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The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is now hailed as one of the greatest, most innovative writers of our age. This landmark collection of essays by leading scholars addresses the full range of her intellectual perspectives--literary, artistic, philosophical and political. The volume provides original, new readings of all nine novels and fresh insights into Woolf's letters, diaries and essays, allowing easy reference to individual themes and texts. The progress of Woolf's thinking is revealed from Bloomsbury aestheticism through her hatred of censorship, corruption and hierarchy to her concern with all aspects of modernism.
286 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 2000
About the author
Susan Sellers
33 books41 followersSusan Sellers is an author, editor, translator and novelist and Professor of English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 27, 2022
I think I enjoy reading about Woolf almost as much as reading her. By this I mean all of her forms of writing, from the novels, essays and diaries, as well as criticism. And when you have read some of all these forms, reading these essays collected here reverberate within a particularly intimate sense of knowledge about her. When I read any criticism of Woolf, I always imagine that we - the critics, the readers - all share this same sense of intimate knowledge of Woolf. For more than any other writer I know, we have had access - through her diaries and letters, her essays and novels, all - to her innermost thoughts and feelings. There is necessarily an intimacy evoked in reading her, and reading about her. The touchstone to Woolf for me has always been To The Lighthouse (1927). It is, for me, the perfect novel; its style, its lyricism, its intimacy, its verbal expression, its imagery, its sensibility. Add to this Moments Of Being and the diaries, and the collated feeling about her is always one of intimacy. Also, ironically, my own mother committed suicide by drowning in a river. I have always felt linked to Woolf for all these reasons. So it is a pleasure - rather than a formidable task - to read the essays collected here by Susan Sellers.
Andrew McNellie's chapter on Bloomsbury is turgidly referential and demands intense concentration, and would be best served by an introductory reading of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Frances Spalding's 2006 National Portrait Gallery publication, which briefly introduces the background and gives an overview of 20 core and fringe personalities of the group. Then, all the references to these personalities and their involvement (painting, literature, philosophy etc.), and particularly their shared and differing philosophies becomes meaningful. But your brain must be working at its optimum to get the most out of this dense piece, and when the conclusions about the essences of belief and representation of Virgina Woolf's greatest work - he agrees - To The Lighthouse emerge, they come with a kin shock of transcendental realisation that Woolf herself experienced (and described in Moments of Being) and articulated in that beautiful novel. It's a tough read, this chapter, but very worthwhile.
Suzanne Raitt's essay 'Virginia Woolf's Early Novels: Finding A Voice' explores how Woolf explored both her expression of narrative voice and her early style, through The Voyage Out (1915), Night And Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922). I've not read the first two, though I had started both, but was impressed, despite the lack of effective story, with the style of Jacob's Room, suggestive of those perfect expressions which were the substance of To The Lighthouse (1927) throughout in that stream of consciousness style. Jacob's Room also has developmental scenes akin to that later work: the opening scene on the beach with the lighthouse obscured by tears so readily evokes the setting of the later work. But, as Raitt confirms, Jacob's Room is full of disjuncture, tentative in its expression, and decidedly undecided about what the narrative voice might be. This is unsurprising, since, as Raitt underlines, Woolf suffered her first breakdowns immediately after her first novel, and Raitt points up the irony of Woolf striving to find her own voice, while acknowledging that in her flow as a writer she was following the voices that 'flew ahead of her thoughts', a situation akin to writers writing of ideas that came from somewhere of which they have 'no notion', but which, during times of breakdown, were terrifying invasions of Woolf's own sanity. Raitt's essay links up many themes in and around Woolf's life and works, and, if you have read any of the early novels, helps define yet another area of Virginia Woolf you thought you had already known.
Jane Goldman's interesting - and interestingly perspectived - essay on 'From Mrs Dalloway To The Waves: New Elegy and Lyric' explores Woolf's movement to a lyric prose style in her 'middle period', where she longed for a poetic expression of prose which encapsulated the individual and collective psyche of modernity, a period particularly concerned with human psychology. Moving from the 'cul-de-sac' of Jacob's Room, Woolf established her famous style of indirect free speech in Mrs Dalloway (1925), a seamless, unchaptered book, and perfected it in To The Lighthouse (1927) in a broader and more intense style, in a book structured as two blocks connected by a corridor: Part One, 'The Window', is linked via Part Two, 'Time Passes', to Part Three, 'The Lighthouse'. While Woolf saw Jacob's Room as having 'purple patches' of lyric poetry, Mrs Dalloway as a more generally lyric style as she found her 'voice', and To The Lighthouse, of which she said 'I have made my method perfect', as perhaps a purple triangle (Lily's artistic expression of Mrs. Ramsay, the novel's central character), Woolf continued to experiment with form, style and expression, and the rejection of traditional plot, culminating in The Waves (1931), a novel comprised entirely of a flow of free indirect speech almost devoid of conventional structure consisting of thought and speech (soliloquy, but little dialogue), with little descriptive prose that is not merely imagery. Goldman's development of Woolf's move through poetry to lyrical prose is a fascinating theme which clearly (and obscurely) runs through these middle novels - of which, I for one (though I haven't finished The Waves, nor read Orlando [1928]), believe gift us her best work. Goldman uses Woolf's diaries of the period and a key essay, 'Poetry, Fiction and the Future' (1927) as insights into Woolf's profound development as an experimental modernist novelist in this essay, which is a delight to read.
Julia Briggs, a Woolf biographer, covers Woolf's late period novels, from The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between The Acts (1941), her last novel, finished (Feb.) before her death (March) and published just after it (July). The Waves is Woolf's most experimental novel, moving far away from the lyrical stream of consciousness so perfected in To The Lighthouse, deploying, as the central dramatic device, the soliloquies of six principal characters templated by friends (Eliot, Strachey, her sister Vanessa, herself) who might also be read as aspects of a single self. The Years, by contrast, is Woolf's return to conventional plot and characterisation, a realist novel describing the progress of a central female character in the family under scrutiny, the Pargiters. Between The Acts returns partly to the free indirect speech mode of Mrs D. and TTL, centred around the wife and mother Isabella Oliver, where Woolf uses a pageant held at the family country home to survey English history and culture as a form of juxtaposition of what was at stake at the time of Nationalist Fascism in Europe. It was a subject Woolf herself was racked by in the years preceding and during the first years of the war, one which ultimately led to her suicide amidst a kind of sane madness. My précis of Briggs's essay also echoes her heavily descriptive analysis of these three last novels.
Hermione Lee, another Woolf biographer, in 'Virginia Woolf's Essays', reminds us that Woolf wrote 'novels, stories, diaries, letters, notebooks, reviews, sketches, essays, story-essays, essay-novels' (p.93), that formed a 'complex web of [...] crisscrossing' between the various forms; that, in her essay writing, reviews and biographical sketches, genre was as much blurred as voice is in her middle-to-late novels. Partly, this is because Woolf was an experimentalist with form and style; partly, this is because Woolf was firmly against the traditional biographies and histories of 'great men', which teased out every detail of background in order to arrive at an unassailable image of the great politician or artist - invariably male - which perpetuated the patriarchal authoritative history where women hardly figured. Consequently, Woolf, through essays and her essay-novels, like A Room Of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), always tried to break open this entrenched assumption and indicate both women and the non-great into a more collective appreciation, as does Lee here in this essay on essays which formed a great deal of Woolf's experimentation that informed her novels, but were relatively lately appreciated.
Michael H. Whitworth, in 'Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Modernity', had a difficult time trying to create a unifying theme of Woolf and Modernism, particularly because Modernism itself is a catch-all for a fragmented bunch of small groups pursuing innovations which were often disparate and at odds. For example, the notion that the novel underwent a transformation both of form and style can be seen from Joyce's innovative linguistic use in the opening of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (1917) and the novel linguistic style and traditional mythical themes in Ulysses (1922), to the linguistically prohibitive Finnegan's Wake (1939), as it can be seen from Woolf's experimental Jacob's Room (1922) through Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the stream of consciousness developed through To The Lighthouse (1927) culminating in the multi-voiced personas of The Waves (1931). So Modernism can be viewed as innovation in form, and similarities of innovation - the representation of consciousness and linguistic novelty - can be identified, but often are not portable between groups, forms nor practitioners. Comparing the Bloomsbury group members, with their representations of novelist, biographer, poet, painter and politician, the unifying theme was experimentation and new representations in diverse art forms. But applying Modernism to Woolf, Whitworth's essay implies, is not necessarily easy.
David Bradshaw's 'The Socio-Political Vision of the Novels' seeks to define the recurrent presence of Woolf's view of poverty, injustice, patriarchy and poverty which recurs as undercurrent themes in some of her novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) and Jacob's Room (1922), through To The Lighthouse (1927) to The Years (1937). A perpetual question that recurs in Woolf's writings is of the nature of civilisation, which, on the brink of war, surfaces in The Years and Between The Acts (1941). That it comprised then of the Victorian Two Nations of Disraeli, and was in the death throes of Empire are uncomfortable truths of Woolf's time, as was the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Bradshaw links in such thematic imagery and symbolism in four of Woolf's novels in a reading which doesn't heavily stand out in the reading of them.
Laura Marcus's 'Woolf's Feminism and Feminism's Woolf' is nothing short of fascinating (and I'm a man) and thought-provoking, but is an ambitious subject - hence why it has been given more space than most of the other essays in this volume. Firstly, there are so many contradictions within Woolf's work and words - ref. A Room Of One's Own and Three Guineas in the development of her feminism - and so many and often contending or contradictory feminist interpretations of Woolf's feminism, ranging from 'pacifist feminist' to 'the first model feminist' in literature. The essay is split into the two parts of its title, the first part investigating different aspects of Woolf's feminism in her works (with some good interpretations of several of her novels), the second on the various developments of feminist criticism to her work - the various 'readings' of Woolf's feminism. We generally regard Woolf as a Modernist, belonging to the Modernist period (~1900-39), but towards the end of this survey Marcus brings in Postmodernist interpretations of Woolf's work, which really livens up the discussion into a fascinating new dimension. While somewhat debilitated by the sheer plethora of examples of feminist interpreters, this is a thoroughly fascinating read, and reads, we can interpret Woolf's feminism almost any way conceivable, materialist, historicist, modernist, post-modernist, androgynist - except as a spokeswoman for patriarchy. The interpretations of A Room Of One's Own were particularly fruitful (where Woolf argues for 'androgyny' as artist), and the reflections on To The Lighthouse confirmatory.
Gender and feminist studies abound about Virginia Woolf. 'Virginia Woolf and Sexuality' by Patricia Morgne Cramer might seem a daunting undertaking for any man, but the usual initial reaction of exclusion soon disappears as Cramer develops her discussion of Woolf's use of indirection and metaphor in her novels to lesbianism, within a general discussion of homosexuality of the time and the homophobic scientific representation of both forms as either 'a sin, a crime against nature, a dreaded contagion, a threat to race survival' or diagnosed homosexuality as 'the effect of congenital defects' (p.190). Against such prejudicial censuring, and the notable cases of Wilde (1895), Maud Allen (1918) and Radcliffe Hall (1928), Woolf, as a modernist, disguised and implied her own lesbianism and references to homosexual love in her work. Cramer's essay moves from sexuality and modernism and feminism to a considering discussion about lesbian sexuality in Woolf's novels, wrapping up with a more general view of the problems of declaring one's colours in Edwardian and interwar Britain.
Helen Carr's 'Virginia Woolf, Empire and Race' looks at Woolf's first and last novels to discuss her critique of patriarchy, imperialism and fascism, noting that while Woolf was always an anti-imperialist, she was also a white upper middle-class insider who, even while pointing up her antipathy of patriarchal empire seeking to acquire and possess native cultures and products, never really represented the view of the dominated outsider. Woolf's critique of imperialism should be seen in the context of the time, where such critique was being asserted more widely, even if that was via the white upper-middle-class intellectual. That she belonged to this dying-imperialist intelligentsia, and so was a product of Empire (many men in her elder family were involved in the rule of India), does not negate the fact that Woolf did make the direct link between patriarchy, imperialism and fascism which led to the two greatest conflagrations in world history. Her shortfall was, as a writer primarily concerned with the representation of voice, that she did not provide a voice for those under the colonial 'yoke'. But perhaps that was more appropriately the due of those peoples themselves.
In 'Virginia Woolf and Visual Culture', Maggie Humm discusses Woolf's highly visual imagery and use of metonymy and metaphor, mirroring and absence, photographic and filmic techniques in all her forms, from essays (artistic appreciation and criticism), letters, diaries, polemical works, and novels, to develop a language and expression as close to painting, most successfully exhibited in To The Lighthouse, but present too in such widely various worlds as Flush (1933) and Three Guineas (1938). For any Woolf admirer, the notions Humm develops initially seem self-evident, but her essay (based on broader and deeper works) defines visual themes through disparate forms that comprised Woolf's modernist sensibility.
The final essay in this collection, Melba Cuddy-Keane's 'Virginia Woolf and the Public Sphere', is by far the most demanding. Introducing a flurry of new concepts, we are asked to follow a highly abstract series of discussions on what aspects of Woolf's work contribute, and how, and most effectively, to the public sphere. After a definition of the public sphere, and a premise for discussing one such type of participant in the ongoing debate within it - the intellectual - Cuddy-Keane moves through a difficult arena of reconciling Woolf's political non-fiction - many of her essays, her criticism, her reviewing and publishing, her political tracts (ROO, TG) - with her prose method of 'shifting focalisations' (p.243) in her fiction: 'both her fictional and non-fictional works draw upon narrative techniques to reach beyond our formed opinions and engage the complexity, richness and fluidity of mind as it modulates and weaves between conscious and non-conscious thought' (p.243) - something which the prose style of To The Lighthouse attests throughout. This is a valuable insight, since it is clear that, the more you read of Woolf, the more she sought and achieved this style of deeply personal intimacy of thought and response, as THE salient valuable achievement of her writing, whichever form it took. While much of the reading of Cuddy-Keane's essay felt like an Ouroboros experience, this point - and that on A Room Of One's Own on pp.240-1 - were the most meaningful. This is an essay deeply engaged with all of Woolf's writings, and needs to be read twice to get the most from.
If Virgina Woolf could glance back at the body of academic and literary criticism her work has engendered, as exemplified in this collection of 12 essays, I think she would have been very pleased not only that we appreciate how her literary 'voice' became something much loved and revered, but that her mind, constantly seeking and questioning the issues of the day and the very modernist preoccupation indeed with mind itself, was so respectfully and fully considered. Almost anything she wrote, virtually everything written about her that you read, highlights these phenomenal achievements. As a woman's voice, particularly, she holds her place with any. I enjoyed this foray into her works, methods and legacy.
Andrew McNellie's chapter on Bloomsbury is turgidly referential and demands intense concentration, and would be best served by an introductory reading of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Frances Spalding's 2006 National Portrait Gallery publication, which briefly introduces the background and gives an overview of 20 core and fringe personalities of the group. Then, all the references to these personalities and their involvement (painting, literature, philosophy etc.), and particularly their shared and differing philosophies becomes meaningful. But your brain must be working at its optimum to get the most out of this dense piece, and when the conclusions about the essences of belief and representation of Virgina Woolf's greatest work - he agrees - To The Lighthouse emerge, they come with a kin shock of transcendental realisation that Woolf herself experienced (and described in Moments of Being) and articulated in that beautiful novel. It's a tough read, this chapter, but very worthwhile.
Suzanne Raitt's essay 'Virginia Woolf's Early Novels: Finding A Voice' explores how Woolf explored both her expression of narrative voice and her early style, through The Voyage Out (1915), Night And Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922). I've not read the first two, though I had started both, but was impressed, despite the lack of effective story, with the style of Jacob's Room, suggestive of those perfect expressions which were the substance of To The Lighthouse (1927) throughout in that stream of consciousness style. Jacob's Room also has developmental scenes akin to that later work: the opening scene on the beach with the lighthouse obscured by tears so readily evokes the setting of the later work. But, as Raitt confirms, Jacob's Room is full of disjuncture, tentative in its expression, and decidedly undecided about what the narrative voice might be. This is unsurprising, since, as Raitt underlines, Woolf suffered her first breakdowns immediately after her first novel, and Raitt points up the irony of Woolf striving to find her own voice, while acknowledging that in her flow as a writer she was following the voices that 'flew ahead of her thoughts', a situation akin to writers writing of ideas that came from somewhere of which they have 'no notion', but which, during times of breakdown, were terrifying invasions of Woolf's own sanity. Raitt's essay links up many themes in and around Woolf's life and works, and, if you have read any of the early novels, helps define yet another area of Virginia Woolf you thought you had already known.
Jane Goldman's interesting - and interestingly perspectived - essay on 'From Mrs Dalloway To The Waves: New Elegy and Lyric' explores Woolf's movement to a lyric prose style in her 'middle period', where she longed for a poetic expression of prose which encapsulated the individual and collective psyche of modernity, a period particularly concerned with human psychology. Moving from the 'cul-de-sac' of Jacob's Room, Woolf established her famous style of indirect free speech in Mrs Dalloway (1925), a seamless, unchaptered book, and perfected it in To The Lighthouse (1927) in a broader and more intense style, in a book structured as two blocks connected by a corridor: Part One, 'The Window', is linked via Part Two, 'Time Passes', to Part Three, 'The Lighthouse'. While Woolf saw Jacob's Room as having 'purple patches' of lyric poetry, Mrs Dalloway as a more generally lyric style as she found her 'voice', and To The Lighthouse, of which she said 'I have made my method perfect', as perhaps a purple triangle (Lily's artistic expression of Mrs. Ramsay, the novel's central character), Woolf continued to experiment with form, style and expression, and the rejection of traditional plot, culminating in The Waves (1931), a novel comprised entirely of a flow of free indirect speech almost devoid of conventional structure consisting of thought and speech (soliloquy, but little dialogue), with little descriptive prose that is not merely imagery. Goldman's development of Woolf's move through poetry to lyrical prose is a fascinating theme which clearly (and obscurely) runs through these middle novels - of which, I for one (though I haven't finished The Waves, nor read Orlando [1928]), believe gift us her best work. Goldman uses Woolf's diaries of the period and a key essay, 'Poetry, Fiction and the Future' (1927) as insights into Woolf's profound development as an experimental modernist novelist in this essay, which is a delight to read.
Julia Briggs, a Woolf biographer, covers Woolf's late period novels, from The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between The Acts (1941), her last novel, finished (Feb.) before her death (March) and published just after it (July). The Waves is Woolf's most experimental novel, moving far away from the lyrical stream of consciousness so perfected in To The Lighthouse, deploying, as the central dramatic device, the soliloquies of six principal characters templated by friends (Eliot, Strachey, her sister Vanessa, herself) who might also be read as aspects of a single self. The Years, by contrast, is Woolf's return to conventional plot and characterisation, a realist novel describing the progress of a central female character in the family under scrutiny, the Pargiters. Between The Acts returns partly to the free indirect speech mode of Mrs D. and TTL, centred around the wife and mother Isabella Oliver, where Woolf uses a pageant held at the family country home to survey English history and culture as a form of juxtaposition of what was at stake at the time of Nationalist Fascism in Europe. It was a subject Woolf herself was racked by in the years preceding and during the first years of the war, one which ultimately led to her suicide amidst a kind of sane madness. My précis of Briggs's essay also echoes her heavily descriptive analysis of these three last novels.
Hermione Lee, another Woolf biographer, in 'Virginia Woolf's Essays', reminds us that Woolf wrote 'novels, stories, diaries, letters, notebooks, reviews, sketches, essays, story-essays, essay-novels' (p.93), that formed a 'complex web of [...] crisscrossing' between the various forms; that, in her essay writing, reviews and biographical sketches, genre was as much blurred as voice is in her middle-to-late novels. Partly, this is because Woolf was an experimentalist with form and style; partly, this is because Woolf was firmly against the traditional biographies and histories of 'great men', which teased out every detail of background in order to arrive at an unassailable image of the great politician or artist - invariably male - which perpetuated the patriarchal authoritative history where women hardly figured. Consequently, Woolf, through essays and her essay-novels, like A Room Of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), always tried to break open this entrenched assumption and indicate both women and the non-great into a more collective appreciation, as does Lee here in this essay on essays which formed a great deal of Woolf's experimentation that informed her novels, but were relatively lately appreciated.
Michael H. Whitworth, in 'Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Modernity', had a difficult time trying to create a unifying theme of Woolf and Modernism, particularly because Modernism itself is a catch-all for a fragmented bunch of small groups pursuing innovations which were often disparate and at odds. For example, the notion that the novel underwent a transformation both of form and style can be seen from Joyce's innovative linguistic use in the opening of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (1917) and the novel linguistic style and traditional mythical themes in Ulysses (1922), to the linguistically prohibitive Finnegan's Wake (1939), as it can be seen from Woolf's experimental Jacob's Room (1922) through Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the stream of consciousness developed through To The Lighthouse (1927) culminating in the multi-voiced personas of The Waves (1931). So Modernism can be viewed as innovation in form, and similarities of innovation - the representation of consciousness and linguistic novelty - can be identified, but often are not portable between groups, forms nor practitioners. Comparing the Bloomsbury group members, with their representations of novelist, biographer, poet, painter and politician, the unifying theme was experimentation and new representations in diverse art forms. But applying Modernism to Woolf, Whitworth's essay implies, is not necessarily easy.
David Bradshaw's 'The Socio-Political Vision of the Novels' seeks to define the recurrent presence of Woolf's view of poverty, injustice, patriarchy and poverty which recurs as undercurrent themes in some of her novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) and Jacob's Room (1922), through To The Lighthouse (1927) to The Years (1937). A perpetual question that recurs in Woolf's writings is of the nature of civilisation, which, on the brink of war, surfaces in The Years and Between The Acts (1941). That it comprised then of the Victorian Two Nations of Disraeli, and was in the death throes of Empire are uncomfortable truths of Woolf's time, as was the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Bradshaw links in such thematic imagery and symbolism in four of Woolf's novels in a reading which doesn't heavily stand out in the reading of them.
Laura Marcus's 'Woolf's Feminism and Feminism's Woolf' is nothing short of fascinating (and I'm a man) and thought-provoking, but is an ambitious subject - hence why it has been given more space than most of the other essays in this volume. Firstly, there are so many contradictions within Woolf's work and words - ref. A Room Of One's Own and Three Guineas in the development of her feminism - and so many and often contending or contradictory feminist interpretations of Woolf's feminism, ranging from 'pacifist feminist' to 'the first model feminist' in literature. The essay is split into the two parts of its title, the first part investigating different aspects of Woolf's feminism in her works (with some good interpretations of several of her novels), the second on the various developments of feminist criticism to her work - the various 'readings' of Woolf's feminism. We generally regard Woolf as a Modernist, belonging to the Modernist period (~1900-39), but towards the end of this survey Marcus brings in Postmodernist interpretations of Woolf's work, which really livens up the discussion into a fascinating new dimension. While somewhat debilitated by the sheer plethora of examples of feminist interpreters, this is a thoroughly fascinating read, and reads, we can interpret Woolf's feminism almost any way conceivable, materialist, historicist, modernist, post-modernist, androgynist - except as a spokeswoman for patriarchy. The interpretations of A Room Of One's Own were particularly fruitful (where Woolf argues for 'androgyny' as artist), and the reflections on To The Lighthouse confirmatory.
Gender and feminist studies abound about Virginia Woolf. 'Virginia Woolf and Sexuality' by Patricia Morgne Cramer might seem a daunting undertaking for any man, but the usual initial reaction of exclusion soon disappears as Cramer develops her discussion of Woolf's use of indirection and metaphor in her novels to lesbianism, within a general discussion of homosexuality of the time and the homophobic scientific representation of both forms as either 'a sin, a crime against nature, a dreaded contagion, a threat to race survival' or diagnosed homosexuality as 'the effect of congenital defects' (p.190). Against such prejudicial censuring, and the notable cases of Wilde (1895), Maud Allen (1918) and Radcliffe Hall (1928), Woolf, as a modernist, disguised and implied her own lesbianism and references to homosexual love in her work. Cramer's essay moves from sexuality and modernism and feminism to a considering discussion about lesbian sexuality in Woolf's novels, wrapping up with a more general view of the problems of declaring one's colours in Edwardian and interwar Britain.
Helen Carr's 'Virginia Woolf, Empire and Race' looks at Woolf's first and last novels to discuss her critique of patriarchy, imperialism and fascism, noting that while Woolf was always an anti-imperialist, she was also a white upper middle-class insider who, even while pointing up her antipathy of patriarchal empire seeking to acquire and possess native cultures and products, never really represented the view of the dominated outsider. Woolf's critique of imperialism should be seen in the context of the time, where such critique was being asserted more widely, even if that was via the white upper-middle-class intellectual. That she belonged to this dying-imperialist intelligentsia, and so was a product of Empire (many men in her elder family were involved in the rule of India), does not negate the fact that Woolf did make the direct link between patriarchy, imperialism and fascism which led to the two greatest conflagrations in world history. Her shortfall was, as a writer primarily concerned with the representation of voice, that she did not provide a voice for those under the colonial 'yoke'. But perhaps that was more appropriately the due of those peoples themselves.
In 'Virginia Woolf and Visual Culture', Maggie Humm discusses Woolf's highly visual imagery and use of metonymy and metaphor, mirroring and absence, photographic and filmic techniques in all her forms, from essays (artistic appreciation and criticism), letters, diaries, polemical works, and novels, to develop a language and expression as close to painting, most successfully exhibited in To The Lighthouse, but present too in such widely various worlds as Flush (1933) and Three Guineas (1938). For any Woolf admirer, the notions Humm develops initially seem self-evident, but her essay (based on broader and deeper works) defines visual themes through disparate forms that comprised Woolf's modernist sensibility.
The final essay in this collection, Melba Cuddy-Keane's 'Virginia Woolf and the Public Sphere', is by far the most demanding. Introducing a flurry of new concepts, we are asked to follow a highly abstract series of discussions on what aspects of Woolf's work contribute, and how, and most effectively, to the public sphere. After a definition of the public sphere, and a premise for discussing one such type of participant in the ongoing debate within it - the intellectual - Cuddy-Keane moves through a difficult arena of reconciling Woolf's political non-fiction - many of her essays, her criticism, her reviewing and publishing, her political tracts (ROO, TG) - with her prose method of 'shifting focalisations' (p.243) in her fiction: 'both her fictional and non-fictional works draw upon narrative techniques to reach beyond our formed opinions and engage the complexity, richness and fluidity of mind as it modulates and weaves between conscious and non-conscious thought' (p.243) - something which the prose style of To The Lighthouse attests throughout. This is a valuable insight, since it is clear that, the more you read of Woolf, the more she sought and achieved this style of deeply personal intimacy of thought and response, as THE salient valuable achievement of her writing, whichever form it took. While much of the reading of Cuddy-Keane's essay felt like an Ouroboros experience, this point - and that on A Room Of One's Own on pp.240-1 - were the most meaningful. This is an essay deeply engaged with all of Woolf's writings, and needs to be read twice to get the most from.
If Virgina Woolf could glance back at the body of academic and literary criticism her work has engendered, as exemplified in this collection of 12 essays, I think she would have been very pleased not only that we appreciate how her literary 'voice' became something much loved and revered, but that her mind, constantly seeking and questioning the issues of the day and the very modernist preoccupation indeed with mind itself, was so respectfully and fully considered. Almost anything she wrote, virtually everything written about her that you read, highlights these phenomenal achievements. As a woman's voice, particularly, she holds her place with any. I enjoyed this foray into her works, methods and legacy.
December 1, 2025
honestly kinda boring but ig i should've expected that from a companion published in 2000.
December 22, 2025
Articles hyper intéressants, certains m’ont plus intéressé (par rapport à mon mémoire) mais l’ensemble est vraiment très complet !!
June 25, 2011
I like these Cambridge Companion series. They're generally very helpful. It's a good way to have an idea of what the authors' main themes and subjects are about. In this one on Virginia Woolf, there are chapters on topics like, "Bloomsbury," "Woolf's early novels," "literary realism, "impact of history," her essays, diaries, letters, her modernism and "impact of post-impressionism," "socio-political vision of the novels," feminism and psychoanalysis.
January 14, 2016
Pretty helpful as an all round guide to Woolf and her work, nothing particularly insightful or exciting though.
February 16, 2016
really helpful essays on virginia woolf, a lot of my research for my final paper came from this book
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews