A Companion to Virginia Woolf

Jessica Berman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119115083, 9781118457887
• eBook ISBN: 9781118457931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field.

• Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future research
• Approaches Woolf's writing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including modernism, post-colonialism, queer theory, animal studies, digital humanities, and the law
• Explores the multiple trajectories Woolf's work travels around the world, from the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press to India and Latin America
• Situates Woolf studies at the vanguard of contemporary literature scholarship and the new modernist studies

Part I
Textual Encounters

Chapter 1
The Lives of Houses
Woolf and Biography

Alison Booth

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and commemoration. The late nineteenth century in Britain witnessed an explosion of printed life narratives, short or full-length, accompanied by an interest in preserving any objects or locations associated with cultural heroes. In her lifetime, it became widely acknowledged that the truth about someone's life should include personal details and private moments rather than polite generalizations, and that many kinds of lives were worth noting, not just those of eminent public figures. These realizations about the value of ordinary experience inspired Woolf as a novelist, to be sure. Yet it is also worth noting how much of what Woolf wrote consisted of non-fiction life writing or commentary on documented lives of the past. Woolf was the daughter and friend of biographers, and many of her writings, including novels, touch on life narrative, with a strong attraction to the revealing intimate detail. Striving to express physical experience, Woolf also evoked objects and places that shape lives. I shall pursue Woolf's life as a biographical writer who was at the same time a haunter of houses, her own and those that seemed alive with biographical meaning.

Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, which ran to 63 volumes by 1900. Much of Woolf's writing can be regarded as biographical. In addition to a biography of her friend the art critic Roger Fry (1940), she produced satiric fictions, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), and a novel, Jacob's Room (1922), that in various ways dramatize the effort to recreate a life in words from fragmentary documents, objects, houses, and environment. Both father and daughter have had a profound influence on the understanding of English-language biography. Although it is often assumed that the exposure of intimate details was a twentieth-century trend, Stephen's writings on biography anticipate a search for “familiar atmosphere” (Stephen 1956: 20) and the flawed truth of character. Extending her father's vision of biography, Woolf's biographical imagination inhabited physical space, yet always with a sense of memory and loss rather than satisfied physical possession.

Woolf's earliest publications in the new century reaped the benefit of her education at home in her father's library. Her essays often reveal strong responses to the personality of writers, not only forebears such as Laurence Sterne or Jane Austen but also the newly rediscovered diarists and correspondents such as Dorothy Osborne and John Evelyn. In essays and reviews, she declared principles for “new biography” similar to those written by her close friend (and briefly fiancé) Lytton Strachey and by Harold Nicolson (husband of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover). The modernist idea of a new biography was more explicitly small-scale and idiosyncratic than Stephen and the Victorians would have it. Strachey and others debunked the pieties or public relations of family-sponsored commemorations. Crucially, women, people of all classes and walks of life, and everyday experience were coming into focus as well. Woolf's version of fresh, vital biography for the new age resembles her father's principles for good biography, with the crucial difference that the subject might be obscure or female. Biography should be neither weighted down with fact nor idealized, but honed to essential moments of being. It should concede, as Stephen also recognized, the elusiveness of memory and the unknowability of others.

As if anticipating the current intensity of interest in her own life and career, Woolf generated a trove of material to enrich biographies about her. Except in periods of enforced rest during treatment for mental illness, she wrote daily, and she leaves behind almost 4,000 letters and 30 volumes of diaries, pages that seem to keep alive an accessible woman behind the public “Mrs. Woolf,” author of some 400 signed or anonymous essays. A few early studies carefully examined her fiction for innovative form and style, but for decades in the mid-twentieth century appreciation of Woolf was hampered in Britain by her characterization as a neurotic, upper-class elitist. The ground-breaking two-volume biography by her nephew Quentin Bell (1972) called attention to the rich material of Woolf's archives without dispelling this reputation. Yet Bell's biography accompanied and aided a surge in feminist criticism of Woolf's writings, and she emerged in new roles. Considerable attention centered on the novels themselves not only as examples of modernist experimentation comparable to James Joyce but also as challenges to the linear logic and power of masculine discourse, in feminine writing or écriture féminine (Caughie 1991; DuPlessis 1985).

Beyond the textual and theoretical studies, however, there were many that focused biographically on evidence from Woolf's life. In the 1980s readers began to find inspiration in the life of Woolf as a great woman writer who was a lesbian. Interpretations developed from her love affair with Sackville-West, the model for Orlando. Woolf's life was further reconsidered in light of her characterization of Mrs. Dalloway and her beloved Sally Seton, or of Lily Briscoe and her beloved Mrs. Ramsay. As scholars became more familiar with the fragments of autobiography and her diaries and letters, they highlighted Woolf's trauma of being molested as a child and young woman by her half-brother, George Duckworth; Louise DeSalvo attributed Woolf's eating disorder and mental illness to this abuse (DeSalvo 1989, cited in Lee 1996: 124). Posthumous diagnosis is always dubious, yet most now agree that Woolf suffered from manic depression, with at times hallucinations. Before she began her successful writing career, she had phases of medical treatment and attempted suicide twice. The worst episodes, apparently, were triggered by the deaths of her parents and her marriage, though publication of a novel was always a perilous time. Studies have linked Woolf's experience to medical treatment at that period, as characterized by the suffering of Septimus Smith, the traumatized veteran in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

Biographical approaches help us to situate an author in relation to cultural history. Instead of the psychological and sexual concerns, many studies have drawn on evidence that associates Woolf with her era. By the 1980s, some regarded her as a political pioneer, focusing on the feminist classics A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1937) and on her involvement in campaigns for women's suffrage and education for working people, as well as the fact that that she and Leonard Woolf attended conferences and held meetings of the Labour Party (Light 2008: 239). Others redirected attention to Woolf as a writer about the city (Squier 1985) and the real world (Zwerdling 1986). Feminist literary historians have recognized Woolf as a feminist critic and reader responding to Victorian and earlier writers (Booth 1992; Ellis 2007; Fernald 2006) and as a public intellectual (Cuddy-Kean 2003). Re-examinations have imbedded Woolf in her social position, notably Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, which begins with chapters entitled “Biography” and “Houses” (1996: 3–49). Alison Light's Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (2008) takes a sharp look at the conditions of everyday life for the Stephens, the Bells, the Woolfs, and associates in houses maintained by the labor of women. Rather than retell Woolf's life story, I will focus on Woolf's immersion in biography, particularly as a writer highly sensitive to physical experience and the domestic lives of houses.

A woman of Woolf's class and generation would have heard many messages to aspire to be the Angel in the House. Woolf responds to domestic space as a trap for what she called a woman of genius. But houses also hold the power of elegy to evoke memories of the dead. Houses represent families and heritage, comforts and pleasures, as well as gendered perils. Domestic space can invite yearning, as in images of an anonymous woman gazing out of a window, or disgust, shame, or horror. Her mother, a contender for the title of Angel in spite of her frequent absences from the house, died early, perhaps intensifying Woolf's attachments to childhood homes. I will visit a series of (auto)biographical houses in Woolf's life and works, although I will necessarily pass over some residences. An urban writer, Woolf also wrote evocatively of landscape. Almost every year, she and members of her family spent the summer months in a house in the country. At different stages, Woolf was prescribed rests in other people's houses or nursing homes. Some houses associated with Woolf have become landmarks, and their influence on her well-known writings is indelible. Significantly, three houses that were important in Woolf's life are now museums owned by the National Trust: her final home, Monk's House; Charleston, her sister Vanessa Bell's home nearby in Sussex; and Knole, the vast edifice of Sackville-West's ancestors. Woolf's novels Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse (1927), The Years (1938), and Between the Acts (1941) as well as the burlesques of biography Orlando and Flush all feature houses, whether in city or country, that bring family history and artifacts back to life. Posthumous intimacies in eloquent spaces pervade Woolf's writings in every genre. Chronology and topography as well as theme, the warp, woof, and dye of biography, reveal Woolf's attachment to the literary spirit of houses.

The London Houses

Woolf's childhood home at 22 Hyde Park Gate blended two families and traditions closely associated with London: the artistic circles in her mother's background and the Evangelical reformers in her father's. The hom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Textual Encounters
• Part II: Approaching Woolf
• Part III: Woolf in the World
• Index
• EULA