of E.M. Forster’s novels she is lofty and magisterial, but she evaluates the works using bafflingly abstract metaphors:

there are moments — and his first novel [Where Angels Fear to Tread] provides several instances — when he lays his hand on the prize.

She believes that one of his greatest novels is Howards End – it ‘mark[s] his prime’, yet when she gets round to looking at it in detail exclaims ‘we may wonder in what mood of the moment we can have been prompted to call it a failure … the book as a whole lacks force’.

In ‘The Art of Biography’ she points out that fiction and biography cannot be easily combined because they have different goals – one towards factuality, the other towards invention. As a novelist and biographer herself, she resolves this contradiction by suggesting that biography is a young genre, that it should explore new methods, and that it acts as a modest handmaid to the work of truly imaginative and great artists.

Her reflections on the condition of young English poets in 1931 are cast in the form of a letter to ‘John’: (this is John Lehmann, who worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press). Against his despair that poetry was ‘dead’ she invokes the great English tradition – of Shakespeare, Donne, Crabbe, Hopkins – urges him and his friends to stop looking inward and write about other people, and implores him ‘for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’.

The volume ends with some vivacious polemics – a critique of lectures as a teaching method in the university education system (sixty years ahead of its time); an account of how she was forced to kill the Victorian notion of ‘The Angel in the House’ (the ideal woman) in order to become a professional author; and what might be the best antidotes to the clamour for aggression and war.

These essays are a wonderful reminder of how Woolf managed to successfully combine serious and profoundly new ideas about everyday life (particularly the lives of women) with both the wit and the erudition of someone who was truly steeped in the traditions of English literary culture.

© Roy Johnson 2016


The Death of the Moth – study resources

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Death of the Moth


The Death of the Moth – complete contents
  • The Death of the Moth
  • Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
  • Three Pictures
  • Old Mrs. Grey
  • Street Haunting: A London Adventure
  • Jones and Wilkinson
  • “Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic
  • Madame de Sévigné
  • The Humane Art
  • Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
  • The Rev William Cole
  • The Historian and “The Gibbon”
  • Reflections at Sheffield Place
  • The Man at the Gate
  • Sara Coleridge
  • “Not One of Us”
  • Henry James: 1. Within the Rim
  • Henry James: 2. The Old Order
  • Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James
  • George Moore
  • The Novels of E. M. Forster
  • Middlebrow
  • The Art of Biography
  • Craftsmanship
  • A Letter to a Young Poet
  • Why?
  • Professions for Women
  • Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

The Death of the Moth 1925 — The Common Reader first series

The Death of the Moth 1932 — The Common Reader second series

The Death of the Moth 1942 — The Death of the Moth

The Death of the Moth 1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

The Death of the Moth 1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

The Death of the Moth 1958 — Granite and Rainbow


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


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, The essay, Virginia Woolf

The Evening Party

November 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Evening Party appears to have been written in the early 1920s, around the time of Virginia Woolf’s other experimental short stories. In her introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf Susan Dick points out that the story appeared in the collection of sketches that was given the title Cracked Fiddles, though it is not clear if this was ever published or not.

The Evening Party

Queen Anne’s Gate – Westminster


The Evening Party – critical commentary

This story has similar features to the other early pieces in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence. The setting is clearly a social gathering in central London, with guests arriving in formal evening dress. The principal characters – the narrator and her companion – are imaginatively detached from the event, and their interchanges are interrupted by people wishing to make social ‘introductions’. These features occur in many of the other early stories – from Phyllis and Rosamond to A Summing Up. The implication is that whilst social interaction is superficial and fellow guests are likely to be boring, there is a rich alternative in the inner life of the imagination.

The technical experimentation in the story comes from Woolf’s clever blending of interior monologue with a first person narrative which becomes a variation on the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique.

Ah, but let us wait a little! — The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising in a mound against the sky with trees upon it, is the earth. The flowing silvery clouds look down upon Atlantic waves. The wind blows soft round the corner of the street, lifting my cloak, holding it gently in the air and then letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws.

At first reading it is not clear from whose point of view the story is being narrated, who is being addressed in the use of ‘us’, or where the events are located – on the Atlantic or in a street. In fact Woolf is presenting two ‘locations’ at the same time – one imagined and the other actual.

It was in these experimental fictions that Woolf devised, as Susan Dick observes, “a way to place her narrator within her character’s mind and to present that character’s thoughts and emotions as they occur”. However, it has to be said that her technique of mingling poetic imagery with practical narrative is more convincing in the non-conversational parts of the story than in the verbal ‘exchanges’ that take place between the characters. In a work of this kind it is simply not possible to believe that one character would say to another – “Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s skirt?” – although it also has to be admitted that Woolf did bring this technique into the realms of the credible by the time she wrote The Waves (1931).

But she is successful in expressing via more credible dialogue an early version of her notion of ‘moments of being’. These are the brief and particular moments of time during which individuals can experience a sense of wholeness or completeness, a sense of being in harmony either with themselves or with the world around them, or they might feel that a significant truth is revealed to them, by accident almost, via the events of everyday life. The narrator here addresses her companion:

‘Don’t you remember in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment — I have some mystical belief that all time past and future too, the tears and powdered ashes of generations clotted to a ball; then we were absolute and entire; nothing then was excluded; that was certainty — happiness.

Very characteristically however, Woolf immediately goes on to demolish this mystical vision of ‘completeness’ or ‘knowledge’ in the very next sentence: ‘See what comes of trying to say what one means! Nonsense!’ This is very similar to the way she undercuts her own imaginative inventions in stories such as The Mark on the Wall and An Unwritten Novel.


The Evening Party – study resources

The Evening Party The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Evening Party The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Evening Party The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Evening Party The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Evening Party The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Evening Party


The Evening Party – plot summary

The story begins with an un-named narrator conjouring poetic imagery out of the surroundings and her imagination. The setting appears to be evening in a city, where the narrator and her companion arrive at a party along with other guests.

The two of them exchange fanciful imagery – one composed of visual and the other of literary impressions. They then exchange observations with a professor, first about Shelley’s use of punctuation, then about classic literature. When he leaves, they go on to discuss ‘moments of being’ and the limitations of speech to arrive at an understanding of the world.

The party hostess interrupts them to introduce the narrator to a Mr Nevill, who admires her writing. They discuss the value of dead authors – and Shakespeare in particular, their enthusiasm for whom dissolves into an exchange of fanciful poetic images. This conversation is interrupted by a woman called Helen who introduces her to someone who knew her as a child.

The narrator rejoins her companion, and after exchanging further fragmentary observations about the party and the night, they agree to leave, hand in hand.


Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words


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.


Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Between the ActsBetween 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.
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter FictionThe 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.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction 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


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.

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works


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

The Hogarth Press

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Hogarth Press 1917—1941

The Hogarth Press was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type and print a decent page. What started as an amateur diversion became one of the pillars of European modernism.

The Hogarth PressThe Woolfs have proved endlessly interesting as individuals and as central players in the drama of Bloomsbury. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to their achievement as publishers. But with ten years research behind his endeavour, John Willis brings the remarkable story of their success as publishers to life. You might expect a book of this kind to be not much more than a long descriptive catalogue of publications, but in fact he generates interesting thumbnail sketches of Hogarth’s authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus

He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press, as well as the minute details of its finances which Leonard Woolf left behind as a legacy of his administrative skills and background.

The press is best known for its fiction, but it also ventured into poetry – supported by a £200 a year subsidy from Dorothy Wellesley. But despite attracting many of the brightest young talents of the inter-war years, none of these publications broke even. The whole enterprise was kept afloat by its best-selling stars, who just happened to be the one-time lovers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.

Leonard Woolf is rightly famous for his shrewd commercial judgements and his fanatical bookkeeping, yet the press also took on an amazing range of authors – from an unknown sixteen year old girl (Joan Adeney Easdale) to the ‘working class’ John Hampson (Saturday Night at the Greyhound) and arch modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).

What’s not so well known is that the Hogarth Press published a great deal on politics – from polemical essays on current affairs to substantial works of political and economic philosophy, particularly anti-imperialism and the promotion of internationalism, which was of particular interest to Leonard Woolf. A measure of his astuteness as a businessman was his publication of Mussolini’s article ‘The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism’ in 1933.

The Maurice Dobbs and the Sidney Webbs of this era published books and pamphlets arguing that Soviet communism offered a positive alternative to the nationalism and imperialism of the European powers which had led to the horrors of the First World War.

Their fundamental error, now more easily observed with the benefit of hindsight, is that they took all the data for their analysis directly from the Soviet regime itself, which we now know was based on lies, falsehoods, corruption, and deceit. They were bamboozled, and didn’t check their facts. Few escaped the God that Failed embarrassment – but Leonard Woolf was one of them, and he deserves to be more highly regarded because of it.

It’s interesting to note that many of the same issues which are being debated at the end of the first century of the twenty-first century were alive eighty years ago – educational reforms, anti-Imperialism, international finance, unemployment, and capitalism in crisis.

Willis’s account also features the strained and often difficult relationships which were created when Leonard Woolf took on assistants and partners in the firm – the best known of whom was John Lehmann, who had two periods of tenure. The partnership approach foundered because Leonard insisted on sticking to his independent commercial practises, and in the end he was proved right.

He was also right in his judgement that the English-speaking world was ready for psycho-analysis and the works of Freud. He took the bold step of publishing translations (some by friends, James and Alix Strachey) of the International Psycho-Analytic Library, as well as Freud’s Collected Papers.

This is a fascinating work which embraces literature, poetry, politics, feminism, international affairs, the mechanics of publishing, and a general account of cultural history in UK of the inter-war years – sometimes referred to as ‘the long weekend’.

There are three ideal audiences for this book: fans of Bloomsbury who want to know about one of its most productive enterprises; bibliophiles who are interested in a company which produced fine objects which were culturally significant but still made money; and cultural historians who might wish to ponder the significance of an enterprise which started out as a table-top hobby and became a major national cultural force.

© Roy Johnson 2005

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US


J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41, London: University of Virginia Press, 1992, pp.451, ISBN: 0813913616


More on Leonard Woolf
More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

from hobby to major cultural enterprise

Hogarth Press 1917-1987
The Hogarth Press 1917-1987 was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type, lock it up in chases, and print a decent page. Their first project, Two Stories, was a thirty-one page hand-printed booklet containing a story by each of them – Leonard’s Two Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the Wall. One hundred and fifty copies were printed and bound on their dining table and sold by subscription amongst friends. These are now highly valued collectors’ items. (See the book jacket and a bibilographic description.)

More small books followed, many of them written by their friends. Fortunately for the success of the Press, they just happened to be connected with the most amazingly avant-guard (and yet popular) names of their day. The list of people published by the Hogarth Press is like a role call of cultural modernism: Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot. They even went on to become the official publishers of the works of Sigmund Freud, via their connections with James Strachey – his English translator and brother of their friend Lytton Strachey.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Other covers in the early series were designed by Dora Carrington and Roger Fry. The jacket covers were considered very modern for the period, and they helped to establish a recognisable house style, which contributed to the success of the Press.

Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

There was no formal agreement about policy: they simply published work which they liked or thought was important. They did all the most menial tasks of running a small home-based publishing business themselves. Virginia spent hours wrapping up books in brown paper parcels and tying them up with string for dispatch to booksellers. She even set the text of The Waste Land by hand, using a compositor’s stick.

In 1921 the Press was equipped with more sophisticated printing equipment and moved to new premises in Tavistock Square. It also began to publish translations of works of Russian literature by writers such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Checkhov, and Gorky.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Virginia Woolf is now well known for her love-affair with fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. What is not so well-known is that Sackville-West’s work, such as her long poem The Land (1926) and her novel All Passion Spent (1931) was also published by the Hogarth Press. In fact it sold far more copies than Woolf’s work at the same time. She was a best-selling writer in every sense of the term, making money for the Press and handsome royalties for herself. It’s to her credit that even when wooed by other publishers promising her larger advances, she stayed loyal to the firm. The Land was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1926, which added to the firm’s prestige.

Leonard Woolf kept the accounts for all commercial activity with the same rigour and the attention to detail that he had learned from his days as a colonial administrator. He made it a policy to answer every letter he received the same day as it landed on his desk. Each penny that went in or out of Hogarth Press was noted by him with anal-retentive exactitude – though as one of his many assistants records, this also reveals something of his dual nature:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987As their enterprise became more successful and the volume of business grew, they felt they needed more help. A succession of younger men were employed to help run the Press – many of them aspirant young writers themselves. Amongst them was Richard Kennedy, a sixteen year old boy, who recorded his very amusing memories of the experience in A Boy at the Hogarth Press. Others included Ralph Partridge, George Rylands, Angus Davidson and John Lehmann.

John Lehmann was the longest lasting and the most serious member of the firm, He was the brother of actress Beatrix Lehmann and novelist Rosamund Lehmann, and he had two spells of employment. He worked first as an apprentice manager from 1931 to 1932. Then in 1938 when Virginia Woolf chose to give up the practical drudgery of packing and typesetting, he bought out her share and returned as part-owner and general manager.

He had ideas to transform the Hogarth Press from a cottage industry into a fully-fledged modern publishing business, and he proposed that they should raise share capital and employ publicists and agents. But his ambitions were antithetical to all Leonard’s principles of self-reliance, independence, and control. Leonard argued – quite rightly as it turned out – that the strength of the Press was its independence and its policy of working with minimum overheads and outlay. He stuck to his guns, and was proved right in the end. Lehmann describes the conflict of views from his point of view in Thrown to the Woolfs, whilst Leonard gives his version of events (complete with balance sheets) in his magnificent Autobiography.

In 1939 the Press moved to Mecklenburgh Square, but it was bombed out in September 1940 during the first air raids on London. A temporary refuge was found with its printers, the Garden City Press, in Letchworth.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Curiously enough, as John Lehmann records in his account of these years, these disasters proved to be a benefit to the press. Its editorial offices and stock rooms were in the same building as its printers, and both were a long way away from London, where other publishers were suffering losses to their inventory as a result of air raids during the war. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, sales rose, because of general shortages: “Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.”

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between Lehmann and Leonard Woolf grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Disagreements rumbled on until after the war had ended. When the final split between them came about in 1946, Leonard solved the financial problem of raising £3,000 to keep the company afloat by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. The Hogarth Press became a limited company within Chatto & Windus, on the strict understanding that Leonard Woolf had a controlling decision on what the Hogarth Press published.

Ian Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who had illustrated some Hogarth titles. She lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so they became business partners as well as sharing a wife. The slightly bizarre nature of this relationship is recorded in their collected Love Letters.

In the period after 1946, the most important books published by the Press were the multi-volume editions of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and Letters, the twenty-four volume set of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1953-1974), as well as Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography. Following Leonard’s death in 1969, ownership of the Press was transferred to Random House UK in 1987 when it bought out Chatto & Windus.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


Bloomsbury Group – web links

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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

Bloomsbury Group web links 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 Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

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


More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature


Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf

The Hours

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the film of a novel about a book

When it first appeared, Stephen Daldry’s film of Michael Cunningham’s best-selling novel was subject to a number of niggling criticisms which made me apprehensive when I sat down to watch it. But I needn’t have worried. Every doubt was completely swept away by the overwhelming visual and emotional power of the film. For those who don’t know, The Hours is inspired by Cunningham’s deep appreciation of Virginia Woolf, and the film itself is split into three apparently unconnected stories.

Virginia Woolf The HoursThe first of these is a fictionalised account of Virginia Woolf’s daily life working alongside her husband Leonard as she writes Mrs Dalloway, the story of a society hostess who is preparing to throw a party. We see her erratic behaviour and his patient attempts to deal with it; her addiction to cigarettes; a good account of her creativity; and eventually her suicide when she fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the river Ouse.

This narrative is intercut with the two others, the first of which is a John Cheever-like study of family life in a prosperous middle-class Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s. At the outset the only apparent connection is that the wife Laura Brown – superbly acted by Julianne Moore – is reading a copy of Mrs Dalloway. She bakes a cake for her husband’s birthday and plans his party.

However, it is made quite clear to us that she is deeply unhappy, and when she leaves her young son with a babysitter and checks into a hotel with a bottle of sleeping pills, it is seems she is going to commit suicide. But at the last minute she changes her mind. However, that’s not the end of the story.

In the third narrative, the connections are more obvious. The setting is contemporary New York, where an arty lesbian hostess called Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) is arranging a party. This is to celebrate the successful publication of a book of poems by her close friend and ex-lover Richard who is dying of AIDS. He cannot enjoy the prospect of celebration because he knows what life has in store for him.

Clarissa goes to try to persuade him to come to the party, but he rejects her kindness, and as he starts hovering around the open window of his skyscraper apartment, readers of Mrs Dalloway know what is likely to follow.

These are just some of the many thematic links between the three narratives. Each one has its own tone, but they hang together beautifully, and the climax of the film is brought about by an amazing blending of all three into one.

As a drama it is wonderfully constructed, and as a film beautifully photographed. Despite the reservations of some critics, I thought the acting superb. Nicole Kidman generates a very convincing portrait of the nervy, clever bluestocking Woolf, and I was glad to see that there was little attempt to glamourise her.

Julianne Moore simply radiates the amazing tension which exists between her outer serenity and inner turmoil. Meryl Streep could be accused of over-egging her role as Clarissa, but not enough to knock the film off track. Ed Harris is very good as an anguished Richard, and there is a unusually persuasive portrait of Lara’s young son by Jack Rovello which will tug at your heart strings.

The film quite rightly gathered a whole swathe of awards; screenplay is by David Hare; and the accompanying music is by Philip Glass.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Buy the DVD at Amazon UK

Buy the DVD at Amazon US


Stephen Daldry, The Hours, 2003


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


Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Literary studies, Mrs Dalloway, The Hours, Virginia Woolf

The Introduction

October 25, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, synopsis, and study resources

The Introduction is mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s workbook ‘Notes for Stories’ in an entry for 14 March 1925. The story never appeared during her own lifetime, and was first published in the Sunday Times Magazine for 18 March 1973. This coincided with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London the same year.

The Introduction

London – Westminster


The Introduction – story synopsis

Lily Everit is at her first adult party in Westminster, London given by Clarissa Dalloway. She is young and socially rather insecure. Earlier in the day she has received a first rate grade from her professor for an essay on Swift – something she values more than the efforts made by her family to make her look smart for the party. She thinks of her life in literary terms – the essay as ‘fact’ and socialising as ‘fiction’. But on arriving at the party she feels that the confidence arising from this small personal triumph will not be sufficient to meet the demands that society makes of her.

Mrs Dalloway introduces her to Bob Brinsley, because she knows that he too likes poetry. But Lily feels this social introduction as a tremendous emotional challenge, largely because of the social expectations for her to perform and behave as a woman in a world which has been constructed by men. She feels at ease in the world of nature, but inadequate to confront ‘civilization’ which she sees in terms of imposing buildings, social institutions, and modern technology.

Mrs Dalloway is meanwhile touched by the spectacle of the two young people she has introduced to each other. It reminds her of meeting her own husband Richard for the first time.

Lily tries not to be overawed by the introduction, but her efforts are dashed when Brinsley casually kills a fly whilst talking to her. She sees him as the embodiment of the man-made ‘civilization’ which seems to have no room for tender feelings and offers her no comfort in her sense of insecurity.


Principal characters
Lily Everit a young woman, inexperienced and clever
Mrs Dalloway a society hostess
Bob Brinsley a young man

Study resources

The Introduction The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Introduction The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Introduction The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Introduction The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Introduction Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

The Introduction Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

The Introduction Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Introduction The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Introduction The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Introduction The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Introduction


The Introduction – commentary

This is one of a number of stories Virginia Woolf wrote featuring guests at Mrs Dalloway’s party and the social chasms which exist between people who are superficially polite to each other. Others in the series include Ancestors, Happiness, Together and Apart, and The New Dress.

Lily is well-educated and talented, but she is inexperienced socially and feels threatened by the expectations society is making of her. She is not unlike the two young women in Phyllis and Rosamond who are hovering on the brink of maturity, but who see the adult world as a threatening.

The main point of interest in this sketch is that the point of view switches from Lily to Mrs Dalloway and back again to Lily – illustrating how the two of them view the same event in a completely different way.

Lily enters the adult world of the older society hostess full of apprehension, and overawed by what she sees as its expectations of her. Mrs Dalloway acts sensitively as the sophisticated hostess, and introduces her young guest to someone she knows shares Lily’s interest in poetry. The sight of the two young people together arouses in Mrs Dalloway a warm and sentimental memory of her own younger days when she first met her husband. But we learn as the point of view switches back to Lily that the encounter is anything but pleasant for her, as she recoils in disgust when Brinsley kills a fly whilst talking to her.

Lily sees Brinsley as the living embodiment of the male-engineered world that she perceives in terms of tall buildings – ‘the towers of Westminster’ – the civilized society she is being invited to be part of, and a way of life which earlier she had felt like a soft force falling benignly from the skies:

he made her think of the towers and civilization with horror, and the yoke that had fallen from the skies onto her neck crushed her

She leaves the party in a state of disenchantment, looking as another guest observes ‘as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders’.


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 The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

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

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (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’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

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


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.

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works


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

The Lady in the Looking-Glass

September 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Lady in the Looking-Glass was first published in the American monthly Harper’s Magazine in December 1929. The story was inspired by a visit Woolf made to Ethel Sands in Normandy. She noted in her diary for 20 September 1927:

How many little stories come into my head! For instance, Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant separate scenes. She did not open her letters.

The Lady in the Looking Glass

Virginia Woolf’s old house in Sussex


The Lady in the Looking-Glass – critical commentary

This is one variation of a story that Virginia Woolf wrote many times over – the imaginative musings of a narrator speculating upon the life of someone else – only to have the picture of the imagined life shattered by the revelation of a truth quite different. The same thing happens in her earliest experimental short story The Mark on the Wall (1917) and in An Unwritten Novel (1920) .

In one sense the story is a form of making fun of invention and imagination – a satire of her own occupation as a creator of fiction. And yet at the same time it’s also a superb demonstration of Woolf’s literary skills and her ability to create fiction out of seemingly nothing – in this case someone sitting alone in an empty room.

The speculation about the imagined personality however is not entirely wasted – for it forms a sort of amateur philosophy of ‘essences’ or ‘being’. It fictionalises an attempt to get below the surfaces of appearances, to dig out something more profound or important. This was one of Virginia Woolf’s important contributions to characterisation as a modernist phenomenon.

The story is also a dramatisation of the creative mind at work, as the narrator weaves together ideas, images, and metaphors. In that sense the subject of the story is not so much Isabella Tyson, the owner of the house, but the narrator, whose imagination we are being invited to follow.


The Lady in the Looking Glass – study resources

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Lady in the Looking-Glass Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

The Lady in the Looking-Glass Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking-Glass Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Lady in the Looking-Glass The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking Glass


The Lady in the Looking-Glass – story synopsis

Sitting in the drawing room of a house in the country, an un-named narrator describes scenes outside the house that can be seen reflected in a mirror in the hall. The play of light and flicker of shadows in the room is evoked as the movement of small creatures, and the garden outside is paradoxically static as reflected in the mirror.

Isabella Tyson, the owner of the house, has gone into the garden to gather flowers. The narrator speculates which type of flowers will best describe her, and realises that even after knowing her for many years such comparisons are meaningless because they do not establish a reliable ‘truth’ about a person.

Isabella is a rich spinster who has travelled extensively and furnished her house with beautiful objects from her travels. The narrator speculates that these objects could yield up valuable information about the richness of her life.

Suddenly the view in the mirror is changed dramatically when the postman delivers a number of letters onto the hall table. The letters are seen like marble tablets establishing a new visual significance, and the narrator thinks their contents might disclose further revelations about Isabella’s character.

The narrator feels an urgent need to uncover hitherto unknown information about her hostess. She pictures her in the lower garden dressed in her expensive and fashionable clothes. Isabella is rich, successful, distinguished – and the narrator wants to know the contents of her hidden depths.

The narrator tries to imagine what the nature of Isabella’s thoughts must be, and conjectures that they will be like the drawing room – full of shadows and light. And then Isabella herself becomes visible in the mirror, returning from the garden. The narrator then has a new vision of the truth’ about Isabella. She isn’t thinking wonderful thoughts at all; she has no friends; and the letters are all bills – which Isabella doesn’t even bother to open.


In the Orchard

Virginia Woolf – by Vanessa Bell


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

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo 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.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (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’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

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


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.

© Roy Johnson 2013


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works


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

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