Virginia Woolf
Story Stream
To the Postbox July 01, 2025
In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the book s...
We Are All Mrs Dalloway Now June 12, 2025
Everyone has cracks; we hear that’s how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted “everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work”. In her m...
Woolfish Perception May 26, 2025
Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bo...
Mrs. Dalloway’s War Wounds May 26, 2025
Katherine Mansfield did not like Virginia Woolf’s first postwar novel, Night and Day (1919). In fact, it offended her. Set against the backdrop of the campaign for women’s suffrage around 1909 or 1910, Night and Day is an Austen-style story of two co...
The Time of Return May 20, 2025
On or about February 2025, the twentieth century ended. Rarely does the beginning or close of an epoch align precisely with its calendar dates; it takes time for the years to settle into the exact note, the timbre, of what is to come. When Virginia W...
