Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
11 - The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
Summary
Shall I ever ‘write’ again? And what is writing? The perpetual converse I keep up.
(Diary iv, 57)Any discussion of what lies behind the conversation in Woolf's novels must take into account the several modes of literary anteriority. There is the anteriority of earlier versions: if we picture writing as a chronological sequence, these will normally take the form of the various manuscripts or typescripts that precede the final text. There is also the quite different but equally significant anteriority of social or cultural context, which exerts its own pressure on what and how a writer writes. And then, behind speech, in yet another sense are ‘the things people don't say’. In Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, Terence Hewet voiced an ambition to write ‘a novel about Silence … the things people don't say. But the difficulty is immense’ (VO, 204). His (or his author's) concern with the as-yet-unsaid, or even the not-to-be-said remained a feature of Woolf's fiction from first to last – one might even see it as constituting her project, a project in which anteriority would be intimately linked to interiority (construed as a prior, and to-be-privileged mode of being). Such interiority, ‘that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness’ (‘Middlebrow’, CE ii, 202) provided the basis for Woolf's first liberated writing for the Hogarth Press in 1917, her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Virginia Woolf , pp. 162 - 171Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006