CONTENTS 1 VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS edited by Maria Cândida Zamith and Luísa Flora Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto 2007 2 VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS FICHA TÉCNICA Título: VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS Org.: Maria Cândida Zamith e Luísa Flora Edição: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto Ano: 2007 Execução gráfica: Tipografia Nunes, Lda - Maia Nr. de exemplares: 500 ex. Depósito Legal: 257593/07 ISBN: 978-972-8932-23-7 Capa: R. M. S. Anselm - reprodução de pintura de Sir Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971) CONTENTS 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………… 5 Contributors ………………………………………………………………… 7 Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………… 11 Introduction ………………………………………………………………… 13 DAWN Maria DiBattista The Sybil of the Drawing Room: Virginia Woolf in Old Bloomsbury. …………… 21 MORNING Natalya Reinhold “A Wonderful Compass of Voices”: From a Passionate Apprenticeship towards Full-Scale Writing …………………………………………………………………………… 39 Ana Clara Birrento Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being …………………………………………………………… 61 Maria Cândida Zamith “Happily I’m Bloomsbury”: Virginia’s Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury’s Virginia …… 73 MIDDAY Christine Froula On French and British Freedoms: Early Bloomsbury and the Brothels of Modernism ……………………………………………………………………………………… 87 José Luís Araújo Lima “For there they were”: Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway ……………… 109 4 VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS AFTERNOON Marilyn Schwinn-Smith Bears in Bloomsbury: Jane Ellen Harrison and the Russians ……………………… 119 Marilyn Slutzky Zucker Woolf’s Revisionist Poetics and the Materiality of Language ……………………… 145 Lígia Silva Virginia Woolf and Gabriela Llansol – “Sweeping the thick leaves of habit” … 155 TWILIGHT Luísa Flora “The Desolate Ruins of My Old Squares”: Woolf out of Bloomsbury and into the Future …………………………………………………………………………………………… 167 CONTENTS 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost the editors want to express their gratitude to the contributors of this book. Their prompt acceptance of the invitation to come to Porto for the Virginia Woolf March 2005 Conference was followed by their immediate agreement to publish the essays with us. They patiently endured the many queries the editing of such a volume inevitably involves, expressing constant support throughout the long process of preparing all the papers for publication. We hope the end result will not disappoint our colleagues and friends. Our special thanks also go to all those who made the organization of the Conference possible: - Professor Gualter Cunha, both personally and as Director of Instituto de Estudos Ingleses, for his precious and indispensable acceptance of and cooperation in the project. - All the Library staff, for an always warm cooperative attitude, with particular emphasis on Drª Isabel Leite who put together a very suggestive and rich exhibition of Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury material displaying what is perhaps the most important Woolf/Bloomsbury bibliographical collection in Portugal. - Gabinete de Eventos for their invaluable assistance, mainly Drª Fátima Lisboa and Cláudia Moreira, who were responsible for the shaping and coordination of even the tiniest particulars of logistics, involving preparation, publicizing, and accompaniment of the event for the guest- speakers’ and audience’s comfort and information. - The Secção de Informática’s helpful staff, particularly Luís Miguel Gomes and Filipe Azevedo Alves for technical and personal assistance at the time of the Conference and problem-solving accompaniment throughout the editing process. Special thanks are particularly due to Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian without whose financial support the publication of Virginia Woolf: Three Centenary Celebrations would not have been possible. We are also grateful to FCT: Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia for the sponsoring of Instituto de Estudos Ingleses’ research and activities programs. Our thanks must also go to Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, which housed the Conference and is the publishing entity of this book. 6 VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS Personal thanks are addressed to Richard Todd for his helpful advice in the early stages of this book. We are further indebted to Drª Cláudia Ramos for her precious advice and cooperation throughout the editing/publishing process. Mrs. Zélia Mota of Tipografia Nunes should not be forgotten either, for her adequate hints and the faithful execution of our directions. We are also grateful to all those in Faculdade de Letras whose support and professional collaboration greatly helped the smooth advancement of this publishing project. The editors want to extend their particular thanks to José António Pimenta de França for the kindness with which he allowed us to use his picture of the R.M.S. Anselm, both for the Conference exhibition and for the cover of the volume. CONTRIBUTORS 7 CONTRIBUTORS Ana Clara Birrento: has a PhD in English Literature. Her research areas include English Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly the novel; cultural and gender studies. Recent publications include book articles on William Blake (2004) and Margaret Oliphant’s fiction (2002, 2000). Forthcoming are, among others, essays on ‘Landscapes of being - autobiography and images of the self’, and on ‘Self-Negotiating Borders, Constructing Identity’. She is currently President of the Department Board in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Évora, Portugal. Maria DiBattista: is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, U.S.A. Her books include The Fables of Anon: Virginia Woolf’s Major Fiction (1980); First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (1991) and, as co-editor and contributor, High and Low Moderns: British Literature and Culture 1889-1939 (1996). Her latest book is Fast Talking Dames (2001), a study of American film comedy of the thirties and forties. Luísa Flora: is Associate Professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal and a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies). Her main interests are novel and short story theory, identity and gender studies, contemporary literature and culture, comparative literature. With Richard Todd, she edited Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands (Rodopi, 2001). Her publications include, as co-editor and contributor, The Crossroads of Gender and Century Endings (2000) and Feminine Identities (2002). She is the author of, among other texts, Short Story: Um Género Literário em Ensaio Académico (2003). Christine Froula: is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, U.S.A. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (Columbia, 2005); Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (Columbia, 1996); To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (Yale, 1984); A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New Directions, 1983); and other writings on interdisciplinary modernism, contemporary theory, and textual scholarship. José Luís Araújo Lima: Worked in the Department of English and North-American Studies of the Faculty of Letters, University of Porto, Portugal, since 1973. His M.A. 8 VIRGINIA WOOLF: THREE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS thesis, presented to the University of Lisbon in 1972, is entitled Death-in-Being and Being-towards-Death in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. English Literature has been his main area of teaching, with special emphasis on the poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is very much interested in American Poetry and published an essay on Sylvia Plath, but his publications have been dominated by the “metaphysical poets” and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. Natalya Reinhold: (PhD in English, Exeter University, UK; Dr. of Philology, Moscow, Russia), has publications on twentieth-century English Literature, Comparative Studies, and Translation. Among them: Psychological Prose; published-essays-cum-interviews with Iris Murdoch, Piers Paul Read, John Fowles and Martin Amis; translations of Virginia Woolf’s essays on Russian writers and A Room of One’s Own; literary criticism of T. S. Eliot; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; ‘Russian Culture and the Work of D. H. Lawrence: An Eighty-year Long Appropriation’(forthcoming). She is currently head and professor of the Department for Translation Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. Marilyn Schwinn-Smith: is a scholar affiliated with Five Colleges Inc., in Amherst, MA, U.S.A. She has presented papers internationally on Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva and British novelist, Virginia Woolf. Research interests include the relations of reading and living in the working lives of women, Anglo-Russian literary relations, and the Gypsy in European literary imagination. Publications include: “Vsevolod Garshin’s ‘The Bears’: Gypsies and Russian Imperial Boundaries”, “Gypsies” in Literature and Culture. (forthcoming); “The Northampton Silk Project”, Smith Studies in History (Northampton, MA, 2005); “Perekop and the Question of Russian Identity”, Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference on Marina Tsvetaeva (in Russian) (Moscow, 2004); “The Activist Pens of Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan”, in Woolf Across Cultures (Pace UP, 2004). Lígia Silva: Graduated in English and German Languages and Literatures from the Faculty of Letters, University of Porto, Portugal. She completed a Masters in