BLOGS: THE ONLINE REVOLUTION
We live in the era of the internet: social media, real-time information, and electronic devices. We are always connected, and we have become slaves of technology in a world in which reality is concealed behind a screen. Nowadays, there are many ways to share information; the media is no longer what our grandparents knew. One of the most revolutionary trends of our times is blogging. People share their thoughts, experiences, and blogs have become a way to raise our voices online, in others word, we have become a mediatized society. Taking as a reference a conference by Professor Monika Kopytowska on “Power, Politics and Blogs”, we have selected some ideas on the importance of blogs.
Blogs are online tools that allow people to be interconnected. They allow us to create a space where people can communicate with other people around the globe, thus replacing face-to-face communication: we are living in a post-human society. In the times of capitalism, the cyberspace and especially blogs have twisted the concept of consumerism. Users not only can participate in the process of consumption, but also all of us can easily become producers.
Besides, a blog can be used for many different purposes. Depending on their aim, we encounter many different types of blogs: ranging from random thoughts created by ordinary citizens to political blogs used as a campaigning tool. Therefore, blogs have become a new form of intersexuality in which the boundaries between creator and user are blurred. The problem with the democratization of the internet is that global accessibility comes with some dangers; there are thousands of cases of radical groups spreading risky messages that could compromise the safety of some users. Moreover, there is no way to know who is behind the screen; blogs allow us to decide whether we want to be transparent or hide ourselves behind a fictitious identity.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that the blogging sphere has open up a new world of possibilities:
-Healthcare: there are many bloggers who share their experiences and give advices related to weight loss or self-diagnosis. Even though some of them might be of help, beware of the reliability of the information!
-Culture: if you like to travel, there many different blogs that will provide you with the best tips to go wherever you want: now, we can all travel without leaving our houses. Moreover, whether you want to check the review of a book or a movie or you need to cook Christmas dinner, blogs can be of help.
-Politics: politicians can get closer to the people, and we can all share our political views and engage in any political debate.
And…
-Educational purposes: blogs can be a source of useful information at the time of studying. There are blogs to learn new languages, and some others allow you to expand your knowledge of specific fields such as linguistics or literature. Hence, this blog would belong to this category because we wanted to share with you interesting facts about Virginia Woolf.
Blogs constitute a new genre that has allowed us to create a sense of communal bonding. We can construct our identity online and share our ideas and opinions with the rest of the online community. We are no longer alone in the technological world.
Virginia Woolf in Downton Abbey.
Did you know that Virginia Woolf appears in the season 4 of this popular TV show?
She appears in the first episode of this last season. Edith Crawley meets her during a party in 1922. This party is hosted by Michael Gregson at his apartment in London.
Although she is shown in pictures talking to Edith and Michael, in the PBS broadcasting she briefly appears without any dialogue.
If you want to know more interesting things about Virginia, stay on track!
Here you can find the references used to write this post:
Some Extra Info
If you are really interested on the life and works of Virginia Woolf, and you really want to explore her world, the following tools might be of help:
1. The Oxford Biographies website will provide you with an overview of the main topics related to our author:
2. If you want to read Mrs Dalloway again, you can download the book in different formats in here (say thanks to the University of Adelaide):
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/
3. JSTOR is a digital library where you can find thousands of academic papers related to this topic:
4. This video might be a good introduction to Mrs Dalloway
5. Finally, if you really want to engage with the characters and the story, visit our website
http://ticwoolf.wix.com/virginia-woolf
Send us your questions here or leave a comment below:
Some Literary Vibes: Music and Virginia Woolf
Did you know that apart fr
om the classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” there are some other songs that have her name on the title or that were inspired by the British author? We have selected some of the songs that are somehow related to the Modernist author:
- Modest House: The band came up with the title after reading Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall, and some of their lyrics are based on her work.
- Laura Veirs-Rapture: She just mentions Virginia Woolf, but the topic of the song could somehow resemble the intensity of Woolf’s writings.
- Freedom or Death-Virginia Woolf: the Indie band took their inspiration from the movie “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, which at the same time is based on the play with the same name written by Edwards Albee.
- The Smiths- Shakespeare’s sister: this song is based on a passage of A Room of One’s Own in which Woolf stated that if Shakespeare had had a sister as good as him at writing, she would not have had the same opportunities to succeed.
There are many others, you just have to take a quick look at Youtube or Spotify. We will update the list soon, so stay tuned!
Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Works: A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, 20th-century modernist writer, has been claimed to initiate the revision of the feminist literary history. She was concerned with the position of women and how they had been 
affected in such a way that they were not able to develop themselves as writers in a world where there was male dominance in literature. Virginia Woolf stated that many women could have written more if their position had been another. Many of the aspects of their conditioning are seen in her very well-known works A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway, where, apart from the reasons, some solutions to women’s problems are given. However, her feminist position in A Room of One’s Own, considered to be one of her major feminist works, has been analyzed in different ways by critics such as Arnold Bennett and David Daiches.
Whereas Bennett analyzed her work as a non-feminist musing collection, Daiches established that it is not only a universal feminist work about upper-middle class women, but also about lower social classes in general. However, Woolf can be positioned somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
In a Room of One’s Own, Woolf said that literature was open to everybody. Women could be locked, but the freedom of their minds would be always free. Thus, regardless of society, women can create and think. However, she continues mentioning the reasons why women do not write, but she also established solutions to them. The main problem of women not appearing in history as much as men did was because they had neither money, nor privacy, nor tradition. It is not a problem of the genius, and she checks this by imagining a Shakespeare’s sister with the same capacity than her brother. She establishes that, as she lived in the eighteenth century, it does not matter the gift she had that she would not have stood out as Shakespeare did. To conclude, Woolf mentions that the solution for women to develop themselves would be to have a room of one’s own and five hundred pounds every year.
On the other 
hand, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf portrayed the patriarchal society of England and how it had an impact on women’s lives. She wanted to show women different ways of giving meaning to their lives, and she did so by presenting the different relationships Clarissa could have had.
Firstly, the relationship between Clarissa and Peter could have been described as a relation between a male dictator and a woman that had to obey. However, this was not what Clarissa wanted, as in this way, she would have had neither privacy nor independence, which was exactly what Virginia Woolf established as things needed for women’s progress.
Then the relationship between Clarissa and her husband, Richard Dalloway, can be described as the relation between a husband who does not care about his wife and a wife that does not have passion in her life. Richard gave more importance to his job than to his wife. However, with this relationship, Clarissa had independence and money; nonetheless, Virginia Woolf showed with this that marriage does not guarantee happiness.
Finally, Sally Seton could be described as a feminist woman demanding equal rights between women and men and an inspiration for Clarissa to think beyond herself. Furthermore, there are other characters that can be considered relevant in Mrs. Dalloway. Miss Kilman is the representation of the woman suffering because of the world and who wants to take revenge of it. In order to do so, she chooses to humiliate Clarissa. Then, Elizabeth, Clarissa’s daughter, is the representation of a woman having working ambitions in life and who wants neither the male dominated society nor the society of her mother. Finally, the relationship between Septimus and Rezia represents the patriarchal society of that period. Rezia would be the women suffering because her husband, who does not love her, is affected by the war; therefore, she finds herself alone in a foreign country.
To finish with, Virginia Woolf will be always remembered thanks to the role she took in the history of feminism. Her works have been considered to help women to develop themselves and to make people aware of the fact that education has to change so that society changes. Moreover, she has contributed to the reappearance of other women writing on the same.
Here you can find the references used to write this post:
‘The Scope of Woolf’s Feminism in ‘a Room of One’s Own’. 5 Mar. 2015. Web. <https://www.lawrence.edu/mfhe/www_web_student/Everyone/The%20Scope%20of%20Woolf’s%
20Feminism%20in%20A%20Room%20of%20One’s%20Own.pdf >
Jasim Samarrai, Ghanim. ‘Reconstructing Virginia Woolf’s Feminism’. Journal of the College of Arts. University of Basrah 2011. Web. 5 Mar. 2015. <http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=57818 >
Shihada, Dr. Isam M. A Feminist Perspective Of Virginia Woolf’S Selected Novels: Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://www.alaqsa.edu.ps/site_resources/aqsa_magazine/files/44.pdf >
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Project Gutenberg. March 2007. Web. 26 April 2015. Web <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html>
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 26 April 2015. Web <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/>
A quick overview of her life.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was a novelist, essayist, publisher, and critic. She is especially famous for her novels and her feminist writings. She is better known as Virginia Woolf and she was born in London the 25th January in 1882. She lived a hard life marked by her parents’ dead and her mental illness. Nevertheless, this was not an impediment to have a wide bibliography, she wrote not only novels, but also essays and articles in newspapers.
Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a biographer and mountaineer. Julia, her mother, was renowned for her beauty and she modeled for many painters including Edward Burne-Jones. Both of them were widows and, for this reason the house was full of children (eight in total) both from previous marriages and from this one as well. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Virginia was the third one. Thanks to his father’s career, Virginia had access to an extensive library, and from an early age she was determined to be a writer. She never went to school; thanks to her family’s wealth she was educated at home.
In May 1895, Julia died from rheumatic fever. Virginia was very close to her mother and this caused her to have a mental breakdown at the age of thirteen. She suffered another breakdown when he father died in 1904. During this time, she will try to kill herself for the first time.
Without her parents giving economic support to the family, Virginia began to teach English literature and history at an adult-education college in London. At the same time, she wrote articles and reviews for several publications including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. In 1908 Virginia started to write her first novel Melymbrosia. She finished it in 1913, and renamed it as The Voyage Out. However, she suffered a severe mental breakdown after her marriage, and for this reason the novel was not published until 1915.
Virginia was part of the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual circle of artists and writers. There, she met her future husband, Leonard Woolf, and they got married in 1912. The couple had a happy married life and they also collaborated professionally. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, where they published works by Woolf and T. S. Eliot, among others as well as commissioned contemporary artworks. The Bloomsbury Group had a liberal approach to sexuality and Virginia Woolf started a relationship with Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson’s wife. From this relationship Woolf wrote Orlando, a literary love letter. Both of them remained as good friends until Woolf’s death.
Hogarth Press became a business around 1922. From 1921 onwards Virginia always published with the Press. She published a collection of experimental short stories Monday or Tuesday. In 1922 she wrote her first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room. The three novels that are generally considered to be her greatest claim as a Modernist writer are Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse ( 1927), and The Waves (1931).
After moving out from London due to the destruction of her home by the German army, Virginia committed suicide the 28th March in 1941, when she pulled on her overcoat, walked out into the River Ouse and filled her pockets with stones. The stream took her with it and her body was found three weeks later. Her last work was Between the Acts, published posthumously by his husband.
She left a suicide note for her husband, you can read it below.
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Here you can find the references used to write this post:
A&E Television Networks. “Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.biography.com/people/virginia-woolf-9536773#death>
Clarke, S. N. “Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography”. Virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. < http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/vw_res.biography.htm>
The European Graduate School. “Virginia Woolf – American Writer – Biography”. Egs.edu. 2015. Web. 10 Mar.
2015. <http://www.egs.edu/library/virginia-woolf/biography/>
“The Principal Works Of Virginia Woolf”. Virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/vw_res.principal.htm>
Scutts, Joanna. “Virginia Woolf | The Core Curriculum”. College.columbia.edu. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/virginia-woolf>
Svendsen, Jessica, and Pericles Lewis. “Virginia Woolf”. Modernism.research.yale.edu. 2015. Print.
<http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf>
Ideas on Death and Life in Mrs Dalloway
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) 
constituted the inauguration of a different style of writing and the first attempt at penning a new mode of fictional narration. This British author started to write her novel in 1922, and it took her two more years to complete it (Zwerdling 94); she stated in her personal journal that her fourth novel was part of a “tunneling process, by which I tell the past by instalments” (Woolf 60). The novel allowed her to explore the mind of the characters from different perspectives, and it could be considered that the importance is placed on language and the inner world of the character rather than in external actions and events. Hence, taking into account the previous statement, it can be considered that “death” operates at two different levels in the novel: psychological and physical.
The first appearance of Clarissa in the story presents the reader with a character who constructs an internal and partially conscious image of herself as dead. Thus, death can be seen as a structuring motif that is introduced to the reader in the very first page of the novel, and that as the plot is developed, it determines the lives of the characters. One of the crucial moments in which death takes a central role is when Clarissa discovers that her husband is about to have lunch with Lady Bruton but she is excluded from the meeting. Even though Clarissa’s love of life is prevalent in the construction of the character’s personality, and she clearly shows an appreciation of the world around her and especially “London; this moment of June” (Woolf n.p.), her exclusion from the meeting results in a disruption of the balance that characterizes her public image.
If Lady Bruton’s lunch provokes Clarissa’s metaphorical death, the party makes her face the possibility of actual death for the first time. The novel describes a day marked by suicide in which Clarissa’s decision of living is always challenged by the possibility of death; however the character’s love of life wins the game and strengthens her identity. Septimus’ suicide functions as an epiphany that reveals Clarissa’s longing for truly living. Septimus’ suicide creates a symbolic relationship between both characters: both are the same, they see themselves drowned by society, and they both face the possibility of escaping through death. Clarissa only becomes aware of the possibility of escaping once she regards herself and Septimus as equals.
The whole day in Mrs Dalloway, which was originally called The Hours is marked by the chiming of Big Ben, and functions as a constant reminder of time running out. It is important to stand out that, in the first version of the novel, Clarissa’s day ended with her death, and that original idea of her suicide remains enclosed in the story Woolf decided to publish. Septimus has always been considered Clarissa’s sacrificial double or Doppelgänger, and the lives of both characters are marked not only by the chiming of time, but also by the chiming of death (Friedman 211).
Even if you haven’t read the novel, the film adaptation The Hours may be a good introduction to the world of Clarissa. The postmodern approach of the film will allow you to get to know not only some of the main characters of the story, but also the life of the author. Moreover, the 1997 adaptation will provide you a faithful interpretation of the actual story.
Here you have the trailers of both movies:
Mrs Dalloway 1997
The Hours 2002
Here you can find the references used to write this post:
Bell, Vereen. “Essays: Misreading Mrs. Dalloway.” The Sewanee Review. 114.1 (2006): 93. Print.
Friedman, Alan Warren. Fictional Death And The Modernist Enterprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.
Henke, Suzette. “Mrs Dalloway”. English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 35.3 (1992): 384-385.
Webb, Caroline. “Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 40.2 (1994): 279–298.
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. [1953]. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Project Gutenberg. Web. 10 March 2015.
Zwerdling, Alex. “Woolf’s The Hours”. English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 41.1 (1998): 94-98.
If you want to know more…
This presentation may be of help to have a better idea of the main topics of Woolf’s life and novels. Click on the photo to open the link: 
Welcome Woolfers
Welcome Woolfers, this blog will be devoted to literature and cinema. We will explore the main aspects of Virginia Woolf’s life and work as well as some other curious facts. Whether you are familiar with some of her most important novels, such as Mrs Dalloway, or you just want to explore the main themes and characters a bit more, this blog will be a journey into the modernist world of the British author. Before beginning your adventure with us, let’s check how much you know about this topic! Click here to check it out!
Woolf World 