Posts Tagged Virginia Woolf

Women’s History Month: choice quotes by women writers

Posted by Amy Steele in Books, Women/ feminism on March 22, 2014

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter,
one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
–Virginia Woolf

Art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean.
–Rebecca West

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple.
–Iris Murdoch

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That’s’ why we have art.
–Joyce Carol Oates

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
–Susan Sontag

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.
–Alice Walker

I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.
–Amy Tan

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
–May Sarton

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Women’s History Month: focus on Mary McCarthy and Virgina Woolf

Posted by Amy Steele in Women/ feminism on March 29, 2010

Mary McCarthy [1912-1989]


–grew up as an orphan in Minnesota
–graduated from Vassar College in 1933
–worked as drama and literary critic
–married to Edmund Wilson, literary critic, from 1938-1946 [like many women’s college graduates/feminists she kept her own name]
–married four times


–best known for The Group [1966]– the postgrad experience of a group of Vassar women–and The Birds of America [1970]–Americans abroad, based on McCarthy’s life in Paris in the sixties

Virginia Woolf [1882–1941]

–born in London
–daughter of model Julia Prinsep Stephen and editor, critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen
–home schooled by her father
–when Virginia was 13, her mother died which led to Virginia’s nervous breakdowns
–her father died in 1904 and Virginia was institutionalized briefly
— in 1912 she married writer Leonard Woolf
–her novels:

The Voyage Out [1915]
Night and Day [1919]
Jacob’s Room [1922]
Mrs. Dalloway [1925]
To the Lighthouse [1927]
Orlando [1928]
The Waves [1931]
The Years [1937]
Between the Acts [1941]
–Virginia Woolf drowned herself March 28, 1941

my two favorite books by Virgina Woolf:

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.
from A Room of One’s Own (1929)

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