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#virginiawoolf — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #virginiawoolf, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Just finished re-reading. Almost 100 years since publication it's still relevant, still insightful, still one of the best books about writing.

    #VirginiaWoolf

  2. A post about Phyllis Bottome, an author with a remarkable life, who caught my eye after I saw her mentioned in a letter by Virginia Woolf. The ODNB says she "wrote on a wide range of subjects in several genres, producing popular, feminist novels and, in her non-fiction, raising the public's awareness of political dangers; her recurring theme was personal freedom."

    miskatonic.org/2026/08/03/phyl

    #PhyllisBottome #VirginiaWoolf

  3. "What do you think is probably the happiest moment in one's whole life? I think it's the moment when one is walking in one's garden, perhaps picking a few dead flowers, and then suddenly one thinks: My husband lives in that house - and he loves me."
    Virginia Woolf
    #love #happiness #marriage #VirginiaWoolf

  4. The Loves of the Arts…
    Diverse forme d‘arte che convivono e si influenzano a vicenda. Dalla letteratura al cinema passando per la pittura. Osservare scene esterna alla nostra vita per meglio comprenderla.

    #virginiawoolf #books #reading #libri #davidzwirner

  5. From the British Fantasy Society:

    In his new essay series on queer horror, Bronte Rowan dives into Virginia Woolf’s 1928 text Orlando, and discovers sexuality, gender and time are fluid—and so are we!

    britishfantasysociety.org/expl

    [Ed note: Bronte did submit this in time for Pride, but I dropped the ball and am very sorry]

    #horror #academicchatter #virginiawoolf #queerwriters #lgbtqia

  6. "Then, for that moment, she had an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed."

    (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

    link to the novel on Gutenberg.org:

    gutenberg.org/ebooks/71865

    #book #literature #VirginiaWoolf #AutisticJoy #reading

  7. It’s Weekend, Let’s Read: Who is the author with more works in the Guardian’s list of 100 greatest novels of all time?

    The Guardian made a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. You can see the list here, with links to how Guardian’s made it. First place of the list is George Eliot with Middlemarch, but I thought to check which authors had more works in this list. And it’s Virginia Woolf with five books!

    Second place in the number of the novels in the list are Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, both with four books.

    Best part? There all in public domain, so you want to start with any of these four authors, right here, right now, head to Project Gutenberg and let’s read!

    Books by George Eliot – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/90

    Books by Virginia Woolf – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/89

    Books by Jane Austen – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68

    Books by Charles Dickens – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37

    #BookLook #books #CharlesDickens #Classics #GeorgeEliot #GreatestNovels #Guardian #JaneAusten #publicDomain #readings #VirginiaWoolf
  8. “But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind…women of ability are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.”

    Virginia Woolf from her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” referencing men favoring oppression of women over survival in the war against the Nazis.

    literaturecambridge.co.uk/news

    #GenderEquality #Equity #Women #Oppression #VirginiaWoolf #Suffrage #Misogyny #Patriarchy #SmashThePatriarchy

  9. 🎭 ■ Un siglo después, los cuentos ocultos de Virginia Woolf serán publicados por primera vez en España ■ El manuscrito de la autora de 'Una habitación propia' había permanecido oculto en la casa de un noble inglés durante ochenta años.
    huffingtonpost.es/life/cultura

    #cultura #literatura #feminismo #virginiawoolf

  10. #VirginiaWoolf

    A Room of One's Own.

    “Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! ...--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”

  11. This evening's viewing: Queen Tilda Swinton in Orlando, adapted from the Virginia Woolf novel.

    I think this was my introduction to Sally Potter's work, coming out when I was a student & the Filmhouse was broadening my #film lore (it still is).

    #Orlando #VirginiaWoolf #SallyPotter #UKFilm #1990sFilm #TildaSwinton

  12. Pop Culture Library Review @popculturelibraries.wordpress.com@popculturelibraries.wordpress.com ·

    Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

    After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

    Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

    Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

    The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

    In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

    Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

    Compilation of four photographs of the Reading Room within the British Library, taken on August 3, 2025 (Photographs by me. Sorry for the blurriness in one of these photos)

    What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

    The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

    The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

    This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

    My photograph on the left on August 3, 2024, of the Rosetta Stone replica in the Enlightenment Gallery, and image of the replica from K-On! the Movie on the right.

    The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

    The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

    When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

    Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

    © 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

    Sources used

    #AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

  13. Samedi 20 septembre à partir de 15h, les animatrices du podcast Sorociné, dédié au cinéma à travers un angle féministe, seront les invitées de la médiathèque Virgina Woolf (Paris 13e) pour un programme spécial comprenant :

    🎥 Projection du film "The Hours" (VOSTFR, 1h54).

    🎙️ Enregistrement en public d’un épisode du podcast Sorociné consacré à Virginia Woolf.

    🙋🏼‍♀️ Questions/réponses avec le public.

    Entrée gratuite sans réservation.

    Le partage est apprécié :mastolove: et votre venue encore plus :shibahearteyes:

    #thehours #sorociné #cinema #bibliotheque #VirginiaWoolf #mediathequevirginiawoolf #feminisme #podcast

    paris.fr/evenements/the-hours-

  14. Samedi dernier, lendemain de tempête. La plage héraultaise était réduite à peau de chagrin et des monceaux de bois parsemaient ce qui reste de sable. Nombre de ganivelles sont endommagées et certains passages sont désormais difficiles d’accès, tant la mer a rongé les dunes. Le vent souffle encore fort, mais la mer, sublime, donne le sourire à celles et ceux qui marchent sur son […]

    https://san.heraut.eu/2025/03/29/chroniques-du-gard-4/

  15. radiofrance.fr/franceculture/p…

    "Il est toujours impressionnant et émouvant de constater chez un auteur une cohérence parfaite de la pensée … un emboitement magistral des idées, au travers de deux textes parfaitement différents. C'est le cas de Une chambres à soi et Des métiers pour les femmes de Virginia #Woolf. Le premier est un texte hautement littéraire, intime, solitaire et vertigineux. Le second est un propos plus spontané dans la forme mais plus doctrinal sur le fond, politique, et donc porteur des idées #féministes de l'autrice.
    Si Virginia Woolf associe Une chambre à soi à la solitude créatrice des femmes, elle les invite à s'interroger aussi sur l'idée d’une communauté littéraire qui se situerait au-delà du genre. Elle les enjoint à tendre vers un idéal #androgyne, ou bien de perpétrer le meurtre de l'Ange du foyer dans Des métiers pour les femmes . Ce sont les deux faces d'un même Janus.
    Pour #VirginiaWoolf, il est impératif de rappeler que si l'écriture est solitaire, la littérature est un bien universel dont la communauté féminine doit s'emparer sans appréhension.
    #UneChambreàSoi et Des métiers pour les femmes constituent le socle d'une pensée éminente dont les #femmes, de Karen Blixen à Marguerite Duras… de Carson Mc Cullers à Annie Ernaux se sont emparées pour s'installer dans la #littérature à la place qui leur est due."
    #AnneKessler
    #franceculture #podcast #baladodiffusion #féminisme

  16. CW: Preciado «le joie est une technique de résistance»

    "Une des choses qui m’a surpris à la #manifestation du 2 juin, qui n’était pas le cas de celles en banlieue, c’est qu’il y avait autant de filles que de garçons, de gens #queer
    [...] Queeriser le mouvement noir, décoloniser le mouvement gay… et du coup il nous faut ce Parlement des #corps. Pendant la période du confinement, la fermeture de toutes les #institutions, dont l’école, a acté leur collapse. Or, c’était des moyens très patriarco-coloniaux d’apprendre l’histoire et la littérature… Donc quelque part il nous faut de nouvelles institutions.
    [...] Il arrivera un moment où on va percevoir la réalité différemment. C’est pour ça que la psychanalyse est importante. Elle s’arroge, se donne le pouvoir de capturer la totalité de l’appareil désirant. Je trouve que c’est très important d’extraire le #désir de cette captation, parce que c’est avec ce désir-là qu’on va pouvoir faire la #révolution.
    [...] À chaque fois, je suis émerveillé. Comment #GertrudeStein a pu écrire ? Comment #VirginiaWoolf a pu écrire ?
    [...] La #race est une technologie de #contrôle qui a été développée pendant l’épisode de #colonialisme capitaliste. C’est la même chose avec la différence sexuelle.
    [...] Comment allons-nous désirer ?" #Preciado manifesto-21.com/paul-b-precia