Name: Virginia Woolf Barbie.
Age: About a decade old.
Appearance: Prim, Victorian, hair in a bun.
Any relation? To whom?
To Virginia Woolf, the author of To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own. Well, yes, sort of.
What do you mean, sort of? It’s actually a Barbie doll, but one that looks like Virginia Woolf.
You mean coincidentally? No, I think it was intentional: the doll was holding a tiny copy of Mrs Dalloway.
They took the celebrated writer and proto-feminist Virginia Woolf and turned her into a dolly? Well, they didn’t in the end. The American toy company Mattel proposed the Woolf doll some years ago, but the author’s estate objected.
I should think so. “We all agreed, over our dead bodies,” said the social historian – and Woolf’s great niece – Virginia Nicholson, speaking at the Cheltenham literature festival this weekend.
Is Mattel in the habit of introducing somewhat counterintuitive Barbie editions? In a word, yes; some fall under its “inspiring women” banner, others are celebrity role models.
Were any of them a worse idea than Virginia Woolf Barbie? While there is no exhaustive accounting of Barbie dolls that never made it past the planning phase, plenty of odd choices actually did get produced.
Name one. There is, for example, such a thing as a Dr Maya Angelou Barbie.
No there isn’t. There is.
Is it a good likeness? The doll retains Barbie’s classic and highly improbable body proportions, but she’s clutching an edition of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, so it’s definitely her.
Well I never. There have also been commemorative Barbies of Billie Jean King, Helen Keller, the investigative journalist and civil rights leader Ida B Wells, the British primatologist Dr Jane Goodall and Queen Camilla.
I suppose they teach young girls that you can achieve great things while still being impossibly skinny. These days Barbies come in a range of body types, including curvy, tall and petite. But, yes, they’re all still pretty thin.
What’s the most inappropriate celebrity Barbie out there? Mattel did once issue a pair of dolls modelled on Elvis and Priscilla Presley on their wedding day.
Remind me: how old was Priscilla when she started dating Elvis? She was 14.
I’m starting to think a Virginia Woolf Barbie isn’t such a terrible idea. Good news – if you manufacture it in the UK, you might not even need the estate’s permission.
Do say: “We’ve got 600,000 new Barbie bodies ready to ship; just waiting to find out whether we’re doing Kamala heads or Melania heads.”
Don’t say: “She’s holding a tiny lettuce – that’s how you know it’s Liz Truss.”
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