Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals shine with moonlight and rain-washed landscapes, but did her later illness inhibit such vision? No, writes Iona Glen, who, when considering the poetry and criticism of Polly Atkin, sees Wordsworth’s creativity flourish in her periods of ill health.
In her essay, author Katy Wimhurst explores how the experience of chronic illness challenges established (and often ableist) conventions of storytelling, opening up fiction – and indeed language itself – to new, imaginative possibilities.
Iona Glen reflects on Celia Paul’s memoir, Self Portrait, the significance of the British Museum and Bloomsbury to the artist’s work, and her subversive vanquishing of “muse-dom” and patriarchal conventions through painting.
Lottie Whalen talks to editor and author Francesca Wade about her prize-winning book, Square Haunting, the single women who sought to find a room of their own in Bloomsbury, her research and writing processes, and why the book resonates for women today.
In this creative, collagic essay, Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie writes with and through the words of Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva to convey the freedom of writing and kinship felt when reading their works.
Victoria Smith is captivated by Lanny, Max Porter’s long listed Booker Prize novel about the disappearance of a little boy from an English village. Here, Smith reviews the novel against Porter’s 2015 debut, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Tate’s latest exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain, reveals the extent to which the artist was inspired by British culture and in turn, influenced it. In her review, Jo Hemmings asks why we’re still captivated by Van Gogh and his work.
Olivia Scott Berry questions curatorial decisions and a lack of intersectionality in the recent exhibition inspired by Virginia Woolf’s writings. In the words of poet Rebecca Wilcox, Berry asks ‘what about the transformational potential of discourse?’ when returning to the oeuvre of Woolf.
