[Vwoolf] Weighing in

[Andrea]

I have so enjoyed reading of all these first encounters.  I think mine was
in 1988, when I took a class called Images of Women as an undergrad.  We
read A Room of One's Own.  I cannot recall what exactly caught me, but I do
know that after the class was over, I asked the professor for names of
writers that influenced Woolf or that she may have influenced.  I don't
know if my list was accurate when I left that day, but it was full of
wonderful and diverse women writers whose work I went on to read.  In 1989,
I read Mrs. Dalloway in a 20th-cenntury Brit lit class, and I knew then
that I would probably go on to study Woolf more, even though I had no idea
at that time that I'd pursue doctoral work.  That summer, while traveling,
I finally read To the Lighthouse.  It was the loveliest thing I had ever
read and may still be.

Elisa Sparks, I got a little nostalgic when I read your post, because the
Lincoln U Woolf conference was also my first one.  I was fresh out of my
MFA program, and that conference not only brought me into the fold of Woolf
scholars and readers, but it also provided me with a way to see myself as
someone who has something to say, someone who could be a valued thinker and
writer.  I am most grateful to Ruth Saxton for suggesting that her students
could participate in that way.  You pointed out how you saw then, as I did,
the very best of Woolf Studies:  the exchange and companionship, the lack
of false divisions and the gracious welcome to those new to the world that
Woolf's work has fostered.  I must have gone to your talk on Woolf and
O'Keefe--was it on Blue and Green Music?  For whatever reason, that one has
stayed with me.



--Andrea


On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Elisa Sparks <SPARKS at clemson.edu> wrote:

>  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" <atleswoolf at aol.com>
> Date: Friday, August 23, 2013 7:44 AM
> To: Bonnie Scott <bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu>, "mcnar001 at umn.edu" <
> mcnar001 at umn.edu>
> Cc: Woolf List <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>
> To: Toni McNaron <mcnar001 at umn.edu>
> Cc: woolf list <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
>
>
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>
>  Bonnie Kime Scott, Ph. D.
> Professor Emerita of Women's Studies
> San Diego State University
> bkscott at mail.sdsu.edu
>
>
>
>
>
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