Risk. Danger. These are certainly not the words that come to mind when thinking about reading and writing, nor the pangs of anxiety one tends to associate with these words. But the writings of the late sixteenth-century Michel de Montaigne and the early twentieth-century Virginia Woolf express and enact the significance of the intimacy between reader and writer – between reader and text. Both were intensely interested in what ensues when one brings one’s self, in all its mystery and mutability, to meet another self, as it is embodied in their carefully chosen words and punctuation, deftly arranged on the page....

It is the words of the title, ‘Women & Fiction’, that constrain Virginia Woolf’s narrator, and it is these words, not surprisingly, that must be ‘slipped from [her] neck’ if she is to continue writing. But for the narrator, ‘the need of coming to some conclusion, on a subject that indeed admits of none, bent [her] head to the ground’ (4). When this passage appears in A Room of One’s Own, it is slightly transformed, for the need to come to a conclusion ‘on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed [her] head to the ground’...

Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own both expresses and enacts its cultural critique by making certain that its readers not only see the significance of the women of their culture as ‘outsiders’, but also appropriate that position for themselves. My discussion, using Brecht’s theory of performance, examines Woolf’s rhetorical and narrative strategies – with a focus on the functioning of language and punctuation – to demonstrate how ‘showing’ the reader the process and calling attention to the constructed nature of the text serve to transform those readers – to get them to see and, ultimately, to critique those institutions that had become, in...

Turf. Gravel path. Smooth lawns. Wild grasses. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own not only establishes territory, possession, boundaries, and the marking of ground but also qualifies this territorial imperative with its self-conscious fictionalisation of ‘Fernham’ and ‘Oxbridge’. Woolf’s narrator reveals that ‘lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping’ (4; emphasis added). Of course, the reader is advised to ascertain the value of what is being imparted. But as...

These are terrifying words, and certainly gain the reader’s attention. My epigraph is the opening of Woolf’s 1940 essay, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, conveying the voice of a witness to these bombings. From Woolf’s letters and diary entries, we know that she was a witness, and suffered as witnesses of atrocities suffer. The immediate focus is sound, for ‘it is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers or anthems – that should compel one to think about peace’ (DM 243). It is always difficult to read...

In her 1916 letter to Margaret Davies, Virginia Woolf expressed her feelings regarding World War I: ‘I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer . . . Do you see any sense in it?’ (II2 76). Woolf’s question is still with us today, as we struggle, in this age of ‘information’, with our expanded media: newspapers, magazines, television, radio and Internet ‘blog’ sites. How did the United States – with major support from Great Britain – undertake this unfathomable pre-emptive war in...