Abstract
On 28 November 1928 Woolf wrote in her diaiy: ’Fathers birthday. He would have been 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable’. It is true that it was his death that made her birth as a professional writer possible. He died in February 1904. Until then his daughter had been an inexperienced student with no defined role in the world and no immediate hope of achieving anything. By the end of that year she was a published journalist, an apprentice, but now earning money and determined to make a career for herself as a woman of letters.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Chapter 2
See Madeline Moore, The Short Season Betiveen Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (George Allen & Unwin, 1984).
See Jane Marcus, ‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination’ in her Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Indiana University Press, 1988). In my view Marcus seriously exaggerates the influence of Caroline Stephen on Woolf by neglecting the fundamental differences between them on questions of religion. Nonetheless, this chapter contains much useful information.
‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, Times Literary Supplement, 11-17 September, 1987, p. 979.
These details I owe to the generosity of Andrew McNeillie who has informed me of 44 recently discovered Woolf essays in the TLS archives. They will be printed as an appendix to a future volume of The Essays of Virginia Woolf.
See Louise DeSalvo, ‘Shakespeare’s Other Sister’ in ed. Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (Macmillan, 1981).
See note 3.
‘Friendship’s Gallery’, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 25, nos 3-4, Fall/Winter 1979, with an introduction by Ellen Hawkes. See also Ellen Hawkes, ‘Woolf’s "Magical Garden of Women’" in ed. Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf.
See, for example, S. P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, volume 1, St Martin’s Press, 1986, pp. 161, 224.
Leonard Woolf, Sowing, in ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism (University of Toronto Press, 1975) p. 104.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1962) p. 15.
J. M. Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’, in Two Memoirs (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949)p. 85, reprinted in ed. S. P. Rosenbaum The Bloomsbury Group, p. 54.
Copyright information
© 1991 John Mepham
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mepham, J. (1991). 1904–1909: Journalist. In: Virginia Woolf. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14145-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14145-6_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-66549-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-14145-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)