Biography and Autobiography

This chapter explores the centrality of biography and autobiography to Woolf’s reading and writing life, and to her cultural milieu, in which experiments in life-writing were a crucial aspect of the modernist reaction against the Victorian era. It examines Woolf’s deep engagement in her fiction with life-writing forms, from the bildungsroman of The Voyage Out to the play with conventional biographical forms of Jacob’s Room, Orlando, The Waves, and Flush and the autobiographical foundations of To the Lighthouse. It also examines her biography of Roger Fry, and her own experiment in memoir-writing, the posthumously published ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in the context of concerns with the nature of memory, identity, and sexuality.

Time

Orlando and other texts express Woolf’s interest in subjective ‘time in the mind’, an interest she shared with other modernists who challenged chronological norms, but Woolf explored other forms of time as well. Some align her work with the theories of Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Mary Sturt, and this variety—the way Woolf developed forms of time across her career as a writer—tracks with the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. His Time and Narrative explains the dialectical pattern according to which Woolf perpetually found new ways for time and narrative to shape each other, culminating in novels that thematize this reciprocal relationship between the art of narrative and possibilities for temporal engagement. Woolf’s early fiction breaks with linear chronology, starting a series of virtuoso performances of temporal poiesis.

Early Novels and Stories (1915–1923)

Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.

Late Works (1933–1941)

This chapter traces the development of Woolf’s late feminist politics and aesthetic experimentalism, focusing on her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). It reads across these texts and Woolf’s wider writings from 1933–1941, including essays, unpublished drafts, and her fictional biography Flush (1933), to identify key strands of social and political enquiry in Woolf’s late works. The chapter pays particular attention to Woolf’s late analysis of the role of art in society and her evolving feminist-pacifist critique of the links between patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, and war. Rejecting a narrative of creative decline, the chapter highlights the productive relationship between political engagement and formal experiment in Woolf’s late works.

Family and Place

How can we understand Virginia Woolf’s life and art through the idea of ‘home’? This chapter answers the question by tracing the multiple places Woolf called home over the course of her life. From a Kensington childhood to final years spent with Leonard Woolf in Richmond, from her famously defiant young adulthood in Bloomsbury to her sister Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat in Sussex, Woolf’s movements between homes shaped her maturing aesthetic philosophies. As the daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, Woolf experienced Englishness itself through a sense of simultaneous belonging and exile. She consistently framed citizenship and national identity as feminist problems because ‘if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical’ (ARO 96). My essay illuminates the vitality of ‘home’ – physical as well as conceptual – in Woolf’s literature, feminism, and politics.

Feminist Theory

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

Private Writings

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s private writings as ethical and political technologies of privacy. In the light of Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-writing, Woolf’s notebooks, letters, and diaries are read as various ‘techniques of living’ rehearsing an elusive tension between immediacy and self-consciousness. The chapter considers in turn the archival impulse of her notebooks, the pragmatics of intimacy at work in her letters, and the aesthetics of daily life outlined in her diaries. Through these daily ‘notes’, Woolf configured various acts of self-making ranging from social critique to psychological immunity. She was also keenly aware of the extent to which her daily ‘scribbling’ or ‘scratching’ was becoming increasingly entangled with new technologies of recording and communication. By relating these archaic media to the social rise of ‘the very private’ in modernity, Woolf mobilized her private writings as untimely techniques of resistance, generating founding, if vulnerable, forms of micro-power.

Literary London

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

Allusion and Metaphor

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s allusive practice involved transforming and interrogating texts rather than invoking the authority of earlier texts or their scholarly interpretations. It shows how Woolf’s allusions are often supported by metaphors that draw attention to the longevity of past literature that is essential to the act of allusion. These include organic metaphors such as the growth of seeds, plants, and flowers; familial metaphors of conception, birth, and reproduction; and the ethereal metaphor of haunting. The chapter examines how Woolf uses allusion and metaphor to articulate relationships with the literary past in A Room of One’s Own and in her representation of characters who are female writers in Night and Day, Orlando, and Between the Acts.

Traditions and Transformations

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.