Friday saw the launch of the Cambridge edition of the works of Virginia Woolf, a project I have been involved in for the best part of a decade. I thought I’d give a taste of the work we’ve been doing by presenting some of the findings from one of our two pilot volumes, The Waves. Scholars have known for …
A writer friend confessed recently she was enjoying revising her novel so much she really did not want the process to end. I know what she means. There’s something very satisfying about taking that hard-won first draft and making it better. I thought my second novel (provisionally entitled Given the Choice and set in the London art world) was finished, …
Translating Virginia Woolf British Literature in China today Chinese books we should read How did you first become interested in the Bloomsbury group? Several years ago, when I began to collect materials for a research project on ‘Virginia Woolf’s Translation and Reception in China’, I read work by other important members of the Bloomsbury group such as E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville-West and Julian …
Sebastian Faulks once remarked that transposing a novel to another medium is like trying to turn a painting into sculpture. It’s an image I’ve been thinking about this summer as I’ve watched Vanessa and Virginia transform into a stage play. What first struck me on reading Elizabeth Wright’s script was the drastic scissoring away of words. Anything not absolutely essential …
There’s a fascinating discussion going on at She Writes about what constitutes the perfect writing day. Here’s mine. I wake up having had enough sleep. This is important – if I’ve had one of those nights where it feels as if the world’s traffic has been using my brain as a concourse I can forget about writing. The …
Why is it so difficult to start a piece of writing? This week I cleared space to begin working on a new novel but for some reason I have managed to fritter away the time, persuading myself that I really should send that reference/keep on top of my inbox/clean out the fridge/take that picture I’ve had since Christmas to the …
After a talk to the Arts Society at Newnham College in Cambridge last night I had an interesting discussion about the differences between literary criticism and creative writing. The talk was to launch a new journal Women and the Arts, celebrating Virginia Woolf’s lecture to the Society in 1928. Woolf later reworked her lecture as her seminal essay A Room …
Earlier this month I visited the Gobelins in Paris, where tapestries and carpets are still made by hand using techniques that have hardly changed over centuries. After the history-for-tourists preamble by our guide we were taken on a tour of the workshops. There was something mesmeric about the row of weavers working with only the simplest of tools: a shuttle …