Sophie Cunningham’s novel about Leonard Woolf and the contemporary writer attempting to tell his story is wry and earnest – and yes, devastating when it needs to be.
Pictured, clockwise from left: Gertrude Stein, Lina Poletti, Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Sappho.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s inventive, poetic reimagining of lives like those of Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt – against a backdrop of Sappho – has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
The pandemic changed the way we shop – with many ‘new’ initiatives actually reinventing old ways of doing things.
Virginia Woolf listened to a wide variety of music, including Russian ballet music which she heard when the Ballets Russes visited London in 1912.
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Written in 1929, this short, passionate book highlighting the silencing of women’s voices continues to shape our culture.
A portrait of George Eliot at 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is often claimed to be the greatest novel in the English language.
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Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Look a little closer, and these Oscars aren’t all they appear to be…
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Virginia Woolf’s satire of readers who use easily accessible art to acquire class and culture might just reveal why certain films win awards like Oscars.
Men of U.S. 64th Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918.
Writers like Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. Barrie suffered personal loss during the First World War. Their grief and insight helped readers with their own post-war collective grief.
Loneliness (feeling alone) and solitude (being alone) are not the same thing.
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For those who are finding the social distancing isolating, here are some lessons from ancient hermits, who often found joy in being alone.
Perhaps the designers of the first Christmas card from 1840 were influenced by Leigh Hunt’s question: Is it right to spend, laugh and revel when there are so many people who live in isolation and poverty? John Calcott Horsely, curator and designer of the card, asked the painter, Sir Henry Cole, to show people being fed and clothed to remind his friends of the needs of the poor during this season.
Leigh Hunt is a nineteenth-century writer who grappled with the question: How can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at this time of the year when there is so much misery in the world?
Allied forces wearing gas masks at Ypres, 1917.
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