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Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

‘Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History’ —Introduction

Anne Besnault, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio et Marie Laniel

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1To give a history to a species, a population of human beings or a social category is necessarily a political gesture. Throughout her career Virginia Woolf was preoccupied with this gesture and with the cultural and political issues that it implies. As we celebrate the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway the ‘action’ of which takes place on a day in June 1923, five years after the end of the First World War, it is only right to place its author in the long genealogy of those who have shown a deep interest in history and its writing. To examine Woolf’s relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history, be that the history of her own time, of the past, women’s history or literary history, leads us to counter her image as a disengaged high-modernist aesthete, thereby allowing her complex artistic and intellectual persona to emerge, that of a changing, pragmatic and self-reflexive figure ‘thinking back through [her] mothers’ (Woolf 2000, 57) while negotiating her own presence among male predecessors and contemporaries.

  • 1 For complete references, see the selected bibliography at the end of this introduction.

2Although ‘Bloomsbury was born and bred Victorian’ (Rosenbaum 2003, 21) and some of its eminent members wrote historical books—among which we might cite Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and E. M. Forster’s Alexandria, a History and a Guide (1922)—the myth of the modernists’ ignorance or rejection of history was not revised until the revaluation of modernism itself took place in the 1990s. Today, deep historicism is at the core of New Modernist Studies: for at least two decades, Victorian and Modernist scholars have joined forces to remap the turn-of-the-century, replacing the ‘break theory’ narrative with complicated versions of the ‘divide’.1 At the same time, Woolf’s position regarding her predecessors, from the Greeks, ‘Antigone and the Bible’ (de Gay), to the Victorians and Edwardians, along with her grasp of history, literary history, past experiences and past traditions, has become a rich terrain of scholarship.

3In 2018, an international symposium on Virginia Woolf and the writing of history was held at the University of Rouen–Normandy. The participants came from France, India, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Drawing on the pioneering work of Gillian Beer, Emily Blair, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Juliet Dunsiberre, Steve Ellis, Alice Fox, Elena Gualtieri, Gabrielle McIntire, Linden Peach and Angeliki Spiropoulou, they engaged in conversations that showed how historicity and the literary are intertwined not only in Woolf’s novels, but also in her short fiction, essays, letters and journals. They explored how questions of anteriority and tradition inform both the po-ethical and political dimensions of a Woolfian writing of history and of pre-history, such as those which informs her late essay ‘Anon’, and are also present throughout her writing in the attention it accords to a cultural unconscious that underlies the present of language like a sometimes conscious, sometimes not yet conscious memory of the past. Using different critical tools and perspectives, they agreed that the interconnectedness of Woolf’s modernism, her feminism, and her understanding of history as a site of knowledge and a writing practice enabled her to negotiate her heritage along with her place as a female artist among the moderns.

  • 2 See, among others, the books by Anne Besnault, Mary Jean Corbett, Anne-Marie Di Basio, Christine Re (...)
  • 3 In a letter to her friend Violet Dickinson dated July 1905, Woolf writes: ‘Do you feel convinced I (...)

4Since then, further work on the subject of Woolf and the writing of history has been published and many of the participants at the Rouen Conference have been instrumental, either jointly or individually, in the advancement of this research.2 The six articles presented here bear witness to this ongoing conversation. Taken together, they continue to establish the common ground of what could be called, in an echo of her 1927 essay ‘The New Biography’ (Woolf 1994, 473‑491), Woolf’s ‘New historiography’. Firstly, they prompt us to explore the synergy that emerges from the study of Woolf’s short fiction, novels, essays in literary criticism and literary history, or personal photographic archives, a new corpus explored here by Adèle Cassigneul. Since Woolf’s conception of history and historiography was always a response to the contemporary world around her, they also encourage us to explore how Woolf’s pursuit of history was a reading and writing practice that evolved over time, its trajectory taking us from her project to write a ‘real historical work’3 on medieval England to a sense, in the 1930s, of the impending catastrophe that transformed the lives of civilians and artists. Initially a site of apprenticeship and of ‘overwhelming inheritance’, history soon became, for Woolf, a self-reflexive reading and a writing practice (Hercend) that enabled her to transcend a certain ‘anxiety of English influence’ (O’Malley), and to elaborate her poetics of the ‘new’: not as a radical rupture but as the result of a process of unwriting and rewriting traditional historiographical orthodoxies.

5This collection of essays also continues to explore the way in which history remained, throughout Woolf’s career, both a political battlefield and the fruitful laboratory of her feminist poetics as a writer, critic and literary historian. At a time when scholars and researchers were implementing anti-Whig methodologies more suitable to the scientific age they lived in (de Gay), and when historians believed that all forms of conjectures, subjectivity and bias could be erased by the right laboratory procedures, Woolf looked back at the Romantics and their elaboration of an alternative history which no longer focused on events deemed of national importance but on the idea that there is a possible disjunction between what a historian can, indeed, represent, and the ‘boundless obscurity’ of the past. In parallel, she addressed the question of the marginalisation of women by historians and literary historians.

6As a woman living between the two World Wars, an avid reader of history books, a critic, and a fiction writer, Woolf explored many genres of history and historical writing, and it is fascinating to see how her work on the representation and the writing of history led her to study, question and rewrite multiple forms of history centred on many multiple subjects: whether histories of literature, of the book, historical biographies, family archives, medieval history, romantic history, social history, to name but a few. In parallel, her own historiographical work took forms as diverse as fiction, short fiction, essays in criticism, the political essay, autobiographical essays. As the following articles will also make clear, Woolf’s historiographical poiesis constitutes the groundwork for her alternative literary history: bringing the past into being in order to illuminate the present becomes, in Woolf’s writing, an artistic and political commitment to the future. It is a writing practice that exhibits the process of its own making up and exclusions acknowledging that all historiographical operations entice a political reflection on genre, gender and the speaking/reading subject.

7In ‘The Common Historian: on the Praxis of Reading the Past in Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader’, Olivier Hercend draws a parallel between Woolf’s reading praxis, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) and Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Interpretation as Pragmatics (1999). He explains that Woolf’s historiographical practice is always entwined with the ‘historical mobility of the subject’ while uncovering her own conception of reader-response theory, itself grounded in her delineation of a democratic ‘Common historian’ echoing her conception of ‘the common reader’.

8Continuing her exploration of the fruitful connection between Woolf’s extensive knowledge of history and her feminist exploration of the literary past, Jane de Gay turns to her historiographical method in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941) before examining the ways in which Woolf combines literary, historical and biographical sources with the more contemporary sources that illuminate an ‘history in the raw’ in Three Guineas (1938). Blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, fact and imagination, memory and history, Woolf radically undermines nineteenth-century narratives of progress while inviting her male interlocutor in the essay to participate in the invention of a ‘history for both women and men of good will’.

9Reminding us how Virginia Woolf’s suggestion in the third chapter of A Room of One’s Own (1929) to ‘add a supplement to history’, if not to ‘rewrite’ it, has made of her both a foremother and an early practitioner of feminist literary history since the 1970s, Valérie Favre demonstrates that Woolf’s seminal essay enacts a historiographical shift from women’s history to gender history. In this respect A Room of One’s Own must be read both as a woman-centred counter-literary history and as a history that radically questions gender relations, gender roles, the gender binary, and the distribution of power between the sexes.

10In ‘History Breaks Down into Images: Woolf’s Monk’s House Albums’, specialist of Virginia Woolf’s photo-cinematography Adèle Cassigneul shows how Woolf’s work as a family archivist provided her with material for the writing of her personal memoirs, fiction and essays. The ‘inherent historicity’ of photography, together with the disorderly and heterogeneous nature of the volumes studied here, raise many of the historiographical questions that Woolf addressed in her fiction and essays: among them, Woolf’s interest in histories grounded in daily life, in diary writing. Her method of assemblage, Cassigneul argues, anticipates the cultural criticism of Aby Warburg in the Mnemonsyne Atlas (1921; 1929) and of Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (1927–1940). As they undermine traditional linearity, periodisation and the idea of causality, The Monk’s House Albums offer us an uncanny kinetic construction of the chronicle grounded in iconographic tension, a new sense of temporality, a contrast between presence and loss. Woolf’s reconfiguration of photographic memory in these Albums ultimately invites us to reconsider Woolf’s historiographical and photographic work in Night and Day (1919) and Three Guineas (1938).

11In ‘“The People” of Virginia Woolf: Populism and Tradition’, Seamus O’Malley explores the ways in which Woolf managed to think ‘the people’ at a time when fascist movements adopted the language of populist nationalism. His paper takes us on a journey from The Voyage Out to ‘Anon’ and Between the Acts, following the ‘rhythms’ of her thoughts on ‘we, the people’ from a political and ethical perspective. Aware, as Woolf was, of the possible obstacles on the path taken—any use of ‘we’ potentially hides subtle forms of exclusion—O’Malley shows that Woolf’s poetic and historiographical reinvention of ‘the people’ as a process transcending false oppositions provides us with a ‘model for how we should react to our own historical, populist crisis’.

12In ‘“The imagination is largely the child of the flesh”: Virginia Woolf’s Embodied Historicity’, Catherine Bernard sheds light on Woolf’s empirical historiography, which she sees as both aligned with the innovative practices of her time, and uncannily prescient of the works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians. Woolf’s desire to save from oblivion the ‘unknown agents of history’ by piecing together the material traces or remains of their lives, ‘the brittle and silent fragments’ of their ‘inchoate narratives’, makes her a contemporary of Eileen Power and Marc Bloch, but also a forerunner of Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘microhistory’, based on ‘the minutiae of past lives’, and of French historian Yvan Jablonka’s ‘intuitive, empathic comprehension of the past’. Her wish to recapture the past as ‘a lived and embodied experience’ anticipates both Lucien Febvre’s ‘history of sensations and emotions’, Alain Corbin’s ‘history of sensibilities’, and David Carr’s ‘phenomenological approach to historicity’. Thus, according to Catherine Bernard, in ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1930) and its revised version published in Life As We Have Known It (1931), which serve as a case in point, Woolf explores ‘the materiality and corporeality of class determinisms’ separating her from women of the working class, while opening up the possibility of a shared experience of ‘communality’, conveyed thanks to her ‘attentive immersion’ in the letters recording these women’s everyday existence.

13Woolf’s ‘new historiography’ never materialised into a ‘real historical work’ (Woolf 1975, 202). It resulted in non-academic works whose plurality and incompleteness were precisely that which actually enabled her to challenge pre-existing historical knowledge, narrative orthodoxies and teleological effects. Incomplete and fragmentary, yet inseparable from her feminism and singular modernity, her evolving histories enact a historiographical poetics: an act of writing grounded in a palimpsest of interconnected texts and evaluative acts that preserves traces of the past, dialectically exposes prior and present judgements, and politically engages with the future. Beyond its apparent heterogeneity and the very contradictory impulses that it does not hesitate to stage, Woolf’s historical thought, as well as her thoughts on modern fiction, on women and fiction, or on the history of literature, is multilayered but coherent; it rewrites the past while anticipating the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers and historians such as Marc Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Carlo Ginzburg, Lucien Febvre, Michel de Certeau, Alain Corbin, Giorgio Agamben, Raphael Samuel, David Carr, and Ivan Jablonka. As she engaged in explorations with past and present, recorded or experienced histories, Woolf never believed that history was meant to be the ‘prerogative of the historian’ since, in the words of Raphael Samuel, it is ‘a social form of knowledge; the work, in any instance, of a thousand hands’ (Samuel 5–6). Writing at the interface at which the history of a life, imagined or recalled, and the foundation of existence in common coincide, Virginia Woolf invents a radical historiography, whose philosophical and political destiny is here mapped out in the readings brought together.

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Bibliographie

Beer, Gillian, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Ann Arbor (Mich.): The U of Michigan P, 1996.

Besnault-Levita, Anne and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, eds., Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature and the Visual Arts, New York: Routledge, 2018.

Besnault, Anne, Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories: Conversations with the Nineteenth Century, Arbingdon: Routledge, 2022.

Blair, Emily, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Albany: State U of New York, 1996.

Booth, Alison, Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Cornell UP, 1996.

Cassigneul, Adèle, Voir, observer, penser: Virginia Woolf et la photo-cinématographie, Toulouse: PU du Midi, 2018.

Corbett, Mary Jean, Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2020.

Coste, Bénédicte, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier, eds., Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuations, Revisions, Speculations, Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience’, Virginia Woolf and the Essay, eds. B. C. Rosenberg and J. Dubino, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, 59-77.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere, Cambridge: CUP, 2003.

De Gay, Jane, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.

De Gay, Jane, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiography in Orlando’, Critical Survey 19/1 (2007): 62-72.

Dusinberre, Juliet, Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader, Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.

Ellis, Steve, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

FOX, Alice, Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990.

Greene, Sally, ed., Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, Athens: Ohio UP, 1999.

Gualtieri, Elena, Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Sketching the Past, New York: Springer, 2000.

Marcus, Laura, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, eds., Late Victorian into Modern, Oxford: OUP, 2016.

Peach, Linden, Virginia Woolf and New Historicism, London: Macmillan, 2000.

Perkins, David, ed., Theoretical Issues in Literary History, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 1991.

Reynier, Christine, Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.

Rosenbaum, S. P., Georgian Bloomsbury: The Early History of the Bloomsbury Group, 1910–1914 (1987), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Samuel, Raphael, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (1994), London: Verso, 2012. 

Smith-Di Biasio, Anne-Marie, Le Palimpseste mémoriel. Entendre la mémoire au fil des modernismes, Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2024.

Woolf, Virginia, ‘The New Biography’ (1927), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4., ed. Andrew McNeillie, London: The Hogarth Press, 1994, 473–491.

Woolf, Virginia, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, 1888-1912, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, London: The Hogarth Press, 1975.

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Woolf, Virginia, ‘Anon’ (1939–41), The Essays of Virginia Woolf 1933 to 1941, vol. 6, ed. Stuart N. Clarke, London: The Hogarth Press, 2011, 581–599.

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Notes

1 For complete references, see the selected bibliography at the end of this introduction.

2 See, among others, the books by Anne Besnault, Mary Jean Corbett, Anne-Marie Di Basio, Christine Reynier in the selected bibliography.

3 In a letter to her friend Violet Dickinson dated July 1905, Woolf writes: ‘Do you feel convinced I can write? I am going to produce a real historical work this summer; for which I have solidly read and annotated 4 volumes of medieval English’ (Woolf 1975, 244).

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Anne Besnault, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio et Marie Laniel, « ‘Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History’ —Introduction »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 11 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16342 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gk

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Anne Besnault

Université de Rouen Normandie

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio

Institut Catholique de Paris

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Marie Laniel

Université de Picardie-Jules Verne

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