Latest news with #VirginiaWoolf
BBC News
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Goddess work displayed at Leeds Art Gallery after restoration
A life-sized artwork depicting the painter's wife as a goddess has gone on display after being of Night by artist Quentin Bell has been repaired by experts at Leeds Art Gallery after a split was found in its brittle piece is on display as part of the gallery's Portrayals of Women exhibition, which explores different portrayals of women over the past 400 Art Gallery assistant curator of fine art Kirsty Young said Bell's wife Anne Olivier Bell was a huge inspiration to him artistically. She said: "Works by Bell have a unique and timeless beauty, even more so because of the personal story behind them and the powerful emotional connection the artist clearly had with his subject."Bell's works frequently reference classical mythology and these works that have a strong architectural quality to them are a perfect reflection of this."In various mythologies, day and night are personified as female deities that control the cycle of light and darkness. These portrayals often highlight female power, beauty, wisdom and influence."The Portrayals of Women exhibition features a selection of works including pieces by Italian painter Ottavio Leoni and Dutch master Rembrandt. Mr Bell was the nephew of writer Virginia Woolf, as well as a renowned ceramicist and former professor of fine art at the University of and Mrs Bell met during a study trip to Paris in 1937, when he first painted delicate work on paper was restored by specialist conservator James Caverhill after it was gifted to the gallery last year by Vanda and Vanda Walton were friends of Bell, who gifted Goddess of Night and its sister work Goddess of Day to them in Young said: "The nature of works on paper means that over time they can be subject to this kind of deterioration as the paper can become very brittle, so we're extremely fortunate to have James's expertise in conserving Goddess of Night in readiness for display."Ms Bell, known as Olivier in her lifetime, was a distinguished art expert and one of the first members of the Arts the 1940s she worked for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Branch of the Control Commission for Germany, which was responsible for protecting cultural property during and after World War Two. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Mint
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Love between women comes of age with ‘Mrs Dalloway'
Ruth Vanita At 100, Virginia Woolf's classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality Natascha McElhone and Lena Heady in 'Mrs Dalloway' (1997). Gift this article A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. Mrs Dalloway packs its startling originality into less than 64,000 words. James Joyce's Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing particularly important happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf loved to do, in the afternoon she rests, and in the evening, she gives a party. Mrs Dalloway is not about events. It reveals the horrors of war and the self-importance and egotism of colonial bureaucrats but its concern is with the pains and pleasures of individuals. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to meeting old friends, in two dimensions—the past and the present. She has a tranquil and affectionate marriage, but she fondly recalls Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything 'intolerable". Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because she knew, with wisdom remarkable in a young woman, that 'a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house". This is a sentiment which anyone who has been married for many years would understand. It is also one with which the great heroines of English comedy, from Shakespeare's Rosalind to Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, would surely agree. A few pages into the novel, Clarissa thinks, with some guilt vis-à-vis her kind and considerate husband, about her lack of erotic warmth towards men, her 'cold spirit", which Peter too comments on. She knows, though, that she has felt for women 'what men felt". In an extraordinary passage, Woolf describes female desire in a way that evokes orgasm, specifically female orgasm: 'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment." This is the best description of female orgasm I have ever read. As all great writing does, it colours precise description with something more than mere technical detail. The match burning in the crocus, like the Buddhist jewel in the lotus, lights up the world, connects the individual to the universe. Continuing to think about 'falling in love with women," Clarissa recalls her youthful love for her friend Sally Seton. She 'could not take her eyes off" Sally, she imbibed Sally's radical ideas about literature, society and life, she admired Sally's beauty as well as her reckless, unconventional behaviour. At first, Clarissa thinks that she cannot feel her old emotions again, but as she undresses and re-dresses, the feeling starts returning to her. As a young girl, dressing to meet Sally, she had felt, as Othello felt when he met his wife, 'if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." As she and Sally walked together at night, Clarissa remembers 'the most exquisite moment of her whole life" when Sally 'kissed her on the lips". She felt as if she had been given 'something infinitely precious," when Peter interrupted. The interruption was a painful shock to her. She compares it to running your face against a granite wall in the dark, and she also felt Peter's 'hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship." 'Mrs Dalloway' is not about events. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Mrs Dalloway is the first major novel in English to explicitly depict a woman falling in love with another woman. The year it was published, Woolf, who was 43 years old, began a passionate affair with the novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was a well-known lesbian and married to a gay man. In her diaries and letters, Woolf evokes Vita's 'incandescent" beauty in lyrical terms: 'she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung." Three years later, in 1928, when Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was censored, Woolf and her close friend, the novelist E.M. Forster, who was also gay, published a letter of protest. Hall refused their attempt to draft a statement that many writers were willing to sign, because Hall wanted them to defend the book on the basis of its literary merit, not merely on the basis of freedom of speech. Neither Woolf nor the other writers thought that The Well of Loneliness was a work of literary excellence. Nevertheless, Woolf was ready to testify in court on its behalf but the court ruled out all testimony and banned the book. The Well of Loneliness is a historically important book read mainly by scholars today; Mrs Dalloway is as vital and surprising now as it was when first published. Woolf's novel Orlando, published in 1928, is much acclaimed these days because it is about miraculous sex change and identity. Orlando is inspired by love. Woolf wrote it as a portrait of Sackville-West. But Orlando is not about love. It is a portrait of a remarkable bisexual person. Mrs Dalloway is a far greater novel than Orlando. At the end of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa hears about the suicide of a traumatised soldier, Septimus, who was married to a woman but loved a man who died in the war. Clarissa senses, almost mystically, that she is similar to Septimus and that he died holding on to the thing that matters most whereas she and her friends have let go of it. Is that thing love? Is it the ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe? She is not sure but she knows that it is obscured in her own life: 'closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,' she had said to herself once, coming down in white." The novel ends with love—Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa's husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally's statement, 'What does the brain matter compared with the heart?" Ruth Vanita is a professor, translator and author, most recently of the novel A Slight Angle. Topics You May Be Interested In
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Let's Talk About ‘Mrs. Dalloway'
'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself': So reads one of the great opening lines in British literature, the first sentence of Virginia Woolf's classic 1925 novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway.' The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That's pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa's roving thoughts. On this week's podcast, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses it with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Laura Thompson. Other books mentioned in this episode: 'The Passion According to G.H.,' by Clarice Lispector 'A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,' by Eimear McBride 'The Lesser Bohemians,' by Eimear McBride 'To the Lighthouse,' by Virginia Woolf 'Orlando,' by Virginia Woolf 'A Room of One's Own,' by Virginia Woolf 'The Hours,' by Michael Cunningham 'Headshot,' by Rita Bullwinkel 'Tilt,' by Emma Pattee We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A writer faces her painful past, with the help of Virginia Woolf
If you're looking for a memoir with a logical structure, like a beginning, middle and end, Heather Christle's meditative 'In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf' is not the book for you. The author of the best-selling 'The Crying Book,' as well as four books of poems, Christle, the daughter of an English mother and an American father, travels to England to find out more about the maternal side of her family. While there, she reconstructs her own memories of visiting London, and steeps herself in the life of Woolf, who serves as her guide on this journey, a kind of Virgil to Christle's Dante.
Telegraph
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Sadiq Khan is killing literary tradition. My great-aunt Virginia Woolf would be horrified
Walking through Westminster I always think of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf's words: 'One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night… a particular hush, or solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.' While Big Ben is now booming out across the city, there isn't much else that my great-aunt would recognise. London has changed quite a bit over the past few years, especially under Sir Sadiq Khan. The first London Mayor to win a third term, Khan has repeatedly pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital, to tackle air pollution, to increase living standards for Londoners, and to end crime on the streets. And yet in Westminster and across central London one is these days confronted by spreading tent encampments, roadworks and rubbish-strewn streets. One-way traffic systems are everywhere, pedestrianised zones, bike lanes weaving in and out of buses, and baffling roundabouts. Certainly devoted readers of Mrs Dalloway – the most popular and most 'London' of her books – many of whom are making the pilgrimage to Bloomsbury this Sunday to mark the novel's centenary, might not recognise the London of its pages. Born in Kensington in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a Londoner to her core, from her earliest years in Hyde Park Gate, the childhood walks around Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond, and visits to the South Kensington museums. As a young woman, London was the epicentre of her social life and creative milieu, as part of the famous Bloomsbury Group. This included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, the adventurous and sometimes scandalous group of artists, writers and political thinkers who (according to Dorothy Parker) had 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'. London was also the inspiration for Virginia's writing and her solace in low moods, as she struggled throughout her adult life with the depression which would eventually overwhelm her. She found escape from her thoughts through walking, or as she called it 'street-haunting'. She walked alone through Westminster, Regent's Park, Bloomsbury, unseen, collecting and absorbing the sights around her, always trying to capture some essence of the city and its people: 'I stop in London sometimes and hear feet shuffling. That's the language, I think; that's the phrase I should like to catch.' Clarissa Dalloway, just like her author, felt that walking in London was 'better than walking in the country', allowing her to escape and lose herself in 'that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'. The novel takes place on a single day, Wednesday 13 June 1923 (and this so-called 'DallowDay' is celebrated every year in the heart of Bloomsbury by wonderfully eccentric Virginia devotees from America and around the world). It follows the heroine from early morning through to the evening of the day on which she is giving a large formal party. Hence those evocative opening lines: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' Virginia adored W1 and the surrounding area, sending Clarissa Dalloway off to buy gloves on Bond Street. In her diary from the early 1920s, Virginia recalls 'a fine spring day. I walked along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight and struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident etc. To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.' So why isn't Sadiq Khan celebrating London's rich literary legacy? Our city streets are steeped in fictional characters, in the sights and sounds of our most famous literary scenes, the haunts and the houses of authors beloved the world over. It's not only Virginia's Bloomsbury and Clarissa Dalloway strolling through Westminster, it's Charles Dickens's Camden Town, Anthony Trollope's Mayfair, Wordsworth 's Westminster Bridge, Robert Louis Stevenson's Hampstead, Arnold Bennett 's Clerkenwell, Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street, to say nothing of George Orwell and Henry James – the list is endless. We should be shouting from the rooftops about London: not in a contrived 'city of culture' way, but to preserve our unique literary heritage and capitalise on it. Instead of the relentless virtue-signalling, the rainbow-painted crossings and the Windrush line, what about an Orlando line, a Pickwick line or a Sherlock Holmes line? Instead of which, taxi drivers taking tourists into these parts of central London are increasingly trapped and gridlocked – as a Bloomsbury cabbie said to me yesterday: 'It's a bloody nightmare.' There are a few blue plaques, but every one of the famous squares could display public information, art and writings from that iconic bohemian set. Children at London schools should be reading and visiting our best London authors, their houses and local streets, getting excited about growing up here. Instead of waging war on drivers with his low traffic neighbourhoods and Ulez schemes, the Mayor could focus on what's already here, he could welcome curious literary pilgrims from around the world and show off everything London has to offer. Instead of the rainbow flags, why not emblazon the images of our greatest London writers on the side of buses? Why not display their writings across the TfL network to inspire commuters and tourists as they travel across our capital city? At London airports too, we could welcome and inspire visitors with a reminder of our truly unique literary heritage. The irony is that Virginia Woolf would be a fabulous woke icon for the Mayor if only he knew it, the most rainbow of all writers, with her rumoured lesbian leanings and her passionate love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Just look at Virginia's gender-bending Orlando (1928) in which the main character transitions sex from male to female, a ground-breaking novel which she admitted to Vita 'is all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.' Instead of slapping a trigger warning QR code on her statue in Tavistock Square, why not celebrate her as a feminist and gay icon, and an experimental literary genius? One hundred years ago Virginia mused on London: 'For heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh… In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge, in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men, in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.'
