Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf

It is the birthday of English writer Virginia Woolf (1882), who is remembered for her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and her book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). She was a leader in the Bloomsbury Group, influential writers, artists, philosophers, which held sway in the early 20th century. In this short recording of the author from a BBC program in 1937, she expounds on the craft of writing. Delightful.

Happy birthday, poet Rupert Brooke

It is the birthday of English poet Rupert Brooke (1887), who is remembered for his stirringly patriotic poetry during World War I, especially The Soldier (1914), which contains the lines: "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England." He was a boyishly handsome young man and quite popular. Virginia Woolf told a friend she went skinny-dipping with him in the moonlight. He was considered a member of the Georgian Poets, whose work featured hedonism, romanticism and sentimentality, and was notable for bridging the period between the Victorian era and Modernism. He died from an infected mosquito bite while on a naval expedition in the Aegean Sea. He is buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

Happy birthday, Dorothy Richardson

It is the birthday of English author Dorothy Richardson (1873), who is credited with writing the first stream of consciousness novel published in English, predating James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The complete work is called Pilgrimmage. it is 12 volumes, the first of which is Pointed Roofs (1915). The autobiographical work chronicles the development of a young woman coming into her own as an adult. She married Bohemian illustrator Alan Odle, and supported him with her writing. She was associated with the Bloombury Group and she watched W.B. Yeats writing by candlelight across the alley from her flat. She died alone in obscurity and poverty in 1957, largely forgotten by the literary world.

Richardson wrote 'interior monologues'

Dorothy Richardson

It is the birthday of British writer Dorothy Richardson (1873), whose novel, Pointed Roofs (1915), is credited with being the first completely stream of consciousness novel published in English, though James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is much more widely known. She worked as a freelance journalist and novelist, also publishing poems, essays, sketches and short stories. She married bohemian English artist Alan Odle (whose work was mainly ignored in this lifetime but is avidly collected now.) She was admired by writer Virginia Woolf, who credited her with inventing or at least developing "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." Richardson herself disliked the term "stream of consciousness," preferring instead "interior monologue." Pointed Roofs and a dozen of her subsequent novels in the style were collected into a four-volume work called Pilgrimage in 1938. Richardson is considered a significant feminist writer, who sought equal rights for women and emphasized the importance of a woman's viewpoint in literature.

Sir Hugh Walpole was popular in '20s, '30s

Hugh Walpole

It is the birthday of English novelist Sir Hugh Walpole (1884), whose  popular historical romance, Rogue Harries (1930), is set in 1730 in Cumberland, and tells the story of Francis Herries and her family who settle in a family estate there. Subsequent novels in the series, Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932) and Vanessa (1933) bring the story of the family into the 20th century. Walpole believed the novels maintained the traditions and vitality of the English novel, though it explored nothing new. Walpole was a celebrated author in the 1920s and 1930s, and was in demand as a speaker in Britain and America. Early in his career, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, among others, encouraged his work. Virginia Woolf praised his attention to detail in his writing. In his novel, Cakes and Ale (1930), Somerset Maugham depicted him as superficial and ambitious. Kenneth Clark, T.S. Eliot and J.B. Priestly were among literary giants who sponge to Walpole's defense.  Two biographies, Walpole, Sir Hugh Seymour (1884-1941) (2004) and Hugh Walpole (1952), were published after his death.