Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-fwgfc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T14:36:32.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Writing Virginia Woolf: Autobiographical Fragments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2023

Get access

Summary

Throughout this book, I have tried to shed new light on Virginia Woolf’s engagement with nineteenth-century women writers, tracing how the tropes and narratives surrounding the domestic amateur writer constitute a lasting Victorian legacy in Woolf’s articles and reviews. Woolf’s view of her predecessors as fundamentally flawed writers, the victims of an oppressive patriarchal society, emerges clearly in the collective biography of her non-fiction; as does the importance of biography for the rise and fall of literary reputations. Speculative personas for Austen, Brontë, Mitford and others emerge clearly under Woolf’s analytical pen: her interest in character and scene-making results in vivid, if not always strictly factual, sketches. However, the writing of biography is a mutually constitutive process. Woolf uses women writer’s lives for experimental life writing and situates herself against them to demarcate her own sphere of work, her artistry, literary integrity and innovation as a challenger of the egotism of Charlotte Bronte, a critic of the intellectual prostitution of Ward and Oliphant, and a descendant of a proto-Modernist Jane Austen. A logical conclusion to this study of Woolf’s engagement with her predecessors’ literary lives is to ask how her representation of her own writing life compares: did female biography change on or about December 1910?

In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf posits that memoirs fail most frequently because ‘[t]hey leave out the person to whom things happened’ (MoB 79). The same cannot be said of Woolf studies: Woolf’s works are frequently read with an eye on her life, social networks, activities as a publisher, her involvement with feminist and activist causes, education, Christianity, her romantic relationships, or medical experiences. Woolf scholars by and large defy Barthes’s concept of the death of the author to explore the myriad ways her life and literature intersect and inform each other. Textually, this endeavour draws on a wide and amorphous body of materials that, like the reviews and articles I analysed, blur the boundaries between fiction and biography and offer intriguing but often contradictory portraits of the many different selves of ‘the person to whom things happened’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Virginia Woolf and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Victorian Legacies and Literary Afterlives
, pp. 182 - 198
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×