Born in London in 1882 and educated in her father’s library, Virginia Woolf came of age at a moment when, as Leonard Woolf put it, political and social movements gave hope that Europe “might really be on the brink of becoming civilized.”¹ Leonard’s prospective formulation reanimates Kant’s dynamic understanding of Enlightenment as no completed, secure achievement but an unfinished and unfinishable struggle against barbarism within Europe.² In the early twentieth century, Bloomsbury modernism addressed barbarities “within the walls” of European civilization, “within our minds and our hearts”: belligerent nationalisms, racialized imperialisms, the class system, the sex/gender system, genocidal persecution, and...

Before anyone dreamt of World War I, Virginia Woolf sailed her first heroine, Rachel Vinrace, through a gap in empire to fight a “Great War.”¹ That gap is opened by Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness as Marlow voyages back from King Leopold’s Congo to tell a lie that tastes of death to Kurtz’s Intended. The Voyage Out (1915) also explores an uncharted darkness within a civilization that Rachel—like Marlow and unlike Kurtz’s Intended—discovers as if for the first time. As she propels her heroine from a cloistered late-Victorian girlhood with her Richmond aunts to a fictional English...

After Leonard read the manuscript of Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf wrote,

We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way…. he found it very interesting, & beautiful,… & quite intelligible…. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at...

Six weeks after Mrs. Dalloway appeared, its author speculated on “a new name” for her novels: “A new ——— by Virginia Woolf…. Elegy?” (D 3:34, 27 June 1925). In modernizing the elegy by adapting its poetics to prose fiction and its work of mourning to postwar London’s post-theological cosmos in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf moves beyond the “satiric elegy” of Jacob’s Room to explore the genre’s full profundity, complexity, and power.¹ This communal elegy unseals “a well of tears”—for the survivors no less than the war dead—and enters into colloquy with the pastoral elegy from the Greeks through Shakespeare...

To the Lighthouse launches the modernist artist Lily Briscoe on a quest for what she calls “reality,” “the thing itself before it has been made anything” (TL 193). Impossible on the face of it, this quest ends with the simultaneous completion of Lily’s painting and the novel itself—each a portrait of “father & mother & child in the garden” (D 3:36, 20 July 1925). In what sense can these family portraits in paint and words fulfill a quest for reality, the thing itself? One answer lies in the way the narrative integrates the modernist aesthetics of painting and novel with the...

“Autobiography it might be called,” Woolf mused as she conjured a book titled first “The Moths/or the life of anybody,” later The Waves.¹ As “books continue each other” (RO 80), The Waves (1931) culminates Woolf’s middle series of self-portraits: To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929). With related diary entries, letters, drafts, and essays, these comprise what I shall broadly consider as The Waves’ genetic text.² To call these works self-portraits presumes a special notion of the genre such as Woolf implies in framing this “abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” as her or...

While finishing The Waves, Woolf was called back to the public voice of A Room of One’s Own by an invitation to address the London/National Society for Women’s Service, a professional organization newly evolved from the first women’s suffrage committee. Scarcely two years after she had urged the Cambridge women whose invitation inspired A Room of One’s Own to earn their livings and so insure their freedom of mind—and only twelve years after the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act had opened the professions to women—a society of professional Englishwomen had materialized. Addressing this unprecedented audience in a “Speech...

In Three Guineas (1938) Woolf paints another portrait of the artist collaborating with her audience in the quest for “new civilisations.” Abandoning The Pargiters’ essay form, she devises an epistolary essay, a compound public letter, as “a way of publishing all the new ideas that are in me”: a letter to an English gentleman who asks her to join his society “to prevent war” and “to defend liberty” and “culture,” enclosing a second letter to an honorary treasurer who asks her help to rebuild a women’s college, and a third to an honorary treasurer who asks her help for women...

When Woolf began Between the Acts (first titled Pointz Hall) in April 1938, the second civil war predicted by Keynes seemed imminent every day. Her wartime diary captures the impact of world events on private life during the novel’s composition. Hitler arms “his million men,” invades Austria, looks ready to “pounce again” (D 5:132, 162, 26 March, 17 August 1938). Stalin stages show trials; the Allies sacrifice Czechoslovakia; Hitler invades Poland; England declares war; Hitler seizes Paris. German bombs fall on London, destroying the Mecklenburgh Square house the Woolfs have just taken and the Tavistock Square house they have just...