[Vwoolf] Encountering Virginia Woolf

[Neverow, Vara S.]

J. J. Wilson started the thread. It's wonderful!

Vara Neverow

From: "A.M. Lindsey" <amtonyan at gmail.com<mailto:amtonyan at gmail.com>>
Date: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 2:34 PM
Cc: VWOOLF listserv <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Encountering Virginia Woolf

Oh, this is fun! I first encountered Woolf when I was a young kid; I found a box of 30 copies of A Room Of One's Own and another 30 of A Haunted House (and other stories) in our basement. I asked my dad, the English teacher, how this came to be, and was told that the high school had stopped teaching the books. He was hoping to bring at least one of them back into the curriculum. Well, he was the only "honors" English teacher for twelfth graders, so when I took his class, A Room of One's Own did make it back into the syllabus! For a girl growing up in a rural small town, preparing to head to Barnard College in a year, it was a very big deal not only to read it, but to show my peers that my "crazy" plan to go to this strange thing called a women's college had, in fact, been quite unremarkable, for quite a long time. They still thought it was a crazy plan, but AROO in school completely renewed my excitement about moving to a place where such conversations would be common place.

Anne-Marie


On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Catherine Hollis <hollisc at berkeley.edu<mailto:hollisc at berkeley.edu>> wrote:
Finally reading these! What a wonderful thread... thanks to whoever started it.

Mrs. Dalloway was my first. I found her at St. Mark's Books in NYC during the fall of 1985. Who was she? Why was she buying flowers? I began to buy myself flowers at the local Korean grocery to keep in my dorm room. I wrote a mash note to an indie rock guy making him guess who wrote "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." He couldn't. Then I wrote on the walls of my room in magic marker: "Pity, for the loss of roses." I walked down 10th street in Greenwich Village looking up at the French windows, wishing I could burst them open and take the plunge myself into the early morning air (I had an 8:30 class). I was so disappointed to learn that Clarissa wasn't me. But what a lark to read her as a girl of 18!


Catherine


--
Catherine W. Hollis, PhD
Instructor, Fall Program for Freshmen
U.C. Berkeley Extension
Berkeley, CA 94720
hollisc at berkeley.edu<mailto:hollisc at berkeley.edu>

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