List of 999 women of the Heritage Floor / Virginia Woolf

This list describes the place setting for Virginia Woolf on the table of Judy Chicago's art installation The Dinner Party . It is part of the list of 999 women on the Heritage Floor who are assigned to the respective place settings on the table. The names of the 999 women are on the tiles of the Heritage Floor, which is arranged below the table and belongs to the art installation.

description

The installation consists of a three-sided table, each with 13 historical or mythological personalities, thus a total of 39 people, from prehistory to the women's rights movement . These people were assigned a place setting at the table, consisting of an individually designed table runner, an individually designed plate, a goblet, knife, fork, spoon and serviette. The first page of the table is devoted to prehistory up to the Roman Empire , the second to Christianization up to the Reformation and the third from the American Revolution to the women's movement. Each place setting on the table is assigned additional personalities who have received an entry on the tiles of the Heritage Floor, which occupies the space under the table and the center of the space between the sides of the table. This list captures the personalities assigned to Virginia Woolf's place setting. Your seat is on the third side of the table.

Hints

In addition to the names as they are used in German transcription or in scientific usage, the list shows the spelling chosen by Judy Chicago on the tiles.

The information on women who do not yet have an article in the German-language Wikipedia is referenced by the individual references listed under comments . If individual information in the table is not referenced via the main article, additional individual references are given at the relevant point. If there are any discrepancies between the information provided in Wikipedia articles and the descriptions of the work of art on the Brooklyn Museum website , this will also be indicated under Comments.

Place setting for Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1902)

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in London as Adeline Virginia Stephen as the daughter of the writer, historian, essayist, biographer and mountaineer Sir Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Prinsep Jackson. She had several siblings and half-siblings. Her psychological problems could be traced back to her half-brothers Gerald and George Duckworth , who abused Virginia or at least touched her immorally more often and thus set one of the triggers for her manic-depressive illness, which is now known as bipolar disorder . Virginia Stephen was tutored by a private tutor and her father, whose work impressed her so much that she too expressed her desire to become a writer at an early age. Her mother died when Virginia was thirteen and this led to her first mental breakdown. Her father died in 1904, which triggered her second episode of mental illness in Virginia, but it also meant a relief, as Virginia and her sister Vanessa had to run the household for the father after the death of their mother and older sister Stella.

She met her future husband, Leonard Woolf , at dinner with her brother Thoby, who had just started studying and was also a guest at Leonard Woolf, who was studying law. Woolf proposed marriage to her in January 1912. This triggered another episode of illness, but after four months of being in the hospital and Woolf was not allowed to visit her, she agreed. She described her marriage as happy even if there were difficulties. Leonard Woolf loved her and she had found an understanding and educated husband who saw her affectionate relationships with other women with serenity and who could bear her frigidity towards him.

Virginia Woolf worked as a writer and, with her husband, as a publisher. She made a name for herself early on as a literary critic and essayist . She made a name as a novelist with her novel The Voyage Out (The trip out) in 1915. In the 1970s, her work and Virginia Woolf were rediscovered when her essay A Room of One's Own ( A Room of One's Own ) from in 1929 became one of the most important texts of the women's movement . Already Ethel Smyth recognized in 1930 the importance of the work, when she asked Woolf, in a BBC program entitled Points of Views looked participate, and the essay as an important contribution to the emancipation movement.

The outbreak of the Second World War prompted the Woolfs to live in their Monk's House in the country and only visit the publishing house in London once a week. The publishing house was destroyed in an attack. Already at the beginning of the war they decided to voluntarily commit suicide when the Germans marched in, because Leonard Woolf was a Jew and a socialist. In the spring of 1941, Virginia feared another psychotic episode, and Leonard took her to a doctor friend in Brighton to discuss treatment options. The next day, March 28, 1941, she committed suicide in the River Ouse near Rodmell . Her body was not found until three weeks later.

For the table setting for Virginia Woolf on the dinner party, Judy Chicago chose an analogy to a blooming flower, with which she describes Woolf's advocacy for liberation from the boundaries of predominantly male-dominated literature, but also the powerful fertility of the early goddess plates the dinner party, which in the case of Woolf is supposed to express creative fertility. The plate is designed with a three-dimensional flower, in the center of which there are seed shapes. It stands on a table runner from which a sewn and painted beam of light shines out from under the plate, which alludes to her book To the Lighthouse . It symbolizes the charisma that Woolf's literary legacy has for other women in order to find a way to a new, female literary language. The table runner consists of a delicate chiffon fabric, which should be interpreted as an indication of the mental fragility of Woolf. The initial letter “V” on the front of the runner is in a wave pattern, which refers to her death by drowning, but also to her book The Waves .

Surname	Spelling on the tile	Date of birth	cultural spatial assignment	Remarks
Adela Zamudio	Adela Zamudio-Ribero	1854	Bolivia	Teacher, writer, playwright and painter who also published her works under the pseudonym Soledad (loneliness).
Agnes Smedley	Agnes Smedley	1892	United States	Journalist and author best known for her articles and books on the Chinese Revolution . In 1920 she opened a family planning clinic in Berlin .
Alfonsina Storni	Alfonsina Storni	1892	Argentina	Poet and writer of the Argentine avant-garde .
Anaïs Nin	Anaïs Nin	1903	United States	Writer, author of diaries, novels and erotic stories with extremely explicitly described sexual acts.
Bertha Eckstein servant	Helen Diner	1874	Austria	Pseudonym Sir Galahad , was an Austrian writer and travel journalist. She wrote the first cultural history focused on women and is considered the founder of matriarchy research .
Colette	Colette	1873	France	Writer, variety artist and journalist. She was the first woman in France to have a state funeral .
Doris Lessing	Doris Lessing	1919	United Kingdom	Writer. In 2007 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature .
Dorothy Richardson	Dorothy Richardson	1873	United Kingdom	She was the first English-language author who a novel in the narrative technique of stream of consciousness ( " stream of consciousness released").
Edith Sitwell	Edith Sitwell	1887	United Kingdom	Poet and critic. Her home was always open to the poetic circle of London, to which she was always generous and helpful. Sitwell published continuously from 1913 poems, some of which were abstract and set to music.
Edith Wharton	Edith Wharton	1862	United States	Writer and author of socially critical novels.
Edna St. Vincent Millay	Edna St. Vincent Millay	1892	United States	Poet and playwright and third woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Lyric Poetry. She was known for her unconventional and bohemian lifestyle.
Emilia Pardo Bazan	Emilia Pardo-Bazan	1851	Kingdom of Spain	Galician novelist, journalist, essayist, critic and scholar.
Gabriela Mistral	Gabriela Mistral	1889	Chile	Poet and diplomat . In 1945 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .
Hannah Arendt	Hannah Arendt	1906	German Empire , United States	Political theorist and publicist .
Karen Blixen	Isak Dinesen	1885	Denmark	Writer and coffee farmer in Kenya for 17 years . One of her best known works is the autobiographical novel Out of Africa .
Karen Horney	Karen Horney	1885	German Empire , United States	Psychoanalyst and representative of neo- psychoanalysis .
Lorraine Hansberry	Lorraine Hansberry	1930	United States	Playwright and political activist.
Mary Esther Harding	Mary Esther Karding	1888	United Kingdom , United States	Eminent Jungian psychoanalyst in the United States.
Nelly Sachs	Nelly Sachs	1891	German Empire , Sweden	Jewish German - Swedish writer and poet . In 1966 the Nobel Prize Committee awarded her - together with Samuel Joseph Agnon - the Nobel Prize for Literature
Olive carpenter	Olive carpenter	1855	South Africa	Writer . She stood up for the oppressed and was best known as an early representative of the women's movement .
Rebecca West	Rebecca West	1892	United Kingdom	Writer and journalist .
Selma Lagerlöf	Selma Lagerlof	1858	Sweden	Swedish writer whose works are part of world literature . In 1909 she was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and in 1914 she was the first woman to be admitted to the Swedish Academy.
Sigrid Undset	Sigrid Undset	1882	Norway	Novelist , novelist, lay Dominican and essayist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928.
Simone de Beauvoir	Simone de Beauvoir	1908	France	Writer, philosopher and feminist . The politically committed author of numerous novels, short stories, essays and memoirs is considered a representative of existentialism .
Simone Weil	Simone Weil	1909	France	Philosopher , lecturer and teacher as well as social revolutionary of Jewish descent
Susanne K. Langer	Susanne Langer	1895	United States	Philosopher . She wrote one of the first introductions to modern symbolic logic .
Vita Sackville-West	Vita Sackville-West	1892	United Kingdom	Writer and garden designer. She is also best known for her relationship with the writer Virginia Woolf . By marriage she later became Lady Nicolson . She received the Hawthornden Prize in 1933 .
Willa Cather	Willa Cather	1873	United States	Writer, received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours in 1923 and enjoyed enormous acclaim with critics and audiences.