Biography and Autobiography

This chapter explores the centrality of biography and autobiography to Woolf’s reading and writing life, and to her cultural milieu, in which experiments in life-writing were a crucial aspect of the modernist reaction against the Victorian era. It examines Woolf’s deep engagement in her fiction with life-writing forms, from the bildungsroman of The Voyage Out to the play with conventional biographical forms of Jacob’s Room, Orlando, The Waves, and Flush and the autobiographical foundations of To the Lighthouse. It also examines her biography of Roger Fry, and her own experiment in memoir-writing, the posthumously published ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in the context of concerns with the nature of memory, identity, and sexuality.

Early Novels and Stories (1915–1923)

Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.

Literary London

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

War and Peace

This chapter examines the intertwining of modernist time philosophy with the recurring theme of global war in Woolf’s oeuvre. Looking at a range of texts—including Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, Three Guineas, The Years, and Between the Acts—it examines how Woolf’s work developed in relation to the major geopolitical events that preoccupied her pacifist activism and informed her temporal innovations. It argues for the need to temporalize her relationship to what Martin Hägglund calls chronolibido—the investment in temporal finitude rather than temporal transcendence—which has to be understood both philosophically as well as politically, to understand how her desire to hold on to a life essentially mortal took shape in the context of seemingly unending war in the early twentieth century.

A Form for Writing 20th Century Loss: Aesthetics of Absence in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

Considered her first modernist novel, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) would be remembered for its experimental techniques to tell the story of Jacob who died in the First World War. Woolf’s construction of her ultimately unknowable character offers a distinct response to the changing realities of warfare and serves as a literary mode of mourning that seeks not to console, but rather to preserve and transmit absence provoked by the losses of the Great War. Here I offer an analysis of Woolf’s aesthetics of absence, which I contend anticipates later concerns in addressing experiences of mass violence in literature. In particular, I trace parallels in Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001).

The Waves as “saturated” Novel

Since Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s fiction had incorporated three tools borrowed from poetry: the lyric “I,” figurative language, and aural recurrence. These tools find their clearest expression in The Waves (1931), which Woolf described as “prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.” This chapter analyzes The Waves with respect to these three tools, and then considers the book’s genre. Since its publication, many critics have received it—and other work by Woolf—as prose poetry and free verse. But to read Woolf as writing in these genres is to disregard authorial intent and historical context, to impose associations and conventions on work conceived without them. And lineating Woolf’s prose to “reveal” it as free verse betrays a confusion of lineation with poetry. Woolf’s vexation with the word “novel” reflects her effort to expand the meaning of the term. One way to honor this expansion is to use the term to describe the work of hers that seems least novel-like.

“Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other”

In this chapter, Högberg traces a specific form of non-violent ethics across Woolf’s interwar and WWII writings, considering its political potential and limits. Focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of ‘The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other’(Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’, 1984) alongside Judith Butler’s attempts to politicise his ethics of precariousness, this chapter shows how Woolf foregrounds vulnerability as an ethical injunction against violence. Arguing that Woolf’s work prompts a still unresolved question as to whether a pacifist ethics can be politically productive, Högberg reads Woolf’s pacifism as rooted in a concept of peace as proximity: the proximity of the ethical encounter, which prompts awakeness to the other’s vulnerability. The chapter ranges from Woolf’s Levinasian elevation, in Three Guineas, of a primary responsibility to Antigone’s Law of love, peace and proximity over the laws of the sovereign state to her literary articulations of an alternatively Levinasian and Butlerian ethics of peace and precariousness in Jacob’s Room, The Waves and Between the Acts. Voiced through poetic tropes of naked defencelessness and extra-linguistic, primal cries, Woolf’s pacifist ethics floods the boundaries defining Europe in a relocation of its ‘Greek’ origins, and in defiance against its political constructions of the other’s precarious face as a threat, which continue to justify the scandalous closing of European borders to ‘millions of bodies’ made vulnerable by war.