2 February 2026
For the first issue of 2026, we are delighted to share with you a special collection for the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. This issue contains a selection of conference reports, interviews, short articles, and creative pieces all reflecting on Woolf. The conference, held in July, was hosted by King’s College London and the University of Sussex – a memorable gathering in the places (London and Sussex) where Woolf lived and loved.
2 February 2026
Emma Crossey, King’s College London
The 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, 4th-8th July 2025
https://woolf2025.uk/
‘Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.’
– Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)[1]
‘Dissidence’ was the overarching theme for this year’s annual Virginia Woolf conference, inspired by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. With expressions of ‘dissidence’ becoming increasingly vital – and personally dangerous – in current political climates, it is no surprise that the conference was filled with (often moving) discussions of protest, anti-fascism, and stories of individual resistance.
Continue reading “Conference Report: The 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf”
2 February 2026
BEINGS is an English Drama Society from Ewha Womans University’s Department of English Language and Literature, leading women’s English theatre since 1930. Under the slogan ‘YOU CAN BE ANYONE WITH BEINGS!’, our stage features entities that transcend the boundaries of gender, era, and language. We explore a new theatrical aesthetic by embracing the absence of a male cast as the foundation of the very essence of theatre: performing. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, adapted by Sarah Ruhl, was our 83rd production in 2024.
Continue reading “Be ‘Orlando’ with BEINGS: A Conversation with the English Drama Society, Ewha Womans University, Korea”
2 February 2026
Miyu Sasaki, Freie Universität Berlin
Rachel Cusk’s 2006 novel Arlington Park depicts the lives of five women – Juliet, Amanda, Christine, Solly, and Maisie – most of whom are housewives and all of whom are mothers. It chronicles a single day in fragments of scenes from their lives, which primarily consist of domestic chores, caring for their children, and socialising. It is also a rewriting of Mrs Dalloway (1925), deploying Woolf’s famous multiperspectival narrative style and maintaining its critical and aesthetic effects.[i] Both novels primarily deal with events on a single day and culminate in a party where the various characters gather. As Monica Latham argues, the five main characters in Arlington Park can be read as versions of Clarissa Dalloway, each typifying certain traits of Woolf’s protagonist.[ii] A number of scholars, such as Latham and Bryony Randall, have discussed the structural and stylistic similarities between Arlington Park and Mrs Dalloway, focusing especially on the narrative’s temporality and its characters.[iii] Cusk’s novel is, however, overtly dark and unsettling, and echoes the Gothic, thus creating a dialogue with Woolf’s novel, and the British Gothic tradition.[iv] My contention is that these intertextual echoes amplify some of the less evident Gothic qualities of Mrs Dalloway to portray the repression of contemporary middle-class women within their domestic lives, so that Arlington Park presents itself also as a critical reading of its hypotext.[v] Continue reading “The Ominous and the Gothic in the Mundane: Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park as a Contemporary Critical Rewriting of Mrs Dalloway”
2 February 2026
Dr Rhonda Mayne, Independent Scholar
As the centenary of Mrs Dalloway (1925) prompts renewed attention to modernist innovations, dance threads through Virginia Woolf’s novel, linking Clarissa’s memories, vitality, and the movement of everyday life. As Susan Jones observes, Woolf’s work exemplifies a modernist effort to represent the disjunctive ‘modern’ subject—whose experience of consciousness, identity, and the passage of time is ‘sceptical’ and multifaceted.[1] In Mrs Dalloway, dance and rhythmic movement extend this modernist project, functioning as both aesthetic expression and a mode of epistemological insight.
2 February 2026
Yuexi Cai, University of Birmingham
The central part of this story takes place over one day, like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
‘An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures.’ – Twelfth Night
Seeing the willows flowing, he wanted to embrace; he thought he must have wished to fling himself into women’s arms while he was still shapeless. Heaven be praised that he was a man, or he would have gone mad. If that’s so, what would happen? Alas, there were willows; willows were all her. Everything would make him think of her; nothing could stir a single strand of his affection for this world unless it began to serve as a symbol of her, signifying his love for her. But who was she? It was only a face he wanted night and day, a face, a woman’s face, and under her face, her neck, her breast, her waist, her arms, these being assembled as a hug, a woman’s hug. Any woman, any woman would do (but at the proper age, of course), just… let her have a face, for one could not desire a woman while sleeping, waking, working, eating (all awfully dull), without a face. Walking to his mother’s office, he saw a face being all a blur to him, but as he started to run, he felt a sense of happiness, a tremendous exultation! He was going to meet her now, a woman whom he had once longed to see.
Continue reading “Satisfaction”
2 February 2026
Dr Suzana Zink, University of Neuchâtel
Explorations of the intersections between Virginia Woolf’s work and that of her contemporaries have yielded fresh insights into modern/modernist networks in the early decades of the twentieth century. This article examines one such connection, taking as its focus the year 1922 in Woolf’s and May Sinclair’s literary careers. As argued below, the two writers’ literary practice and their observations on modern fiction in essays and newspaper articles around this time reveal a common vocabulary of change and renewal, one which we readily associate with some of the boldest experiments of modernism.
2 February 2026
Miriam Rawdon Ivo Cruz, Independent Researcher
In ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1930), the reader joins Virginia Woolf in a quest across London. Officially in pursuit of a pencil; in truth, in search of pleasure. Woolf finds a compelling pleasure in observing the city’s surfaces, that is, its buildings, objects, people. However, if these compel, they also pressure her gaze. Moving through the city demands a delicate negotiation between the public space and private body. The potential for transgression is a defining source of urban anxiety but also of excitement, heightened, this essay argues, by Woolf’s interactions with marginal bodies — those that are socially outcast, particularly disfigured or disabled. Woolf’s encounters with marginal bodies reveal the paradoxes of the city as a space with ambiguous boundaries, and city-haunting as a means of simultaneously dissolving and reaffirming Woolf’s identity.
2 February 2026,
Karen Dellinger, Durham University
This is a digital drawing of Virginia Woolf painted in vibrant colours and backgrounded with a blend of floral and wave motifs. The portrait evokes the sensory lushness of Woolf’s narrative style while also drawing inspiration from the illustrations of Aino-Maija Metsola, whose cover design work on the Vintage Classics editions of Woolf’s books has been a kaleidoscopic companion to my ongoing journey through Woolf’s words. The figure of Virginia herself is strewn with flowers that embellish her face and robe, while her head is haloed with a quote from her diaries: ‘I like to have space to spread my mind out in’.[1] The image’s focus on fluid lines and bright colours offers an alternative to the most common visual depiction of Woolf often found sombrely haunting book jackets and conference posters: the black-and-white or sepia photographs of her side profile, which do little justice to her bold, perceptive spirit. Blending the bright greens and oranges used by Vanessa Bell in paintings of Woolf with geometric and fluid linework, I aim to create a playful and expressive visualization of Virginia Woolf’s subtle yet influential artistic dissidence from dominant creative representations, and give pictorial form to her vivid affinity with space and consciousness.
Sources
[1] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), III (1925–1930), p.28.
2 February 2026
Sylvia Jiang, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Preface
This piece was written as a creative assignment for my British Literature course of the School of English and International Studies in Beijing Foreign Studies University, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1921). I was particularly drawn to the symbol of the mark—its ambiguity, and how it sparked the author’s playful and contemplative train of thought. To me, the stream of consciousness style embodies a form of expressive writing that allows thoughts to run freely, like wild horses across an open prairie.
If the mark on the wall represents a moment of sitting indoors and thinking without constraints, I wanted the “mark” in my own life to inspire broader reflections on life itself—extending across time, from childhood to adulthood and into old age. Continue reading “The Mark in My Life”
The Modernist Review 