Orlando
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Orlando is Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography of a poet who first appears as a sixteen-year-old boy at the court of Elizabeth I, and is left at the novel's end a married woman in the year 1928. Part love letter to Vita Sackville-West, part exploration of the art of biography, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and entertaining works.
Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
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Love Letters: Vita and Virginia
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Delve into a legendary literary love affair 'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...' At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat - and sapphist - Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn't think much of Vita's conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia's death in 1941. Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear these women's constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write her most fantastical novel, Orlando, and discover a relationship that - even a hundred years later - feels radical and relatable.
Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World
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An insightful, witty look at the life of 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 sisters Stella, 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. Praise for Virginia Woolf"Woolf's life has been endlessly pored over, but Gill finds a fresh way in by structuring her chatty, occasionally speculative biography around the female influences on Woolf's thinking and well-being, including her bohemian sister, Vanessa." --New York Times Book Review"Captivating and incisive." --BookPage"Gill presents a deft and empathetic portrayal of Woolf, the most famous author in the Bloomsbury group, by providing fascinating personal histories of generations of Pattle and Stephen women who influenced and inspired her." --Booklist"This volume will be welcomed by readers and students curious about the cultural aspects of Woolf's development as a writer." --Library Journal
