This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawr

This groundbreaking study explores the formative influence of classical music on Woolf's writing, illustrating the importance of music to Woolf's domestic, social and creative lives.

“A truly comprehensive, multi-perspective, and up-to-date survey of the undeniable role of music in Woolf ’s life and writings” (Music and Letters). Through Virginia Woolf's diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, this fascinating volume explores the inspiration and influences of music—from classical through mid-twentieth century—on the preeminent Modernist author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and other masterful compositions. In a letter to violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, Woolf revealed: “I always think of my books as music before I write them.” In a journal entry she compared herself to an “improviser with [my] hands rambling over the piano.“ Approaching the author’s career from a unique perspective, Virginia Woolf and Music examines her musical background; music in her fiction and her own critical writings on the subject; its importance in the Bloomsbury milieu; and its role within the larger framework of aesthetics, politics, gender studies, language, and Modernism. Illuminating the rich nature of Woolf's works, these essays from scores of literary and music scholars are “a fascinating and important contribution to scholarship about Virginia Woolf, music, and interdisciplinary art” (Music Reference Services Quarterly).

Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves. Woolf's investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf's robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing. Correspondingly, Clements uses a methodology that employs theoretical tools from the disciplines of both literary criticism and musicology, as well as several burgeoning and newly established fields including sound, listening, and performance studies. Ultimately, Clements argues that a wide-ranging combination of these two disciplines produces new ways to study not only literary and musical artifacts but also the methods we employ to analyze them.

"Remember, what's down inside you, all covered up—the things of your soul. The important, secret things . . . The story of you, all buried, let the music caress it out into the open." When Allegra was a little girl, she thought she would pick up her violin and it would sing for her—that the music was hidden inside her instrument. Now that Allegra is twelve, she believes the music is in her fingers, and the summer after seventh grade she has to teach them well. She's the youngest contestant in the Ernest Bloch Young Musicians' Competition. She knows she will learn the notes to the concerto, but what she doesn't realize is she'll also learn how to close the gap between herself and Mozart to find the real music inside her heart. The Mozart Season includes an interview with author Virginia Euwer Wolff.

Julia Briggs has written a chronological exploration of Woolf's life that reads her life through her books, using the novels to create a new form of biography. Each chapter is illustrated with a sample of Woolf's original manuscript.

This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring various experimental forms she created in response to violence and crisis. Across fifteen chapters written by an international array of scholars, this book draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s aesthetics and deepens our understanding of her writing about war, ethics, feminism and European culture.