When Virginia Woolf, in this famous passage from her unfinished and posthumously published memoir ‘Sketch of the Past’ (1976), outlines her ‘philosophy’ or ‘constant idea’, she presents us with a ‘conception’ of life that is embedded in materiality: a ‘pattern’, ‘hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life’ (MB 85). It is, as Mark Hussey has recently put it, a form of theorising that is ‘grounded’ and ‘embodied’,¹ and other critics have placed emphasis on Woolf’s formulation of human communality through language and art: Lorraine Sim, for example, writes of ‘a connective principle’ in Woolf’s ‘pattern’ which is revealed through...

Perhaps her most famous figuration taken from the natural world, Virginia Woolf’s ‘granite and rainbow’ (E4 478) is the centrepiece of a theory which appears to capture both halves of a ‘neatly split up’ question concerning the aims of biography. Her 1927 essay ‘The New Biography’ assimilates granite with the ‘hard facts’ of reality: it is ‘truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truth is to be found in the British Museum’ (E4 473). In Woolf’s view this is characteristic of Sir Sidney Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare (1898) and King Edward VII: A Biography...

Combining the Greek roots andro (male) and gyn (female), the term ‘androgyny’ has historical ties to a wide range of myths and religions, as well as philosophy, psychology, and literature. Critics have explored its links to the Yin and Yang of Taoism, the Upanishads and Puranas of Hinduism, various aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and noted that versions of androgyny can be found in Plato’s philosophy, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, and Jung’s psychology.¹ In her own famous passage on androgyny in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf points to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

the sight of the two people getting into the...

In Transpositions, Rosi Braidotti reads this diary entry by Virginia Woolf – dated 16th February 1930 – as evidence of the ‘shimmering intensity’ of her love affair with Vita Sackville-West, which had earlier famously inspired the mock-biography Orlando.¹ In her groundbreaking study Vita and Virginia, Suzanne Raitt uses similar language when describing how Woolf’s letters to Sackville-West ‘shimmer with the luminosity of shared sexual pleasure’,² and she emphasises that from its inception Woolf’s writing of Orlando was ‘bound up with her desire for Sackville-West’.³ Indeed, for some time it has been commonplace for critics to refer to the correspondences and...

As Woolf’s underdog book, Flush: A Biography has recently received increased levels of critical attention and gained entry into Woolf’s modernist canon, although it is still by no means afforded the same scrutiny as her more famous fictional biography, Orlando. Indeed, Flush’s (re)creation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel – from his early life in the country to a rear bedroom in London’s Wimpole Street, dognapping and incarceration in Whitechapel, a journey abroad to Florence, and finally his death on Barrett Browning’s lap – has often been written off as a relatively trivial escapade, with Woolf’s own description in December...

In The Phantom Table (2000) Ann Banfield sets Woolf’s ‘table’ as the meeting place for her writings and the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the Cambridge Apostles. As ‘the paradigmatic object of knowledge’ in the tradition of British Empiricism, the table is ‘planted squarely in the centre of Woolf’s novelistic scenery’;¹ a place where Woolf can gather together her thoughts on ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’ (TL 28) and, according to Banfield, a place that aligns Woolf with Russell’s theory of knowledge. In a recent article Timothy Mackin also discusses Woolf’s tables as central to her engagement...