[Vwoolf] Weighing in

Fri Aug 23 10:06:14 EDT 2013

The summer of 1969, I was assigned to read to the Lighthouse for my freshman comp class at Bryn Mawr.  Looking back at the history of Woolf studies, that was really quite advanced since in 69, not many people were teaching her.  Recently I gave a "last lecture" on the occasion of my retirement.  Here's an excerpt on my relationship with Woolf.

So how did I come to Virginia Woolf?    I started writing down quotes from To The Lighthouse in volume two of my Black Books, in May of 1969.  I had been assigned to read Woolf for my freshman seminar. The quotations I wrote down all had to do with states of consciousness, with Mrs. Ramsey being alone. (I was very intense and introspective at the time)  I remember that Quentin Bell's biography came out near the end of my time in college, and I have a very early edition, so I must have bought it then.  But in those days women writers weren't read much.  As far as I can remember, Virginia Woolf was the only woman writer I studied in undergraduate school (at a women's university where—unknown to me— Kate Millet was teaching… in the Sociology department!!)   My next encounter with Woolf was ten years later, in the summer of 1979, which I was spending in Athens, Greece with my friend Alice Donohue, a classical archeologist finishing up the research for her dissertation.   For some reason, I was moved to buy Woolf’s Moments of Being in an English language bookstore.  I remember reading her at the same time as I was reading Dodd’s The Greeks and the Irrational.  An odd but serendipitous mix. I fell in love then with "Sketch of the Past" in particular.  Woolf floated back into my consciousness again in the summer of in 1982 in a post-dic NEH at Stanford where I read Room of One's Own along with Cixous and again in1984 when I took a post-doctoral seminar on “Tradition and the Female Talent” at the School of Criticism and Theory with Sandra Gilbert.  The essay I contributed to the volume we edited from that seminar was  “Old Father Nile:  T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom on the Creative Process as Spontaneous Generation,” and Woolf premptorily interrupted that essays as an expression of the female presence missing from both critics’ masculinized metaphors for creativity.
My full re-discovery of Woolf came in 1992. I was going through a very hard time emotionally. My best friend was up for tenure. I was on the Personnel Committee and in the end, in all good conscience, I had to vote against him.  None of had realized how far he’d fallen into alcoholism. I had turned, as I often did, to reading Art History for therapy.  For some reason I was devouring a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe.  I think there was some kind of health and wholeness in her use of color and flower imagery that I found healing.  (I have done some research on this and she did in fact ascribe to certain aspects of color therapy). As I looked at images of her work, I kept remembering passages from Woolf’s autobiographical writings, especially "A Sketch of the Past.".   And then I saw for a call for Papers for the Third Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.  SO I sent in a proposal for a paper on Woolf and O’Keeffe.  They accepted it, and then I had to write it.
Well to make a long story short.  I fell in love.  With an academic community.  I had never met such a vital, quirky, friendly, supportive, passionate group of people.  On the three-hour bus ride out to Jefferson City Missouri, I watched Bonnie Kime Scott  take four grad students (all total strangers to her) meticulously though their dissertation projects and provide them with detailed lists of which special collections they needed to access at which libraries, complete with names of librarians. Barbara Christian decided she'd known me in a previous life, and we spent lots of the conference crouched outside under overhangs, smoking illicit cigarettes.  Throughout the conference I saw people treat each other humanely, differentiate easily between undergraduates, graduate students, new and experienced scholars, and question and advise each at the appropriate level.  I met people whose books I’d read, and they were just as nice as people who were only starting out. I remember Mark's speech abt the call for papers when he said we should not quote extensively from Woolf because everyone at the conference had everything she'd ever said memorized, which made me ambitious to read everything.  And I remember standing in the back of the auditorium during Barbra Christian's keynote speech about Woolf and Toni Morrison, tearing up over the brilliance, joy, and love in that talk and thinking about what Virginia would have made of it all.  The more Woolf I read, the more she opened up to my interests: in consciousness, in visual arts, in color, in gardens, in flowers.  And so, I've never looked back.

From: "atleswoolf at aol.com<mailto:atleswoolf at aol.com>" <atleswoolf at aol.com<mailto:atleswoolf at aol.com>>
Date: Friday, August 23, 2013 7:44 AM
To: Bonnie Scott <bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu<mailto:bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu>>, "mcnar001 at umn.edu<mailto:mcnar001 at umn.edu>" <mcnar001 at umn.edu<mailto:mcnar001 at umn.edu>>
Cc: Woolf List <VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<mailto:VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Weighing in

Michael Cunningham tends to get knocked around a lot on this list, but that's where the interest in Woolf started for me.  While in college, I'd read bits of A Room of One's Own in a literary theory anthology (where it was helpfully listed under "Feminism"), but very little else -- no one else taught her.  In 1998, I read a rave review of The Hours in the gay magazine The Advocate a few months before it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I thought, "That sounds interesting."  I went straight to the bookstore, bought it, and read it in one sitting.  I knew at that instant that my life was now different.  I walked over to my bookshelves -- about a year earlier, I'd bought a book-club four-pack paperback set of the Bell biography, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas which I'd not touched since.  I picked up the Bell biography, began reading, and have not stopped with Woolf since that moment.  As fortune would have it, I was beginning graduate school around that time, so I was free to make her the focus of my work and my writing.  So yes, all because of Cunningham.  I recognize his flaws, but it's not all bad, folks.  I've had plenty of students over the years begin reading Woolf after reading The Hours, which I think was Cunningham's point all along.

Best,
Drew Shannon
College of Mount St. Joseph
-----Original Message-----
From: Bonnie Scott <bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu<mailto:bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu>>
To: Toni McNaron <mcnar001 at umn.edu<mailto:mcnar001 at umn.edu>>
Cc: woolf list <VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<mailto:VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>>
Sent: Thu, Aug 22, 2013 11:23 pm
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Weighing in

I was aware of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf  and during my freshman year in college I decided on a rainy afternoon to check her out in the library.  I pulled To the Lighthouse off the shelf, sank down on the floor and began reading.  Before I knew it the bell for the library closing was going off.  My roommate was sure that something dire had happened to me, not just because I barely made curfew, but because I returned in a slightly dazed condition. I did my honors thesis in Woolf and Joyce, a combination I've never turned from.

Best,
Bonnie
On Aug 22, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Toni McNaron wrote:

Vara asks other of us to say how we became captivated by Woolf.  I was in graduate school in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, working on Renaissance (as we called it then) literature.  I had never even heard of Virginia Woolf.  A woman to whom I was entirely attracted asked me if I read her and I tried not to answer.  I went right to the library and got /To the Lighthouse/ because the object of my crush had mentioned that title.  I was completely stunned and amazed and just kept reading.  As soon as I had a little wiggle room as a professor, I began teaching her to other young people who didn't know who she was.  The relationship with the woman only lasted 7 years, but my connection to Virginia continues to grow as I continue to age.

Toni

_______________________________________________
Vwoolf mailing list
Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf

Bonnie Kime Scott, Ph. D.
Professor Emerita of Women's Studies
San Diego State University
bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu

_______________________________________________
Vwoolf mailing list
Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.eduhttps://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20130823/2b05a04b/attachment.html>