11 June 2024
King’s is the new home for WoolfNotes, a digital humanities project bringing Virginia Woolf’s reading and research notes into the public domain.
WoolfNotes, which formally launches at King’s on 9 July 2024, sits in the Department of English, an internationally recognised hub for Woolf studies. The project brings Woolf’s final substantial body of unpublished work into the public domain, which casts new light on her fiction and critical work – and challenges how she portrayed herself.
Professor Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, and Dr Clara Jones, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature, are the authors of the archival scholarship that has been crucial to a reappraisal of Woolf’s social and literary engagements.
My work on Woolf focuses on her significant socio-political investments. This open access digital resource will offer new and unexpected routes into Woolf's literary and political imagination.
Dr Clara Jones, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature
The project features high-specification images of approximately 7,000 manuscript and typescript pages from the archives of the Monks House Papers in Sussex, the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Smith College Special Collections, with the support of the Woolf Estate (managed by the Society of Authors).
Woolf already has a connection to King's as an alumna of the Ladies’ Department, having taken classes in Greek, Latin, German and History between 1897-1902. The discovery of this link by Professor Snaith and Christine Kenyon Jones disputes Woolf’s account of herself as having no formal education.
It is a great honour to be part of the WoolfNotes project and to bring it to King’s: an institution with such significant Woolfian connections. The project has already generated much excitement amongst scholars and readers of Woolf and modernism more generally, and we look forward to seeing the research which it will undoubtedly generate.
Professor Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature
In addition to the digital archive, Dr Jones and Professor Snaith are co-organising the the 2025 Woolf Conference on 5-8 July 2025 around the theme of ‘Woolf and Dissidence’, held between King’s and the University of Sussex.
Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature
Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature
King's College London is the new institutional home of WoolfNotes, an online resource that brings into the public domain...
