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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

Virginia Woolf

  

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Virginia Woolf : Night and Day

'There is a trifling scene in Virginia's book where a charming young creature in a bright fantastic attitude plays the flute: it positively frightens me - to realise this utter coldness and indifference'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'[Ethel] Mannin was firmly rooted in the autodidact tradition. In her father's library she enjoyed Gissing and Wells, "Adam Bede" and "The Cloister and the Hearth". A Clapham letter-sorter, he collected Nelson's Sevenpenny Classics, which she applauded as "a great boon to poor people"... By age fifteen she was quoting Wilde, Dr Johnson, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Browning, Omar Khayyam, Anatole France, Emily Bronte, Shaw, Hazlitt, Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Schopenhauer in her commonplace book...Except "Orlando", she read nothing of Virginia Woolf, whom she found "too intellectual, too subtle and complicated and remote from reality...Mannin made sure to read "Ulysses" (or at least the final chapter) and she admired Gertrude Stein'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Mannin      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Roger Fry: A Biography

[Virginia Woolf's] 'masterpiece, in Rosamond's opinion, was her biography of Roger Fry, although the novels were also revered - "To the Lighthouse" above all - even if some of the stylistic tricks were sometimes found to be irritating.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse

[Virginia Woolf's] 'masterpiece, in Rosamond's opinion, was her biography of Roger Fry, although the novels were also revered - "To the Lighthouse" above all - even if some of the stylistic tricks were sometimes found to be irritating.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : A Room of One's Own

'Sunday 3 October. I am reading "A Room of One's Own". Most delightful and profound - if I had the time I would write an essay about life in the WRNS'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Barbara Pym      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf to Gwen Raverat, 11 March 1925: 'I don't think you would believe how it moves me that you and Jacques should have been reading Mrs Dalloway, and liking it. I'm awfully vain I know; and I was on pins and needles about sending it to Jacques; and now I feel exquisitely relieved; not flattered: but one does want that side of one to be acceptable'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Gwen Raverat      Print: Unknown, In proof copy

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

'Hugh Walpole's The Apple Tree, a volume of reminiscences, was published for Christmas 1932. The first words of the book are: "There is a fearful passage in Virginia Woolf's beautiful and mysterious book The Waves, which when I read it, gave me an acute shock of unanticipated reminiscence." He then quotes a long passage in which he found his title: "The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared."'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Hugh Walpole      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf to Stephen Spender, 10 July 1934: 'I'm so happy that you read the Lighthouse with pleasure, when there are so many other books you might be reading.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Stephen Spender      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf to Philip Morrell, 3 February 1938: 'I'm delighted with -- first: your liking Jacobs Room [...] second, that you should actually have read, still more marvellously have liked, Night and Day'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Morrell      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Night and Day

Virginia Woolf to Philip Morrell, 3 February 1938: 'I'm delighted with -- first: your liking Jacobs Room [...] second, that you should actually have read, still more marvellously have liked, Night and Day'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Morrell      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Roger Fry

Virginia Woolf to Benedict Nicolson, 13 August 1940: '[opens] Just as I began to read your letter, an air raid warning sounded. I'll put down the reflections that occurred to me, as honestly as I can, as you put down your reflection of reading my life of Roger Fry while giving air raid alarms at Chatham [goes on to describe thoughts on reading letter, looking up at raiders overhead, etc].'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Benedict Nicolson      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader

'I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for "Mrs Dalloway", but as I didn't want to write you the 'How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much' sort of letter, I thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader, which I am sorry to say I have now done.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : unknown

'I shall have, however, to give up reading your works at dinner, for they are too disturbing. I can't explain, I'll have to explain verbally some day. Unless you can guess. How well you write, though, confound you. When I read you, I feel no one has ever written English prose before, - Knocked it about, put it in its place, made it into a servant.'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      

  

Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway

'Last night I went to bed very early and read Mrs Dalloway. It was a very curious sensation: I thought you were in the room - But there was only Pippin, trying to burrow under my quilt, and the night noises outside, which are so familiar in one's own room; and the house was all quiet.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader

'then the old problem: what shall I read at dinner, propped open by a fork? decide finally on Virginia, grab the common reader, a pair of spectacles, a pencil, go in to dinner,'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse

'But everything is blurred to a haze by your book of which I have just read the last words, and that is the only thing which seems real. I can only say that I am dazzled and bewitched. How did you do it? how did you walk along that razor-edge without falling? why did you say anything so silly as that I 'shouldn't like it'?'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse

'"I'm in the middle of the Lighthouse, ekeing it out so that it will last. Why doesn't she publish a book every day? and what fun to be in at the birth of books quite as important as Jane Austen. She is a genius and I would carry a thousand hair-shedding dogs to the gates of Hell for her did she wish it!"'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Hugh Walpole      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Sun and the Fish

'I can't tell you how much I like "The Sun and the Fish", (all the more because it is all about things we did together,) and I am ordering a copy of Time and Tide.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway

'I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for "Mrs Dalloway", but as I didn't want to write you the 'How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much' sort of letter, I thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader, which I am sorry to say I have now done.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'It seems to me the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read, - excelling even your own Lighthouse.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Manuscript: Codex

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'He [a friend] took me to a bar which he said was quite respectable, but the proprietor showed me pornographic photographs, which are things I absolutely loathe and abhor. So I went away in a dudgeon and read a chapter of Orlando to cleanse my mind. That book is the cleanest thing I know, - like very clear and deep crystal.'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Harold Nicolson      

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'I came in just now, having been to Wertheim's to buy a pair of gloves for 4 marks, and meant to go on with my story of the bank clerk who loses his memory, but having stopped at the book shop on the way and bought Orlando in Tauchnitz I began to read, and so lost myself that the evening is already nearly gone. Do you know, I never read Orlando without tears pricking my eyes?'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Voyage Out

Wednesday 15 September 1920: 'Blessed with fine weather, I could look from my window, through the vine leaves, & see Lytton sitting in the deck chair reading Alfieri from a lovely vellum copy, dutifully looking out words. He wore a white felt hat, & the usual grey clothes; was long, & tapering as usual; looking so mild & so ironical, his beard just cut short [...] For my own encouragement, I may note that he praised the Voyage Out voluntarily; "[italics]extremely[end italics] good" it seemed to him on re-reading, especially the satire of the Dalloways.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Lytton Strachey      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader

Monday 1 June 1925: 'Now comes Mrs Hardy to say that Thomas reads, & hears the C[ommon]. R[eader]. read, with "great pleasure".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Hardy      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Common Reader

Monday 1 June 1925: 'Now comes Mrs Hardy to say that Thomas reads, & hears the C[ommon]. R[eader]. read, with "great pleasure".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Hardy      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : diaries

'On 22 December the Woolfs went to Charleston for Christmas [...] Clive and Vanessa Bell [sister to Virginia Woolf] and the three children were there [...] Vanessa reported to Duncan Grant [...] that they had spent a fascinating evening reading V[irginia]W[oolf]'s diary recalling early days at 46 Gordon Square, with the four Stephens' very full and "rather high society life" there' (source ed.'s note).

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vanessa Bell and family     Manuscript: Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : 1923 diary

Saturday 27 February 1926: 'Mrs. Webb's book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life. I read some of 1923 this morning, being headachy again'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : Three Guineas

'In the meantime, let me say that I read you with delight, even though I wanted to exclaim, "Oh, BUT,Virginia..." on 50% of your pages.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

'Vanessa [Bell] wrote [to her sister Virginia Woolf] from Charleston (n.d., Berg [Collection]): "I have been for the last 3 days completely submerged in The Waves -- & am left rather gasping, out of breath, choking, half drowned, as you might expect. I must read it again when I may hope to float more quietly -- but meanwhile I'm so overcome by the beauty ...'"

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vanessa Bell      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

Extract of letter to Virginia Woolf from E. M. Forster, copied by Woolf in diary entry of 16 November 1931: '"I expect I shall write to you again when I have re read The Waves. I have been looking in it & talking about it at Cambridge. Its difficult to express oneself about a work which one feels to be so very important but I've the sort of excitement over it which comes from believing that one's encountered a classic."'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: E. M. Forster      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

'G. L. Dickinson wrote to V[irginia] W[oolf] in praise of The Waves on 23 October [1931], and again, after re-reading, on 13 November 1931.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

'G. L. Dickinson wrote to V[irginia] W[oolf] in praise of The Waves on 23 October [1931], and again, after re-reading, on 13 November 1931.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

Thursday 21 July 1932: 'Alice Ritchie ringing me up [...] said "One thing I want to say. Please dont go so far away in your next book". She had just re-read The Waves: magnificent: but loneliness almost unbearable.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Ritchie      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : diaries

Friday 7 July 1933: 'Being headachy [...] I have spent the whole morning reading old diaries, and am now (10 to 1) much refreshed. This is by way of justifying these many written books [...] The diary amuses me.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : diaries

Wednesday 17 October 1934: 'I am so sleepy. Is this age? I cant shake it off. And so gloomy. Thats [writing] the end of the book [The Years]. I looked up past diaries -- a reason for keeping them -- & found the same misery after Waves.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : A Room of One's Own

From Appendix ('Biographical Outlines of Persons Most Frequently Mentioned') to The Diary of Virginia Woolf vol.4: 'Reading V[irginia] W[oolf]'s A Room of One's Own fired [Ethel Smyth] with the desire to meet the author, which she did in 1930'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Smyth      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Voyage Out

Saturday 15 March 1919: '[Mary Agnes Hamilton] told me a curious thing about the sensibilities of my family -- Adrian [Stephen] had asked her to tell me how much he'd liked The Voyage Out, which he has just read for the first time, & is too shy to write & tell me so himself.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Adrian Stephen      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Diary

Sunday 20 April 1919: 'In the idleness which succeeds [writing] any long article [...] I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better [...] And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye [goes on to discuss further reasons for, and artistic benefits of, keeping diary].'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Manuscript: Codex

  

Virginia Woolf : The Years

Friday 2 April 1937: ''Maynard is reading The Years. & is enthusiastic.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Maynard Keynes      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Three Guineas

Tuesday 24 May 1937: 'I'm pleased this morning because Lady Rhondda writes that she is "profoundly excited & moved by 3Gs." Theo Bosanquet who has a review copy read her extracts.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Theodora Bosanquet      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Three Guineas

Philippa Strachey to Virginia Woolf, 30 May 1938: 'I have read [Three Guineas] with rapture -- It is what we have panted for for years and years'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philippa Strachey      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Diary (17 May 1932)

Thursday 9 February 1939: 'Looking at my old Greek diary I was led to speculate [...] I won't budge from the scheme there (1932) laid down for treating decline of fame. To accept; then ignore; & always venture further.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Manuscript: Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : 'The Leaning Tower'

Friday 15 November 1940: 'I had a gaping raw wound too reading my essay in N.W. Why did I? Why come to the top when I suffer so in that light?'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Years

Tuesday 30 March 1937: 'Ethel rings up to say she has re-read Years, under Miss [Alice] Hudson [JP]'s direction, & finds it no longer unintelligible, but superb -- How can this be true of any mind?'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Smyth      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Jacob's Room

'I was idly looking at [italics] Jacob's Room [end italics] tonight. It exasperated yet charmed me. Here was an attempt to relate day and night. She [Virginia Woolf] lays her little strands side by side instead of working them into a patern. But perhaps it is because there is no solid structure underneath that it leaves me with this curious empty and dissatisfied feeling. In the last book it is beaten out so thin that it is threadbare.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : "memoir of Old Bloomsbury"

'After dinner, (a delicious dinner), Virginia read us her memoir of Old Bloomsbury. She had read it to me already at Saulieu, but I loved hearing it again; I want you to hear it.'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'My own darling, I write to you in the middle of reading "Orlando", in such a turmoil of excitement and confusion that I scarcely know where (or who!) I am. It came this morning by the first post and I have been reading it ever since, and am now half-way through. Virginia sent it to me in a lovely leather binding - bless her.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : Waves, The

'This 'new direction' [in literature], Larkin was beginning to realize, would depend on subtlety as well as candour - the sort of approach he was learning to associate with other writers he now re-read, or read for the first time. With Henry Green and Virginia Woolf (he admired "The Waves"); with Julian Hall, whose novel of public school life "The Senior Commoner" he approved for its "general atmosphere of not shoing one's feelings in public"; and with Katherine Mansfield. "I do admire her a great deal", he told Sutton, "and feel very close to her in some things".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : unknown

'At that time Winifred's Derbyshire contemporary, the poet and novelist Thomas Moult, was editing a series of "Modern Writers on Modern Writers". When he invited her to contribute a volume and choose her own author, she selected Virginia Woolf, whose novels she had always admired, as a deliberate exercise in intellectual discipline.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Winifred Holtby      Print: Book

  

Virginia Woolf : The Waves

'She preferred to say - in words written ten years ago at the end of "The Waves" which might stand for her epitaph - "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain      Print: Book, Unknown

  

Virginia Woolf : Orlando

'Meeting held at Gower Cottage, 20.II.’39
R. D. L. Moore, & subsequently H. Stevens in the Chair.
1. Minutes of last read & approved.
[...]
5. R. H. Robson told of The Stately Homes of Thames, + we heard of Bisham Abbey, Mapledurham, Ufton Court, of Jesuits hunted by Walsingham, of the incident of The Rape of the Lock, of Lovelace, Lady Place, Hurley, and Soames Forsyte.

6. H. R. Smith, dealing with the Story of the River, + passing lightly over the Danish incursions upstream, spoke of the thousand years in which the Thames had been in bounds. Weirs had been made by millers, navigation had been slow and perilous, the modern lock was a matter of the last hundred + fifty years. Twenty- six mills were named in Domesday Book[.] The Thames Conservancy had brought order out of chaos.

[...]

8. S. A. Reynolds read from Mortimer Menpes of warehouses + houseboats, the boat race + Henley Regatta, Kingfishers + quick backwaters, fishing + the vagaries of the towpath.

9. R. D. L. Moore gave us Literary Gleanings, touching on Spenser and Shelley, quoting from The Scholar Gypsy + Thyrsis, + reading Soames Forsyte’s thoughts in the early morning on the river, Kipling’s The River’s Tale, + Virginia Woolf’s astonishing account in Orlando of the great frost, when a girl dissolved into powder + fish were frozen twenty fathoms deep!

[...]

11. Muriel Stevens read a friend’s notes on Deptford + its river scenes.

12. A. B. Dilkes from Three Men in a Boat.


[Signed] S A Reynolds
27/3/93 [i.e. 27/3/39]'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Roger Moore      Print: Book

  

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