Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Aparecida de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Victoria Ocampo

This paper aims at investigating how Woolf influenced Ocampo’s literary production; it might be through Ocampo’s Testemonies or in her journal Sur. It also our aim to analyse how Ocampo divulged Virginia Woolf’s writings in all Spanish-speaking countries through translations, lectures, publications and especially through her passion in talking about Woolf. Through Ocampo’s gaze, Woolf’s image and writing was understood in a different way, which goes beyond the European’s boundaries. This relationship has contributed tremendously for both of them, as women writers and intellectuals of their time. Ocampo’s progress as a writer had a dramatic impact after meeting Woolf. Above all, Ocampo contributed immensely for spreading Woolf’s writings.

Dialogues between South America and Europe: Victoria Ocampo Channels Virginia Woolf

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Cristina Carluccio
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
South America ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Interpersonal Distance ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Victoria Ocampo ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Women’S Writing

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo’s exchanges within a modernist transnational framework shaped by alternative forms of female writing and dissemination. Rather than focusing on any cultural asymmetry between the English writer Woolf and the Argentinian author Ocampo, the analysis highlights the two women’s similar concerns and ideals regarding the female universe, and more specifically women writers. Their shared outlook constituted a powerful empathetic catalyst that allowed them to surpass any cultural and interpersonal distance and thus to satisfy their intellectual hunger. The presence of loans and inheritances – both imaginary and real – in Woolf and Ocampo’s interaction is analysed partly in the light of the global novel and located on a borderless spectrum of women’s writing. More specifically, Ocampo’s inter-textual dialogues with Woolf – such as those in her ‘Carta a Virginia Woolf’ (1934), which includes references to A Room of One’s Own (1929) – are read as a typically female form of dissemination, partly aimed at interrupting an otherwise male monologue. The two women’s face-to-face encounters – and recollections of them – are also pondered. Special attention is paid to their first meeting, when Woolf and Ocampo sealed a female intellectual pact against fascism as an overt manifestation of male tyranny.

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
African Women ◽  
East African ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The People ◽  
African Women Writers ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Isak Dinesen

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.

Marguerite de Navarre

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Randall
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Marguerite De Navarre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
To Come ◽  
Court Life

The highly cultured, erudite, and learned Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) was the daughter of Charles d’Angoulême and Louise de Savoie, and the sister of the Renaissance king François I. Marguerite’s mother had insisted on a solid humanist education for her; like her brother, Marguerite was proficient in Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, and Italian, and read philosophy and theology. She was an avid reader whose own literary production was to be much influenced by figures such as Plato, Plutarch, and Boccaccio. Married to the unsatisfying, unintelligent Charles, duc d’Alençon, Marguerite began to come into her own upon her brother’s ascension to the throne in 1515. Indeed, when François I (whom she adored) was taken prisoner in Italy, Marguerite was instrumental in securing his eventual release. In many respects, Marguerite was what we would today call a Renaissance woman, for she was intimately involved in court life, the artistic production of the day, political and diplomatic negotiations, and contemporary educational (“humanist”) and religious discussions and controversies. Both her life and her writings were to inspire many other French men and women writers (among them Hélisenne de Crenne) many of them “evangelical” (such as Anne de Marquets). At Nérac, Marguerite gathered around her artists, thinkers, and writers whom she encouraged. As an avid and faithful patron of the arts, she had considerable influence that can still be discerned in France today. Marguerite’s second marriage to Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, resulted in a daughter, Jeanne, the future spouse of Henri IV.

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