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 anticipated 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...

The year after The Voyage Out was published, Woolf wrote in ‘Hours in a Library’ that ‘the great season for reading is the season between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four’ (CE, II. 34). In her own case, that six-year period led up to her beginning Melymbrosia, the first draft of The Voyage Out, in 1907, at the age of twenty-five (L, I. 315 n.; QB, I. 125). Quentin Bell suggests that Melymbrosia ‘may have had its beginnings in Virginia’s imagination’ in 1904 (QB, I. 125) and indeed, Woolf herself suggested that she had a ‘vision’ of her first book...

Katherine Mansfield criticised Night and Day for being old-fashioned on its first publication in 1919, describing it as ‘a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!’¹ As a courtship drama, which reaches a comic conclusion in the engagement of two couples, the novel can be read as conservative not only for following an age-old narrative pattern but also for appearing to endorse the conservative social imperative of marriage. It thus seems to undo the progress made...

It is widely accepted that Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) are Woolf’s first experimental novels, building on radical short stories such as ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and on the theories of fiction developed in ‘Modern Novels’. Woolf abandons the rigid chapter structure she criticised in ‘Modern Novels’, adopting in both a more flexible form built on sketches or ‘moments’ of varying length. She eschews a documentary approach to character in Jacob’s Room by making the eponymous character an enigma, and in Mrs Dalloway by concentrating on the mental experience of her protagonists, the latter...

Father’s birthday. He would have been . . . 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; – inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must...

Orlando is often taken on Woolf’s own estimation as ‘an escapade’ (D, III. 131) and viewed as a lighthearted comic piece. However, when read in the context of Woolf’s engagement with the literary past, it can be seen to serve the serious purpose of critiquing the assumptions of patriarchal literary history and developing feminist perspectives to replace them. Although Woolf’s use of parody in Orlando is undoubtedly comic, it is also layered and strategic. On the one hand, her parody of academic conceptions is satirical: she mocks conventional approaches to literary history (as well as biography and history) by mimicking...

Woolf considered The Waves to be the novel which came closest to capturing her own ideas and establishing her own style. When exploring her earliest ideas for the work, she noted a desire to write a book which was ‘made solely & with integrity of one’s thoughts’ (D?, III. 102), and after finishing it, she noted, ‘I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning – if The Waves is my first work in my own style!’ (D, IV. 53). Although these statements may appear to be...

Virginia Woolf’s engagement with the literary past was at its most urgent and intense in Between the Acts. Written against the backdrop of the escalation of the Fascist threat and the outbreak of the Second World War, a period Woolf feared might signal ‘the complete ruin not only of civilization in Europe, but of our last lap’ (D, V. 162), it betrays a concern to preserve a threatened culture in writing. Set in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, the novel encapsulates a form of English society which was about to disappear. Literature is given a prominent place...

We can now see that Woolf’s novels were informed deeply by her sometimes vexed, sometimes positive conversations with past writers. As the analyses of her creative processes in the preceding chapters reveal, her reading and writing practices were closely interfused: quite simply, she needed to read in order to write, and almost invariably she preferred to read past writers. Sometimes she needed to read for intellectual stimulation: it is significant that she began to draft The Voyage Out after six years of intensive reading, but even in the 1930s, reading poetry helped release her from creative deadlock whilst formulating The...