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Woolf

6 articles

Latest Woolf articles

The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain review – a bloodless origin story for Du Maurier’s Rebecca

The novelist has expanded her devastating 2014 short story about an imagined affair between Daphne du Maurier and a fictional Polish-Jewish housekeeper The rollcall of notable novels that began life as short stories is surprisingly long and various. Two years before Clarissa Dalloway famously shopped for flowers in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway she was shopping for gloves in Woolf’s short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street; Evan S Connell’s Mrs Bridge and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides began life as stories published in the Paris Review. Rachel Cusk’s story Project, which ran in the New Yorker in September 2025, serves almost word for word as the opening for her new novel, Life of M. The newest addition to that list is Rose Tremain’s 17th novel, The Housekeeper, which pays homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca by imagining the events that might have inspired it. Tremain first explored the idea in a 2014 story, also called The Housekeeper and included in her acclaimed collection The American Lover . Her protagonist, then and now, is Lilianne Danowski, a Polish Jew who fled the pogroms with her father as a child and who presides with reserved efficiency over a large staff at Manderville Hall near Fowey in Cornwall. When Du Maurier comes to lunch, it is Danowski, known to her employers as Danni (Danowski was “a mouthful of fishbones”), who is deputised to show her around the house, who proudly encourages Du Maurier to look through the clothes in her dead mistress’s fastidiously maintained bedroom and takes her down to the boat house. It is Danowski who, after a passionate year-long affair with Du Maurier, will be twisted into the malevolent Mrs Danvers. Continue reading...

Virginia Woolf

Oct 5, 2026 · byThe Guardian

Gillian Anderson Explains Confrontation With “Distracting” Superfans Who Sat In Front Row Of West End Show: “We Can All See You”

Gillian Anderson has explained why she asked a group of superfans not to sit in the front row of her West End stage show, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Anderson is performing at Soho Place Theatre and was filmed confronting audience members following a performance. In the video, posted just after midnight on Sunday morning […]

Angry Anderson Gillian Anderson West End

Oct 5, 2026 · byDeadline

Gillian Anderson responds to backlash after telling ‘distracting’ fans to stop sitting in front row

The actor, who is performing on the West End, was filmed telling theatre fans ‘you can’t come 20 times and sit in the front row, it’ll drive me mad’ Gillian Anderson has come under fire after the actor was filmed telling a group of fans that they were “distracting” her by repeatedly sitting in the front row while she performs in London’s West End. The Sex Education and X-Files star was filmed outside the Soho Place theatre where she’s performing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , telling a group of fans: “You guys cannot sit in the front row. I do not care; you cannot sit in the front row. It’s so distracting.” Continue reading...

Gillian Anderson London West End

Oct 5, 2026 · byThe Guardian

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? review – Gillian Anderson fights tooth and nail in marital meltdown

@sohoplace, London There is no shortage of sparring between Anderson and Billy Crudup in Edward Albee’s classic, though its comedy has an air of George and Mildred Those who want to moan about the toxic reliance on celebrity casting and screen stars in the West End can stop right there: Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson both began their careers on stage. Here they are now, glittering up Edward Albee’s conflagration of a play about unhappy marriage and its necessary illusions, immortalised on screen by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Anderson and Crudup can hold their own against that landmark adaptation of the play about George, a middle-aged history professor with a sagging academic libido, and Martha, his frustrated, ceaselessly needling wife. They are confident performers and it makes sense that this 1962 American classic about conjugal warfare is taken on by two Americans, albeit under the aegis of British directorial powerhouse Marianne Elliott. If Elliott’s previous production, Les Liasons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, had what some considered an anaemic connection between its leading lovers, there is no shortage of sparks and sparring for the central couple here. They are shouty and jousting, although it does not feel dangerous or emotionally eviscerating enough between them for rather too long. Continue reading...

Angry Anderson George Russell Gillian Anderson

Oct 1, 2026 · byThe Guardian

RSC embraces ‘hugely challenging’ task of staging Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

The Royal Shakespeare Company announces ambitious adaptations of novels in season that includes Elizabeth Debicki as Richard II and Damien Molony as Coriolanus The Royal Shakespeare Company is to stage two highly experimental novels, written almost 100 years apart and posing serious conundrums for adaptation, according to co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey. Virginia Woolf’s 1925 “day in the life” classic Mrs Dalloway and Susanna Clarke’s otherworldly 2020 award-winner Piranesi grapple with what they described as “a century-old theatrical preoccupation: the exploration of inner life on stage”. Harvey will direct Mrs Dalloway, adapted by Zoe Cooper, and said it would be “hugely challenging” to “bring the inside out” from Woolf’s novel, which uses stream of consciousness as the eponymous heroine gives a party whose guests’ thoughts intermingle with her own. Cooper, said Harvey, has “created this extraordinary sense that we as an audience are flowing in and out of people’s minds, in and out of different moments in their histories”. Mrs Dalloway opens in the Swan theatre in April and will be the third major adaptation of the novel staged in England within a year: Kit Green’s one-woman performance recently toured and Holly Robinson’s new version opens at the Yard in London in March. Continue reading...

England The Swan Woolf

Oct 1, 2026 · byThe Guardian

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Woolf in Orbis on the role of nuclear norms in an era of renewed competition

On July 20, Forward Defense nonresident senior fellow Amy Woolf published an article in Orbis titled “Nuclear Norms in an Era of Renewed Nuclear Competition.” She highlights that the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in February 2026 has left nuclear weapons states without formal systems that reduce the risk of […] The post Woolf in Orbis on the role of nuclear norms in an era of renewed competition appeared first on Atlantic Council .

Atlantic Council Woolf

Sep 9, 2026 · byAtlantic Council