The March of Headlines

2018 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Diary Entry ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Distant Relative

Virginia Woolf's “curious props”—including her diary and others’ diaries—ably support her across 1931. She shows, in fact, such sure life command that she mocks the outer political scene in September of 1931. Meanwhile, she continues to add newspaper headlines to her 1930–1931 diary, and her inner wars persist. This chapter shows how Woolf used her 1930–1931 diary as a practice field for The Waves. Other diaries also aid her. In December 1930, she makes double use of The Journal of a Somerset Rector, with its tale of a country suicide. First, she summarizes John Skinner's Journal in her diary to test her ability to write and then she revises the diary entry for her Second Common Reader essay “The Rev. John Skinner” (1932). She finds James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson further proof of life deathless in a diary and pairs him with John Skinner in the Second Common Reader. In May 1931, The Private Diaries of Princess Daisy of Pless—Vita Sackville-West's distant relative—offers Woolf rich matter for future works: for Flush, The Years, and Three Guineas.

Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Church ◽  
Critical Interest ◽  
English Heritage

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

The Loose-Leaf Diary

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own

In 1927, Woolf embarks on a two-and-a-half-year experiment with a loose-leaf diary, meant to catch more stray or “loose” thoughts. Her 1927 loose-leaf diary seems to plunge her into her creative unconscious. An off-handed air emerges from this diary, which seems a holding pond spontaneously spouting scenes. Orlando comes to her in this diary and the play-poem The Waves. The loose-leaf diary both invites unfettered fancy and serves as a site to preserve, and even restrain, Woolf’s “gushing mind” as she enjoys the “ardour and lust of creation.” Touchingly, at this time when Woolf is awash in spontaneous invention, she reads in August 1927 the first published version of Katherine Mansfield’s Journal. She could hardly fail to note there Mansfield’s greater struggle and self-doubt. Yet Woolf finds Mansfield's Journal most suggestive. Mansfield endorses androgyny there; she describes an imaginary child who changes gender. Journal passages also resonate uncannily with Woolf’s own growing ideas for The Waves, and Mansfield offers the concept of “derision” which Woolf will take for Three Guineas. More than anything, however, Mansfield’s 1927 Journal presents Woolf with ideas and a cautionary life story for A Room of One’s Own.

“Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other”

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Elsa Högberg
Keyword(s):  
Specific Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Unresolved Question ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Primary Responsibility ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Jacob's Room

In this chapter, Högberg traces a specific form of non-violent ethics across Woolf’s interwar and WWII writings, considering its political potential and limits. Focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of ‘The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other’(Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’, 1984) alongside Judith Butler’s attempts to politicise his ethics of precariousness, this chapter shows how Woolf foregrounds vulnerability as an ethical injunction against violence. Arguing that Woolf’s work prompts a still unresolved question as to whether a pacifist ethics can be politically productive, Högberg reads Woolf’s pacifism as rooted in a concept of peace as proximity: the proximity of the ethical encounter, which prompts awakeness to the other’s vulnerability. The chapter ranges from Woolf’s Levinasian elevation, in Three Guineas, of a primary responsibility to Antigone’s Law of love, peace and proximity over the laws of the sovereign state to her literary articulations of an alternatively Levinasian and Butlerian ethics of peace and precariousness in Jacob’s Room, The Waves and Between the Acts. Voiced through poetic tropes of naked defencelessness and extra-linguistic, primal cries, Woolf’s pacifist ethics floods the boundaries defining Europe in a relocation of its ‘Greek’ origins, and in defiance against its political constructions of the other’s precarious face as a threat, which continue to justify the scandalous closing of European borders to ‘millions of bodies’ made vulnerable by war.

Renewed Diary Experiment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
General Strike

Woolf expands her 1926 diary. In February, she begins “a new convention”: starting each entry on a new page, her “habit in writing serious literature.” In May, she reaches outward toward public history with a diary of the General Strike. She then turns inward for eleven titled “State of Mind” probes: probes of the boundaries between sense, thought, and art. In October, she imagines “an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.” The diaries she reads propel her toward this place. Across the year Woolf returns often to Beatrice Webb’s memoir My Apprenticeship, woven around diary extracts. These extracts supply notions for To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Flush, and Three Guineas—and especially for A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women.” In September, Woolf reviews the Journals of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. His questing journals encourage Woolf’s search for “the mystical side of this solitude,” she writes, or what Webb calls the great Unknown. Soon after, Woolf reviews the Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals. Haydon’s Journals offer her a memorable moment for To the Lighthouse and matter for A Room of One’s Own—and more.

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Waves

This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf’s upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf’s friends and associates. It shows that Woolf’s awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

Thinking Back through Virginia Woolf: Woolf as Portal in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine W. Hollis
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Waves

“I am not Virginia Woolf,” a character exclaims in Lidia Yuknavitch’s award-winning novel The Small Backs of Children (2015). But who among us is? If we are women writers, particularly experimental women writers, Virginia Woolf’s legacy is profound and ongoing. Thus Yuknavitch’s main character, a woman writer troubled with a traumatic past, expresses her debt to Woolf with a bit of brash ambivalence: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl” (7). That these are the first words this character speaks in Small Backs belies her debt to Woolf’s influence. Indeed, Lidia Yuknavitch – a contemporary American writer and academic – has elsewhere spoken of Woolf as the “portal” through which Yuknavitch approaches her own writing. In this paper, I want to demonstrate the multiple and compelling ways in which Yukavitch’s most recent novel is indebted to the legacy of Virginia Woolf. The Small Backs of Children is an experimental, sometimes challenging novel that defies generic conventions. As in Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Small Backs of Children takes as its subject the impact of war and violence on the bodies of women and girls. As in Woolf’s The Waves, each character takes turns recounting their part of the narrative, while their multiple voices together create a collective consciousness greater than any single perspective. Further, as in Woolf’s theory of biography, Yuknavitch mixes the “granite and rainbow” of fact and fiction to craft a story that is a groundbreaking mixture of the two. Indeed, in the example of The Small Backs of Children, we see a compelling example of a 21st century woman writer thinking back through Virginia Woolf.

The War Within

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The Waves

Chapter 1 begins with a swift summary of fascism's rise in both England and Germany from 1929 to 1931: or what I call “the war without.” It then notes Woolf's response, including her scrapbooks, which collected articles on tyranny and war. As Woolf seeks out a bound diary book in June 1929 and embarks on her third and final diary stage, her mind also turns inward to the lonely artistic battle she foresees with The Waves. Both her diary and that novel reveal what she will further argue in Three Guineas: that the private and the public are inseparably linked. In October of 1929, Woolf publishes a tribute to “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals,” a vivid illustration of her ability to choose diaries and to find in them just what she needs to assist her public prose.

The Waves

1986 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Warner
Keyword(s):  
The Waves

How physics is rocked by the waves of history

Nature ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 580 (7802) ◽  
pp. 183-184
Author(s):  
Sabine Hossenfelder
Keyword(s):  
The Waves
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