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Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

History Breaks Down into Images: Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House Albums

L’histoire se décompose en images : Les albums Monk’s House de Virginia Woolf
Adèle Cassigneul

Résumés

Écrire l’histoire personnelle ou collective, c’est compiler des archives, des traces ténues de sa vie passée. Il s’agit de « sauver quelque chose du temps » (Annie Ernaux) et de récupérer le présent des temporalités passées pour les découvrir et les clarifier. Dans cet essai, j’explore les albums photographiques de Woolf dans leur relation avec la représentation littéraire et politique de l’histoire de Woolf ; c’est-à-dire les archives personnelles qu’elle a compilées et organisées tout au long de sa vie en tant qu’« archiviste de la famille Stephen et Woolf » (Neverow) et historienne, À travers les théories culturelles de l’image (Warburg, Benjamin, Didi-Huberman), mon objectif est de voir en quoi cette masse de documents factuels a fourni à Woolf du matériel pour l’écriture de ses mémoires personnelles, de ses fictions (Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway) et de ses essais (Three Guineas). J’analyse comment, en s’appuyant sur l’historicité inhérente à la photographie, Woolf met en image des gestes historiques qui subvertissent les chronologies linéaires et la rhétorique monumentale patriarcale.

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Texte intégral

A Reading Prior to All Languages

  • 1 Virginia Woolf’s photo albums are held by Harvard Houghton Library. A digitalised version of all si (...)

1The Monk’s House Albums are complex and contradictory material.1 The volumes are heterogeneous and chaotic. They despise conventional chronological order, are overtly anachronistic and jumble together different types of images. They are packed with photographs yet remain unfinished, open-ended and riddled with blanks. They offer visual knowledge that pulls itself away as soon as you try and take hold of some meaning. Woolf’s collected photographs are plotless and prevent straightforward interpretation—they are flat images which, as Barthes says, ‘I cannot penetrate, cannot reach’. ‘I can only sweep [them] with my glance, like a smooth surface’ (1981, 106). And yet they did act as plot-inducing memory-images for Woolf, as her autobiographical texts, Moments of Being, make clear. They stand as individual free-floating fragments that can be singled out but can also create meaningful constellations. In short, they are both familiar—as we easily recognise Woolf’s family and all the Bloomsberries, and album-making is a common enough family lore—and yet they also remain irreducibly mysterious and unknowable, disconnected from us by the passage of time. Indeed, Woolf’s albums are not definitive. Just like life, they escape. They are impure and deconstructive. They frustrate interpretation and shatter certainties as they invent their own visual language. They could thus stand as Foucauldian heterotopia, disturbing entities that ‘secretly undermine language, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance’. They embody the disorder Foucault talks about, ‘the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite’ (2005, xix).

  • 2 See Cassigneul.

2Those intimate vernacular objects2 are clumsily handcrafted, as the uneven hand-cut slits and hand-written captions show: they were made to be manipulated and transformed by the family. At once domestic and collective, they were meant to be useful rather than decorative. In this light, they open another space, a space of otherness, which allowed the Woolfs to chronicle and document daily family life, to collect family memories as well as fantasised ascendancies, to experiment with images and reflect on iconographic rhetoric. As they display messy visual patterns, the Monk’s House Albums foreground lack and repetition, they are an idiosyncratic visual language that twists and subverts traditional family storytelling. What kind of shifting (her)stories was Woolf assembling?

  • 3 In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee corroborates: ‘her first publication in book form was her u (...)

3Because of her constant diary-writing and album-making, Woolf has been described by critics as ‘the Stephen and Woolf family archivist’ (Neverow 69), as the ‘family historian’ (Leaska xv).3 What does this mean exactly? These qualifiers imply compilation, organisation and preservation of material. They entail encyclopaedic rigour, a rational ordering of data, an obsession with lineage and family blood, that are the exact opposite of what the albums actually present. I thus wonder what kind of atypical family historian Woolf was. Indeed, she clearly does not take on Sir Walter Elliot’s Baronetage in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which follows ‘the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family’ (1998, 10). I rather want to suggest that she has more to do with the Mnemosyne Atlas Aby Warbug made between 1921 and 1929, and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical historical method. Indeed, she combines the archaeological with the actual to ‘read what has never been written’ (Benjamin 722). The albums’ formal driving force is montage, their guiding principle is imagination.

4In this essay, I shall focus on several aspects of the albums to see how album-making has contributed to building Woolf’s historical gaze and how, taking her cue from Warburg and Benjamin, she uses images as an instrument of historical readability. As she puts it in Three Guineas,

There is that marvellous, perpetually renewed, and as yet largely untapped aid to the understanding of human motives which is provided in our age by biography and autobiography. Also there is the daily paper, history in the raw. There is thus no longer any reason to be confined to the minute span of actual experience which is still, for us, so narrow, so circumscribed. We can supplement it by looking at the picture of the lives of others. It is of course only a picture at present, but as such it must serve. (7)

5My aim is to delve into Woolf’s idiosyncratic method when, as historiographer, she looks at the picture of her life and that of others.

The Dialectical Structure of Awakening

  • 4 Leslie Stephen’s album is in the Smith College Special Collections (identifier: MRBC-MS-00005). Its (...)

6To understand Woolf’s historiographical method in the albums, we first need to consider Woolf’s influential family heritage. Namely, Leslie Stephen’s monumental funeral album, which he composed when writing the Mausoleum Book after the death of Julia Stephen in May 1895. It contains 73 photographs taken between 1856 and 1894 and is divided into seven chronological series celebrating family origin and genealogy.4

The Jackson family, 1875–1883
The Stephen family and friends, 1860–1890
The Jackson-Duckworth family, 1856–1871
Leslie Stephen’s early adulthood and marriage to Harriet Marian Thackeray Stephen, 1860–1875
Leslie Stephen’s marriage to Julia Duckworth Stephen and their young, 1879–1886
Julia and Leslie Stephen, their children and friends at Talland House, 1880–1894
Julia and Leslie Stephen in Switzerland, 1889

7This is a memorial to his dead wife, her ancestry and her offspring; it has the fixity of a gravestone. Following 19th-century customs, it ‘symbolizes the unity, the gathering, the reduction and the cessation of a world’ (Rouillé 84; translation mine). A mausoleum is a tomb or a large gloomy room; it is a restricted, limited space; and this shows in the architectural layout of the plates. Confinement and order prevail, turning the album into a distressing and sentimental ‘instrument of control’ (184) governed by the elegiac montage of revering remembrance.

8Stephen autographed the album’s dates and captions, and rigorously established a list of contents with matching leaf numbers. He took on the traditional historian’s notion of a linear and teleological narrative (Rosenberg 1125), displaying his Victorian family history as Mrs Hilbery also does when she exhibits her treasured portfolio to her daughter Katharine in Night and Day. ‘[T]urning over the photographs’, ‘rambling on from story to story’ (124), she celebrates her great forebears, imposing famous gentlemen and angelic fair ladies who recall Julia Margaret Cameron’s photo book published in 1926 by the Hogarth Press. As she casually yet passionately unfolds the overwhelming ancestral narrative, her gaze remains fixed on an imperial, nationalist and gendered past.

I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House, in their flounces and furbelows, so calm and stately and imperial (and the monkey and the little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more than we do, I sometimes think. They WERE, and that’s better than doing. (Woolf 1978, 123)

9Her eyes glued to the images, caught in the mesmerising photogeny, Mrs Hilbery is sucked into an idealised visual history, with which she clearly identifies and which eventually entices her daughter too.

Katharine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men and women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces, and seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvellous dignity and calm, as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great love. Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough in a forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The superb stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past. (123–124)

  • 5 In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf ponders on the dialectical form she wants to give to her autobiogr (...)

10Katharine falls short of being dragged into the grand album narrative. Yet, the instant she sets her eyes on the plates and almost fails to identify with her ancestors, the young woman awakens. The ‘but’ highlights the startling rupture: Katharine does not feel targeted by this ancient tale. Quite the reverse. She suddenly awakens to set the now and the then in contrast5 and to willingly collide heterogeneous times, thus promoting a more dialectical conception of history. In his Arcade’s Project, Walter Benjamin calls it the dialectical structure of awakening.

Dialectical structure of awakening: remembering and awakening are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance. It is an eminently composed reversal from the world of dreaming to the world of wiling. . . . The new, dialectical method of doing history teaches us to pass in spirit—with the rapidity and intensity of dreams—through what has been, in order to experience the present as waking world, a world to which every dream at last refers. (Benjamin 884)

11To dream is to unconsciously remodel thoughts, memories and feelings into images. As psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis puts it: ‘the dream is what has been seen’ (38; translation mine). It offers another mental framework which is nurtured on ‘scraps, orts and fragments’ (Woolf 1969: 189) and builds up a ‘visual form of knowledge or a knowledgeable form of seeing’ (Didi-Huberman 2011, 13; translation mine). To me, the Monk’s House albums testify to this traversing of the past so as to experience the present as dialectical history. They entail a material and psychological activity.

Historical Time and Knowledge-Montage

  • 6 ‘What, therefore, is an operating field in this context? It is a determined place . . . capable of (...)
  • 7 Jane and Beth Bussy appear twice in album 5 (MH5 46–47). On both photographs, Dorothy is sitting in (...)

12Through her album volumes, Woolf questions ‘positivist linear intelligibility and historical causality’ (Spiropoulou 6). She displays a new order of things through what Melba Cuddy-Keane calls her ‘modernist perspectivism’ (166). The kinetic historical construction of the albums foregrounds Woolf’s subjective response to her photographic material which, unsurprisingly, disturbs immediate comprehension. The albums amount to an ‘atlas of the impossible’ (Foucault xviii) as they bring together different categories of image: portraits-carte de visite of mainly unknown Victorians, professional studio photographs, family memorabilia and contemporary mundane Monk’s House snapshots all sharing a common locus (xvii). Images are closely arranged next to one another and the very narrowness of the distance between them makes the arrangement confusing. The anachronistic sequences of images produce a perplexing temporal movement which annihilates ‘quiet contemplation’ (Warburg in Michaud 80; translation mine). The atlas-albums act as operating fields that exhibit temporal and categorial disorder in which images can be arranged without being fixed. They open a framed and bound space where miscellaneous realities can meet6 and which requires an active and perceptive viewing as the reflexive snaps of Beth and Jane Bussy illustrate.7

  • 8 For a definition of the concept, see Knape and Recht.
  • 9 ‘With Mnemosyne, Warburg founded an “iconology of intervals” that no longer focuses on objects, but (...)

13In the collusion generated by the paratactic structuring, recurring symptomatic gestures and attitudes silently come to be disclosed as surviving and recurring visual tropes akin to what Aby Warburg called Pathosformel.8 This emotionally charged sign-giving gesture language draws visual links throughout time and images. Sitting figures in Woolf’s album 3 which, in all likelihood, was assembled in the 1930s, compose such a visual trope. One experiences an uncanny feeling when observing the album’s first pages which surprisingly open with a professional portrait of Julia Stephen, apparently taken by Oskar Rejlander circa 1863–65. It is followed by a spectral blank page, the famous 1892 Talland library photograph which also figures in Leslie Stephen’s and Vanessa Bell’s albums, and a 1931 plate showing Leonard and Virginia which initiates the first consistent series of sitting contemporaries. Other comparable series are sprinkled throughout the following volumes. This montage refers us back to volume 1 and sends us forth to volume 6 which both compile a whole range of Victorian cartes de visite also figuring dutifully seated models. Given temporal incongruences, as we jump back and forth between the 19th and the 20th centuries, the albums foreground Woolf’s interest in iconographic tension, analogy, contrast and even contradiction. The novelist nurtures a Warburgian iconology of intervals which works in the same way as Eisenstein’s montage of attractions.9 The instability of the historical ordering showcases a social ritual that takes on an age-old class-bound tradition of portraiture and was photographically coded in the 1860s. The underlined habitus is entrenched in people’s gestures as well as in visual production. But Woolf’s albums also emphasise cultural mutations and appropriation, since posture changes considerably from one generation to the next.

  • 10 ‘The confusion of times is in every era, in every historical moment, in every image, and I would ev (...)

14Time thus seems to oscillate as Victorians and Moderns appear as at once similar and different. The albums’ deconstructive structure refutes linearity to promote a more paradoxical or contradictory conception of historical time. Suspended in a simultaneously periodising and ahistorical dialectical present, the constellation of photographs looks at the same time towards the past and towards the future. The albums present an intense and hallucinatory temporal tear. In each image, in each gesture, ages get confused.10 Woolf reconfigures photographic memory without arresting or fixing personal recollections on a timeline. Visual remembrance is at once personal and historical. Photographs in her collection are arranged to simultaneously see past and present anew; they foster historical awareness. Along with the mnemonic function of ‘figurative language of gesture’ (Warburg 58) this historical awakening in a tear or gap is at work in a short satirical passage of Mrs Dalloway, when Lady Millicent Bruton suddenly strikes an atavistic pose under Richard’s probing eye.

Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now, the General’s great-grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. . . .
Indeed, Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written there (one evening in the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an historical occasion. (Woolf 1981, 104–105; emphasis added)

  • 11 Didi-Huberman comments upon this strangeness in Warburg’s analysis of Ghirlandaio’s frescoes: ‘Bref (...)

15The inherited historical gesture re-enacts Bruton’s great-(great-)grand-father’s imposing military posture and noble stature as they are celebrated in the photograph. The text produces an uncanny superimposition as the Lady’s stiff demeanour suddenly freezes—her hand grasping a bunch of flowers—and duplicates that of her honourable ancestor holding an official document. Exhibiting General Talbot’s portrait, Lady Bruton acts as the guardian of a familial and national temple. Woolf here underlines the tight link between iconic celebration—true institutional display that has an ‘advertisement function’ (Woolf 1966, 20)—, imperialist propaganda and belligerent nationalist ideology. She also brings out women’s active role in the reproduction of the power and violence of masculine domination—after all Bruton sounds like a rather brutal name. The image of the alpha male has rubbed off on the woman’s aristocratic body which comes to assimilate and embody him. The photograph also acts as a memento of the Lady’s own victory as a colonial war adviser, the token of a discreet self-celebration. The then of Talbot’s image and the now of Lady Bruton’s pose are fused in an ambivalent dialectical present. Historical time seems suspended in the anachronistic temporal collision. We find the same strangeness of re-visitation11 in the 1924 Vogue photograph of Woolf wearing her Lady Ottoline dress. At once spooky and playfully parodic, archaeological and dynamic, the picture combines and dissolves past and present, opening up endless possible re-enactments. It captures a gaping historical time.

In the Archive: The Queen of Faculties

16Looking for symptoms and resurging visual motifs in the Monk’s House albums (and a systematic analysis is needed of those running through the six volumes), we could in the end make some sense of their hidden logic. Yet, we also have to confront the missing photographs which in all probability migrated elsewhere (we know Woolf exchanged images with family and friends). Indeed, Woolf’s visual archive also documents what Derrida calls ‘the life of forgetting’ (1994, 136): it acknowledges loss—‘keep loss as loss’, he says (2010, 19)—and preserves its surviving traces. One keeps the archive of “some thing” (of someone as some thing) which took place once and is lost, that one keeps as such, as the unkept, in short, a sort of cenotaph: an empty tomb’ (19). Loss is recorded on the pages through the surviving names inscribed beneath absent photographs; Woolf’s collection of bygone images thus also becoming an archive of disappearance.

17Indeed, the albums document erasure, an irretrievable history. The blanks are what condition movement, flexibility and liveliness but they also blatantly signal absence, erasure and annihilating oblivion. As historical documents, the albums literally offer what remains, piecemeal debris of what has been. What knowledge we can get from them is unstable and provisional. In this respect, they offer a new reading instrument, they force us to draw new links between scattered images, to make our own montage so as to be able to read what has never been written. Integral knowledge is, of course, denied. That is why the albums are at once dizzying and stimulating. Facing them, I am at once dazed by their sheer unknowability, their unbreakable secrecy—something in them will always remain resistant—and overwhelmed by the freedom they offer. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, images do not provide a closed field of knowledge but rather a ‘whirling and centrifugal’ one (Michaud 14; translation mine) that endlessly renews questions. They are unresolved and call upon our interpretative faculties, as Orlando’s witty biographer very well knows.

It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part in the public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. . . . the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination. (Woolf 2000, 74)

18When the ‘white light of facts’ (Woolf 1966, 45) provided by historical documents comes amiss, Woolf re-members the disparate constellation of remaining fragments, to provide creative facts, fertile facts, ‘facts that suggest and engender’ (Woolf 1993, 151). She stands as the advocate of a hybrid hermeneutic approach which blends archival knowledge and the powers of imagination to provide unforeseen insights and disclose an unconscious understanding that reveals a surviving knowledge at the crossroads of sensibility and intelligibility. Historical construction thus becomes as much poetic as it is accurately factual.

History in the Raw

  • 12 See MH4 6.
  • 13 See Three Guineas Scrapbook vol. 2, University of Sussex, Special Collections, SXMS-18/2/B/16/F/2.

19I wish to conclude with one last album phenomenon which helped Woolf read what had never been written and conditioned her feminist historical vision. On the second page of the fourth Monk’s House volume there is a newspaper clipping showing Lady Baldwin and her audience.12 The two cut-out images belong to the collection Woolf was building throughout the 1930s while working on the writing of The Years and Three Guineas. They belong to the ‘only evidence that [was] available to the daughters of educated men’, the one collected from ‘history, biography, and from the daily paper’ (Woolf 1966, 130) and later compiled in scrapbook volumes.13

20In the scrapbooks, we find image sequences as they were printed in the press, which picture powerful men and anonymous women, as well as montages of newspaper images which combine the portraits of celebrated men. This collection mirrors the 19th-century imagery assembled in Monk’s House volume 6 which shows institutional representatives as well as plate 7 of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne which displays the pathos of the winner. All these photographs will eventually be reduced to the five emblematic pictures in Three Guineas that represent a judge, royal heralds at the King’s coronation, a university procession and an archbishop (all well-known characters in Woolf’s time). We thus see that this odd assortment of Victorian cartes de visite and 1930s press images eventually form the matrix of the knowledge-montage at work in Woolf 1938 essay. The photographs constitute a decisive piece of historical visual knowledge—Clément Chéroux insists on the fact that photography is inherently historical (10)—which shaped Woolf denunciatory rhetorical strategy.

21Three Guineas draws a connection between two types of image, introducing a new type of dialectical historical discourse. Actual duplicated photographs of educated men and virtual generic images of war victims are put together to better unmask the horrors that hide behind the ostentatious ceremonies pictured in the text. ‘What connection is there between the sartorial splendour of the educated man and the photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies?’ (Woolf 1966, 21) asks Woolf, confronting the Then of an age-old patriarchal tradition to the Now of the Spanish Civil War. Juxtaposing images in praesentia and photographs in absentia, she elaborates a scathing argumentation that undermines conventional reasoning together with prevailing ideologies. Her arguments culminate in a flabbergasting prophetic textual superimposition which, in its symbolical efficiency, equates all future historical commentaries.

 . . . another picture has imposed itself upon the foreground. It is the figure of a man; some say, others deny, that he is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Fürher or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies—men, women and children. (142)

22At the tip of Woolf’s pen, the scrapbook images of Hitler or Mussolini, the portraits shown in the essay (which carry in their folds a whole gestural iconographic tradition as shown in the albums and scrapbooks) and the absent war photographs merge to compose one single horrifying image, the picture of Horror itself. This staggering textual superimposition is as strong a historical statement as John Heartfield’s or Erwin Blumenfeld’s Dada photomontages were. I think of Blumenfeld’s Hitler, Face of Terror, made in 1933, and his Dictator series, made between 1933 and 1937. Through montage, Woolf found ‘some more energetic, some more active method of expressing our belief that war is barbarous, that war is inhuman’ (12). She built a heteroclite and disturbing historical reading which shifts the gaze to better open it. This is why I read Three Guineas as an ‘open form of inventive thinking’ (Didi-Huberman 2010, 94; translation mine); a form that calls for Mrs Ramsay’s idiosyncratic zig-zag deciphering more than Mr Ramsay’s straight and alphabetical reading.

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Bibliographie

Austen, Jane, Persuasion, Oxford: OUP, 1998.

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard UP, 2002.

Cassigneul, Adèle, ‘“Betwixt and Between”: Virginia Woolf and the Art of Craftsmanship’, Études britanniques contemporaines 54 (2018), last accessed on 25 January 2025 at http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4390; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.4390.

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

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Neverow, Vara, ‘Thinking Back Through Our Mothers, Thinking in Common: Virginia Woolf’s Photographic Imagination and the Community of Narrators in Jacob’s Room, A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas’, Virginia Woolf and Communities. Selected Papers of the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds. Jeanette Mcvicker and Laura Davis, New York: PUP, 1999, 65–90.

Pontalis, J.-B., La Force d’attraction. Trois essais de psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1990.

Recht, Roland, ‘L’Atlas Mnemonsyne d’Aby Warburg’, Aby Warburg, L’Atlas Mnémosyne. Écrits II, Paris: L’écarquillé, 2012, 7–48.

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Notes

1 Virginia Woolf’s photo albums are held by Harvard Houghton Library. A digitalised version of all six volumes is accessible online (https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/3265). In her ground-breaking work, Maggie Humm was the first to put forward several readings of the album volumes: a bio-historical analysis in Snapshots of Bloomsbury (2006), which comes with a precious catalogue raisonné, and a feminist study in Modernist Women and Visual Cultures, which drew on psychoanalytic and visual theories (2002).

2 See Cassigneul.

3 In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee corroborates: ‘her first publication in book form was her unsigned contribution to Maintland’s biography—fulfilling the expected role for the family’s woman historian’ (57).

4 Leslie Stephen’s album is in the Smith College Special Collections (identifier: MRBC-MS-00005). Its digital version is accessible online: https://compass.fivecolleges.edu/object/smith:1342146.

5 In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf ponders on the dialectical form she wants to give to her autobiographical notes: ‘It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast’ (1985, 75).

6 ‘What, therefore, is an operating field in this context? It is a determined place . . . capable of making heterogeneous orders of reality meet, then of constructing this very meeting in place of overdetermination. It is a “table” on which one decides to place certain disparate things with a view to establishing multiple “intimate and secret relations,” an area possessing its own rules of arrangement and of transformation for relinking certain things whose links are not at all obvious. And for making these links, once they are brought to light, the paradigms of a rereading of the world’ (Didi-Huberman 2018, 39–40).

7 Jane and Beth Bussy appear twice in album 5 (MH5 46–47). On both photographs, Dorothy is sitting in an armchair, leafing through and album while Jane leans over her to watch the snapshots. One of the images captures Dorothy’s blurred gesture, picturing the actual movement of reading.

8 For a definition of the concept, see Knape and Recht.

9 ‘With Mnemosyne, Warburg founded an “iconology of intervals” that no longer focuses on objects, but on tensions, analogies, contrasts or contradictions’ (Michaud 238–239; translation mine).

10 ‘The confusion of times is in every era, in every historical moment, in every image, and I would even say in every gesture of our body. If I call for a “knowledge through montage”, it is because every social and historical object constitutes itself as a montage’ (Didi-Huberman 2008, 12; translation mine).

11 Didi-Huberman comments upon this strangeness in Warburg’s analysis of Ghirlandaio’s frescoes: ‘Bref, c’est l’étrangeté qui prend ici le pouvoir d’intensifier un geste présent en le vouant au temps fantomal des survivances. C’est l’étrangeté qui, dans la collision anachronique du Maintenant (la servante) et de l’Autrefois (la Victoire), ouvre au style son futur même, sa capacité à changer et à se reformer entièrement—comme Warburg l’énonce quelquefois sous le terme d’Umstilisierung’ (2001, 144).

12 See MH4 6.

13 See Three Guineas Scrapbook vol. 2, University of Sussex, Special Collections, SXMS-18/2/B/16/F/2.

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Adèle Cassigneul, « History Breaks Down into Images: Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House Albums »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 09 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16472 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141go

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Adèle Cassigneul

Dr Adèle Cassigneul specialises in Woolfian studies, text/image relationships and gender studies. She is a board member of MAI: feminism and visual culture, the editor of the online journal Outsider, co-editor of Polysèmes, and the treasurer of the French Virginia Woolf Society. She is the author of Voir, observer, penser. Virginia Woolf et la photo-cinématographie (PUM, 2018) and Woolf (Pérégrines, 2025).

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