Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

255 Pages·2016·7.78 MB·English

by  Julie Vandivere (editor), Megan Hicks (editor)

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Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries places I
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Virginia Woolf’s writing in context with that of other G VIRGINIA WOOLF
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women writers during the fi rst decades of the twentieth
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century. Th e book increases our understanding of many

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female writers, helping us to comprehend how they
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contributed to, and complicated, modernist literature. O
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Th e essays in this book, divided in fi ve parts, explore F

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burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers
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who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf. Th e fi rst D edited by

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part, entitled “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contem- Julie Vandivere
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poraries,” explores the boundaries of contemporaneity by R & Megan Hicks

considering women across time, class and national iden- F
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tity. Th e second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores M
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Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture,
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including fi lm and book societies. Th e next two sections,

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“Virginia Woolf’s Contemporaries Abroad” and “Virginia O
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Woolf’s Contemporaries at Home,” illuminate the inter-
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locking network of women writers and artists. Finally, one
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of the most enticing sections of the volume is a collection P
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of essays presented as a fi tting memorial to Jane Marcus.
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Th ere, three of Marcus’ students celebrate the life, work,
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CLEMSON UNIVERSITY PRESS
CLEMSON BLOOMSBURG CASEWRAP CPI.indd 1 28/04/2016 10:52:00
Virginia Woolf
and Her Female Contemporaries
Selected Papers from the Twenty-Fifth Annual
International Conference on Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
and Her Female Contemporaries
Selected Papers from the Twenty-Fifth Annual
International Conference on Virginia Woolf
Edited by
Julie Vandivere and Megan Hicks
Works produced at Clemson University by the Center for Electronic and Digital Publish-
ing (CEDP), including The South Carolina Review and its themed series “Virginia Woolf
International,” “Ireland in the Arts and Humanities,” and “James Dickey Revisited,” may
be found at our website: http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/press. Contact the director at
864-656-5399 for information.
Copyright 2016 by Clemson University
ISBN 978-1-942954-08-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-942954-09-5 (e-book)
Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital
Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina.
Produced with the Adobe Creative Suite CS6 and Microsoft Word. This book is set in Adobe
Garamond Pro and was printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY.
Editorial Assistants: Sam Martin, Kara McKlemurry, and Charis Chapman.
Table of Contents
Julie Vandivere and Megan Hicks • Introduction ...........................................................vii
Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................xviii
Abbreviations ...............................................................................................................xx
Who Are VirginiA Woolf’s femAle ContemporAries?
Mary Jean Corbett • Considering Contemporaneity: Woolf and “the Maternal
Generation” .............................................................................................................2
Mary Wilson • Who Is My Contemporary?: Woolf, Mansfield, and Their Servants .............8
Catherine W. Hollis • “The World is My Country”: Emma Goldman among the
Avant-Garde .........................................................................................................15
Kristin Bluemel • “Definite, Burly, and Industrious”: Virginia Woolf and Gwen
Darwin Raverat ....................................................................................................22
Jeffrey M. Brown • “A Verbal Life on the Lips of the Living”: Virginia Woolf,
Ellen Terry, and the Victorian Contemporary ...........................................................29
Elisa Kay Sparks • Twists of the Lily: Floral Ambivalence in the Work of Virginia
Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe ....................................................................................36
VirginiA Woolf’s CulturAl Contexts
Nicola Wilson • Virginia Woolf and the Book Society Limited ........................................48
Alyssa Mackenzie • The Outsider as Editor: Three Guineas and the Feminist
Periodical ..............................................................................................................56
Eleanor McNees • Woolf’s Imperialist Cousins: Missionary Vocations of Dorothea
and Rosamond Stephen .........................................................................................62
Beth Rigel Daugherty • Mary Sheepshanks, Virginia Stephen, and Morley College:
Learning to Teach, Learning to Write ......................................................................69
Leslie Kathleen Hankins • Moving Picture This: Virginia Woolf in the British
Good Housekeeping!? or Moving Picture This: Woolf’s London Essays and
the Cinema ...........................................................................................................76
Sarah Cornish • “Quota Quickies Threaten Audience Intelligence Levels!”: The
Power of the Screen in Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema” and “Middlebrow” and Betty
Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square ..........................................................................86
VirginiA Woolf’s ContemporAries AbroAd
Patrizia A. Muscogiuri • Reconfiguring the Mermaid: H.D., Virginia Woolf, and the
Radical Ethics of Writing as Marine Practice ...........................................................94
Jessica Kim • A Carnival of the Grotesque: Feminine Imperial Flânerie in Virginia
Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and Una Marson’s“Little Brown Girl” ...........................102
Kimberley Engdahl Coates • Mad Women: Dance, Female Sexuality, and Surveillance
in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman ....................................109
v
Lois Gilmore • Shop My Closet: Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, and Fashion
Contemporaries ...................................................................................................116
Maria Aparecida de Oliveira • Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian
Perspective ...........................................................................................................122
Joyce E. Kelley • Making Waves in Lonely Parallel: Evelyn Scott and Virginia
Woolf ..................................................................................................................129
Urvashi Vashist • Critical Characters in Search of an Author: Cornelia Sorabji
and Virginia Woolf ..............................................................................................136
Kristin Czarnecki • “In my mind I saw my mother”: Virginia Woolf, Zitkala-Ša,
and Autobiography ..............................................................................................143
VirginiA Woolf’s ContemporAries At home
Gill Lowe • “The Squeak of a Hinge”: Hinging and Swinging in Woolf and
Mansfield ............................................................................................................150
Kate Haffey • “People must marry”: Queer Temporality in Virginia Woolf and
Katherine Mansfield ............................................................................................157
Emily Rials • The Weight of “Formal Obstructions” and Punctuation in Mrs.
Dalloway and Pointed Roofs ..............................................................................163
Diane F. Gillespie • Advise and Reject: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and a
Forgotten Woman’s Voice .......................................................................................170
Karen L. Levenback • Florence Melian Stawell and Virginia Woolf: Home-front
Experience, The Price of Freedom, and Patriotism ................................................177
Benjamin D. Hagen • Intimations of Cosmic Indifference in Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando and Olive Moore’s Spleen .......................................................................183
Mark Hussey • “Could I sue a dead person?”: Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf .............189
Vara Neverow • Splintered Sexualities in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier,
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “A Love Match” ....196
Barbara Lonnquist: Sexual Cryptographies and War in Virginia Woolf’s Between the
Acts and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day .................................................202
tribute to JAne mArCus
Linda Camarasana • Memorial Tribute for Jane Marcus ...............................................210
J. Ashley Foster • To Jane, Thank You. With Love, .......................................................213
Jean Mills • Tribute to Jane Marcus.............................................................................216
Notes on Contributors ..............................................................................................218
Conference Program ..................................................................................................223
vi
introduCtion
by Julie Vandivere and Megan Hicks
In 2011, a number of scholars of lesser-known female modernists were sitting in a bar
at a conference. Yes, we know that sounds like the setup for a joke. And perhaps in a
way, it is. For out of that casual conversation, we (Erica Delsandro and Julie Vandivere)
decided to produce an international conference, focusing on all of Virginia Woolf’s female
contemporaries, at Bloomsburg University, a small Pennsylvania state institution that, be-
cause of its rural location, had never before hosted an international conference of any sort.
Ever. The punch line to the joke, of course, is that the conference was a big success—and
planning and presenting it was the best time many of us have had in years. We learned that
campuses like ours can be perfect settings for conferences—and that hosting the Virginia
Woolf conference, in particular, can offer tremendous benefits to any institution.
Never would we have imagined just how great and positive an impact the Woolf
conference would have on our university and hometown. It gave us the means to develop
bonds between “town and gown” as never before: We secured grants from local corpora-
tions and businesses, connected local readers with international academics in book groups
and at the conference, and involved undergraduates and area high school students in
reading, writing, and presenting on Virginia Woolf at the college level. In turn, confer-
ence-goers poured into the towns’ shops and restaurants, not only providing a jolt to the
local economy but also giving residents real pride in our downtown. Bloomsburg Univer-
sity and the town of Bloomsburg truly welcomed and, we must say, delighted in the 25th
Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.
Because of the very positive and unexpected results of marrying the town, university,
and conference into one event, we’d like to use this introduction to give you a behind-
the-scenes look at how we made the conference happen and encourage future conference
organizers to use what we learned to even greater success.
setting up A foundAtion ACCount
Bloomsburg University, like most universities, has a foundation, and it took only one phone
call to ask that a subcategory be added for the conference. Foundations already have all the
mechanisms in place to accept donations online, issue receipts, and acknowledge contribu-
tions. More importantly, because foundations are tax-deductible entities, the clear tax benefit
gives incentive to individuals, foundations, and corporations to donate. With the foundation
account easily and quickly constructed, we were able to approach a local charitable group,
the Degenstein Foundation, and request that they donate money to build the town-gown
relations. Once the Degenstein Foundation pitched in and the work was started, we were
able to approach other individuals and groups and ask that they, too, help make connections
between the university and town. We learned, for example, that university presidents and
provosts have foundation accounts outside their academic budgets and that they are able to
move money from their own foundation accounts to those they feel are worthwhile.
vii
An additional benefit is that the foundation account does not require the same sort of
paperwork as university budgets and can be used to reimburse individuals right away for
services and goods or, in highly regulated states like ours, buy wine for banquets and re-
ceptions. In addition, if the conference organizer sets up an account, she then has control
over that money and it cannot be reabsorbed into any university budget but can be used
only at her discretion. Thus, after the conference ended, we still had some funds available
in the account and were able to use that money to provide scholarships for some of the
undergraduates who had worked so hard on the 2015 conference to travel to the 2016 An-
nual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in Leeds, England. Some of the students
we have awarded have never even been out of state, none have ever left the country, and
all are giddy with excitement at the thought of travelling to England.
reAChing out to the Community
Our second—and, undoubtedly, most important—step was to use the Degenstein money
to develop relations with the town of Bloomsburg and high school students. We began by
pairing with Bloomsburg University’s education department to place hundreds of copies of
A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway in high school classes a year before the conference.
Students in ten classes at five area high schools began reading Woolf as a result of this initia-
tive. Bloomsburg University students, under the direction of their professors, taught both
books in the high schools and, with the guidance of the Bloomsburg University Writing
Center, helped high school students prepare papers to present at the conference. The result
was transformative, as both our undergraduates and the high school students developed
their abilities to produce good and precise writing and became inspired by Woolf’s writing
and the ways it allowed them to discuss vital concepts in the classroom, including the role of
women in the world, the importance of education, and the devastating effects of war. Ulti-
mately, two high schools participated in the conference and, thanks again to the Degenstein
grant, attended all panels, plenary dialogues, and special events at no cost.
We also established a community reading group that met weekly in the months leading to
the conference. Each of six English professors picked their favorite poem or story by a modern-
ist women writer and then, on an assigned night, led the reading group at a locally owned (and
struggling) bookstore. One snowy night, when we were supposed to be discussing Katherine
Anne Porter, only three people showed. Still, it was a great evening of community as we all
bundled off to a local bar. Other nights, there were as many as fifteen people in attendance:
professors, students, teachers, and other members of the community. It was very gratifying to see
one women use the reading group as an exercise for her adult literacy course. At forty, she had
never learned to read, and so she would trace the words in the stories and poems slowly with her
finger, sounding out the meaning. Clearly, she wasn’t ready for either literary analysis or a search
for multiple meanings, but her successful grasp of the plot thrilled her—and all of us.
In these two ways and long before scholars arrived on campus, we saw the conference
engaging people from both the university and town and with varied levels of experience:
Intellectually sophisticated English professors and enlightened undergraduates were hav-
ing spirited discussions with intelligent but naïve high school students, lovers of popular
literature, and even the most rudimentary readers. We inadvertently had created that
audience that Woolf speaks of in “The Common Reader.” These non-academics who were
viii
reading Woolf and her female contemporaries for the first time brought a freshness to
the table. It became clear to us that the soon-to-arrive group of scholars should enjoy the
same vibrancy, and we decided to move as much of the conference into town as possible.
prepAring for the ConferenCe: other Art forms in the Community
Our initial activities in town broadened our perspective on what the conference could be,
and we decided we wanted to move our special events downtown. Then, asked our students
and faculty, why not incorporate theater and the visual arts into the program? Indeed, why
not? The town of Bloomsburg is fortunate to be home to the highly successful, professional
resident ensemble, the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE), a group that is unique in
the United States and rare in the world. American Theatre Magazine calls BTE “a shining
example” of “commitment to place.” Because of their reputation, Ellen McLaughlin, an
award-winning Broadway actress who has dedicated much of her career to bringing Woolf’s
work to the stage, agreed to come to the conference and, with BTE, do a one-night, staged
reading of Septimus and Clarissa, McLaughlin’s theatrical rendering of Mrs. Dalloway. New
York Magazine named Septimus and Clarissa one of the best off-Broadway plays of 2011
and the New York Times called it “thrilling and richly theatrical.” As you might imagine, we
scrambled to find funds for the production, and the date was set.
At the same time, undergraduate Katie Starliper worked with Bloomsburg Univer-
sity’s art department to organize a juried exhibition of small works on paper inspired or
broadly influenced by those female artists who were contemporaries with Virginia Woolf.
In an effort to keep costs reasonable for as many artists as possible, we made three key
decisions: We would set a very low entry fee ($25 for up to three entries), require that
entries be no larger than 15x11 inches, and exhibit the work unframed (but behind glass).
We then mailed our call for entries to just about every art department and print shop
we could think of and posted it on more than 20 Web sites. Within days, our exhibition
garnered attention from artists all over the world (evoking many comments and references
to Bloomsbury), and submissions started flooding in.
And so, two months before the conference, momentum was building on campus
and in the community. Dr. Kristie Byrum, a professor from Bloomsburg University’s
mass communications department, offered to make connections with the Chamber
of Commerce and television and radio stations, as well as to arrange interviews and
public service announcements. As a result of her efforts, the Chamber of Commerce
distributed two thousand flyers, we were interviewed on the radio, and the local PBS
television affiliate contacted us about covering the conference and its connection to
the community for a television special that was aired in October 2015. Undergraduate
Nick Strittmatter, who has connections to town businesses, thought it would be a good
idea to approach our favorite restaurants, ask that they offer specials or discounts for
conference-goers, and announce their support for the conference with signs in their
windows. In thanks, we would advertise the restaurants in the program and on the
website, provide a map with their locations for all conference attendees, and include a
review of each restaurant in our program. All agreed and soon the town was bedecked in
a Woolfian celebration. Signs appeared in windows, banners were strung across building
ix