Virginia Woolf, Online Teaching and Digital Resources:

Prompted by some recent questions about teaching Woolf online, we at MAPP have put together a quick list of resources and a few ideas about how to use them in the classroom.

Please let us know if we’ve missed anything: helen@uoregon.edu

We’ve found students have some amazing skills (that they don’t even realize are useful) in terms of doing digital work with literary material.  With so many resources online, this is a good opportunity to have students explore and learn how to sort through digitized and born digital content, and to learn how to use the web responsibly.  Google books can be frustrating because it reveals fragments, but it often provides leads that can be explored elsewhere.  

Consider building exercises around archives, marketing (analyzing and perhaps recreating visuals/covers/book art), material practice (including the Hogarth Press), readership and reception, Woolf as icon (see Silver’s book) and Woolf and contemporary issues.  Our own Alice Staveley has designed an exciting new class on Woolf in the Age of #MeToo, also posted at MAPP’s teaching site here. 

Some of the skills we’ve taught include digital curation, transcription, preservation and display, archival research, data visualization, collaboration, TEI, crowdsourcing, copyright issues, and writing for online platforms.  This really is a good opportunity to unleash creativity!

One particular assignment we’ve used many times is a biography assignment, which introduces students to discovery research by having them investigate a little-known figure from the MAPP database and writing a short biography of that person. Many of our students and those of our colleagues have subsequently been through peer review and have been published on our site. If you are interested in collaborating with us on an assignment like this, we’d be delighted! Please be in touch with us at mappbios@gmail.com to submit student work for consideration or to discuss “available” authors with us! The assignment sheet we use with specifications is linked here

Woolf Materials Online:

Adelaide’s full text versions are accessible through the Wayback Machine,

[Per Mary Ellen Foley: “Woolf's works as posted by the University of Adelaide are still available via the Wayback Machine aka Internet Archive.  Just do a search for Wayback Machine and, when you get there, do a search for (at least, this is the string I used -- but *without* the quotation marks): "adelaide.edu woolf"”]

Stephen Barkway pointed us to Kobo for full text versions of the short stories:

“You should be able to find [stories] in Kobo’s complete Virginia Woolf Collection, for less than £1.00 for pretty much everything!  It should be listed under VW’s Complete Shorter Fiction.”

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/search?query=Virginia+WOolf

The British Library has some great scans of first editions of Woolf’s earlier work, for example:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/two-stories-written-and-printed-by-virginia-and-leonard-woolf

https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-hogarth-press  [this links to Monday or Tuesday]

You can have students compare the 1919 and the 1927 editions of Kew Gardens (both illustrated):

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/kew-gardens-by-virginia-woolf-1919

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/kew-gardens-by-virginia-woolf-192

https://modernistarchives.com/work/kew-gardens

The BL also offers unpublished notebooks/drafts:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/notebook-drafts-of-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-volume-i

https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/virginia-woolfs-london

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/eminent-charlestonians-with-illustrat...

and a few Hogarth Press titles including Hope Mirrlees’ Paris, celebrating its 100th year in 2020:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/paris-by-hope-mirrlees

https://modernistarchives.com/work/paris-a-poem

Note that the following are not full texts:

Mansfield’s Prelude and Eliot’s Poems and The Waste Land.

Woolfonline: Julia Briggs/Mark Hussey/Peter Schillingsburg/Pamela Caughie’s To the Lighthouse site offers a huge amount of contextual material for Woolf’s 1926 novel, including: contemporary news articles, photos of the Stephens, reviews, essays . . .

Research Assignments using Woolf online (Rebecca Cameron)

https://modnets.org/exhibits/Teaching_with_Woolf_Online

VWSGB  The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.org.uk/

Lots of material here, including: Orlando illustrations and notes here:

http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.org.uk/resources/illustrations-in-the-fi...

The International Virginia Woolf Society: bibliographies, annual conference information

http://sites.utoronto.ca/IVWS/

http://sites.utoronto.ca/IVWS/woolf-publications-online.html

Here at MAPP/Modernist Archives Publishing Project:

MAPP allows students to learn about the Woolfs at work as editors and publishers at their own Hogarth Press (1917-1946).

You can explore the site by searching a term or text of interest or using our ‘Browse’ tab to peruse a random selection of works, people, businesses, or archival documents we house on the site.  You can also view a complete list of each of the types of items we have in the site. 

Some highlights: Leonard Woolf’s day-to-day work at the Hogarth Press via full scans of his correspondence from the University of Reading’s HP Archives folders; visual materials (covers/author portraits); scans of original order books; biographies of many Hogarth Press authors (Woolf’s contemporaries and colleagues); short summary descriptions of Hogarth Press books; production documents describing the printing process for Hogarth Press works as well as negotiations around foreign rights and translations 

Other Hogarth Press related research topics: You can ask students to create a biography of a Hogarth Press title, to follow a book through Robert Darnton’s book production circuit from conception to publication to reception. Many of the archival documents found in MAPP can illuminate different points in the “circuit.” The letters and diaries might provide evidence about the relationship between the Woolfs and the author, databases like the TLS, lexis/nexis or newspapers online can allow the students to search for book reviews.  Students have tracked down reading networks for Hogarth Press texts using library catalogues and second hand book dealers (such as abebooks)—looking at evidence of ownership in terms of names in books. At MAPP, we’ve posted order book samples that can be used for building networks and maps of bookshops. 

Here’s MAPP’s Matt Hannah’s blog about teaching with MAPP at Vanderbilt:

https://www.modernistarchives.com/content/virginia-woolf-in-the-digital-humanities-seminar

And Ashley Foster’s Cal State Fresno class’s response to MAPP’s virtual visit:

https://modernistarchives.com/content/mapp-visits-literature-and-dh-grad...

Three Guineas Reading Notebooks (Merry Pawlowski & Vara Neverow; Vara can provide a password) NB: These notebooks, currently hosted by Southern Connecticut University, will soon be going on hiatus.  From August 2, 2021, they will no longer be accessible but will reappear on MAPP when we launch a new version of the website in FALL 2021.  Stay tuned!)

http://woolf-center.southernct.edu/

The MJP/Modernist Journals Project—(-1922) has some great teaching resources at https://modjourn.org/teaching-and-research/ For example, you’ll find a great exercise where students are asked to read a novel via a magazine article published contemporaneously.  

Woolf doesn’t appear very much with a search at the MJP (note that many of her early reviews were anonymously published).  We found a few advertisements for Woolf’s/Hogarth Press works, in Coterie.

Another sister site, The Blue Mountain Project, has full text versions of more foreign language magazines; its domain “the Western Avant-Garde in literature, art, music, and architecture”

https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/exist/apps/bluemountain/index.html . . . includes Broom where you can see Woolf’s “In the Orchard” and a review of Jacob’s Room.

The Shakespeare and Company Project

https://shakespeareandco.princeton.edu/

The Shakespeare and Company Project provides access to the library cards of the customers of Sylvia Beach’s Paris-based English language bookshop, up until now tucked away in the Sylvia Beach Shakespeare and Company archive at Princeton University.  “The Project details what members of the lending library read and where they lived, and how expatriate life changed between the end of World War I and the German Occupation of France. The Project also illuminates the influence of Shakespeare and Company on French intellectual life.”

Explore who read Woolf in Paris!  Leo Stein borrowed The Common Reader in 1926.  American writer Solita Solano, Maud Burt of the British Institute in Paris and poet David Gascoyne borrowed Flush in 1933 . . .

In other marginalia:

Check out Amanda Golden's images of Sylvia Plath's reading copy of Jacob's Room housed at Smith College:  wonderful underlinings and the occasional star!   https://www.agoldenphd.com/news-and-events/sylvia-plaths-copy-of-jacobs-room

Harvard’s Houghton Library has a collection of amazing photographs from Woolf’s Monk’s House photo albums, including a few of Hogarth Press workers, now digitized: https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/3269

For more photos of Woolf/Bloomsbury, explore the National Portrait Gallery’s collections which holds, among other things, Lady Ottoline Morrell’s photograph collection.

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp04923/virginia-woolf-...

A selection of the artwork from the excellent Tate St Ives Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writing is here: 

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/exhibition/virginia-woolf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hVe1oA2Su0&list=PLyGYYHTi-lrbzpgFdRxlWm-JzPvrjYJfs&index=165

Other art/visual material related sites: 

See Judy Chicago’s place setting for Virginia Woolf

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/virginia_woolf

https://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/what-on/exhibitions-displays/bloomsbury-art-and-design

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2020/about-time

https://repository.duke.edu/dc/bloomsbury

Washington State University’s The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf Catalogue includes a list of a large number of the books owned by the Woolfs, now held at the library in at the Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, USA.

http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibr...

The Orlando Project (unfortunately behind a paywall, but your university library may subscribe)

http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/

“The textbase we have produced, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, is an unprecedented work of literary scholarship. Published by Cambridge University Press and updated twice a year with new and revised material, its design encourages researchers and readers to explore and remix it in creative ways.

This is literary history with a difference. Not a book, though in length the equivalent of more than 80 scholarly books, and not a digital edition of an existing text, it is a richly searchable textbase of born-digital, original writing. It is full of interpretive information on women, literature, and culture, with more than 8 million words of text in documents on the lives and writing of over 1400 authors, together with a great deal of contextual historical material on relevant subjects, such as education, politics, science, the law, and economics.”

BloggingWoolf, Paula Maggio.

https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/

Has links to lots of interesting things including:

Hermione Lee’s full Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture 

https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/hermione-lee-lecture-on-woolfs-birthday/

BBC dramatisation of A Room of One’s Own:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jnkk

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jnkk

Charleston Festival at Home:

https://www.charleston.org.uk/festival/watch-again-charleston-festival-at-home/

Charleston Trust:

Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography read in its entirety. Live-streamed on the 90th anniversary of the novel's publication on 11 October 1928.  Including readings by Jeanette Winterson, Juliet Nicolson, Colin Grant, Louise Doughty, Eve Best, Juno Dawson and others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwfedCiBSdM

Elisa Bolchi’s database of all Italian translations of Woolf’s works: https://www.instagram.com/italianwoolf_project/ a preview of Elisa’s database of all Italian translations of Woolf’s works (and of all articles/books/chapters/reviews written by Italians on Woolf).

Ella Ophir’s The Note Books of a Woman Alone: http://drc.usask.ca/projects/notebooks/homepage.php

“Evelyn Wilson (a pseudonym) was born in Manchester in about 1886. She began work as a live-in governess at age seventeen, and after ten years took a position at a London employment agency for domestic workers. Unmarried and self-supporting, she lived on meagre wages for the next twenty-one years. But her rented room was a sanctuary, a place she could read and write. Her notebooks were found after her death. They were edited by Mary Geraldine Ostle and published by J.M. Dent in 1935.”

“Beyond the brief obituary that appeared in the London Times in 1950, what we know about Mary Geraldine Ostle comes mainly from two sources: two letters she wrote to Virginia Woolf, and the records of her professional life preserved in the papers of the Froebel Society, a progressive educational organization that offered training and support for elementary school teachers and governesses. Ostle read Woolf's feminist masterpieces A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) as soon as they were published, and was moved in both cases to write to Woolf to convey her enthusiasm and gratitude. In a post-script to the second letter she identifies herself as the editor of The Note Books of a Woman Alone. Describing the book as her own effort “to express some of the difficulties women labour under,” she attributes her inspiration to A Room of One's Own.”

Kabe Wilson talking about Of One Woman or So, a rewrite of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az0Pxa2y8aQ&t=931s

https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/kabe-2019

For French Speakers: Simonetta Greggio’s week-long radio documentary (2018) for France Culture about Woolf “Virginia Woolf : La traversée des apparences”:

https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/virginia-woolf-grandes-traversees/saison-01-07-2019-26-08-2019

France Culture has quite a bit of Woolf-related content. 

Gloomsbury (2018): BBC Radio 4 Literary comedy by Sue Limb parodying the arty and adulterous adventures of the Bloomsbury Group. (appears to no longer be available).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000z52

Patti Smith reading from The Waves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UzS0dwuuHg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw1CzkHTx5w

Patti Smith also includes polaroids of Woolf related artifacts in Patti Smith: Camera Solo (exhibition catalogue).

Eileen Atkins’ adaptation of A Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFxrBUPsSUQ&t=1536s

Ballet/Music: Extracts from Woolf Works: Orlando pas de deux. (Uzma Hameed/Wayne McGregor)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD9NHyW39lc

https://www.roh.org.uk/productions/woolf-works-by-wayne-mcgregor

https://www.roh.org.uk/news/watch-choreographer-wayne-mcgregor-dramaturg-uzma-hameed-and-royal-ballet-dancers-on-woolf-works (20 min. Interview and live stream of rehearsal--I got a technical error, but hopefully will work soon).

https://www.roh.org.uk/news/watch-woolf-works-rehearsal-livestream

https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/three-worlds-music-from-woolf-works/

Adam Hammond’s The Brown Stocking, a website for exploring voices in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

http://www.adamhammond.com/the-brown-stocking/

Melba Cuddy Keane’s “Mapping Mrs Dalloway: Networked City: London as a Networked City”

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/97406

“This on-line essay, however, concerns not what Woolf’s characters would have seen walking in London, but the patterns described by their movements. Starting with a pictorial map of London from 1923 (the year in which the novel is set) and superimposing the various routes as well as travelling sounds and ground/air vehicles, GIS mapping reveals Woolf’s London to be a complex, networked city.”

Several online exhibitions from Karen Kukil (at Smith):

Woolf in the World: A Pen and Press of Her Own (Online exhibition). This online exhibition provides an overview of Woolf’s writing and Hogarth Press publications, including “The Mark on the Wall” and To the Lighthouse. All of the items featured in this exhibition are from the rare book and manuscript collections at Smith College.

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/penandpress/

Leslie Stephen Photograph Album (Online exhibition). Virginia Woolf consulted her father’s photograph album when she was writing To the Lighthouse. This album coupled with quotes from Leslie Stephen’s memoirs provides a good history of Woolf’s extended family.

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/stephen/

Virginia Woolf: A Botanical Perspective (Online exhibition). This exhibition of the gardens and botanical artwork of Woolf’s family and friends was held in 2003 at Smith College in the Church Exhibition Gallery, Lyman Plant house.

https://garden.smith.edu/exhibit/virginia-woolf-a-botanical-perspective

Finding aid for the Virginia Woolf Papers at Smith College:

https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/405

Finding aid for the Leslie Stephen Photograph Album at Smith College:

https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/428 

Smith College’ s Woolf, Creativity, and Madness: From Freud to fMRI

“Virginia Woolf bequeathed us an extraordinary canon of literary work, yet she battled emotional demons throughout her life. Scholars interested in the role mental illness plays in the expression of creativity have scrutinized her career and writing. This multimedia website offers researchers, educators, and students across the humanities and sciences a range of online resources to evaluate Woolf’s case and explore the broader relationship between creativity and psychological well-being.” 

https://www.smith.edu/woolf/lcdigitalnarratives.php

Elisa Kay Sparks’ sites:

http://studywoolf.blogspot.com/

Elisa's collection of study aides, teaching guides etc

https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/

A collection of essays on individual flowers mentioned by Woolf: fiction, essays, and life-writing

http://woolfbloom.blogspot.com/

A daily almanac of quotations from Woolf, mostly having to do with flowers

A Greek theatrical adaptation of The Waves (subtitles available), The Onassis Young Theatre Workshop:

https://www.onassis.org/video/waves-virginia-woolf

Amanda Golden’s students’ digital work: https://www.agoldenphd.com/digital-woolf.html

Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform has lots of interesting material pertaining to Woolf:

https://modernismmodernity.org/tags/wool

The Modernist Review: a monthly round-up of publications, conferences and events from across the diverse field of modernist studies.  From the British Association of Modernist Studies.

https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/ 

Études Britanniques Contemporaines: lots of excellent Woolf-related content in French and English.

https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/

Yale’s Modernism Lab

https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/category/virginia-woolf/

Emily McGinn, Matthew Hannah, Paul Bellew and Amy Legette.“Comparing Marks: A Versioning Edition of Virginia Woolf's ‘The Mark on the Wall,’” Scholarly Editing, 35 (2014). Web. <http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2014/editions/intro.markonthewall.html>

Virginia Woolf Selected Papers:

https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/

Some full texts available:

https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cudp_woolfe/  [sic]

[Thanks to Barbara Green for the following 2 items]

Women's Library at the LSE has made some of their materials available online.

https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/thewomenslibrary

Maria DiCenzo has a project that provides helpful material on feminist media in the interwar years. The material on Time and Tide could be particularly useful for a session on Woolf's feminist writings, especially since excerpts from A Room of One's Own were published in Time and Tide. (Time and Tide is not yet readily available online, however.)

https://interwarfeminism.omeka.net/about 

Useful Talks and Interviews:

Hermione Lee, Mrs Dalloway documentary (1987):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYySvYKGong

CSPAN Interview with Herminone Lee on life writing:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?312125-1/book-discussion-hermione-lee

Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900 1939

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtM4hlXBwQU 

Woolf’s Voice (“Craftsmanship”):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI

Leonard Woolf - On the Formation of the Bloomsbury Group and on Virginia Woolf

Interview with LW: from 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVQRGhJkgo

Vanessa Berry on Flush (book history focus):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC9LzvCEPBU

Manuela Palacios on “Women Writers and the Avant Garde: Woolf and Painting”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNW2y5sYDGU

Molly Hite on Woolf and Vita and Gardens: “Literature, Life, Gardens: The Influence of Vita Sackville-West.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKK9CBt0Mko 

Juliet Nicholson on V S-W at 5x15:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaMcqN3zsqI

Alexandra Harris: “How to Think About Woolf”

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/engage/archive-events/core,events/core,event...

SELECTED FURTHER READING/BROWSING

Battershill et Al.  Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making MAPP.  Palgrave, 2017.

Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age, Cambridge UP, 2016.

Hussey, Mark.  “Digital Woolf.” in Berman, Jessica. Blackwell Companion to Virginia Woolf. Blackwell, 2016.

Maggio, Paula. “Virginia Woolf in the Cyber City: Connecting in the Virtual Public Square.”  in Evans and Virginia Woolf and the City. [How to find Woolf in the Second World.]

Ross, Shawna. ““From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Digital Humanities and Modern Studies.” Modernism/modernity, PrintPlus Platform.” 3.2. (Summer 2018)

-----. “Toward a Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities.” Forthcoming, Feminist Modernist Studies 1.3 (October 2018).

Ross, Stephen. “Modernism and Digital Humanities” Literature Compass. 11/9 (2014): 625–633.

Utell, Janine.  Forthcoming MLA Approaches toTteaching Modernist Women’s Writing volume has a big section on DH.  A number of the chapters include Woolf.

https://mina-loy.com/  excellent site by Suzanne Chruchill and team about Mina Loy

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1117465/the-virginia-woolf-bbc-radio-drama-collection/9781787534346.html