South Orange Professor Lectures on Virginia Woolf

South Orange resident and Fordham University professor Anne Fernald launches a four-lecture book talk and lecture series on the life and works of Virginia Woolf. Fernald teaches English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006) and the editor of a forthcoming edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press. 

The book talks, which will take place at the Brooklyn Public Library on alternating Wednesdays,  from 3 - 5 p.m. will focus on the following books: 8/22 Mrs. Dalloway 9/5 To The Lighthouse 9/19 Moments of Being, and 10/3 Between the Acts.

Fernald has read and studied Woolf's work for decades. "When I began studying Woolf, 25 years ago, I fell in love with her sentences. A quarter century later, I still find it hard to believe how carefully she crafted them, how she manages, without showing off, to imbue them with a sense of literary history, gorgeous sound, and beautiful meaning all at once."  

Woolf's work is timely, says Fernald. "Her writing still resonates today." She explains, "I think in part that as we feel dizzied by the rapid changes in our world, it is both fascinating and somehow comforting to read her accounts of her own changing world. Woolf once wrote 'On or about December 1910, human character changed,' and she felt it was changing for the better, especially for women. I love her strong feminism and her patience."

For information about the series, which is free and open to the public, click here.