The previous two chapters have considered Woolf's sense of Beingin- the-world principally from the perspective of her treatment of place. In this chapter, the focus shifts to the notion of temporality, an area of study that is granted particular emphasis in Heidegger's Being and Time. Specifi cally, Woolf's approach to history and historical discourse from the perspective of Being-in-the-world is investigated. Woolf's interest in the subject of history began at an early age under the instruction of her father, the historian, biographer and man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen. A willing student in terms of her adolescent submission to her father's direction, Woolf's appreciation of the far-reaching signifi cance of history and its representation was to continue during her lifetime, where both the subject and critique of history became recurrent themes throughout the various forms of her writings. As late as six months before her death, Woolf records in her diary ‘an idea for a Common History book’ (D5: 318); this idea was to culminate in her unfi nished fi nal essays, ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’. As this chapter demonstrates, while to some extent, Woolf possessed a desire to emulate her father's approach to his work, ‘she was shaped too by wanting to do nothing that father did. Much of how she lived and wrote was formulated in reaction against him’ (Lee 1996: 72).

In this chapter, Woolf's representations of history are viewed from a variety of perspectives, beginning with a discussion of her approach to the notion of ‘time’, which both she and Heidegger understand as the essential connectedness and interpenetration of the past, present and future.4 Such a perspective is in marked contrast to the traditional discourse of historicism, which is founded upon an understanding of time as a series of homogeneous and successive ‘nows’, as refl ected in ‘clock-time’. For both Woolf and Heidegger, the individual is viewed as an inherently temporal, and therefore historical being, as demonstrated by Heidegger's notion of ‘thrownness’, which refers to the inextricable connection between the past and the projected possibilities of the present and future, for both the individual and the collective.