Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf
1882-1941

British writer, one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century.

Major works

• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Known associates

• Members of the “Bloomsbury Group”, a loose collection of friends who were artists, writers, and thinkers
  • Clive Bell
  • E.M. Forster
  • John Maynard Keynes
  • Lytton Strachey
  • Leonard Woolf (husband)
• Roger Fry
• James Joyce
• Henry James
• Katherine Mansfield

Further reading

• Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf (E. H. Wright, Hesperus Press Limited, 2011)
  • This source seeks to shed light on several well known and lesser known aspects of Virginia Woolf’s life. The author spends an equal amount of time discussing the literary achievements of Woolf, as well as her struggles with mental illness, her fluid approach to sexuality, and her eventual suicide. This source seeks to understand the individual facets in Woolf’s life, in an attempt to understand her complex character.
• The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, editors; Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  • This companion resource offers a collection of essays by leading scholars that addresses the range of Virginia Woolf’s intellectual perspectives- literary, artistic, philosophical, and political. This companion also provides original, new readings of all of Woolf’s nine novels and insight into her letters, diaries, and essays all organized and allowing easy reference to individual themes and texts.
• Modernism and Virginia Woolf (N. Takei da Silva, Windsor Publications, 1990)
  • This resource written by da Silva seeks to not only trace the development of the term ‘Modernism’ to make sufficiently clear the outline of the lineage of Modernism, but this source also seeks to develop and clarify the nature of Virginia Woolf’s unique contribution to the Modernist movement.
• Woolf Studies Annual (Pace University Press)
  • This source is an online journal (available through being logged in to your Michigan account) that publishes new scholarship on the works of Virginia Woolf and the environment in which she lived, worked, and eventually died in. This source includes not only peer-reviewed articles but also reviews of new books and an up-to-date guide to library special collections of interest to researchers.

Primary sources 

• The Smith College Library has an online exhibition entitled Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own  created in conjunction with the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. This exhibition showcases Woolf’s manuscripts and Hogarth Press first editions of her work. The focus of this exhibition reflects the theme of the conference – Woolf in the Real World – and includes handwritten notes by Woolf, images, and manuscripts available to view online. This exhibition also includes links to papers from the conference as well as early photographs of Virginia Woolf.
• The National Portrait Gallery has an online collection of various portraits, paintings, and sculptures of Virginia Woolf. This collection is available online and includes a Woolf Family Tree and  links to galleries of related people similar to Woolf, groups she was in, and places she is associated with.

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BBC Radio Broadcast from April 29, 1937 entitled “Words Fail Me: Craftmanship”