Virginia Woolf

General Orientation
Publications by & About VW
• Amazon search on VW as author: 174 hits (audio,
different editions)
• Amazon search on VW as subject: 382 hits,
including about a dozen recent biographies (but this
mixes Edward Albee play and movie, which are not about Woolf at all,
though this is the most powerful association with Woolf for many
people)

• Salmon Library search on VW as subject: 113 hits

(some of them e-books).
 Woolf’s Opus
• 15 books published in her lifetime (10 of
them novels)
• Dozens (maybe hundreds) of book reviews
and essays
• The earliest modern feminist criticism, A
Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas
• 6 volumes of letters, 5 volumes of diaries
(posthumously pub. in the 1970s-80s)
 Woolf Societies
• International Virginia Woolf Society
publishes a Miscellany (since 1973) and
Woolf Studies Annual (since 1995), which
collects papers from the Woolf conference
(now in its 14th year)
• Vwoolf listserv – over 600 subscribers
• France and Japan have their own Woolf
societies
 Woolf on Film
• Movies have been made of
– To the Lighthouse (1983)
– Orlando (1992)
– Mrs. Dalloway (1997 with Vanessa Redgrave)
• Several plays are based on Woolf’s work and/or
her life
– Vita and Virginia
– A Room of One’s Own (Eileen Atkins)
(Note: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is not about VW.)
 Woolf Imitators
• Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998)
was inspired by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which it
imitates in style and structure.
• Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway (1999) uses the
characters from Woolf’s novel and follows a day
in the life of Richard Dalloway two years later.
Lippincott imitates Woolf’s style.
• Numerous authors have copied the title or the
informal structure of AROO (see,e.g., Domna
Stanton, The Female Autograph)
 Woolf and The Hours
• The Hours is now a major motion picture that
won the Golden Globe Best Picture and Best
Actress award for Nicole Kidman as Woolf
(Kidman also won the Oscar).
• HBJ has reissued all of Woolf’s books, and Mrs.
Dalloway sales are way up. (The summer the movie came out,
MD ranked #255 in amazon.com sales vs. #355 for The Hours. The following
summer, both had slipped way down, but MD was still way ahead: #2727 vs.
#7880 for The Hours.)
• The Vwoolf list thread on Cunningham and The
Hours went on at great length.
 Focus of Course
• Woolf and Place – especially her emphasis on
setting in the three novels studied, and how place
informs these works.
• Woolf and Bloomsbury – especially aesthetic
ideas about modernism that this group fostered
• Woolf and Biography – the autobiographical
element in her work makes it both “Modern” and
“feminist.”
 Woolf and Bloomsbury
• Anti-traditional, breaking with the past – focus on
shedding the Victorian culture in which they were
raised.
• Artistic experimentation – Woolf’s experiments
with narrative begin with Jacob’s Room (1922,
same year as Ulysses), and are evident in all of her
work. Compare these to the Bloomsbury
appreciation for post-impressionist art and to
Vanessa Bell’s paintings (at Charleston)
 The Bloomsbury Group
• The name given to a group of friends who lived in the
Bloomsbury district of central London and became
associated with an artistic and intellectual aesthetic.
• Woolf describes its origins in “Old Bloomsbury,”
associating it with the move from her family home in staid
Hyde Park Gate to 62 Gordon Square, a house her sister
Vanessa Bell found for the four Stephen children (all in
their early 20s) , after their father died in 1904. Her older
brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends made the house a
center of lively conversation about the arts, politics, even
economics. (You will hear more about these people in a
student presentation.)
 Woolf & Biographical Criticism
• People become wrapped up in Woolf’s life and times, the
interesting people she knew, especially the Bloomsbury
Group
• Her published diaries and letters, plus the fact that
practically everybody who knew her wrote memoirs, give
unusual access to Woolf’s thoughts and ideas
• All of her books are to some degree autobiographical, and
she was interested in biography as a genre, writing a
formal biography of her friend Roger Frye, the art critic
who invented the term “post-impressionism” and brought
the first exhibit of the work of Cezanne, Picasso, Manet,
and others to London in 1910.
 Biographical Studies
 It is rare to read an article written since 1980 that
does not refer to the diaries or letters (published in
the 1970s), spurred by the abbreviated Writer’s
Diary (1953 UK, edited by Leonard Woolf).
 This approach has had some negative effects,
especially in emphasizing her life more than her
art, particularly as:
 a madwoman who committed suicide
 an incest survivor
 a “case,” conflating the woman and her writing (see
Rachel Bowlby 13)
 Auto/Biography in Novels
• Mrs. Dalloway – topic of mental illness and
suicide draw on her own experience; details of
London streets draw on her lifetime in that city
• To the Lighthouse – her most autobiographical
novel; based on her own family, especially her
parents.
• Orlando – a pseudo-biography using facts from
the ancestry of her friend Vita Sackville-West
(including photographs).