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As a young woman, Virginia Woolf toured London’s National Portrait Gallery and grieved to find that almost all the portraits in the collection were of men. Woolf was so resentful that she later refused to sit for a drawing commissioned by the gallery, seemingly renouncing an opportunity to add her own portrait to its walls.

The post Virginia Woolf: author, publisher, feminist appeared first on OUPblog.

In a recent article for The Huffington Post, journalist Erin Schumaker advises students not to let their brains waste away over the summer: "you might be better off skipping the beach read this summer in favor of something a little more substantive." Yet some of us might find the idea of settling down on a sun lounger with War and Peace less than appealing. To help you out, we asked staff at Oxford University Press for a list of summer classics that will help you relax without letting your brain get lazy!

The post Best beach classics: the books you should be reading this summer appeared first on OUPblog.

The team at BBC Culture asked 82 book critics to name their favorite British fiction books. All of the participants who were polled do not reside in the United Kingdom; they come from the United States, continental Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Here’s more from the BBC: “Each who participated submitted a list of 10 British novels, with their pick for the greatest novel receiving 10 points. The points were added up to produce the final list.”

Altogether, this international group of bibliophiles selected a total of 228 books. Below, we’ve listed the top 10 titles; click on the links to download free eBooks. Did any of your favorites make the cut?

01. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1874)
02. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
03. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
04. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
05. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
06. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
07. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
08. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
09. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
10. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

Reading Virginia Woolf is like stepping out onto a veranda, where the entire world unfurls before you in dazzling detail. Her unparalleled ability to paint a scene so exquisitely, and to inhabit her characters with such clarity and intensity, makes for an experience that is both awe-inspiring and deeply moving. To the Lighthouse, set in [...]

Describe your latest book. My novel, The Daylight Marriage, is about a wife and mother who goes missing one day. The narrative alternates between her husband and children's story, as they try to figure out what's happened to her and the story of what is, in fact, happening to her. The husband is a climate [...]

The Spring issue of Shiny New Books is up!

I was so lucky to have the chance to read and review not one, but two, Oxford Classic reissues of Virginia Woolf books.

There is the delightful and marvelously rich Orlando:

I first read Orlando by Virginia Woolf many years ago. Fresh in love with Woolf’s writing and having just learned about her romance with Vita Sackville-West, I read the book as one long love story. But to read Orlando purely as a love letter from Virginia to Vita is to miss all the truly strange and wonderful things the book does. Because the book is also mock historical fiction and a satire on biography, not to mention an examination of identity and gender as well as a criticism of literary criticism. The book turns out to be charming, rich, and complex.

Having just published To the Lighthouse, Woolf wanted to write something lighter to please the public, something of which a reader could understand every word. But this is Woolf we are talking about and she sent me to the dictionary a number of times. Orgulous? Drugget? Obfusc? Woolf made that last one up!

Then I got to read The Waves for the first time. I was pretty nervous about that one and as you can tell, the introduction didn’t help matters. However, I should not have worried because it turned out to be a most amazing book:

Oxford World Classics has produced a terrific reissue of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. There are helpful endnotes, biographical information, a selected bibliography and an introduction. But don’t read the introduction first. This is not because the introduction spoils anything, The Waves has no plot to spoil. Nor is it a badly written introduction, in fact it is quite good.

Don’t read the introduction first because it will color the way you read the novel. It will scare you by telling you how difficult The Waves is. It will tell you the book is Woolf’s most anti-colonial novel and you will spend far too much energy looking for clues for this. It will explain characters to you before you even meet them, which will cause you, when you do meet them, to have preconceived opinions. It will try to pin down into reality much of what Woolf works so hard to leave open and ambiguous. Read the introduction, but read it afterwards, after you have been tossed and tumbled about by The Waves and finally washed up on the shore bruised, glassy-eyed and gasping for breath.

Pop over via the links for the full reviews and while you are there, be sure and check out all the other articles and reviews. And be prepared to add to your TBR pile!

What’s your favorite Virginia Woolf book? The team at EssayMama.com has created an infographic called “Top 10 Writing Tips from the Desk of Virginia Woolf.”

Some of the advice featured on the image includes keeping a diary, going on walks, and forging innovative paths. We’ve embedded the full infographic below for you to explore further—what do you think?

How much sleep would you forgo for the sake of productivity? Brain Pickings blogger Maria Popova and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton partnered together to design the “Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits & Literary Productivity” visualization.

The image features thirty-seven writers including Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage author Haruku Murakami, Revival author Stephen King, and Mrs. Dalloway author Virginia Woolf. Follow this link to view the full piece.

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A ‘slobbering valentine to a member of the upper classes’, ‘an orgy of snobbery’, and ‘the apotheosis of brown-nosing’: Angela Carter’s excoriating dismissal of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), delivered in Tom Paulin’s notorious televisual polemic, J’accuse Virginia Woolf (1991), serves as a reminder that this work has as much potential as any of her novels to provoke heated disagreements. That it should be so might seem surprising, as it is one of the most easy-going of her novels, one in which she consciously simplified her prose style in the interests of drawing in the reader effortlessly; it is also the most comic of her novels, mocking the conventions of history and biography. That Carter in particular should be so violently opposed to the novel is particularly surprising, as its willingness to rewrite conventional fictional forms anticipates her novels, and its employment of fantastic elements anticipates the ‘magic realist’ mode that she was to employ. Like Orlando, Carter’s own The Passion of New Eve (1977) also centres on a change of sex, albeit more violently wrought. Mostly intriguingly of all, in 1979 Glyndebourne Opera House commissioned Carter to write a libretto for an opera, never completed, of Woolf’s novel. Carter’s dismissal of Woolf might appear to stem from unease about working in her shadow.

To leave it there would neglect the prominence of social class in Carter’s opinion. Though the fragments of her libretto were published under the title Orlando: or, The Enigma of the Sexes, another working title was Orlando: An English Country House Opera; the country house and the aristocracy are significant factors in Orlando. Woolf’s novel was inspired by her passionate relationship with Vita Sackville-West in 1925 and 1926. Vita had been brought up at Knole in Kent, her family’s ancestral seat since the early seventeenth century; she loved the house and its history, but as a woman, she did not stand to inherit it. Vita’s family history made a strong impression on Woolf: ‘All these ancestors & centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body’, she wrote in 1924, with a hint of critical awareness of Vita’s privilege; in the same diary entry she noted how Knole could house all the poor of Judd Street, then one of the slum areas of Bloomsbury. In 1927 she was more overawed, more deeply in love, and less critical: walking round Knole with Vita, ‘All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed; affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily.’ Politically Woolf was liberal, progressive, and above all anti-authoritarian; by the 1930s she was actively involved in her local Labour Party. Visiting Knole in 1927, however, she seems to have been enchanted by a conservative ideology in which the country house serves as symbol of continuity between generations, of the centrality of monarchy to the British constitution, and of a benign relation between the aristocracy and the people. It is ‘ideological’ in the sense of masking and normalizing exploitative economic relations.

The strength of Carter’s hostility in 1991 may well have something to do with the revival of the country house ideology in British mass culture in the 1980s. ITV’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in the depths of the economic recession of the early 1980s, was a particularly pointed example. Critical works such as Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) and Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987) highlighted the ways in which ‘heritage’ serves political ends. However, Carter’s remarks don’t tell the whole truth, no matter how much they resonated in their moment. Important though the country house is to Orlando, it is less important than poetry and the hero/heroine’s dogged pursuit of the muse, and poetry in turn is less important than the question of personal identity. House-building and poetry-writing stand in direct contrast to each other. In Chapter II, it is the scorn of the poet Nick Greene that makes Orlando turn to the refurbishment of his house; though when the work is complete he holds banquets there, when the banquets are at their height he retreats to his private room to enjoy the pleasures of poetry. When Orlando travels to Turkey, his/her English values are put into perspective. To the Turkish gipsies, a family lineage four or five hundred years is of negligible duration, and the desire to own a house with hundreds of bedrooms is vulgar. Viewed from a certain angle, the established aristocrat becomes a vulgar upstart. Although the house still matters to Orlando when she returns to it triumphantly in the final chapter, and although the house still holds vivid memories of the people she has known, the cause of the triumph is the recognition of Orlando’s writing; and she recalls the sceptical perspective of the gipsies.

Focusing on the relationship between Vita and Virginia, Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’, a phrase that was Carter’s starting point. If Carter’s estimate is distorted by the demands of her time, Nicolson’s isn’t quite right either: Orlando is more than a purely personal document. It raises questions about personal identity and national identity, about history and its transmission, and about the value of writing, and it does so in a way that persistently mocks established values.

Headline image: Knole House, owned by the National Trust (2009). In the early 17th century the Sackville family re-modelled the old archbishops’ palace into a stately home. Photo by John Wilder. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Fade in on the Mission Dolores, the fictional gravesite of Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. One block away, two writers with their first jobs teaching creative writing (okay, it was us!) decide to collaborate on a book of short stories that respond to classic and cult movies. We try — and fail — to [...]

Can you hold a book signing without having written a book? Comedienne Chelsea Peretti decided to do just that.

Peretti (pictured, via) announced on Twitter that she wanted fans to bring whatever books they wanted and meet her after a performance. They came in droves and brought a plethora of different titles.

According to BuzzFeed, Peretti signed and left comments in Bossypants by Tina Fey, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Hedge Funds For Dummies, and more. After the impromptu event ended, she sent out a tweet with this message: “fun book signing last night.”

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As the first year of the World War I centenary continues, here is a selection of classic literature inspired by the conflict. Some of it was written in the years after the war, while some of it was completed as the conflict was in progress. What they all have in common, though, is an unflinchingly expression of the horrors of the First World War for those in the thick of the battles, and those left behind at home.

The Poetry of the First World War, edited by Tim Kendall

The First World War brought forth an extraordinary amount of poetic talent. Their poems have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors of war. Some of these poets are widely read and studied to this day, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Ivor Gurney. However, others are less widely read, and this anthology incorporates that writing with work by civilian and woman poets, along with music hall and trench songs.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

This, Woolf’s fourth novel, prominently features Septimus Warren Smith, a young man deeply damaged by his time in the First World War. Shellshock causes him to hallucinate – he thinks he hears birds in a park chattering in Greek, for instance – and the psychological toll wrought by war drives him to a profound hatred of himself and the whole human race.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was in the process of writing The Good Soldier when the First World War broke out in 1914. Inevitably this influenced his work, and this novel brilliantly portrays the destruction of a civilized elite as it anticipates the cataclysm of war. It also invokes contemporary concerns about sexuality, psychoanalysis, and the New Woman.

Greenmantle by John Buchan

In Greenmantle – published during the First World War, in 1916 – Richard Hannay travels across Europe as it is being torn apart by war. He is in search of a German plot and an Islamic Messiah, and is in the process joined by three more of Buchan’s heroes: old Boer Scout Peter Pienaar; John S. Blenkiron, an American determined to fight the Kaiser; and Sandy Arbuthnot, Greenmantle himself, who was modelled on Lawrence of Arabia. In this rip-roaring tale Buchan shows his mastery of the thriller and of the Stevensonian romance, and also his enormous knowledge of international politics before and during World War I.

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, and was published in 1922. It is an experimental portrait of Jacob Flanders, a young man who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into the First World War. Even his very name indicates his position as the archetypal victim of the war: Flanders is an area of Belgium where many British soldiers were killed and injured during the First World War. Jacob’s Room is an experimental novel, cutting back and forth in time, and never quite allowing the reader full sight of its subject. Rather, Jacob’s story is told through the words and memories of the women in his life.

War Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling may be most commonly remembered for the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book, but he also wrote extensively about war. His only son, John, was unfortunately killed in action in 1915, and Kipling took many years to accept what had happened. Until his death in 1936, he continued searching for his son’s final resting place but even today John has no known grave. Of the poems Kipling wrote in the aftermath of the First World War, perhaps the best known is his tribute to The Irish Guards (1918), the regiment with which his son was serving at the time of his death.

Headline image credit: World War One soldier’s diary pages. Photo by lawcain via iStockphoto.

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Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Woolf’s Darkness” that appeared in the New Yorker online was what made me buy her essay collection Men Explain Things to Me. It wasn’t enough to read it in digital and possibly not have access to it forever. I had to read it in print so I could mark it up and I had to know that I would always have it.

What I like so much about this essay is not just that it is about Woolf, but that it is also about art, criticism and life and instead of being an abstract theory, Solnit manages to ground it and make it relevant to reading Woolf, reading in general and to being a human.

Solnit begins by quoting a January 18, 1915 diary entry of Woolf’s:

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

And she goes on to assert how

It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing—as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion.

Most people are afraid of the dark.

Solnit suggests that it is the job of writers to go into the dark with eyes open, “to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing.” She acknowledges that not all writers are successful nor are all writers even interested in such an undertaking but if one wants to get at the truth, one needs to be willing to engage repeatedly with the dark unknown.

The main thrust of the essay is the ability to dwell in uncertainty whether you are a writer, critic, reader, or person who cares about the world. And it is easy to think, well, I am just fine with uncertainty, no problem at all, why, I don’t even know what I’ll be having for dinner tonight! Ah, but do you make plans? I do. I am a planner to the nth degree. Solnit quotes wilderness survival author Laurence Gonzalez:

‘The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.’ His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.

It is not the planning itself that is the problem, it is how we cope with the inevitable uncertainty that will arise when the plan and reality do not meet. Do we stick to the plan no matter what? Or do we revise the plan or maybe even toss it out completely?

This is where Woolf comes in:

All Woolf’s work as I know it constitutes a sort of Ovidian metamorphosis where the freedom sought is the freedom to continue becoming, exploring, wandering, going beyond. She is an escape artist.

The language of authority and assertion is so much simpler and easier, Solnit suggests, than that of nuance, speculation and ambiguity. Woolf is “unparalleled” at the latter language. Instead of trying to pin things down, she is always working at opening them up, expanding, connecting, inviting possibilities.

And I think that is what made me like this essay so much. Solnit’s Woolf is very much my Woolf too. What I love about Woolf is how she is so much like water: smooth, slippery, shape-changing, both transparent and opaque at the same time, she is never the same yet she is always herself. It is the darkness, the uncertainty that Woolf embraces that makes me describe her as being like water and the roots of her writing that I love most. Woolf never fails to astonish and delight me, to frustrate and anger me, to make me cry from sadness and beauty.

The essay as it appears online is edited a bit from how it appears in the print book so if you have the chance to read it in print, do. Also, whether you read it online or in print, be prepared for a sudden urge to read Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” and her novel To the Lighthouse. I have been meaning to reread To the Lighthouse for awhile now. I think the time has finally come to actually do it.

By Christopher Wiley

The 8th May marks the seventieth anniversary of the death of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), the pioneering composer and writer, at her home in Hook Heath, near Woking. In the course of her long and varied career, she composed six operas and an array of chamber, orchestral, and vocal works, challenging traditional notions of the place of women within music composition. In her later years she found a second calling as an author of auto/biographical and polemical writings, publishing ten books between 1919 and 1940.

Smyth led a fascinating and unconventional life. Having resolved at an early age to enter the music profession, she overcame opposition from her father (an army general) in order to enrol at the Leipzig Conservatorium in 1877. During her years in Continental Europe she came into contact with Brahms, Clara Schumann, Grieg, and Chaikovsky. Returning to England in the late 1880s, her compositions attracted much attention in the years and decades that followed, from influential figures including Empress Eugénie, Lady Mary Ponsonby, Queen Victoria, Princesse de Polignac, and, in the field of music, Thomas Beecham, Bruno Walter, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Donald Tovey, and George Bernard Shaw. She received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Oxford, and was awarded the DBE in 1922.

Ethel Smyth, 1908. Lewis Orchard Collection Ref.9180, courtesy of Surrey History Centre.

This intriguing artist has been a subject of my research for over a decade, leading to my article “Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and ‘The First Woman to Write an Opera’” recently published in The Musical Quarterly (itself a companion-piece to an article I published in another Oxford journal, Music & Letters, in 2004). My particular interest lies in Smyth’s relationship with the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whom she befriended in 1930 and with whom she maintained a lively correspondence that provides many valuable insights into Smyth’s activities as memoirist and polemicist, and, more widely, into the differences between their respective disciplines.

Smyth may not have been the first ever woman to write an opera, as Woolf erroneously suggested in the quotation that inspired my article (that distinction goes to Francesca Caccini, over 250 years earlier). But she was nonetheless a pathbreaking individual in many different respects. To commemorate the anniversary of her passing, here follow five facts about Ethel Smyth, some well known, others less so, illustrating ways in which she made history in music, politics, and literature.

Front cover of Ethel Smyth Der Wald, 1902. Lewis Orchard Collection Ref.9180, courtesy of Surrey History Centre.

1.  Smyth is the only woman composer to date to have presented an opera at The Met. The performances of her second opera, Der Wald (The Forest), on 11 and 20 March 1903 yield the only instance out of over 300 different works given at The Metropolitan Opera, New York City between October 1883 and July 2013 to have been composed by a woman. According to one contemporary account, the opera was attended by “one of the largest and most brilliant audiences” of the season, eliciting applause that “continued for ten or fifteen minutes, surpassing even the most generous for which the opera patrons are distinguished.”

2.  Smyth withdrew one of her operas during its performance run in a move she believed to be “unique in the annals of Operatic History.” For the première of her third opera, Standrecht (The Wreckers), at the Neues Theater, Leipzig in November 1906, she stipulated that no revisions to the score should be made without her consent. However, she discovered the day before the dress rehearsal that Act III had been extensively cut, and her pleas for reinstatement of the excised material were in vain. In response, following the first performance she removed all of her music from the orchestra pit and took it to Prague, where the opera had already been accepted for performance — though this turned out to be a woefully under-rehearsed fiasco.

3.  Smyth became a leading suffragette in the early 1910s. In September 1910 she met, and became enchanted by, Emmeline Pankhurst. She pledged to devote two years of her life to the women’s suffrage campaign, and a close friendship developed between the two women (Woolf even believed they had been lovers). Smyth’s work for the “Votes for Women” movement is reflected in much of the music she composed at that time, not least The March of the Women, which came to be adopted as the suffragette anthem. She was said to have once stormed into 10 Downing Street and hammered out the March on Prime Minister Asquith’s piano while the Cabinet was in session.

Image: Lewis Orchard Collection Ref.9180, courtesy of Surrey History Centre

4.  Smyth served a jail sentence for her suffrage activity. She was one of some 200 women arrested on 4 March 1912 as a result of a co-ordinated window-smashing campaign across the West End of London, and was sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison. Smyth had chosen to target the Berkeley Square home of the colonial secretary, Lewis Harcourt, in retaliation for a remark he had made along the lines that “if all women were as pretty and as wise as his own wife, [they] should have the vote tomorrow.” She recounted the episode on the BBC National Programme in 1937, in interview with the author Vera Brittain.

5.  Smyth kept a series of dogs for over fifty years. Her first dog, given to her in 1888, was a St Bernard cross called Marco, who travelled everywhere with her. In 1901, a friend presented her with an Old English sheepdog puppy she named Pan, who became the first in the line of sheepdogs she successively numbered Pan II, Pan III, up to Pan VII. Her lesser-known book Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936), a collected biography of some of her canine companions, stands alongside such classics as Virginia Woolf’s Flush and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild as famous examples of dogs in literature.

Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK. His research primarily examines musical biography and the intersections between music and literature. Other interests include music and gender studies, popular music studies, and music for television. He is author of “Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and ‘The First Woman to Write an Opera’” published in The Musical Quarterly. Follow Christopher Wiley on Twitter. Read his blog. He can also be found on Scoop.it!.

The Musical Quarterly, founded in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, has long been cited as the premier scholarly musical journal in the United States. Over the years it has published the writings of many important composers and musicologists, including Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, and Camille Saint-Saens. The journal focuses on the merging areas in scholarship where much of the challenging new work in the study of music is being produced.

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Yesterday was far too nice a day to be indoors in front of a computer. We actually made it to 70F (21C)! It was the warmest day we’ve had since October 11, 2013. There should be a state law that says the first 70 degree day of spring is a holiday. But since there isn’t, I had to take advantage as best I could. I ate my lunch outdoors in the sunshine and instead of blogging when I got home I sat on my deck and wrote a few cards to mail. Of course today is not as warm and it will probably be another week before we reach 70 again. That’s spring in Minnesota. But enough about the weather.

I just found out there is going to be a ballet at the Royal Opera House in London during their 4014/15 season based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf! Does the Royal Ballet ever tour? I would so love to see a Virginia Woolf ballet. Please bring the show to Minneapolis!

For poetry month Tor (science fiction fantasy) has commissioned a number of authors to compose original poems for them. Jo Walton did one and is it ever good. Hades and Persephone turns the story from one of abduction and rape into one of love with Persephone bringing light and flowers into the darkness of Hell. It’s a poem about desire and how much light and darkness need each other.

Have you ever heard of Drop Everything and Read Day? It is celebrated on April 12th, Beverly Cleary’s birthday since she is the author of the book in which D.E.A.R first appeared. For whatever reason I was not a Cleary reader or Ramona fan when I was a kid. Nonetheless, I can certainly get behind a day of doing nothing but reading! Come Saturday I will try my hardest to drop everything and read. Household chores can wait another day, right?

The great author Virginia Woolf drowned 72 years ago today. To remember her literary legacy, we’ve rounded up four free Woolf books for your Kindle, iPad or other eReader–follow the links below to download. You can find the rest of her books at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has collected condolence letters from other authors and linked to Patti Smith‘s tribute to Woolf. Here’s an excerpt from the letters post:

On March 28, 1941, at the gruesome onset of WWII, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with rocks, treaded into the River Ouse behind the house in East Sussex where she lived with her husband Leonard, and drowned herself. She had succumbed to a relapse of the all-consuming depression she had narrowly escaped in her youth. Once news of her death broke, an outpour of condolence letters captured the enormous collective grief, mourning at once the deeply personal emptiness left behind by a remarkable woman and a loyal friend, and the severe cultural loss of a brilliant mind and a transcendent artist.

continued…

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After having written about the first part of Ruth Gruber’s Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, I forgot all about writing on the second part of the book. The first part, as you may recall, is memoir about how Gruber came to be the youngest person to receive a Ph.D, wrote her dissertation on Woolf, and actually got to meet her. The second part of the book is the dissertation Gruber wrote.

Written in 1932, the dissertation examines Woolf’s work up to and including The Waves. Gruber’s thesis in a nutshell:

Virginia Woolf is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it. Her will to explore her femininity is bitterly opposed by the critics, who guard the traditions of men, who dictate to her or denounce her feminine reactions to art and life.

The way Gruber sees things Woolf had a choice to write to please the critics and their arbitrary standards, to write in the male novelist tradition, or to create something altogether new and different.

Gruber traces the evolution of Woolf’s style through her novels. While it is a decidedly feminist analysis, it is interesting to note that her idea of femininity squares up with the prevailing notions of the time. She therefore says much about “feminine sensitivity” and discusses Woolf’s “feminine impressionism.”

Gruber makes a really interesting analysis of Orlando as Woolf struggling between a sort of Scilla and Charybdis of critics and male influence in order to find her way into her own style. These days it seems Orlando is talked about mostly as a biography and love letter to Vita Sackville-West. Gruber makes no comment of this and I suspect that at the time, she probably didn’t know the two women had been lovers. Her analysis does prove, however, that there is a lot more going on in the book then we generally account for.

Woolf’s use of painting and music are traced out through her work. Gruber also notes, “It is the mark of Virginia Woolf’s organic concept of life, that she concludes an endlessness in conflicts.”

As long as there is night and day, light and darkness, there will be antithetic stylists, inimical poets and negating critics. The conclusion that there is no absolute truth in either fact or fancy, structural or rhythmic form, enables her to employ both styles without self-consciousness or doubt.

The Waves, Gruber concludes, shows Woolf as having at last achieved the style she had been working towards.

There is much of interest in this dissertation that I haven’t even mentioned. I think much of what Gruber wrote still holds up today. As I was reading, I had to pause in wonder now and then since Gruber wrote it when she was only twenty. Oh, and she wrote it in a year while also taking a full load of classes. She also uses no secondary sources because no one had really done any critical analysis of Woolf at the time. Gruber’s range of knowledge about Woolf’s work and literature in general left me impressed and envious. How did she know all that without the aid of Google or other critical sources? It’s enough to make one feel both lazy and stupid.

I don’t think The Will to Create as a Womann would be of interest to everyone, but if Woolf is one of your favorite authors this is a book that will definitely appeal. And here is an interesting non-related tidbit I gleaned from the acknowledgements: author Dava Sobel is Gruber’s niece.

To celebrate Mediabistro’s upcoming Media App Summit, we are hosting The World’s Longest Literary  Vampire Remix writing contest.

Follow this link to sign up for our new writing contest. With the help from writers around the country, we will rewrite Varney the Vampire–a bestselling vampire novel from the 19th Century filled with enough star-crossed romance, vampire action and purple prose to inspire another Twilight trilogy.

You will rewrite a small section from the book your own unique style (from poetry to Twitter updates to cartoons to imitations of your favorite writer). We will publish the final product as a free digital book (complete with Victorian-era illustrations) that anyone can download. Every contributing writer will receive a byline, a short biography and a website link in the remixed novel. In addition, we will reprint our favorite remixed passages and share your work with Mediabistro readers.

Intrigued? You can sign up at this link.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now explore the library online and watch it grow.

Currently, the makeshift library counts 390 books. Follow this link to find out how you can donate. We’ve listed ten books from the library below, illustrating the scope of the collection. The Occupy Wall Street librarians also hope to schedule more author visits.

Here’s more from the library blog: Rather than having scheduled mega-events with activist authors coming to pep talk the whole occupation, I would prefer smaller, impromptu groups and a books-oriented approach to fit with our little niche mission. My idea is to ask authors to come talk about the “books that have inspired you” and then whatever else they want. We can post announcements in advance on a dry erase board and/or make an announcement when someone arrives. Then, whoever happens to be around can come check it out. If it’s only a few people, I see no problem with that. Whatever stimulates conversations, and huge groups don’t allow it so much. I feel this is a good role for our library.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Top 5 Most Inspirational Female Authors