Buried Treasures: Virginia Woolf In and Out of the Archive

Professor Urmila Seshagiri of the University of Tennessee and author of ‘Making It New: Persephone Books and the Modernist Project’ (Modern Fiction Studies 2013) will be in conversation with former Persephone Books employee Dr Clara Jones of King's College London about a newly-found typescript of three early Virginia Woolf stories that she is preparing for publication. What do they tell us about Woolf that we didn't know? And more broadly how do Woolf's first pieces of writing compare to her later work? They will also reflect on the pleasures and pitfalls of archival research and how this recovery work, which has been so central to feminist literary criticism and to Persephone Books in general, might change the way we think about the literary canon. With reference of course to Flush, A Room of One's Own, and A Writer's Diary.