Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past

240 Pages·2006·1.16 MB·English

by  Jane de Gay

Virginia Woolf’s Novels and
the Literary Past
Jane de Gay
Edinburgh University Press
© Jane de Gay, 2006
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7486 2349 3 (hardback)
The right of Jane de Gay
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements v
Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
1. From Woman Reader to Woman Writer:The Voyage Out 19
2. Tradition and Exploration inNight and Day 44
3. Literature and Survival: Jacob’s Roomand Mrs Dalloway 67
4. To the Lighthouseand the Ghost of Leslie Stephen 96
5. Rewriting Literary History in Orlando 132
6. ‘Lives Together’: Literary and Spiritual Autobiographies in
TheWaves 160
7. Bringing the Literary Past to Life in Between the Acts 186
Conclusion 212
Select Bibliography 216
Index 227

Acknowledgements
Quotations from Virginia Woolf’s novels by permission of The Society of
Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.
Excerpts from Night and Day, copyright 1920 by George H. Doran and
Company and renewed 1948 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission
of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf,
copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf,
reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from Orlando copy-
right 1928 by Virginia Woolf and renewed 1956 by Leonard Woolf,
reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts from Between the
Acts by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1941 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed
1969 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
Quotations from The Diary of Virginia Woolfedited by Anne Olivier Bell,
The Letters of Virginia Woolf edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann, Moments of Being edited by Jeanne Schulkind, Collected
Essays, all published by Hogarth Press and reprinted by permission of
The Random House Group Ltd. Every effort has been made to obtain per-
mission for all quotations: persons entitled to fees for any matter included
here are invited to apply in writing to the publishers.
This book has had a long gestation and many people have helped and
encouraged me along the way. Early research trips and conference visits
were funded by the Open University Arts Faculty Research Committee.
Trinity and All Saints’ College funded trips to the annual Virginia Woolf
Conference and a short period of study leave (special thanks to Joyce
Simpson and Sally Dawson for their support). I value the encouragement
and feedback of Woolfians and other colleagues, including: Richard
Allen, Ann Ardis, Jessica Berman, Jane Goldman, Mark Hussey, Laura
Marcus, Eleanor McNees, Andrew McNeillie, Rosemary Mitchell, Vara
Neverow, Stephen Regan, Bonnie Kime Scott and Pierre-Eric Villeneuve.
Thanks to the staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford and Stephen Crook
of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library for assistance. Thanks
vi Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past
to Karen V. Kukil of the Rare Books Room, Smith College for help and
picture research. Many thanks to all family and friends for support.
Special thanks to Suzanne Raitt for her honest and sound advice and
stimulating conversations, and to Lizbeth Goodman, for her belief in my
work from the start and her continued support and encouragement.
Finally, many thanks to Wayne Stote for his love and patience in living
with this book for as long as I have.
This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to my parents – to my
father, Edmund, and to the memory of my mother, Joan. It is also dedi-
cated to the memory of Marjorie Reeves, who was a great inspiration and
in whose household much of the text was written.
Abbreviations
Texts are by Virginia Woolf, unless stated otherwise.
3G Three Guineas, intro. Hermione Lee ([1938]; London:
Hogarth Press, 1986).
Anon ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’,
ed. and intro. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth-Century Literature,
25:3–4 (1979), 356–441.
Apology Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays
(London: Smith & Elder, 1893).
BA Between the Acts, ed. and intro. Frank Kermode ([1941];
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
CE Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–67).
D Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, asst. ed. Andrew McNeillie, 5
vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–84).
E Essays, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1986– ).
English Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the
Eighteenth Century(London: Duckworth, 1904).
History Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century, 2 vols (London: Smith & Elder, 1876).
HD The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and ed.
John W. Graham (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).
JR Jacob’s Room, ed. and intro. Kate Flint ([1922]; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
L Letters, ed. Nigel Nicolson, asst. ed. Joanne Trautmann
Banks, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80).
MB MomentsofBeing:UnpublishedAutobiographicalWritings,ed.
andintro.JeanneSchulkind(London:Triad/Granada,1978).
MBk Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, intro. Alan Bell
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
MP Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner ([1814];
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
viii Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past
MD Mrs Dalloway, ed. and intro. Claire Tomalin ([1925];
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
ND Night and Day, ed. and intro. Suzanne Raitt ([1919]; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
O Orlando, ed. and intro. Rachel Bowlby ([1928]; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
OHD To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, tran-
scribed and ed. Susan Dick (London: Hogarth Press, 1983).
P Persuasion, ed. and intro. D.W. Harding ([1818];
Harmondswoth: Penguin, 1965).
PP Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Tony Tanner ([1813];
repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
QB Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London:
Hogarth Press, 1972).
Room A Room of One’s Own ([1929]; London: Grafton, 1977).
TL To the Lighthouse,ed. and intro. Margaret Drabble ([1927];
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
VC Anne Thackeray Ritchie, The Village on the Cliff (London:
Smith & Elder, 1867).
VO The Voyage Out, ed. and intro. Lorna Sage ([1915]; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
W The Waves, ed. and intro. Gillian Beer ([1931]; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
Works The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols,
gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn (London and Princeton, NJ:
Routledge & Kegan Paul; Bollingen Series LXXV, Princeton
University Press, 1969– ).
Introduction
Virginia Woolf has long been celebrated as an innovative novelist and a
radical thinker who broke with the aesthetics of earlier generations and
challenged their values; some critics have even suggested that she antici-
pated ideas and approaches which emerged long after her time. However,
it is less widely acknowledged that Woolf also looked backwards; that
she was immersed in the literary past and her intellectual heritage as a
reader and critic; and that this had an impact on her fiction. Although
Beth Carole Rosenberg has drawn attention to Woolf’s dialogue with
other writers in her essays and fiction, and Sally Greene’s edited collec-
tion, Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, has demonstrated that
the strength of Woolf’s interest in the Renaissance can be seen in both her
scholarship and her fiction,1many scholars are none the less reluctant to
see the presence of the literary past in the novels. So, for example,
although Elena Gualtieri and Juliet Dusinberre have drawn attention to
Woolf’s intimacy with the literary past in her essays, both resist applying
these insights to her novels: Gualtieri makes a distinction between the
essay, which ‘remained for her attached to the paternal figure and there-
fore became the arena where the relationship between tradition and
modernity was explored’, and the novel, which ‘represented the possibil-
ity of experimenting with new forms and shapes’; and Dusinberre argues
that Woolf ‘used the past for a purpose, as an empowering model for
herself as woman writer, and particularly as a writer not of fiction but of
criticism and literary history’.2
This book will demonstrate that Woolf’s preoccupation with the liter-
ary past had a profound impact on the content of her novels, on her phi-
losophies of fiction and on certain aspects of her fictional method. It will
explore how Woolf continually engaged with the literary past in her
fiction: by revisiting and revising plots which had made an impression on
her as a reader, by using densely packed literary allusions and even by
using her fiction as a forum for exploring literary history. As a result, her