A Week in Woolf’s Houses

Gloria Friedman reflects upon the 2022 Woolf Summer Course

I was taking a class on Virginia Woolf in Chicago when Covid struck. When zoom became a ‘thing’, I searched the internet for a way to continue my study of Woolf and found Literature Cambridge— and what a glorious find it was! After one lecture, I was hooked and immediately bought all of the first Virginia Woolf season. I also read, with envy, about their 5-day intensive summer courses — desperately wishing I could attend one. The minute I saw that they were offering a zoom summer courses on Woolf’s Houses in July, 2022, I signed up.

Lecturers Trudi Tate, Karina Jakubowicz, Alison Hennegan, and Ellie Mitchell, and Producer Jeremy Peters

But then I started getting nervous. How in the world would they be able to do this across many different time zones? Equally important, I began to fear that I didn’t know enough about Woolf to participate. Virtually all of the people who attended Literature Cambridge Woolf lectures, knew far more about her and her works than I did — many of them were Woolf and/or English Literature scholars. I was neither. I’m just someone who loves to read and loves Woolf and has had a long interest in the Bloomsbury Group.

I should not have worried. I realised quickly that I should have known that Trudi Tate (the Director of Literature Cambridge) would do this right and that the lecturers knew how to teach all levels of students. First the logistics. The lectures were recorded so while you could watch them live, if the live lectures were at 4am (as they were in my time zone), I could watch the recorded version while having coffee when I got up. Or, if I wanted, I could even watch them the night before. I was able to do everything else in person (well, in person on zoom). 

The five days were simply wonderful. All of the lectures were outstanding but that didn’t surprise me. I had been to lectures by all the lecturers so I knew they were all better than first-rate. The lectures achieved an extraordinary level of scholarship and insight while also being engaging and, dare I say it, entertaining. We studied Night and Day, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Between the Acts, and more. The heart of the course (and the part that had worried me the most) was the daily small group supervisions (tutorials) The participants were divided into groups of four. My group was led by Alison Hennegan and you’d need to be a better writer than I am to be able to express my respect and admiration for her knowledge and humanity.

When we introduced ourselves, Alison’s skill made me feel confident enough to join in the discussion. We discussed a great range of topics around Woolf including: how memory is explored in To the Lighthouse and how it relates to Woolf’s Moments of Being and Proust; art and artistic creation in virtually all of the readings; gender identity and the concept of ‘the other’ in Orlando and Between the Acts; what city and country settings reveal in all of her works but especially in Night and Day and Orlando; and so much more. While discussions always started around the ideas in the lecture, everyone was encouraged to bring topics or thoughts that they wanted to explore. 

Ellie Mitchell’s lecture

In my time zone, I would begin listening to lectures at around 8.00 am and everything was over at around 1.30. When I told friends what I was doing, they thought I was nuts — how can you spend over 5 hours a day discussing Houses in Virginia Woolf?! But I didn’t want those days to end. I wanted the discussions to keep going; I wanted to re-listen to the lectures — and I often did. I wanted to get to know the other participants better. I was sad when the course ended but thrilled that I will be able to do these zoom classes and zoom summer courses every year. It is something good that has come out of the Covid nightmare, and I am very grateful.

Gloria Friedman
Chicago

Virginia Woolf’s Houses ran live online for 5 days in July 2022. Our 2023 live online summer course was on Virginia Woolf’s Women. In 2024, the theme for our summer course is Woolf and Childhood.