Virginia Woolf

[Roman Clodia]

Daisy & Woolf looks interesting, thanks - maybe some light LOTE vibes going on, though it sounds like the tone is less wacky?

[Mike]

Sid wrote: "Mike wrote: "I have just read To the Lighthouse. "

Terrific review, Mike. I'm trying to brace myself to read this - I haven't got on at all well with the Woolf I've read - and you've ..."

Thanks Sid. I was hesitant about tackling it and it does need to be read in the right frame of mind, but in the end I found it really memorable. Dive in!

[Alwynne]

Something for Woolf fans:

https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress...

[Roman Clodia]

I just came across these two volumes from Vintage:

Selected Diaries
Selected Letters

They don't seem to be new but I'd never seen them before so worth sharing here: I need them for my Woolf library!

[Alwynne]

Roman Clodia wrote: "I just came across these two volumes from Vintage:

Selected Diaries
Selected Letters

They don't seem to be new but I'd never seen them before so worth sharing her..."

I really liked the entries in Selected Diaries, have the letters too but only dipped in and out.

[Roman Clodia]

I have now managed to collect all five old volumes of the diaries second hand but fancy this selection too and the letters for the matching spines!

I've only read some of the letters to Vita: Woolf just has such a distinctive, compelling way of thinking and expressing herself. Thanks for confirming the diary selections have been well done, Alwynne.

[Alwynne]

I gave up on Charlie Porter's What Artists Wear because I found his framing of the material infuriating but may still be worth looking out for his upcoming Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion just because it's Bloomsbury and clothes, although wonder how he'll organise it, for me the fashions I associate with Bloomsbury are in the earlier, Liberty-related phase which I love, although I know the style wouldn't even vaguely suit me.

Also notice GR have two entries for this, one with the cover image but no description, the other with the description but no cover image! But the mention of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings did remind me that I sprung for some posh scarlet tights in a Bloomsbury/Women in Love inspired moment of madness, but never actually wore them!

[Roman Clodia]

Ooh, that sounds fab on Bloomsbury and fashion. And I love the idea of scarlet tights - wasn't there an old cover of Women in Love that showed Gudrun wearing something like that? It's a fuzzy memory so I may be imaging it. And I only recently learned that Lawrence partly used Katherine Mansfield as a model for Gudrun - I could imagine her in red tights!

[Alwynne]

Came across this too, due out next March, so worth keeping an eye out for it on Netgalley, fits with Woolf but also with our current buddy read, Harriet Baker's Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann

[Roman Clodia]

Looks fab! I've read a handful of Lehmann's books but know hardly anything about her life.

[Alwynne]

Roman Clodia wrote: "Looks fab! I've read a handful of Lehmann's books but know hardly anything about her life."

It sounds promising, Harriet Baker's an academic who's doing a doctorate that's in this area, but the book is aimed a more general audience and building on the popularity of things like Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars. I'm hoping that it will be closer to Lara Feigel's early work than Wade's though. Should at least be readable there was a bidding war for the rights.

[Susan]

I recently came across this: Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel

The first book in the ‘Biography of a novel’ series offers a compelling account of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece.

The fourth and best-known of Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is a modernist masterpiece that has remained popular since its publication in 1925. Its dual narratives follow a day in the life of wealthy housewife Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, capturing their inner worlds with a vividness that has rarely been equalled.

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel’s writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf’s process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel’s remarkable legacy to the present day.

Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted her novel ‘to give life & death, sanity & insanity… to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.’ Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel reveals how she achieved this ambition, creating a book that will be read by generations to come.

Looks great to accompany a re-read of the novel.

[Susan]

Also, was booking tickets to the Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate and came across this at Tate Britain:

Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant
12 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
Explore the vivid world of the Bloomsbury Group’s famous artistic duo

This major exhibition features the work of two of the most celebrated British artists of the twentieth century. Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant delves into the extraordinary relationship between the artists, while tracing their remarkable creative partnership that spanned more than 50 years. The exhibition explores Bell and Grant’s legacy as core members of the famed Bloomsbury Group. The group’s commitment to living lives centred around freedom and radical experimentation had a significant influence on the course of art, literature, and societal thought in Britain.

The exhibition features over 250 works, including vivid portraits, still lives, landscape paintings, decorative works on furniture, ceramics, textiles, and much more. A once-in-a-lifetime restaging of Duncan Grant’s studio, relocated for the exhibition from their Sussex home, Charleston, is an unmissable highlight.

As well as emphasising Bell and Grant’s shared creative endeavours, visitors will see how the artists also forged their own paths. This joyful exhibition celebrates their extraordinary artistic partnership, and the enduring impact these two remarkable artists had on British Art.

Supported by Tate Members. This exhibition is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with Charleston.

Thought someone here might be interested.

[Roman Clodia]

Ooh, love the Mrs Dalloway 'biography' and the Tate exhibition - I'll definitely see that.

2025 is the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway in 1925 and, to celebrate that book, I'm planning a one-day course exploring the Mrs Dalloway short stories collected in Mrs Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence for this autumn - just waiting for it to be signed off.

One angle we'll be exploring is the representation of fashion and dress in Clarissa Dalloway's world and what it is made to mean: what Woolf called 'a party consciousness,,, a frock consciousness' in her diary - fun!

[Susan]

Sounds fantastic, RC. I hadn't seen the exhibition advertised, just came across it by chance.

[Susan]

https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/

The latest episode of The Secret Life of Books podcast is about Mrs Dalloway, celebrating 100 years in 2025. I loved Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel which I read after re-reading the novel.

We need more Virginia Woolf in our lives. She fascinates me.

[Roman Clodia]

Susan wrote: "We need more Virginia Woolf in our lives. She fascinates me."

I'm always up for talking Woolf or Bloomsbury more broadly, as you know.

I'm currently reading a selection of her letters (Selected Letters) which is absolutely fantastic - she really is one of the best letter writers I've read, and it's lovely to see her in all her moods: gossipy, mischievous, sad, empathetic, sharp. I've got her diaries to read too which will be interesting as she doesn't talk much about her work or depression/breakdowns in the letters.

[Susan]

Ooh, I can see her diaries are now available on kindle. That may be my bedtime reading next year. I love a diary.

I have my eye on The Benson Diary: I: 1885-1906; II: 1907-1925 which is definitely on my TBR list

[Susan]

The Secret Life of Books are planning to look at 4 of Woolf's novels:
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighthouse, Orlando and a Room of One's Own, to name only a few of her extraordinary achievements.

To celebrate Mrs. Dalloway's centenary, Virginia Woolf's middle-aged burst of creative brilliance, and to tell the story of the other members of the Bloomsbury circle around her, we take a deep dive into Woolf and her work. Virginia Stephen was born in Victorian England to a famously literary and artistic family: both parents were fixtures in high end London intellectual society. But her childhood was turbulent as much it was illuminated by brilliance all around her. The young Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were sexually and emotionally abused as children and young teenagers, and these early experiences contributed to Woolf's battle with mental illness, probably bipolar disorder. But her life was also filled with joy, including the joy of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.

One of many wonderful things about Woolf is that although she died relatively young she left a huge amount of writing behind her. 9 novels, 25 years of diaries, letters, lectures, essays and journalism. Join us for an extraordinary 20thC story of literary glamor and dazzling success, alongside terrible grief, suffering and trauma. We’ll meet many of the biggest names in Modernism, we’ll encounter some of the century’s most horrifying events, and one of fiction's greatest parties.

Great podcast and highly recommend.

[Roman Clodia]

I always want to listen to podcasts but they're a bit like TV to me and I tend to get bored...

I'm still planning on reading the last Woolf novels that I haven't read yet: The Years and Between the Acts.

I also want to read a biography of Vanessa because I'm interested in Bloomsbury fashion and Vanessa designed material for the Omega workshops. Also I have a bit of a crush on Duncan Grant!

I've dipped into the diaries and they are wonderful - she's such a natural writer.

[Susan]

Ah, then the Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell exhibition is for you then. I read a joint biography of Virginia and Vanessa which was very interesting. I will undoubtedly be reading the diaries.

I love a podcast. Tend to listen while doing paperwork and have become a little addicted to many of them. I am not a visual person, so not so keen on TV, but podcasts work for me when I can't concentrate on an audible book.

[Nigeyb]

Susan wrote:



"....podcasts work for me when I can't concentrate on an audible book"

Me too

Listen to loads

[Roman Clodia]

I think it's the lack of control over the information that's being imparted that I don't like - if they're talking about something boring it's harder to skim like you can in books.

[G]

I think that is what I dislike about them as well.

[Alwynne]

Not sure if this has come up already so just in case:

‘A cottage of one’s own’: Newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories to be published
A chance discovery at a country house revealed the three funny – sometimes surreal – interlinked tales, written almost a decade before Woolf’s first book was published

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

[Roman Clodia]

I know, this is exciting!

[Nigeyb]

That is absolutely extraordinary


What a moment for Urmila Seshagiri - can you imagine?

And ending up in a London junk shop

You couldn't make it up


The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories

Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first time

A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.



Beautiful cover too...

[Roman Clodia]

I know - every academic 's dream!

[Alwynne]

Nigeyb wrote: "That is absolutely extraordinary


What a moment for Urmila Seshagiri - can you imagine?

And ending up in a London junk shop

You couldn't make it up


[book:The Life of Violet: Three Early Storie..."

It is a really great cover, looks like a Liberty's design from the early 1900s - or at least inspired by one.