An illustrated critical edition of the stories and essays of Julia Stephen, the mother of the novelist Virginia Woolf. Includes biographical information, notes, and some drawings by her husband.
An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.
The National Portrait Gallery's Character Sketches series provides biographical sketches of a specific group of historical figures from the Gallery's collection of portraits. Each volume examines the public images and private faces, the characters and relationships that gave each group its identity and importance. Introductions to each volume give a comprehensive account of the lives featured from a critical perspective. Journals, letters, diaries, anecdotes, poems and novels are all used to create portraits in words as well as images. This issue focuses on the pre-Raphaelites.
This biography is to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life. Curtis looks both at the effect of these relationships on her emotional life and the inspiration that each woman provided for the female protagonists in her fiction. The author begins by exposing the lesser-known details of Woolf's Victorian childhood, and continues with a study of the other unique women in Woolf's life: her sister Vanessa Bell; artist Dora Carrington; writer Katherine Mansfield; novelist Vita Sackville-West; and militant composer Ethel Smyth.
Woolf's acclaimed first novel, a moving depiction of the thrills and confusion of youth, traces a shipboard journey to South America in a captivating exploration of a young woman's growing self-awareness.
Bryher (1894-1985)—adventurer, novelist, publisher—flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and sultry Parisian cafes. Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with Marianne Moore, Freud, Paul Robeson, her longtime partner H.D., Stein, and others. This compelling memoir, first published in 1962, reveals Bryher’s exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice by helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis. “A work so rich in interest, so direct, revealing, and, above all, thought-provoking that this reader found it the most consistently exciting book of its kind to appear in many years.”—The New York Times