6 - Writing Virginia Woolf: Autobiographical Fragments

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’.