Early Graduate Theses on Virginia Woolf

ELIZABETH MCKEE EDDY MA University of Chicago, 1930.

RUTH GRUBER PhD University of Cologne, 1932.

NURI MASS MA Hons. University of Sydney, 1942.

DEBORAH NEWTON BA Hons. University of Melbourne, 1944.

Early textual readings of Virginia Woolf are opening up many new historiographical insights into her work and its influences. In this essay I outline one new stream in this project for a new historiography, focussing upon young non-United Kingdom women university students exploring Woolf in the period from 1930 to 1944. As part of my primary research on the Australian thesis on Virginia Woolf by Nuri Mass, completed at the University of Sydney in 1942, I sought comparisons first with the Ruth Gruber thesis from Cologne in 1932, then began looking for any other non-UK academic student work of the period. In many ways the Gruber thesis, reprinted in 2005, sparked a great interest in early female reception but had not been placed into comparative contexts. Searching US and Australian archives I then found two less well-known but equally illuminating early readings, also by young women, Elizabeth McKee Eddy (Chicago, 1930) and Deborah Newton (Melbourne, 1944). Limiting my search to non-UK academic female student work on Woolf gave me a workable framework, and a time sequence from 1930 to 1944 with particularly strong relevance to the pattern of modernist spread before and after the impact of World War II. In addition, it was possible to chart the wider shift in critical practice as the New Criticism school developed outside the UK, setting the academic agenda for new generations and positioning Woolf outside the dominant canon. All four of these early theses were researched and submitted with minimal impact from the New Criticism and Leavisite methodologies discussed further below.

The reception of early modernist texts in the United States and Australia is a complex story, and in relation to Woolf, it is in part the story of the spread of a negative view of Woolf which was not overcome until at least the late 1960s. This view does not reflect the work done by these young women scholars Eddy, Gruber, Mass, and Newton.