Connecting threads (1)

Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Trevelyan in Oxford

This essay was written as the afterword for the recent reissue of Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1938 novel, William’s Wife (you can read more about this extraordinary novel in part two here). In May 1927, Virginia Woolf gave a lecture at Oxford called ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ and among the audience was a young undergraduate called Gertrude Trevelyan who listened to Woolf’s words about a new type of fiction carefully. A month later Trevelyan became the first woman student to win Oxford University’s most prestigious poetry prize, a huge achievement at a time when the rights of women at Oxford were being contested yet again. The story begins with Virginia Woolf recording her sense of awe after seeing the total eclipse over Yorkshire in 1927.

A solar eclipse, and other momentous events

On 29 June 1927, in the early hours of the morning, a total solar eclipse could be seen from parts of the United Kingdom. It was the first to be visible in England for over two hundred years,[i] and Londoners…