Essays & Features
‘Virginia Woolf Underground’ in Woolf and the City, ed by Elizabeth Evans and Sarah Cornish, Clemson Digital Press, 2010.
Virginia Woolf Underground in Woolf and the City
“Looking at the crowds on the escalators, Jinny thinks of all those who have died. She sees those passive bodies being conveyed mechanically into the bowels of the earth and imagines them as ghosts inhabiting an afterlife. She cowers as she watches “the soundless flight of upright bodies down the moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards”. The image of the streaming phantom crowd of commuters clearly connects up with the crowds owing over London Bridge in The Waste Land: “I did not know death had undone so many”. Eliot’s spectral London haunts Woolf at Piccadilly station.”
‘Almost fashionable Again: John Sell Cotman and the Second World War’ in From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction, ed by Sally Bayley and William May (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
‘Common Readers in Wartime’, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 31, 2009 (Julia Briggs Memorial Prize 2009)
‘The Antimacassar Restored: Victorian Taste in the 1920s and ’30s’, in Strange Sisters, ed by Francesca Orestano and Francesca Frigerio (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009)
‘Seaside Ceremonies: Coastal Rites in Twentieth-Century Art’ in Modernism on Sea, ed by Alexandra Harris and Lara Feigel (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009)
More from Alexandra
On Woolf
Secret Life of Books podcast on the The Waves
'Woolf in Winter', a published lecture on seasons, rituals, ice and love.
'A Walk of One's Own', four radio programmes following Woolf on foot.
On artists
Ashmolean NOW exhibition from November 2026: Samuel Palmer and Garry Fabian Miller. My catalogue essay is called 'Magic Circles'.
Art, War, and Resurrection. An essay for Revisiting Modern British Art, ed. by Jo Baring. This work on 'resurrection' grew from thinking about illness, revival, and not getting better.
On history
A rural history classic from Virago: I introduce a new edition of Mary Chamberlain's Fenwomen, now reissued in a 50th anniversary edition.