Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of editions and abbreviations used in the text
- Indroduction
- Chapter 1 Reclamation: Night and Day
- Chapter 2 Synchronicity: Mrs Dalloway
- Chapter 3 Integration: To the Lighthouse
- Chapter 4 Disillusion: The Years
- Chapter 5 Incoherence: the final works
- Conclusion: reclaiming the shadows
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 3 - Integration: To the Lighthouse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of editions and abbreviations used in the text
- Indroduction
- Chapter 1 Reclamation: Night and Day
- Chapter 2 Synchronicity: Mrs Dalloway
- Chapter 3 Integration: To the Lighthouse
- Chapter 4 Disillusion: The Years
- Chapter 5 Incoherence: the final works
- Conclusion: reclaiming the shadows
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In May 1924, Woolf's Post-Victorianism was given iconic expression in the famous photograph of her wearing her mother's dress that appeared in Vogue magazine. As Jane Garrity observes, given Vogue's ‘couture mission’ to register ‘every radical shift in fashion in the 1920s – from short skirts and dropped waists to geometric futurist fabrics and shingled hair’, such an image seems odd in the extreme. While Garrity recognises that the illustration shows ‘a modernist who is haunted by her Victorian past’ (p. 202), she prefers to explain it at the level of Vogue's own blend of the chic and the conservative, its desire to reconstitute ‘the modern woman as an object of sanctified domesticity’ (p. 204), though this fails to account for the exceptional nature of the image which Garrity herself calls attention to. This also denies Woolf's own agency in the matter, a Victorian splash in the heart of a modern style which, as we have seen, Woolf was notably resistant to. As a publisher as well as writer, Woolf works to keep the Victorian image alive in the 1920s, bringing out works like Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (Hogarth, 1926), and constantly soliciting books from friends and acquaintances that memorialise the past.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Victorians , pp. 78 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007