Woolf SeminarWriters on Woolf
A few of the many writers who have been influenced by the work of Virginia Woolf,
and others who have commented on her work
Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998; winner of the Pulitzer Prize) is a postmodern rewriting of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. The lesbian desire of Clarissa for Sally Seton and the covert homoerotic subtext of Septimus Smith is recontextualized by Cunningham in an enchanting novel that traces familial, social, cultural and sexual connections across time and space. The Bourton-Westminster, battlefield/London past/present dynamic in Mrs Dalloway is echoed here in passages involving Manhattan and Los Angeles. You can listen to a recording of Michael Cunningham's informal, personal discussion of how he first discovered Woolf's work and how much it meant to him at http://www.nytimes.com/books/home/. From there, select "Specials/Audio" and you will see a link to a Manhattan celebration of Virginia Woolf's life and work on March 9, 2000. You can listen to the entire event or select only Cunningham's short talk if you like. The novel opens with Virginia Woolf herself as a character, in 1923 (Mrs. Dalloway's time) The rest of the novel alternates between a present narrative and a narrative set in 1949. In the present, on a sunny June day in Greenwich Village (like the day of Mrs. Dalloway in London in 1923), Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown plans her husband's birthday dinner and tries to bake a cake. Clarissa and Laura Brown are also linked by their reading of Woolf. Cunningham uses transitions to link the separate narratives in ways that are similar to Woolf's in Mrs. Dalloway. He also embeds a more direct connection between the disparate narratives than Woolf does between Septimus and her Clarissa. I won't give away what that connection is, but while you're reading The Hours, you will discover it. You will also notice an interesting connection or contrast between the dangers of Woolf's time (The Great War is one) and Cunningham's and ours (AIDS is one).
Jeannette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and others) has written on Woolf and has written novels in which you can see Woolf's influence. For example, you can compare Written on the Body to Orlando. Winterson discusses Orlando in her essay "A Gift of Wings" and The Waves in "A Veil of Words" (both essays are included in her collection Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.
Carole Maso (Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, AVA, Aureole, Defiance) has commented on Woolf directly, quoted passages from Woolf within her own novels, and alluded to Woolf's life in her novels. I have mentioned a couple of these specific echoes in class (and I discuss them in forthcoming essays). In 1993 I compared Maso's novel AVA to Woolf's The Waves when I reviewed it for the Chicago Tribune. In "An Essay" in American Poetry Review, Mar/Apr 95, Maso commented on Woolf's use of stream-of-consciousness and its connection to erotic desire.
"Virginia Woolf knew the illusion of fiction is gradual even if moments are heart stopping, breathtaking. There is a pattern, which is only revealed as patterns are, through elongation and perspective, the ability to see a whole, a necklace of luminous moments strung together. How to continue the progression, the desire to go beyond the intensity of the moment or of moments. Like sex, one has to figure out how to go on after the intensity of the moment--how in effect to compose a life after that, how to conjure back a world worth living in, a world which might recall, embrace the momentary, glowing, obliterating, archetypal. One longs for everything. For the past one never experienced, for the future one will never know--except through the imaginative act. One longs to be everything. To have everything."
Doris Grumbach's Chamber Music is another novel that can be studied in relation to Woolf's work and life. In this novel a woman is married to a homosexual man, a prominent musician and composer, who contracts AIDS. In coming to terms with her husband's sexuality, she also must come to terms with her own. Thanks to Professor Catharine Gabriel Carey at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio for suggesting this book.
Dorothy Richardson's series of novels in Pilgrimage are worth studying for their stream of consciousness technique. Pointed Roofs is the first in the series. Richardson was a contemporary of Woolf's; thus it's not so much that she was influenced by Woolf (she actually pioneered the method a bit before Woolf did), but you may enjoy reading her in comparison with Woolf. (Along with James Joyce and other obvious contemporaries.) Read excerpts from a paper discussing Richardson and Woolf.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read an early paper that compared the two writers.
For writers referred to in Woolf's novels, see other pages on this website pertinent to particular novels.
this page created March 21 2000; updated March 23, April 22, May 26 2000
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