Events
PLEASE NOTE: Online events appear in purple type.
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Society events (members only)
Recordings
VWSGB Online speaker events are recorded and loaded to the Society’s YouTube channel. Members can access recordings for talks up to May 2022 using the password supplied to them. (From July 2022 only ticket holders have access to the event recording.)
Recordings of online events to May 2022
Email onlinevwsgb@gmail.com for further information and queries.
Reading Group: The Common Reader: Second Series (selected essays)
Friday 6 November 2026, 6pm GMT
Live online only (not recorded)
For November we will be reading three essays from The Common Reader: Second Series (1932):
The Strange Elizabethans
Donne after Three Centuries
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
We are pleased to offer this online reading group FREE to VWSGB members who want to talk about the works of Virginia Woolf and some of her Bloomsbury friends and contemporaries, to find connections, influences and similarities between them. Come prepared to tell us about your experience of reading the work, whether it’s your first or your hundredth time! What themes or motifs did you notice? Did anything surprise, delight, perplex or anger you? What do you think are the best parts, and why?
Email membershipvwsgb@gmail.com to join the Society, or onlinevwsgb@gmail.com for further information about the Reading Group.
VWSGB Online: Quentin Bell, talk by Matthew Holliday
Wednesday 18 November 2026, 5.30pm GMT
This talk explores Quentin Bell, the first major exhibition in almost thirty years devoted to the artist, writer and art historian (see below). Bringing together ceramics, sculpture, illustration and works on paper, the exhibition looks beyond Bell’s familiar place within the Bloomsbury circle to consider the distinctive visual language he developed across a lifetime of making. The talk will reflect on Charleston’s influence on his imagination, the humour and experimentation that shaped his work, and the curatorial process of bringing renewed attention to an artist too often overshadowed by his celebrated family.
Matthew Holliday is the curator of Quentin Bell and an independent art historian specialising in Bloomsbury and the Camden Town Group. His research on Bell has been presented at the University of Oxford, and he runs Bloomsbury Potter, an ongoing project devoted to Bell’s life and work. He also reviews for The Burlington Magazine and has contributed to a number of exhibitions and publishing projects. Matthew is a full-time teacher based in the New Forest.
Cost: £6 (members only, who will be emailed with details)
Want to join the VWSGB? See the Membership page of the website
Society events (open to non-members)
Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture
Saturday 23 January 2027, 2pm
University Women’s Club, 2 Audley Square, London W1K 1DB
Professor Rachel Bowlby will speak on ‘“All the centuries seemed lit up”: To the Lighthouse’s Anniversaries’. To the Lighthouse marks its times in many ways, dissolving the human orders of present, past and future. At the start of the year when the novel reaches its centenary, this lecture will look at the novel’s many ways of thinking through time – at its many kinds of anniversary. Rachel Bowlby is the author of Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. She was the editor of Woolf’s novel Orlando in the Oxford World’s Classics series, and of Virginia Woolf, a collection of essays in the Longman Critical Readers series. She co-translated Daniel Ferrer’s Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language with Geoffrey Bennington. Her other books include Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life; Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future; and Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories. Following the lecture, there will be drinks and birthday cake (included in the ticket price). There will also be the chance to enter and win prizes in the raffle.
Cost: £30 VWSGB members, £35 non-members
Ticket holders will receive a printed copy of the Birthday Lecture when published.
To book, please email eventsvwsgb@gmail.com with your full name and you will be sent information on how to make payment.
Please email eventsvwsgb@gmail.com if you have any questions about accessibility at the venue.
Other events
The Standard of Living (play)
Now until Saturday 12 December 2026
Theatre Royal Haymarket, 18 Suffolk Street, London SW1Y 4HT
With Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes and Natalia Osipova (Woolf Works) as Lydia Lopokova.
Written by James Graham and directed by Nicholas Hytner, this is the story of rebel economist John Maynard Keynes. Husband to ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Lover to Duncan Grant. Friend to Virginia Woolf. Keynes moves between the corridors of power in Whitehall and the intoxicating freedom of a radical circle of artists, writers and lovers – all determined to live differently. But as markets crash, old systems crumble and Britain teeters on the edge of chaos, one question begins to consume him: What is a good life?
Alive with music, dance, desire and debate, The Standard of Living is a thrilling, funny and deeply moving portrait of a man who dared to imagine something better.
Tickets from £25, available through the Theatre Royal Haymarket website
E. M. Forster’s Legacy of Connection: Unseen Memorabilia (exhibition)
Now until mid-December (not daily)
Camden Archives and Local Studies Centre, Holborn Library, Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8NW
An exhibition of unseen memorabilia and memories of E. M. Forster and paintings by Jim Buckingham. Forster famously had a thirty-year friendship with working-class policeman Bob Buckingham. But the connection did not end there. Forster had a wider influence on the whole Buckingham family, including Bob’s nephew Jim Buckingham who was inspired to follow his passion for painting. Now in his eighties, Jim Buckingham has a collection of never-before-seen Forster memorabilia, letters, photographs and his own paintings, including portraits of Forster himself, Bob Buckingham and other family members. The exhibition offers new insights into E. M. Forster’s legacy of connection, as well as into Bloomsbury working-class history.
FREE
Further information on the Bloomsbury Festival website
Quentin Bell (exhibition)
Now until Sunday 7 March 2027
Open Wednesday–Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday, 10am–5pm
Charleston, Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL
This exhibition offers an opportunity to discover the work of Quentin Bell, son of artist Vanessa Bell and art critic Clive Bell, and best known as the biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf, but an artist in his own right. Bell’s practice began at Charleston, where he arrived at the age of six. He dug clay from the pond, built ceramic towers and illustrated a daily family newspaper written by Woolf. The exhibition traces that practice across a lifetime, from childhood invention to his mature work as a potter, sculptor and illustrator. Bringing together more than 100 works, the exhibition covers the full range of Bell’s career. and reveal his originality as an artist in many media, from childhood invention to his mature works in ceramics, sculpture, painted objects and works on paper.
Also on view is ‘Growing Up at Charleston’, a journey through the house, tracing the childhoods of Vanessa Bell’s children, Julian, Quentin and Angelica, through the rooms where they lived, played and grew up. Photographs by Vanessa Bell, family albums and rarely seen paintings and drawings from Charleston’s own archive bring their childhood to life, and offer further context for the ‘Quentin Bell’ exhibition.
Cost: Included in house entry (available from Charleston website)
Growing Up at Charleston
Now until Sunday 7 March 2027
Open Wednesday–Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday, 10am–5pm
Charleston, Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL
For the artist, Charleston was a refuge from London and the world at war. For the children who lived here, it was a playground of adventure and opportunity. ‘Growing Up at Charleston’ is a journey through the house, tracing the childhoods of Vanessa Bell’s children – Julian, Quentin and Angelica – through the rooms where they actually lived, played and grew up. Photographs by Vanessa Bell, family albums and rarely seen paintings and drawings from Charleston’s own archive bring their childhood to life, and offer further context for the ‘Quentin Bell’ exhibition.
Cost: Included in house entry (available from Charleston website)
36th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference: ‘Between the Arts’ (CFP)
Call for papers, deadline 15 October 2026
Conference Wednesday 16–Sunday 20 June 2027
Oslo National Academy of the Arts / University of Oslo, Norway
‘Between the Arts’ brings together scholars, artists and practitioners to explore the creative and intellectual spaces between disciplines, art forms and communities. Inspired by Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury group and their collaborative networks, the conference examines the intersections of academic and artistic research. Through presentations, workshops, exhibitions and performances, participants will reflect on collaboration, influence, dialogue, artistic freedom and the democratic value of collective creativity. ‘Between the Arts’ celebrates the relationships and exchanges that shape artistic and scholarly work and asks how new ideas emerge in the spaces between the arts.
Please submit abstracts for papers or creative works to woolf2027@khio.no by 15 October 2026.
For more information, see the conference website.
Virginia Woolf Season: Woolf and History (Lit Camb)
Monthly on Saturdays
Live online
Join us for a unique season of online lectures and seminars on the major works of Virginia Woolf.
Leslie Stephen saw his daughter Virginia as his literary heir, and he regarded the study of history as a fine preparation for writing. He enthusiastically encouraged her reading of history, bringing her the five huge volumes of Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation from the London Library. By the age of 15, Virginia Stephen was reading Carlyle and Macaulay. Later, she read Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and J. R. Green’s Conquest of England for her classes at Morley College. And in May 1905, she wrote to Violet Dickinson that she was ‘going to write history one of these days. I always did love it’. At the end of her life, she was planning to ‘write a history of English literature’, the beginnings of which we can see in ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’.
All her life, Woolf was deeply interested in the reading and writing of history. And she was equally interested in the lives of the people of the past: their societies, their houses, their politics, their loves, their relationships with nature. All this went into her writing. This season of lectures explores various aspects of history across a range of Woolf’s novels and essays.
These sessions are all on Saturdays at 6–8pm BST/GMT. Each session includes a one-hour lecture, followed by a seminar.
• Saturday 24 October 2026. Lecture 2. Clara Jones, Married Love and War in Night and Day (1919)
• Saturday 21 November 2026. Lecture 3. Mark Hussey, The Many Histories of Between the Acts (1941)
• Saturday 19 December 2026. Lecture 4. Trudi Tate, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the Peace Treaties
• Saturday 16 January 2027. Lecture 5. Beth Daugherty, The Historian in Virginia Woolf’s Essays
• Saturday 6 February 2027. Lecture 6. Kabe Wilson, To the Lighthouse (1927) and the Alphabet
• Saturday 6 March 2027. Lecture 7. Claire Nicholson, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Fashion History
• Saturday 3 April 2027. Lecture 8. Ellie Mitchell, Three Guineas (1938) and Leonard Woolf, The Hotel (1939)
• Saturday 8 May 2027. Lecture 9. Alison Hennegan, Orlando (1928) and Their Histories
• Saturday 12 June 2027. Lecture 10. Varsha Panjwani, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Feminist History
Individual lectures
£33 full price (£28 VWSGB members)
Bookings on the Literature Cambridge website
Mad Bloomsbury (exhibition)
Wednesday 4 November 2026–Sunday 11 April 2027
Charleston in Lewes, Southover Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1AB
A landmark exhibition exploring how the Bloomsbury group engaged with evolving ideas of madness in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on new research the exhibition re-examines forgotten and familiar Bloomsbury histories through the lenses of disability, neurodiversity and lived experience, and explores their intersections with queer, feminist and class histories. The exhibition coincides with the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926) and includes a rare public display of works by Helen Coombe, the artist and long-term institutionalised wife of Roger Fry. This exhibition reflects a wider shift in how Charleston tells its own history and acts as a sector-leading approach to telling these histories.
For this upcoming season at Charleston in Lewes, every day we’re open, you can visit the new exhibitions at a price that suits you. Simply pre-book or turn up on the day and pay what you can –there’s no minimum entry price. Further information on the website
On Being Ill (exhibition)
Wednesday 4 November 2026–Sunday 11 April 2027
Charleston in Lewes, Southover Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1AB
In her essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), Virginia Woolf asks why illness, something we all experience, is so rarely written about. This exhibition brings together modern and contemporary art in dialogue with her text, exploring the lived experience of illness and disability.
For this upcoming season at Charleston in Lewes, every day we’re open, you can visit the new exhibitions at a price that suits you. Simply pre-book or turn up on the day and pay what you can – there’s no minimum entry price. Further information on the website
Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant (exhibition)
Thursday 12 November 2026–Sunday 11 April 2027
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
This major exhibition features the work of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, delving into the extraordinary relationship between the artists, and tracing their remarkable creative partnership that spanned more than fifty years. The exhibition explores Bell and Grant’s legacy as part of the Bloomsbury group, whose commitment to freedom and radical experimentation had a significant influence on the course of art, literature and societal thought in Britain.
The exhibition features more than 250 works, including vivid portraits, still lives, landscape paintings, decorative works on furniture, ceramics, textiles and much more. Duncan Grant’s studio, relocated for the exhibition from Charleston, is an unmissable highlight. As well as emphasising Bell and Grant’s shared creative endeavours, visitors will see how the artists also forged their own paths. This joyful exhibition celebrates their extraordinary artistic partnership, and the enduring impact these two remarkable artists had on British art.
Tickets will be available from the Tate Britain website
An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One’s Mind (play)
Saturday 14 November 2026, 2.30pm and 7pm
Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, London E1 8JB
In this compelling new play, Virginia Woolf delivers a withering critique of patriarchy, laying bare her brilliant, complex mind. Drawing from The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, Woolf dips into her own stream of consciousness to reveal her clarity on women and the fissure of her vulnerability. The play celebrates women winning their freedom in literature and championing writers from our past to inspire the voices of our future. Written and performed by Lucy Stevens. Directed by Margarett Perry.
Written and performed by Lucy Stevens, an actor, singer and theatre maker. Lucy Stevens creates new work telling women’s stories, touring throughout the UK and internationally and has featured on BBC 2, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.
Running time: 70 minutes, no interval
Tickets £11–£25 (concessions available)
Mrs Dalloway (play)
Friday 16 April–Saturday 12 June 2027
Swan Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 6BB
Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey directs Zoe Cooper’s artful adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel. Set in a city suspended between the aftermath of war and future unrest, Mrs Dalloway is a deep exploration of interior lives, the agony and ecstasy of queer love and the magnetic power of human connection.
Morning, Westminster, 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, socialite and perfect political wife, collects flowers for the party she’ll host tonight. Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the First World War, waits to meet his physician. As the day marches on to the chimes of Big Ben, fragments of conversations and chance observations spark memories, yearnings and foreboding. Two lives, lived apart but in parallel, will soon connect with life-changing consequence.
Public booking opens Wednesday 21 October
Close Reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (Lit Camb)
Wednesdays 5 May–9 June 2027, 6–8pm BST
Live online with Ellie Mitchell
The Waves (1931) is often described as Virginia Woolf’s most difficult novel. Evading any definitive ‘reading’, it is both elusive and allusive, replete with patterns of sights and sounds and sensory experience. Reading The Waves can feel very similar to being among actual waves. The text advances and retreats; its movements can break, unexpectedly, both exhilarating and exhausting its reader as it rushes back to rise again. The Waves rewards close and attentive reading. Over the six weeks of this course, we will study the novel together in its entirety, moving slowly through six sections, guided by an expert close reader and Woolf scholar.
Cost: £260 (£240 for VWSGB members). Bookings on the Literature Cambridge website.
‘Time Passes’: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at 100 (conference)
Thursday 1–Saturday 3 July 2027
International Conference, Sorbonne Université, Paris
Keynote speakers
Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University)
Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow)
Catherine Lanone (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Kabe Wilson (Artist in residence, Jesus College, Cambridge)
See the website for further information
Monks House
Rodmell, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 3HF
Visits must be pre-booked (includes National Trust members)
Explore the country retreat of the novelist Virginia Woolf, where she wrote many of most celebrated novels. Leonard and Virginia’s personalities saturate the house and it should feel as if they have just stepped out for a walk. You can explore the house at your own speed and there are room guides on hand to help you to bring the house alive. The beautiful English country garden was designed by Leonard Woolf and has incredible views of the Sussex Downs. Virginia Woolf was greatly influenced by the garden wrote many of her major works in her writing lodge. Her short story ‘The Orchard’ was inspired by the garden. With the tranquility of the Sussex Downs through the window and the garden surrounding her, it was the perfect place to write.
Facilities
There is a small shop selling guidebooks, postcards and some second-hand books. Outdoor privy located in the garden. Dogs are permitted in the garden on a lead, but there are no dog bins at the property. There is a small parking area for cars and bicycles nearby, and the Abergavenny Arms in Rodmell serves tea, coffee and cake when Monks House is open.
Volunteer guides
Would you like to be a volunteer guide at Monks House? Meet other Woolf enthusiasts and work, surrounded by Bloomsbury treasures, in the house where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived for so many years. Training will be provided. Read more about volunteering for us. If you’re interested, please phone 01273 474760 or email monkshouse@nationaltrust.org.uk
Charleston
Charleston, Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL
Open Wednesday–Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday, 10am–5pm (house, gardens, galleries, shop and cafe in Firle)
Visit Charleston to explore the art and lives of artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their contemporaries. Almost as soon as they moved to Charleston in 1916, Bell and Grant began to paint. Not just the walls, but on every surface imaginable, transforming the house into a living, breathing work of art. Over the following decades, Charleston became a gathering point for some of the twentieth century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals. Today, it continues to be a place that brings people together to engage with art and ideas.
A visitor assistant will accompany you around the house as you explore the individually designed and hand-painted rooms. Entry to the galleries and the house is by timed ticket and pre-booking is recommended. The shop, café and garden are available to visit without purchasing a ticket. For events, see the What’s On page. You can shop online at the Charleston shop web page.
Tickets £29 (concessions available; Friends of Charleston free)
Allows access to the House and gallery exhibitions at Charleston in Firle.
Promoting your event
We would be happy to tell members about your Virginia Woolf event, feature it on this page and post about it on our social media pages (Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram) if you are willing to email the following to onlinevwsgb@gmail.com. Please note that we need the full details: if we don’t receive them, we have to do your research ourselves. In a busy period this may not be possible.
For website/member message:
Title of event
Day / date / time
Full address & postcode
Brief description
Ticket price and how to book
Contact email / phone no.
Web address (in full) for more info
–Events are listed in date order and will be deleted when expired, so please make sure all the relevant details appear for each event separately.
For Facebook, as above, plus at least one image. For X/Twitter, please provide a short post no longer than 280 characters (including spaces), and for Instagram, a 100-word paragraph plus image. Please make sure that these include the date of your event and contact details.
Payment (VWSGB events only)
First, book your place at the event by emailing eventsvwsgb@gmail.com
Next, pay for the event by online banking, PayPal, credit/debit card or cheque (sterling only).
1) For online payments, please use the following details.
Bank: Santander
Account Name: Virginia Woolf Society GB
Account No.: 40411044
Sort Code: 09 06 66
2) If you wish to pay by PayPal, please email for details. You may need to add a little extra to cover costs.
3) If you wish to pay by credit/debit card, you can email for a PayPal invoice. You will then be able to pay by Visa/Visa Debit/Visa Electron, Mastercard, Discover, UnionPay, Maestro or American Express.
4) Make out a cheque to ‘Virginia Woolf Society’ and email for details.
Reference: for all payment types, please indicate the event plus your surname (e.g. AGM22 SMITH), so that we can match up the payment with the contact details provided.