Virginia Woolf

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924)

Victorian realism has lost its ability to capture consciousness

on or about December 1910 human character changed

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924)

Focus on intimacy and detail

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite

Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject - Makiko Minow-Pinkey

Formal disruption and androgyny

Her concept of androgyny can be seen as an attempt to theorise after the fact vital new insights to which she had already broken through in literary practice

Title of Orlando

Orlando: A Biography

Feminist Destinations - Rachel Bowlby

Genre and biography in Orlando

The novel… satirises the conventions of biographical and historical writing

Conrad Aiken review of Orlando in the Chicago Dial

The tone of the book, from the very first pages, is a tone of mockery. Mrs Woolf has expanded a jeu d'esprit to the length of a novel....

Feminist Destinations - Rachel Bowlby

Orlando as an ironic sequel to Jacob’s Room (1922)

Orlando is a kind of ironic sequel to the earlier novel [Jacobs Room (1922)], taking apart the components of masculine biographical identity in a rather different, but directly related way.

After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism - Andreas Huyssen

Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.

Orlando - opens with image of masculinity

He - for there could be no doubt of his sex… was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters

Orlando - superficiality of sex change

Orlando had become a woman… But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.

Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject - Makiko Minow-Pinkey

Clothing as representative of Orlando’s gender fluidity

S/he slides from woman to man, from man to woman, as easily as she changes clothes, metamorphosis in a permanent flux.

Who did Woolf include photos of in the manuscript of Orlando?

Vita Sackville-West

Orlando - line interrupted by image of Vita Sackville-West

Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires

Key differences between 1928 manuscript and published versions of Orlando

Specific dates are included in the manuscript which are not in published versions

Orlando’s sex change is precisely dated - May 10th 1683

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

Necessary for a woman to write

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

Language as inherently gendered

That is a man's sentence… It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

‘Sitting-room’ as depriving women of experiences

if we escape a little from the common sitting-room

A Literature of Their Own - Elaine Showalter

On the ‘room of one’s own’ idea

Woolf is the architect of female space, a space that is both sanctuary and prison

Feminist Destinations - Rachel Bowlby

Idea of a man’s sentence

Their identity as one or the other precedes the language they put to ‘use’ as a medium of expression