Latest news with #Woolf
Belfast Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
A century of Clarissa: Why Mrs Dalloway will forever fascinate us
As Virginia Woolf's fourth novel turns 100, Katie Rosseinsky speaks to experts about how this dazzlingly experimental work still has readers and writers under its spell ©UK Independent In his 1998 novel The Hours, writer Michael Cunningham imagines Virginia Woolf sitting down to do battle with the draft of a book that will eventually become Mrs Dalloway. 'Can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?' his fictional version of the novelist ponders. The sweet, sad irony, of course, is that any reader of Mrs Dalloway knows that she needn't fret: the answer to Woolf's self-questioning is a resounding 'yes'. She is, in fact, working on a story so dazzling and expansive that it will prove irresistible to generations of readers to come, including writers like Cunningham. A century on from its debut, Woolf's fourth novel is 'as vital as ever', says Vintage Classics editor Charlotte Knight. To read it 100 years later is to be shocked by its immediacy and the sheer audacity of its experimentation; it's no wonder that contemporary authors are still in its thrall.
Perth Now
a day ago
- Sport
- Perth Now
Origin duo backed to go full-throttle in Perth
The Dolphins' and Newcastle Knights' respective coaches have vowed their State of Origin stars will be in full flight for Saturday's NRL clash at HBF Park. In the battle of sixth vs 15th, both Dolphins coach Kristian Woolf and his Newcastle counterpart Adam O'Brien backed their Queensland Origin starters Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Kalyn Ponga to back up after their mid-week heroics against NSW. Woolf said Tabuai-Fidow, who scored two first-half tries in the Maroons' heart-stopping 26-24 win at Optus Stadium, had been bouncing off the walls after linking up with his club teammates in Perth. 'He came into camp with a real smile on his face and that's always a great sign for 'Hammer',' he said. 'I liked the way he was moving out there as well, I probably expected him to be a little bit tentative but he's moving around really quick and he's ready to go. 'They performed really well and made some real improvements from what they did in the first game. They all looked like a really happy group; he's certainly come into camp that way and it's great for us.' Ponga started at full-back for the Maroons and O'Brien said the Port Hedland-born star had pulled up well following the grueling clash. Kalyn Ponga. Credit: Scott Gardiner / Getty Images 'Kalyn will play. He looks great. It's an extra day from what it was from Origin one, so that helps, and then he just stayed on, didn't have to travel.' The Knights will bring back Bradman Best, Fletcher Sharpe and Tyson Frizell following injuries and O'Brien said his side needed to be prepared for the exciting Tabuai-Fidow and his fellow Dolphins outside backs. 'They move the ball great, they play to their strengths. With a few of their forwards out, they rely on getting the ball to their outside backs, who are quite athletic,' he said. 'We understand we have to be very good defensively because you're going to face a lot of shift, a lot of shape, particularly in parts of the field you're not normally used to.' Following their thumping 58-4 win over North Queensland last week, Woolf said his team could not afford to put the cart before the horse ahead of the Newcastle match. 'We've just got ourselves into the top eight and we've had to work really hard to do that after a slow start,' he said. 'More concerning for us at the moment is the week-to-week performance and making sure we continue on the right direction.'
West Australian
a day ago
- Sport
- West Australian
NRL: Dolphins and Newcastle Knights duo Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Kalyn Ponga ready for Perth clash
The Dolphins' and Newcastle Knights' respective coaches have vowed their State of Origin stars will be in full flight for Saturday's NRL clash at HBF Park. In the battle of sixth vs 15th, both Dolphins coach Kristian Woolf and his Newcastle counterpart Adam O'Brien backed their Queensland Origin starters Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Kalyn Ponga to back up after their mid-week heroics against NSW. Woolf said Tabuai-Fidow, who scored two first-half tries in the Maroons' heart-stopping 26-24 win at Optus Stadium, had been bouncing off the walls after linking up with his club teammates in Perth. 'He came into camp with a real smile on his face and that's always a great sign for 'Hammer',' he said. 'I liked the way he was moving out there as well, I probably expected him to be a little bit tentative but he's moving around really quick and he's ready to go. 'They performed really well and made some real improvements from what they did in the first game. They all looked like a really happy group; he's certainly come into camp that way and it's great for us.' Ponga started at full-back for the Maroons and O'Brien said the Port Hedland-born star had pulled up well following the grueling clash. 'Kalyn will play. He looks great. It's an extra day from what it was from Origin one, so that helps, and then he just stayed on, didn't have to travel.' The Knights will bring back Bradman Best, Fletcher Sharpe and Tyson Frizell following injuries and O'Brien said his side needed to be prepared for the exciting Tabuai-Fidow and his fellow Dolphins outside backs. 'They move the ball great, they play to their strengths. With a few of their forwards out, they rely on getting the ball to their outside backs, who are quite athletic,' he said. 'We understand we have to be very good defensively because you're going to face a lot of shift, a lot of shape, particularly in parts of the field you're not normally used to.' Following their thumping 58-4 win over North Queensland last week, Woolf said his team could not afford to put the cart before the horse ahead of the Newcastle match. 'We've just got ourselves into the top eight and we've had to work really hard to do that after a slow start,' he said. 'More concerning for us at the moment is the week-to-week performance and making sure we continue on the right direction.'
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Vanessa Bell, the mother of British modernism
One of artist Vanessa Bell's earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell 'which I liked best, my father or my mother.' Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be 'jumping around naked' in the bathroom. Bell's preference was for her mother. Woolf, meanwhile, analysed her own feelings before choosing their father. Bell was 40 when she recalled the incident in a letter: 'Such a question seemed to me rather terrible – surely one ought not to ask it… If one could criticise one's parents, what or whom could one not criticise? Dimly some freedom of thought and speech seemed born.' The conversation was a 'turning point' in the sisters' relationship, writes Wendy Hitchmouth in a new biography of Bell. Vanessa and Virginia had begun to plot an escape out of their strict Victorian upbringing into the realm of the provocative. The role of the home looms large in Vanessa Bell, The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale University Press). Hitchmouth is more familiar than most with Bell's best-known residence, the pastel-hued Charleston House in the Sussex Downs: she was the curator there for 12 years. This is her second book on the early 20th-century group of artists, writers and thinkers in as many years, following 2023's The Bloomsbury Look, and in it she puts Bell on a new podium: not as the overlooked sister of Woolf's or lover of artists Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but as the mother of British modernism. It's a bold move, not least because – as Hitchmouth intricately unpicks throughout the biography – Bell spent her lifetime hiding her light under a bushel. But this, Hitchmouth convincingly argues, was all part of the plan. Woolf and Bell grew up in the stiff gloom of Hyde Park Gate, against a backdrop of academia, mourning and suggested childhood sexual abuse. But while they escaped it for still-radical lives dedicated to writing, art, polyamory and beauty, Bell maintained and manipulated certain trappings of Edwardian womanhood to further her career and fuel her lifestyle. One of the many portraits of Bell by Duncan Grant depicts how she is remembered by art history. She lies in a hammock next to the pond at Charleston. At her feet lies a man, reading and a boy, her middle child, Quentin, rocking her. Bell and Grant's daughter Angelica, her youngest, pulls a small toy dog along the garden path, barefoot. Her eldest child Julian is alone in a rowing boat in the distance. Bell, in a pink dress and headscarf, has her feet and arms crossed, her head back, gazing into the distance; part-hippy mum, part exhaustion, both central and removed from it all. She was the big sister nicknamed 'The Saint' by her siblings, who raised the Stephens children after their mother and step-sister died. The woman who nursed Woolf during her well-reported depressions. The mother of three, who couldn't stop her daughter from unwittingly marrying her real father's former lover. All of these biographical details are attended to in Hitchmouth's biography, but what they are revealed as a facade to a woman whose determination and dynamism was overlooked. Hitchmouth transcribed some 1,500 unpublished letters from Bell to dig into the minutiae of effort that lies behind the gatherings, exhibitions and publications that make cultural movements happen. The ordering of the canvas and the booking of venues, the sending of invitations and liaising with picture editors, the arranging of models and wooing of cultural grandees. Bell did it all, and then said the men she worked among were responsible for it. There were reasons for this, Hitchmouth explains: 'In the public domain, Vanessa's upbringing instilled in her an enduring semblance of passivity.' When Leonard Woolf – who would later marry Virginia – first met the sisters during a visit to their brother Thoby at Cambridge, he recalled that 'they hardly spoke'. The Stephens sisters may have come from enough money to enable their creative freedom after their parents' premature deaths, but they carried the gendered baggage their male contemporaries didn't. As Hitchmouth writes: 'Vanessa internalised the prejudices that limited her career.' Perhaps this is why, even in her own words (Bell was a vivid and witty writer, although she denied this), she shrugged off her efforts. Perhaps she was just self-effacing. Probably both. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe In Bell's memoirs, the weekly late-night bohemian she hosted at Gordon Square in her early twenties, effectively forming The Bloomsbury Group, are described as happening when 'one or two of these friends began to drift in'. But she had made invitations and introductions, she had purposefully shaken off the strictures of Victorian socialising for whisky and biscuits at midnight. She hung pictures strategically in the hallway, knowing the impression they would make. Bell did the same with The Friday Club, the Omega Workshops (comparing the running of them, entertainingly, to 'ordering dinner'), painterly gatherings at country houses in Sussex and Studland and the South of France and, of course, Charleston. Bell not only hosted the Bloomsbury Group, she invented its ways of being and brought it together, and over the decades that work was forgotten. Hitchmouth also demonstrates the convoluted mechanics of Bell getting away with living the personal life she wanted. Her in-laws never visited Charleston, where she lived with Grant, because they assumed she and Clive had a normal marriage. The past decade has seen art history attempt to re-establish Bell; The Dulwich Picture Gallery retrospective in 2017 was her first – she died in 1961. A subsequent, more recent, show at Milton Keynes gallery reached the pages of the New York Times. It feels, now, that we are comfortable in naming her among the first British artists to play with abstractism. Still, Hitchmouth is insistent on Bell's pioneering approaches: she writes that Bell made cut-outs before Matisse and dripped paint before Pollock. Her abstract paintings appeared while Mondrian was still a Neo-Plasticist. Nobody, Hitchmouth claims, had coloured walls like she had before. As for Woolf's much-feted room of one's own? Bell got there first by setting up their sororal home to have a separate living and working space apiece. Sometimes these proclamations of invention are so smuggled into a text rich with names and dates and artworks that I wondered if they deserved more bolstering. What is undeniable is that the hundreds of works she made alongside other artists, first through the Omega Workshops – where work was deliberately anonymous – and then later through her decades-long partnership with Grant, was mostly unattributed. Grant outlived Bell and, in her wake, entertained art dealers, collectors and historians, some of whom encouraged him to retrospectively sign pieces that could have been made by either of them, sometimes in biro. With it, Bell's efforts were made invisible. Woolf wrote the forewords for Bell's 1930s solo shows. In one of them she interrogated the patriarchy that both had worked to navigate throughout their careers. After working through the contradictions of Bell being both masculine and feminine, interested in children but 'equally interested in rocks', able to make clothes but also being a fan of nudity, Woolf concludes that Bell is 'not a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and with her hands shelling peas'. It's a passage that demonstrates both the deep and complex affinity the sisters shared and the enormity of Bell's creative output and ways of being. It's this enormity that Hitchmouth's biography struggles with; sometimes we lose sight of who Bell was as a woman under the abundance of her achievements, the many people she was connected to, the homes and exhibitions and artworks she created. Huge life events are glimpsed: Woolf's affair with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, and Vanessa's revelation of Virginia's letters about it to Woolf's husband, for instance. The death of Bell's beloved son Julian during the Spanish Civil War. We learn that Quentin's infant illness prevented Bell from exhibiting at a history-making exhibition in Paris, and provided an important connection in her relationship with Roger Fry ('he knew what it felt like to have one's baby ill'), but not on how it affected her more broadly. I was curious as to where the children were, and how Bell felt about them, as she bounded from home to home, lover to lover, experiment to experiment. Hitchmouth's biography is revelatory about the strength and compassion of sisterhood between Woolf and Bell – which for so long has been positioned as an uneven rivalry – but I was left hankering for more of the intimacy of their letters. And it is through Woolf's eyes that we get the best understanding of Bell as a person. Not as a saint or a painted matriarch or a lover, but a woman, clever and conniving to make not just a life of modernity, but a movement. And through this cacophony of letters, connections and history, Hitchmouth gives Bell back the identity Woolf remembers her sister having. That of the person who, as a child 'scrawl[ed] on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. 'When I am a famous painter – ' she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way.' Related
Hindustan Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill
Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Published by Hogarth Press, that the author set up with her husband Leonard in their basement at Hogarth House in Richmond, London, the novel challenged the Victorian idea of a plot. A luminary text, that has been adapted to films and plays, it is set to soon have its own biography published by Manchester University Press. But as everyone holds forth about the centenary – the book was published on May 14, 1925 though Dalloway Day celebrations are held in mid-June, when the central event of the novel, Mrs Dalloway's party, takes place – few question Woolf's colonial gaze. Indeed, the Eurasian character left in the margins has rarely been addressed. Far away from the colonial metropole, Daisy, Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian lover awaits news from him in India. When Woolf mentions her in passing, it is with an air of racial superiority even as her protagonist, Clarissa, suffers from low self esteem. 'Oh if she [Mrs. Dalloway] could have had her life over again!...She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin like crumpled leather and beautiful eyes… slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere… She [Mrs Dalloway] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them… this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.' The passage establishes Woolf's protagonist as someone without an inherent sense of self. In her fifties, when she is no longer pressed by the duties of being a wife and a mother, Clarissa Dalloway finds herself wanting to be more than her social identity as wife of a conservative MP with her silks and scissors preparing to throw a party on a fine evening in 1923. As she walks across London, she has opinions on everyone but it's not the same as participating in luncheons hosted by Mrs Bruton where they discuss politics. From Hugh Whitbread and Peter Walsh to Sally Seton and Miss Killman, everyone is scrutinised, even Septimus Smith's wife, Lucrezia, 'a little woman, with large eyes in sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.' Everyone, but not 53-year-old Peter Walsh's 24-year-old Anglo-Indian lover, Daisy, wife of a major, mother of two in India. She describes Indian women at large as 'silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops.' The stream of consciousness narrative, whose film parallel would ideally comprise one long single shot somehow narrated from the perspective of different characters, makes the reader wonder: Was Daisy merely a tool to explore the complex relationship that Peter and Clarissa shared in their youth? For Peter looks at Daisy as someone who'd boost his ego, '…of course, she would give him everything…everything he wanted!' which Clarissa had bruised. He describes, in his insecurity, the women he loved over the years as 'vulgar, trivial, commonplace' and has thought before that 'Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa.' Clarissa's presence in his life is further underlined by the impactful lines at the end of the text: 'It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.' The contemporary reader is bound to ask: With Clarissa's overbearing presence, what was Daisy doing in Peter's life? Compensating for the void left behind by Clarissa? When Woolf dug her characters from within, showcasing their perception of each other, why was Daisy left voiceless far away in India? Her mixed race mentioned but not explored. A century later, enter Michelle Cahill with Daisy & Woolf. An Australian of Anglo-Indian heritage, the author provides a glimpse of Daisy's life along with the difficulties and blockages that come with it by introducing a mixed-race immigrant protagonist, Mina, who is writing Daisy's story. Woolf is evoked in the novel's epigraph with a quote from A Room of One's Own: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.' While the book revolves around motherhood quite a bit, the epigraph works like a double-edged sword: it showcases gratitude for the feminist writers who have paved the way for the telling of Daisy's story while also challenging their silence that has rendered voiceless this character at the margins. In this metafiction set in 2017, Cahill presents the dilemmas of race and migration through Mina's reimagination, in the novel that she is writing, of Daisy journeying to London to meet Peter Walsh. Mina writes, 'Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump's immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world people of colour felt vulnerable while crossing borders.' As the storyteller of Daisy's life, she narrates harrowing experiences of being Anglo-Indians from East Africa and of her brother's mental illness, a result of being bullied at school for being brown skinned. It's as if Mina, and Cahill herself, is attempting to fill an intersectional gap in the canon. Instead of writing a straight postcolonial response like Jean Rhys does for Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, Cahill makes her work partly epistolary. Between Mina's meditation on racism and writing and her travels across India, China, London, and New York to find the nuances of Woolf's life, Daisy tells her story through letters and diary entries. Alongside, Mina writes, 'Mrs Woolf had kept Daisy stunted, and on purpose it seems. Her intent was always to centre Clarissa Dalloway, setting her in flight. Drifting and timeless, she is a hallmark achievement: Clarissa, the stream of Virginia Woolf's consciousness.' Daisy too addresses the absorbing nature of Clarissa's presence, which makes you wonder if she will ever see herself as Clarissa's equal or if she will succumb to class and racial hierarchies. She writes, '…although you [Walsh] hint at… an air of disappointment about Clarissa, it is impossible for me to imagine a woman more absorbing?' Cahill's Daisy has the decisive power to leave her husband and son behind to board a ship for London with her daughter and Radhika, a servant girl from Bihar. She reflects on her experiences as an Anglo-Indian in India by chronicling her life story and through the course of a journey lasting months from Calcutta to London, she comes face-to-face with the plague, loses her child to death, which changes her romantic obsession into something much stronger, a determination to chart out her life irrespective of Peter Walsh. She engages with the suffragettes, befriends Lucrezia — the other peripheral character in Mrs Dalloway — and makes a living in Italy, which can be interpreted as tragic for the former wife of an officer in the Indian army or as empowering for an immigrant woman in an alien land. Interestingly, Cahill leaves Daisy's servant girl behind. Radhika disappears, quite literally, from Daisy's life implying that not all stories can be accommodated when the writer chooses to focus on one character. However, this absence is observed and mourned by Daisy, who was held together by her support in the lowest times — a treatment that's better than Woolf's treatment of Daisy. Throughout the novel, Cahill keeps fictional characters and real-life figures in conversation with each other. Daisy & Woolf is meta not only for its story-within-a-story structure but also for the many references to Woolf's diaries and letters to interpret her psychology at the time. Daisy is also travelling to London at a time when Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway. Characters from Woolf's story and suffragette figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst are masterfully incorporated into Daisy's narrative. All of it creates a dialogue between the worlds of Mina, Virginia and Daisy while also exploring grief, death, motherhood, alienation, sexuality and mental illness. The prose of both these novels is distinctive. But while Mrs Dalloway glides, Daisy & Woolf startles by intentionally hitting the brakes on multiple occasions. In the end, this novel, that breathes life into an incidental character, encourages readers to examine the colonial gaze of a celebrated 20th century high Modernist, while also realising that race, identity and migration are as fraught today as they ever were. Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.
