Virginia Woolf Season 7
Woolf and History

Live online, September 2026 to June 2027

Join us for a unique season of lectures and seminars on the major works of Virginia Woolf. Our theme for 2026-27 is Virginia Woolf and History..

Leslie Stephen saw his daughter Virginia as his literary heir, and he regarded the study of history as a fine preparation for writing. He enthusiastically encouraged her reading of history, bringing her the five huge volumes of Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation from the London Library. By the age of 15, Virginia Stephen was reading Carlyle and Macaulay. Later, she read Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and J. R. Green’s Conquest of England for her classes at Morley College. And in May 1905, she wrote to Violet Dickinson that she was ‘going to write history one of these days. I always did love it’. At the end of her life, she was planning to ‘write a history of English literature’, the beginnings of which we can see in ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’.

All her life, Woolf was deeply interested in the reading and writing of history. And she was equally interested in the lives of the people of the past: their societies, their houses, their politics, their loves, their relationships with nature. All this went into her writing. This season of lectures explores various aspects of history across a range of Woolf’s novels and essays.

These sessions are all on Saturdays at 18.00-20.00 pm British time. Live online via Zoom. Each session includes a 1-hour lecture, followed by a seminar. Live online. Bookings are open.

• Saturday 19 September 2026. Lecture 1. Claire Davison, The Years(1937) and the Streets of London.
• Saturday 24 October 2026. Lecture 2. Clara Jones, Married Love and War in Night and Day (1919).
• Saturday 21 November 2026. Lecture 3. Mark Hussey, The Many Histories of Between the Acts (1941).
• Saturday 19 December 2026. Lecture 4. Trudi Tate, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the Peace Treaties.
• Saturday 16 January 2027. Lecture 5. Beth Daugherty, The Historian in Virginia Woolf's Essays.
• Saturday 6 February 2027. Lecture 6. Kabe Wilson, To the Lighthouse (1927) and the Alphabet.
• Saturday 6 March 2027. Lecture 7. Claire Nicholson, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Fashion History.
• Saturday 3 April 2027. Lecture 8. Ellie Mitchell, Three Guineas (1938) and Leonard Woolf, The Hotel(1939).
• Saturday 8 May 2027. Lecture 9. Alison Hennegan, Orlando (1928) and Their Histories.
• Saturday 12 June 2027. Lecture 10. Varsha Panjwani, A Room of One’s Own(1929) and Feminist History.

• Book all 10 sessions for the price of 9. Offer closes Saturday 5 September 2026 at 16.00 British Summer Time (just before the first lecture).

Individual lectures

£33.00 full price
£28.00 Students on a low income
£28.00 CAMcard holders
£28.00 Members of the VWSGB

Full season

£297 Full price for all 10 sessions (save £33)
£252 Students and CAMcard holders for all 10 sessions (save £28)
£252 Members VWSGB for all 10 sessions (save £28)

All prices include VAT at 20%

Recordings

Each lecture will be recorded live and will be available to participants after the live event for 48 hours. We hope this will be helpful to participants in various time zones, and to those who want to hear the lecture again. The recordings are available only to people who have booked the session. The seminars are not recorded.

Time Zones

These online sessions are at 18.00 British Time / 19.00 Central European Time / morning or early afternoon in American time zones. Each session lasts a maximum of 2 hours.

Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time: please note that clocks in Britain are on Summer Time in September 2026, and change to Greenwich Mean Time on 25 October 2026. In spring 2027, the clocks change from GMT to Summer Time on 28 March 2027.

If you cannot attend a session you have booked

Please note that, because places are limited, we cannot usually give refunds if you cannot attend a session or listen to the recording. But if you contact us in advance, we might be able to transfer your booking to a different session.

Zoom link

We will send you a zoom link by email approximately 24 hours before the lecture. If it does not arrive, please let us know by email in good time, at least an hour before the session, so we can re-send

Optional Further Reading

• Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh UP, 1996)
• Beth Rigal Daugherty, Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
• Claire Davison,  ‘Ancestral Voices Pacifying War? Transnationalising Modernism on the BBC, 1939–1945’, in Massimiliano Tortora and Annalisa Volpone, eds., Borders of Modernism (Morlacchi Editore, 2019).
• Mark Hussey, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (Manchester UP, 2025)
• Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh UP, 2016)
• Clara Jones, ed., Virginia Woolf and Capitalism (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (biography) (1996)
• Anna Snaith, ‘Woolf and Education’, in Anne Fernald, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf (Oxford UP, 2021)
• Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (1998; HeB, 2013)
• Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context, OUP, 2009)
• Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (California UP, 1986)

Podcasts

The Virginia Woolf Podcast, with Karina Jakubowicz
Anne Fernald, podcast on A Room of One’s Own today, 2022.
Varsha Panjwani, Podcast series on Women and Shakespeare

To book, click on one of the images below. Bookings are open.