| Freshwater: A comedy | |
|---|---|
 Invitation card for first performance 1935 | |
| Written by | Virginia Woolf |
| Date premiered | 18 January 1935 |
| Place premiered | Fitzroy Street, London |
| Genre | Comedy |
Freshwater: A comedy is a play written and produced by Virginia Woolf in 1935, and the only play she wrote. Although only performed once in her lifetime, it has been translated into many languages and produced in many countries since. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears as a character in this play.
Virginia Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled Pattledom (1925), [1] and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron's photographs. [2] [3] She had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron's life in 1923, but abandoned it. Finally it was performed on 18 January 1935 at the studio of her sister, Vanessa Bell on Fitzroy Street in 1935. [4] Woolf directed it herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa, her daughter Angelica Garnett, Virginia's husband Leonard and Duncan Grant, Angelica's father. Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirizing the Victorian era. [5] It was not performed again in Woolf's lifetime. It was found among Leonard Woolf's papers after his death in 1969 [6] and was not published till 1976, when the Hogarth Press produced an edition, edited by Lucio Ruotolo, [7] who was living in Virginia Woolf's home, Monk's House, at the time. [8] [4] The edition was illustrated by Edward Gorey under the pseudonym Loretta Trezzo. [9] [7]
The play is named after Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where Julia Margaret Cameron lived in a somewhat bohemian atmosphere at her home, Dimbola Lodge, surrounded by a number of artists and literary figures, including George Frederick Watts and Tennyson in the 1860s. Tennyson's nearby home, Farringford was another artistic centre. The plot revolves around the attempts by the young actress Ellen Terry to escape from her marriage to the much older Watts, partly family history, partly mocking the conventions of the Victorian times that the Bloomsbury group had fought to escape. [10] The Camerons are set to embark for India, while both Mrs Cameron and Watts are intent on portraying Ellen in their respective media. Ellen on the other hand views a young naval lieutenant as her escape, with an offer to escape to Bloomsbury. [6] This collapses a number of historic events into a single afternoon. [3]
The 1935 version had a rehearsed reading in Melbourne, Australia by Performing Arts Projects at the Linden Gallery in 1989. In New York in 2009, both the 1923 and 1935 versions were combined for the first time in an Off-Broadway production to celebrate Woolf's 128th birthday, [11] [12] Charles Isherwood praising the wordplay. [13] In London the play was performed in Virginia Woolf's former home, 46 Gordon Square (now part of the School of Arts, Birkbeck College) in 2012. [14] Freshwater has also been performed at Monk's House in Rodmell, Sussex. [15]
The play has been translated into French (1982), [16] Spanish (1980) and German (2017). [17] It was performed in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 1982, and in Mainz, Germany in 1994. The French production was revived in New York in 1983, starring Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Joyce Mansour, Guy Dumur and Florence Delay. [18] [19]
Although a slight work not intended for publication, and easily dismissed as frivolous, [20] it has been given a larger meaning when placed in the broader context of Woolf's work and views. For beneath the comedic elements, there is an exploration of both generational change and artistic freedom. Both Cameron and Woolf fought against the class and gender dynamics of Victorianism [10] and the play shows links to both To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own that would follow. Ellen's flight to Bloomsbury symbolising freedom from patriarchy. [3]
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Julia Margaret Cameron was an English photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorians and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature.
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Leonard Sidney Woolf was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children.
Gerald de l'Etang Duckworth was an English publisher, who founded the London company that bears his name. Henry James and John Galsworthy were among the firm's early authors.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
(Helen) Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist and translator. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, an influential fantasy novel, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an experimental poem published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."
Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann was an English publisher, poet and man of letters. He founded the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine, and the publishing house of John Lehmann Limited.
George Frederic Watts was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.
Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf. It was published shortly after her death in 1941. Although the manuscript had been completed, Woolf had yet to make final revisions.
Monk's House is a 16th-century weatherboarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, three miles (4.8 km) south of Lewes, East Sussex, England. The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard Woolf, bought the house by auction at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, on 1 July 1919 for 700 pounds, and received there many visitors connected to the Bloomsbury Group, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. The purchase is described in detail in her Diary, vol. 1, pp. 286–8.
This is a bibliography of works by the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).
The Bloomsbury Group plays a prominent role in the LGBT history of its day.
Adeline Marie Russell, Duchess of Bedford, was a British advocate for penal reform. She led the European War Fund that cared for the wounded of the First World War.
Octavia Wilberforce (1888–1963) was an English physician who made a medical career despite opposition from her parents, with support from Elizabeth Robins. She was in general practice in Brighton, and ran a women's shelter near Henfield. She treated Virginia Woolf's mental illness in the final years of Woolf's life. She was also friends with multiple members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Julia Prinsep Stephen was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Joan Adeney Easdale was an English poet from Sevenoaks, Kent. Her mother was the author Gladys Ellen Easdale, née Adeney (1875-1970). Her father, Robert Carse Easdale, left her mother during the First World War. Virginia Woolf discerned some "real merit" in her early work.