About this Event
Join us for evening in the heart of Bloomsbury with Urmila Seshagiri in discussion with Marina Segona about Virginia Woolf’s early writing, the impact on her future work, women’s lives and writings.
In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.
Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell UP), she is writing a book about the complex legacy of modernist aesthetics in contemporary literature and culture, provisionally titled Still Shocking: 21st-Century Encounters with Modernism. She is the editor of Virginia Woolf’s The Life of Violet (Princeton UP), Jacob’s Room (Oxford UP), and To the Lighthouse (W. W. Norton; in preparation), and she is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir, A Sketch of the Past.
Marina Segona is an Italian and American multimedia artist. Her practice is concerned with exploring shared identity and dynamics of communication and control. Her projects are cycles based on several different works, each conveyed through a different medium, including video, sculpture and drawing. In Rome she was assistant to postmodern artist Mario Schifano and studied Art History at the University La Sapienza. In New York she started her career drawing for The New Yorker and the New York Times.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Waterstones, 82 Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 7.00 to GBP 20.00
