Memorial Tribute for Jane Marcus

This is a memorial essay to Jane Marcus. Her profound impact on Woolf studies, feminism, and literary studies and her influence as mentor and community builder creates a tremendous legacy.

Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective

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.

Picture this: Virginia Woolf in the British Good Housekeeping!? or Moving Picture This: Woolf’s London Essays and the Cinema

This chapter assesses the illustrations for Virginia Woolf's London Scene essays as they were first published in the British Good Housekeeping magazine, 1920–32. Are etchings, paintings, or photographs adequate for capturing Woolf's kinetic prose? No, but moving pictures are, such as the Wonderful London and Open Road series of cinema shorts from 1924.

Mary Sheepshanks, Virginia Stephen, and Morley College: Learning to Teach, Learning to Write

This essay extends Sybil Oldfield’s biographical treatment of Mary Sheepshanks as it speculates about what Virginia Stephen learned at Morley College about teaching and about writing. The essay discusses Morley College and Virginia Stephen’s teaching there, particularly her teaching of composition; traces the relationship between Stephen and her principal, Mary Sheepshanks; and argues that Sheepshanks may have indirectly taught Virginia Woolf how to use pedagogy in her essays.

Who is My Contemporary? Woolf, Mansfield, and Their Servants

This chapter argues that Virginia Woolf’s female contemporaries include not just fellow writers like Katherine Mansfield but also domestic servants, whose work enables writerly creation. The chapter focuses on representations of domestic servants in Mrs Dalloway and “The Garden Party” and in Woolf’s and Mansfield’s private writings. The chapter compares Woolf’s and Mansfield’s texts to demonstrate different ways of depicting and understanding servant labor and to show the centrality of servants to the form of modernist fiction. It suggests that servants are too often marginalized in analyses of modernist narrative innovation, and argues for a broader examination of the significance of domestic labor to better understand modernist fiction.

Virginia Woolf and the Book Society Limited

Woolf foresaw the appeal of what would shortly become the Book Society Ltd., a mail-order book club modeled on the American Book-of-the-Month Club. Woolf worked with the Book Society and came into contact with its large, worldwide membership as both publisher and author, a perhaps unlikely relationship facilitated by her friendship with Hugh Walpole (Book Society chairman). Drawing on business correspondence in the archive of the Hogarth Press, this chapter examines the extent to which the Woolfs were willing to negotiate with the Book Society throughout the 1930s and how much impact the Book Society’s demands could have on the production schedules, prices, and occasionally upon the material production of Hogarth Press texts.

Splintered Sexualities in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “A Love Match”

Chris Baldry in Rebecca West’s debut novel The Return of the Soldier (1918), Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and the siblings Justin Tizard and Celia Tizard in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “A Love Match” (1961) all struggle with sexual attractions generated either by the trauma of direct exposure to the horrors of the Great War or by the side-effects of the war. Each of the characters discussed must cope with war-driven sexual confusion that violates the cultural restraints circumscribing sex and marriage while forbidding the transgressions of homosexuality and incest. The essay explores how the characters cope with their war-induced emotional distress and how their sufferings are offset through moments of intense love and euphoria that transcend all conventions. The essay also takes into account issues relating to censorship, particularly with regard to the timeframe of publication for Warner’s work.

“Could I sue a dead person?”: Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf

Despite their claims that they did not know one another very well, Woolf and Rebecca West maintained a wary regard for one another throughout their lifetimes. To Woolf, West was a “celebrity” and also a somewhat aggressive figure; to West, Woolf was a genius and also a mad woman. In 1982, Woolf was described in the Saturday Review as “the Marilyn Monroe of American academia,” while West was profiled as “the aged virago of English intellectuals” in the New York Times. By putting recent work on literary celebrity into dialogue with Brenda Silver’s earlier theorizing of Woolf’s “iconicity,” this paper asks how West went from being “Indisputably the world’s number 1 Woman Writer” (Time, 1947) to “little more than a famous name” (Mendelson 2000), and questions the value of celebrity to a woman writer. It argues that West and Woolf mutually missed the opportunity for a fruitful intimacy.

The Weight of “Formal Obstructions” and Punctuation in Mrs. Dalloway and Pointed Roofs

This paper explores formal differences between Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway and Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs to argue that Woolf’s punctuation reveals how her fiction defies the “damned egotistical self” which she claimed “ruins” her contemporaries’ work. While Richardson’s ellipses distinguish her narration of Miriam’s thoughts from both the “current masculine realism” against which she wrote and male writers’ conventions of “feminine prose,” Woolf’s apparently-seamless sentences develop Clarissa Dalloway’s interiority by engaging, rather than rejecting, what Richardson calls “formal obstructions” on the page. Combining narratology with textual and feminist criticism, this paper argues that the novels’ punctuation reflects these writers’ radically different approaches to character interiority, narratorial authority, and the ethics of representation.

“In my mind I Saw my mother”: Virginia Woolf, Zitkala-Ša, and Autobiography

This essay considers how the self becomes a subject in Virginia Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939, and Dakota Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, published in the Atlantic Monthly over several months in early 1900. I analyze how both women conceive of their nationality, social position, and politics amid competing pressures vying for their minds and bodies; how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies; how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their lives and writing; and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits. Significant differences of course exist between Woolf, raised in an upper-middle-class family in late-Victorian England, and Zitkala-Ša, born on a Sioux reservation at the height of America’s “Indian wars” and initiatives to eradicate Native American languages, cultures, and spiritualities. Nevertheless, their autobiographical reflections on their childhood and young adulthood express comparable feminist impulses and narrative strategies.