Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

A selective list of literary criticism for the English novelist, reviewer, and essayist Virginia Woolf, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in peer reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Web Pages

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Literary criticism

Alley, H. Mrs. Dalloway and Three of Its Contemporary Children. Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2006

Ames, Christopher. "Carnivalesque comedy in Between the Acts." "Surely Woolf's humor has escaped many readers," Ames notes. Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998

Anspaugh, Kelly. "Blasting the bombardier: another look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf." Anspaugh notes that "if Virginia Woolf is the modernist critics love to love - at least contemporary critics - then Wyndham Lewis is the modernist critics love to hate." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994

Bain, Alexander. Cosmopolitics of modernism. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2002

Benzel, Kathryn N. "Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography "Reading Orlando: A Biography or, for that matter, any of Virginia Woolf's novels becomes a venture into uncertain terrain where the reader must sign on with the writer to discover the text's construction and thus a path, not necessarily an easy one, to its meaning." Style, Summer, 1994

Blair, Kirstie. "Gypsies and lesbian desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf," Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004

Boxwell, D.A. "Disorienting spectacle: the politics of Orlando's sapphic camp." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998

Burns, Christy L. "Re-dressing feminist identities: tensions between essential and constructed selves in Virginia Woolf's Orlando." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994

Clewell, Tammy. "The Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon," reviews three recent books on Virginia Woolf. College Literature, Summer 2005

Clements, Elicia. "Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction," College Literature, Summer 2005

Collier, Patrick. "Virginia Woolf in the Pay of Booksellers: commerce, privacy, professionalism, Orlando." Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002

Cramer, Patricia. "Virginia Woolf's matriarchal family of origins in Between the Acts." Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993

Cyr, Marc D. "A conflict of closure in Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall.'" Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996

DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989). A review in the NY Times, which begins, "The danger in analyzing lives and literature according to selective evidence or a single set of experiences is that the essential spirit of people and their creative products can suffer severe misinterpretation if tucked neatly into Procrustean beds. Such a reductionist reading is at the heart of Louise DeSalvo's thesis in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work."

Doyle, Laura. "'These Emotions of the Body': intercorporeal narrative in To the Lighthouse." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994

Fernald, Anne. "A Room of One's Own, personal criticism, and the essay." Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994

Fulton, Lorie Watkins. "'A direction of one's own': alienation in Mrs. Dalloway and Sula [Toni Morrison, William Faulkner]. African American Review, 22-MAR-06

Gruber, Ruth. On the author of Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, and Gruber's meeting with Woolf in 1935. By Lys Anzia in Moondance, 1/31/07. Another review, National Review, 7/1/05

Handley, William R. "The housemaid and the kitchen table: incorporating the frame in To the Lighthouse." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994

Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. "A splice of reel life in Virginia Woolf's 'Time Passes': censorship, cinema and 'the usual battlefield of emotions.'" Criticism, Wntr, 1993

Harris, Susan C. "The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of Jacob's Room." Harris explores the perception that "although much of the plot of Jacob's Room deals with Jacob's sexual education, the narrative voice is spectacularly reticent when it comes to actually recording his progress. Throughout the novel, anything spoken on the topic of sexual desire or sexual activity is subjected to a very specific and ostentatious kind of censorship that cuts overt discussion of sex or sexual desire out of the text even as it directs the reader's attention to the lacunae left behind." [Virginia Woolf's novel Jacob's Room] Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997

Haule, J. M. "Virginia Woolf's revisions of The Voyage Out: some new evidence." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996

Hoff, Molly. "The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway." Hoff analyzes the purported antagonism of Virginia Woolf to Joyce's Ulysses. Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999

Hoffman, Michael J. and Ann Ter Haar. "Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999

Ittner, Jutta. Part spaniel, part canine puzzle: anthropomorphism in Woolf's Flush and Auster's Timbuktu. [Paul Auster]. Mosaic, 01-DEC-06.

Johnson, George M. "'The Spirit of the Age': Virginia Woolf's response to second wave psychology." Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994

Kane, Julie. "Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf." Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995

Lee, Hermione. Nosing around in a life: Getting at the real person isn't easy. On Virginia Woolf's Nose, (Princeton Univ. Press). Philadelphia Inquirer, May. 15, 2005 (taken offline)

Littleton, Jacob. "Mrs Dalloway: portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995

Lucenti, Lisa Marie. "Virginia Woolf's The Waves: to defer that 'appalling moment.'" Criticism, Wntr, 1998

Marder, Herbert. A review of The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years. Marder, who has a lifelong interest in Virginia Woolf, is most interested in her radical and subversive ideas, says reviewer Carolyn Kuebler: "What he shows us is how Woolf's always-powerful sense of anger at political and social injustices grew more and more urgent as she grew older, and how she grew increasingly desperate to manifest this rage in her work." In Rain Taxi, winter 2000. Another review, Criticism, Spring, 2001, by Lisa Low

Mepham, John. A substantial introduction to Virginia Woolf from the Literary Encyclopedia, 3/16/01

Miller, Marlowe A. "Unveiling 'the dialectic of culture and barbarism' in British pageantry: Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts." Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1998

Moers, Ellen. A review of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume I: 1888-1912, ed. Nigel Nicolson. In the NY Times, November 23, 1975

Montgomery, Nick. "Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000

Panichas, George A. "Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears,'" Modern Age, Summer, 2004

Phillips, Brian. "Reality and Virginia Woolf," Hudson Review, Autumn 2003

Poresky, Louise A. Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professor's House and To the Lighthouse. [Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf] Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2008

Rosenfeld, Natania. A review of Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). Criticism, Spring, 2001, reviewed by Brenda R. Silver

Roy, Anindyo. "'Telling brutal things': colonialism, Bloomsbury and the crisis of narration in Leonard Woolf's 'A Tale Told by Moonlight.'" Criticism, Spring, 2001

Schroder, Leena Kore. "Tales of abjection and miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's 'Jewish' stories." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003

Scott, Lynda. "Similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing," focuses on their shared distrust of, and fascination with, the workings of memory; and their construction of a personal sense of selfhood. Deep South v.3 n.2 (Winter 1997)

Smith, Craig. "Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush." Smith sympathetically reconsiders Flush: A Biography, Woolf's story of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog. Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002

Smith, Susan Bennett. "Reinventing grief work: Virginia Woolf's feminist representations of mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse." Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995

Southworth, Helen. "Virginia Woolf's 'Wild England': George Borrow, autoethnography, and Between the Acts." [Virginia Woolf's novel and George Borrow's Lavengro]. Studies in the Novel, 22-JUN-07

Spurr, Barry. On the Bloomsbury Group (1904-1939), whose members included Virginia Woolf, her sister the artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia's husband the writer Leonard Woolf, the artist Duncan Grant, the art critic Roger Fry, the novelist E. M. Forster, and the biographer Lytton Strachey.

Stone, Wilfred. "Some Bloomsbury interviews and memories." Stone recounts his personal meetings with some of the figures of Bloomsbury, still living in 1957-8 and 1965, including Bloomsbury's favorite philosopher, G.E. Moore [George Moore]. Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1997

Swanson, Diane L. "'My Boldness Terrifies Me': sexual abuse and female subjectivity in The Voyage Out." Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995

Tetterton, Kelly. A brief paper on the paperback book covers of the editions of Orlando and what they reveal about critical perceptions of the book; jpegs of the covers are included. Conference paper, 1995

Utell, Janine. Meals and mourning in Woolf's The Waves. College Literature, 22-MAR-08

Vandivere, Julie. "Waves and fragments: linguistic construction as subject formation in Virginia Woolf." Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1996

Webb, Caroline. "Listing to the right: authority and inheritance in Orlando and Ulysses." [Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Orlando] Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994

Westman, Karin E. "The First Orlando: The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's 'Friendships Gallery.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. "Final curtain on the war: figure and ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts - World War II." Style, Summer, 1994

Wussow, Helen. "Virginia Woolf and the problematic nature of the photographic image." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994

Zemgulys, Andrea P. "'Night and Day Is Dead': Virginia Woolf in London 'Literary and Historic.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000

A special edition on Virginia Woolf from the South Carolina Review contains 18 articles on her. Conceived with Kindness: The Woolf Family Perspective, by Jean Moorcroft Wilson; Wrapped in the Stars and Stripes: Virginia Woolf in the U.S.A., by Jane Marcus; Uncommon Readings: Seeking the Geopolitical Woolf, by Susan Stanford Friedman; Virginia Woolf and Antigone-Thinking Against the Current, by Sybil Oldfield; A Room of One's Own to A Literature of Their Own, by Marion Shaw; Editing Woolf for the Nineties, by Julia Briggs; Virginia Woolf With and Without State Feminism, by Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström; From Thematics and Formalism to Aesthestics and History: Phases and Trends of Virginia Woolf Criticism in Germany, 1946-1996, by Vera and Ansgar Nünning; Virginia Woolf and the French Reader: An Overview by Pierre-Eric Villeneuve; The China Letters: Julian Bell, Vanessa Bell, and Ling Shu Hua, by Patricia Laurence; Passage to China: East and West and Woolf, by Melba Cuddy Keane and Kay Li. Courtery of the Clemson Univ. Digital Press

Introduction & Lighter Reading

"Leonard Woolf, Bloomsbury's Older Brother," on Virginia Woolf's husband, his efforts to be a successful writer, and other members of the Bloomsbury group. By Rachel Cohen, New Yorker, 11/6/06

The Virginia Woolf of 'The Hours' Angers the Real One's Fans. By Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, 2/15/03

An article compares the Woolf's novel Orlando with Sally Potter's film version. "An off-beat adaptation: Orlando," by Timotheos Roussosm. In Philament vol.3, April 2004

NY Times articles from April 3, 1941 ["Virginia Woolf believed dead"] and April 19, 1941 ["Virginia Woolf's body found"]

The NY Times archives on Virginia Woolf contain extensive material, including newspaper articles and reviews from her novels "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925); "The Common Reader" (1925); "To The Lighthouse" (1927); "Orlando" (1928); "The Waves" (1931); "The Years" (1937); "Between The Acts" (1941); "The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays" (1950), reviewed by Katherine Anne Porter; "A Writer's Diary" (1954), reviewed by Elizabeth Bowen.

A reading of Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out sees it as a response to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "Gender in the Jungle: The Voyage Out as a Response to Heart of Darkness," by Patricia A. Crouch, January 2002, published in the online journal Women Writers

"Complexity & contradiction." Brooke Allen challenges "the prevailing image" of Virginia Woolf, which he claims was generated by feminists. New Criterion, Nov. 1997

An old essay by Wyndham Lewis on idealists and materialists in English literature, which casts Woolf as the exemplary idealist. "In the present chapter I am compelled, however, to traverse the thorny region of feminism, or of militant feminine feeling. I have chosen the back of Mrs. Woolf--if I can put it in this inelegant way--to transport me across it. I am sure that certain critics will instantly object that Mrs. Woolf is extremely insignificant--that she is a purely feminist phenomenon--that she is taken seriously by no one any longer today, except perhaps by Mr. and Mrs. Leavis--and that, anyway, feminism is a dead issue."

A NY Times Magazine essay on Virginia Woolf's changing reputation, 1996

Some discussion questions for Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, prepared by professor Catherine Lavender for a college class

Traces some allusions in To the Lighthouse, including Mr. Ramsey's quoting of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," and Shelley's "The Invitation."

Bibliography and Web Sites

An online exhibit of some bindings by Virginia Woolf from the personal library of Leonard and Virginia, housed in the Special Collections of Washington State University

The International Virginia Woolf Society publishes online its annual bibliographies from 1996-2001, a complete list of all books, journal articles, book chapters, dissertations and theses on Virginia Woolf for the year; with short summaries of the most important books of the year

The web site for the Charleston, the home of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell and a gathering place for group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group: Clive Bell, David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant

The web site of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has some brief biographical essays and info about their publications

main page | 20th-century literature | modernist novel | 20th-century women writers | about literaryhistory.com

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