Introduction to Contradictory Woolf

Summary

In her 1939 essay “Reviewing,” published as one of the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Virginia Woolf suggests that the growing trade in reviews—“those few words devoted to ‘why I like or dislike this book’” (E6 204)—meant that authors in the twentieth century were less sure than ever of the true opinion of their writing, and that readers were less likely to go out and buy a particular novel or collection of poetry based on them: “The clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out” (E6 198). In her letters and diaries Woolf also expresses a frustration with the many “contradictory” reviews of her books, leading to uncertainty on her part about her own critical reception (see for example L2 578, L2 587, L6 116). But contradicting the view that one contradiction negates another, the very “contradictory Woolf” explored by independent scholars, writers, artists, dramatists, “common readers,” and academics from around the globe (some of whom are also, indeed, reviewers) at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf offered a range of fascinating new approaches to, and understandings of, Woolf's writings. Whether opposing, questioning, interrupting or “butting,” the rich variety of essays selected for this volume represent the view shared by so many of the speakers in Glasgow that Woolf's writing continually refuses settled readings or closed meanings, revealing and reveling precisely in its potential or actual, subtle or forceful, contradictions. How appropriate then that the dialogue was opened by the call for papers which, in honor of the first sentence of A Room of One's Own (1929), invited participants to make ample use the word “but” at in their presentation!

How appropriate, too, that the first essay in this collection is Judith Allen's thought provoking exposition of the repeated difference of Woolf's “But,” as well as her parentheses and ellipses, in A Room of One's Own, and of key terms in Three Guineas (1938) including the word “word” itself.