Mark Hussey

Woolf Studies Annual is a refereed journal publishing substantial new scholarship on the work of this major writer and her milieu. Each volume includes several articles, reviews of new books, and an up-to-date guide to library special collections of interest to researchers. The Annual also occasionally features edited transcriptions of previously unpublished manuscripts.

This new publication of On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms presents Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia Stephen in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is a part of every human being's experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is "the great confessional." Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness and she explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us. Notes from Sick Rooms addresses illness from the caregiver's perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete and useful information to caregivers today. Originally published by Paris Press in 2002 as On Being Ill, this paperback edition includes an introduction to Notes from Sick Rooms and to Julia Stephen by Mark Hussey, the founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, the founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. Hermione Lee's brilliant introduction to On Being Ill is a superb introduction to Virginia Woolf's life and writing. This book is embraced by the general public, the literary world, and the medical world.

The annotated, authorized edition of the renowned author's last novel with commentary by literary critic and Virginia Woolf specialist Melba Cuddy-Keane. Between the Acts takes place on one summer's day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant as World War II looms. In the garden of Pointz Hall, the Oliver family's country seat, everyone from the village has gathered to present the traditional pageant--scenes from the history of England starting with the Middle Ages. As the story of England unfolds, the lives of the villagers also take shape. The past blends with the present and art blends with life in a narrative full of invention and lyricism. Through her character's passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's final novel both celebrates and satirizes Englishness. Even so, the coming of war hangs over the whole community, heralding a new act. This authorized edition from the Virginia Woolf library features: Biographical PrefaceChronologyIntroduction to the textExtensive notesSuggestions for further readingThis annotated edition is the perfect companion to more fully understand Between the Acts, its importance in twentieth century literature, and Virginia Woolf's world.

The first book in the ‘Biography of a novel’ series offers a compelling account of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. The fourth and best-known of Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is a modernist masterpiece that has remained popular since its publication in 1925. Its dual narratives follow a day in the life of wealthy housewife Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, capturing their inner worlds with a vividness that has rarely been equalled. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel’s writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf’s process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel’s remarkable legacy to the present day. Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted her novel ‘to give life & death, sanity & insanity… to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.’ Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel reveals how she achieved this ambition, creating a book that will be read by generations to come.

Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2022'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller______________Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell’s own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell’s stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new.'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell

Woolf's first distinctly modernist novel follows an aloof yet beloved young man from his childhood through his student days to his too-early death during World War I. Annotated and with an introduction by Vara Neverow

The Years is a sweeping tale of three generations of the Pargiter family, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, in the thick of life's cycles of birth, death, and the search for a pattern in all the chaos. Annotated and with an introduction by Eleanor McNees

The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, The Waves yields new treasures upon each reading. Annotated and with an introduction by Molly Hite

Begun as a "joke," Orlando is Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography of a poet who first appears as a sixteen-year-old boy at the court of Elizabeth I, and is left at the novel's end a married woman in the year 1928. Part love letter to Vita Sackville-West, part exploration of the art of biography, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. This new annotated edition will deepen readers' understanding of Woolf's brilliant creation. Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista

Virginia Woolf Miscellanies comprises the latest research on Virginia Woolf's life and work by prominent scholars and authors in the field of twentieth-century literature. Presented as a compilation of papers and abstracts from the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, this collection yields the most recent opinions and discoveries concerning Woolf, from current analyses of her most celebrated works to new biographical interpretations. Among the topics addressed are Woolf and Mourning; Woolf and Pedagogy, Experimentalist Contemporaries; Lesbian Myth and Ritual; Feminism; Woolf and her Audience; Woolf as "Landscape Artist" and Cultural Historian. A list of over sixty contributors includes works by Carol Ascher, Pamela Caughie, Louise DeSalvo, Evelyn Haller, Jane Lazarre, Jane Lilienfield, Roger Poole, Jean Moorcraft Wilson, Alex Zwerdling and many others.

"Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes." Setting out to answer the question "How are we to prevent war?" Virginia Woolf argues that the inequalities between women and men must first be addressed. Framing her arguments in the form of a letter, Woolf wittily ponders to whom--among the many who have requested it--she will donate a guinea. As she works out her reasons for which causes she will support, Woolf articulates a vision of peace and political culture as radical now as it was when first published on the eve of the Second World War. A founding text of cultural theory, Three Guineas can also help us understand the twenty-first-century realities of endless war justified by "unreal loyalties." "Witty, scornful, deeply serious... If you are a woman, or anti-war, or both, read it."--The New Yorker

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me." Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children--three boys and three girls--playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.