The wondrous whimsy of this sentence shows the hand of a writer so confident in her craft that she can self-mock, choreograph a textual performance with abandon and eight semi-colons, and embody in an act of deconstruction her mastery of the tools she has made from her own ideas. Mixing metaphors, Woolf is a juggler, throwing all the balls in the air, and still holding the pattern of form and order when the sentence settles. In a radical act of textual and literal housekeeping (much like that of the old cleaning woman in the sentence), with a bold clearing of the textual space, Woolf enacts the scrubbing clean of the canvas, the rubbing out of the meanings and the words. She shows not only the brush strokes, but also the rag that wipes them clean, and as she says, mockingly, this clearing work only takes one old woman half an hour. When the change comes, it comes fast. It lets in the air, the light and the colour of a new perception. It breaks the bond between words and old meanings, and enacts the undoing of mimetic representation.

Inspired by the experimentation in Virginia Woolf's creative work in the last years of her life, my project takes three interlocking pathways: performance, painting and exegesis. In previous writings and art work I have based my exploration of Woolf as artist in the idea of synaesthesia, the multiple forms of perception she fuses in the text. Her unfinished novel Between the Acts (1941) is a consummate statement of this method, with performative, visual, voice, documentary and sound structures. I do not read the Between the Acts text as a final work, and I read it as more than a finished work, because it opens so powerfully into an emerging form, not informed by nostalgia or elegy but nevertheless an encounter with the prevailing revivalism of the 1930s decade. It can be seen as a response to the parochial, a loving gesture to kindle creative survival in hard times.

My methodology forms a triple creative process of interconnected languages. Reading Between the Acts and Woolf's other works of the late-30s period, while working on my large canvas, and simultaneously developing the pageant play script, I was hoping to tap into my own synaesthesic pathways as writer, artist and researcher. At the same time I was reading within the large body of scholarship on the novel and the period, as well as researching medieval manuscripts, the Luttrell Psalter, the Holkham Bible, Chaucerian text and early woodcuts, the Ellesmere text of Chaucer, all examples of text/image fusions which I wanted to create on the canvas. The canvas draws on typographical and mythological material, rural landscape, local history, elements of the novel and the pageant, held within an illuminated manuscript.

The creative process was slow to evolve. Things really started to happen once I had suddenly seen in my mind Woolf riding the Chaucer horse with her hand out in that familiar pointing gesture, the iconic Chaucer image. Early medieval texts all incorporated images on and through the page, fusing text and image without privileging or enforcing separation. I wanted to bring back image to the combination of forms, and then extend that into the performance work.

The conference theme “Contradictory Woolf” proved a perfect synthesizing template. How am I defining contradiction in this project?

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.