‘Indiscretions’: Virginia Woolf’s Literary Biography

In the 1924 Vogue article ‘Indiscretions’, Virginia Woolf posits the existence of two different modes of reading: the literary critic engages with the text alone, while ‘the rest of us’ approach literature from a personal standpoint. Indiscreet and driven by affection, for these readers ‘in every book there is something –sex, character, temperament –which, as in life, rouses affection or repulsion; and, as in life, sways and prejudices; and again, as in life, is hardly to be analysed by the reason’ (E3.460). These readers care for authors and not literature alone: they imagine the person behind the book, ascribe personalities and habits to their favourites, and banish disliked authors based on imaginary misconducts.

Virginia Woolf’s decision to count herself as one of these readers may seem incongruous. In 1924, she was a leading literary critic who was able to ‘extract the essence [of a book] and feast upon it undisturbed’ (E3.460), and a rising Modernist novelist who had perfected an impersonal mode of writing in her own fiction. However, this book will show that Woolf was often a personal and sometimes an indiscreet reader and writer, whose interest in the lives and personalities of authors fundamentally shapes her critical encounters with them. Much of Woolf’s non-fiction intersperses literary criticism with biographical sketches and imaginary encounters: the demarcation between the literary critic and the indiscreetly affectionate reader is therefore much more porous than Woolf – however light-heartedly – suggests here. Woolf’s responses to her literary predecessors also allow new insights into her self-positioning within the literary canon, her engagement with her predecessors and her responses to biographical traditions. Reading Woolf’s non-fiction through the lens of literary biography therefore offers a new approach to the almost forty years of journalism she produced during her lifetime.

Mark Goldman’s pioneering study The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic opened with the observation that ‘Any study of Virginia Woolf’s criticism must begin by pointing to the obvious but striking contrast between her stature as a novelist and her reputation as a literary critic’. Although few would nowadays dispute Goldman’s assertion that read collectively, Woolf’s essays set out her theories of reading, criticism and literary tradition, they continue to be a comparatively neglected body of work.