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Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

‘The imagination is largely the child of the flesh’: Virginia Woolf’s Embodied Historicity

« The imagination is largely the child of the flesh » : l’historicité incarnée de Virginia Woolf
Catherine Bernard

Résumés

‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1930, puis 1931) occupe une place particulière dans l’œuvre d’essayiste de Virginia Woolf. Tout à la fois essai politique et travail de réminiscence, réflexion sociologique et exploration méta-historique, cet essai doit se lire comme l’une des expérimentations les plus visionnaires de Woolf dans le domaine de l’écriture de l’histoire. Woolf y sonde la nature expérientielle de l’histoire, ainsi que la manière dont l’identité et les structures de domination sont incarnées et s’inscrivent dans le quotidien. Cette approche expérimentale de l’histoire évoque certains tournants historiographiques du xxsiècle, des travaux de l’historienne de l’économie Eileen Power, à l’histoire de la sensibilité, ou à la micro-histoire. L’attention que Woolf porte à l’identité sociale incarnée et la réflexivité de sa lecture anticipent sur certaines évolutions plus tardives de l’historiographie, telles qu’articulées par Raphael Samuel ou encore Yvan Jablonka. S’appuyant sur l’essai de 1931, ainsi que son journal de l’année 1926 ou A Room of One’s Own, cet article met en lumière la nature empiriste de l’écriture de l’histoire pratiquée par Woolf et la manière dont la réflexivité de l’écrivaine s’enracine dans la réalité expérientielle des structures de pouvoir politiques et culturelles.

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Notes de l’auteur

This article is a revised and expanded version of a plenary lecture, given at the Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History international conference held in Rouen, in 2018 and co-organised by Anne Besnault, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio and Marie Laniel.

Texte intégral

  • 1 See Anne Besnault’s Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories. Conversations with the Nineteenth Century (...)

1Virginia Woolf’s engagement with history and history writing has elicited numerous explorations of her dialogue with historians of past generations, specifically when that dialogue sheds light on her historicising of literature and literary history.1 Repeated emphasis has been placed on her critical debunking of the normative language of history and on her defence of a form of history writing that might trace alternative legacies, in keeping with her own historiographical critique of dominant strategies of reading the past. Tania Modleski’s early focus on Woolf’s ironical take on discursivity underlined the unstable relation to truth-making inherent, according to her, in Woolf’s feminist history writing. Rewriting the past from the point of view of the disenfranchised and what Modleski names ‘the mute body’, Woolf places a wedge in the architecture of meaning and opens the door to a hermeneutics working against meaning, a hermeneutics that produces history ‘inaccurately’ (Modleski 22). Her playing with history writing is thus, for Modleski, no denial of historicity, but on the contrary a way of writing the past historiographically, with a profound and demanding awareness of its determinisms and of what history keeps silent: ‘Far from eliding the question of history and avoiding historical conflict, then, Woolf actually stages a conflict with the past, complicating the notion of history and simultaneously demonstrating a commitment to its very absences’ (Modleski 22). Such a commitment to the obscure and the absent has fuelled critical interest, with specific attention being, needless to say, paid to the convergence of history and biography, for the capacity of life-writing to engage with the dialectics of the public and the private, the collective and the individual, as was also evidenced by the Modernist New Biography (see Laura Marcus 2002).

Untimeliness / Contemporaneity

  • 2 In her article ‘Who’s afraid of Rosamond Merridew?: Reading Medieval History in “The Journal of Mis (...)

2The early years of the 20th century were propitious to a rethinking of the material and boundaries of history writing. As Leena Kore-Schröder has amply shown, Woolf’s early acquaintance with Frederic William Maitland, the medievalist—who was also a relative of the Stephens—, must have fostered in her an already revisionist attitude to history and a passion for ‘specific detail’ and the ‘uncanonical evidence’ of ‘incidental archival papers’ that may grant access to the sole object and subject of history, i.e. ‘what is human’ (Kore-Schröder 6). Virginia Woolf’s acquaintance with Maitland was more than a passing or distant one, since, as Anne Besnault reminds us, she agreed in 1904 to help him with the writing of Leslie Stephen’s biography and expressed her admiration for his work (Besnault 16, note 21). From Maitland Woolf may have learnt to trust in the heuristic potential of imagination and story-telling, since ‘to understand history in this way, is also to allow for its narrativity’ (Kore-Schröder 6).2 Ultimately, it was Maitland’s reading our relation to the past in terms of relationality, rather than teleological linearity, that may have influenced her own revisionist embrace of the past, a relationality that makes our link to the past synchronous rather than merely diachronic and that also, in more immediately political terms, extends to the ordinary and thus pluralises historical agency, a lesson she was to carry over into fiction-writing:

  • 3 Kore-Schröder is quoting from Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction.’

What Maitland makes possible for Woolf, therefore, is nothing short of the ability to appreciate what ‘ordinariness’ can mean in itself, for if she seeks to understand an ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ she first needs a history that operates in terms of relation rather than exclusion. (Kore-Schröder 11)3

  • 4 For a history of Power’s involvement with the LSE, see Pomata as well as Harte.
  • 5 For a close reading of Woolf’s and Power’s distant acquaintance see Kore-Schröder (4–5); see also t (...)
  • 6 Anne Besnault notes that Woolf did buy Power’s essay and that she read it alongside the work of Ame (...)

3Woolf’s almost exact contemporary, Eileen Power, a close colleague of economic historian R.H. Tawney, was also to displace the historian’s gaze in order to cast it on the unknown and potentially irretrievable agents of history: the unrecorded multitude. In her 1924 essay, Medieval People, as Kore-Schröder insists (4), Power deliberately adopted the point of view of the common in order to peer into the ‘kitchens of History’ (Power chapter 1, ebook). Her ‘social history’—the opening words of Power’s preface to that same essay—is one that challenges entrenched historiographic hierarchies and proceeds through a sort of montage of archival material in order to include the overlooked, a montage that incorporates: ‘the estate book of a manorial lord, the chronicle and traveller’s tale, the bishop’s register, the didactic treatise in household management, the collection of family letters, and houses, brasses, and wills’ (Power Preface, ebook). Power’s career further testifies to her commitment to a pluridisciplinarity that looked ahead in its belief in the necessity to write history at the juncture of disciplines. A Director of studies in history at Girton College, Cambridge, from 1913 to 1921, she transferred to the London School of Economics, where she became Professor of economic history in 1931.4 Although Power’s influence on Woolf cannot be established as explicitly as Maitland’s,5 Woolf shared Power’s belief that ‘history, after all, is valuable only in so far at it lives’ (Power Preface, ebook).6

  • 7 Marc Bloch reviewed Eileen Power and Michael Moissey Postan’s essay Studies in English Trade in the (...)
  • 8 On the implicit affinities between Eileen Power and Marc Bloch, see Natalie Zemon Davis: ‘History’s (...)
  • 9 They thus also distanced themselves from what French historiography defines as histoire méthodique, (...)

4Woolf’s approach to the material of history was thus not as idiosyncratic as it has been made out to be, if one remembers that, just as she was Power’s contemporary, she was the contemporary of the Annales School. Both Power and the Annales School opened modern perspectives on the writing of the past and Power’s work was reviewed by Marc Bloch,7 who, himself a medievalist, admired Power’s broadening the remit of historical materialism. He also urged a change of temporal perspective allowing to take into account a less linear embodied history,8 and critics have alluded to Woolf’s and the Annales’ shared insistence on ‘a slow-moving social history as opposed to the histoire événementielle, the faster history of events’ (Gualtieri 157, note 30).9

  • 10 In her reading of A Room of One’s Own, in Virginia Woolf, Catharine R. Stimpson similarly notes tha (...)
  • 11 Anne Besnault also turns to Jablonka in relation to Woolf, in her 2021 essay (see 63–64, 84–85).

5Crucial here is Woolf’s careful attention to what Marc Bloch defined, for his part, in his 1941 essay Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien as ‘knowledge by trace’ (quoted in Reynier 150). Like him, she trusts in the brittle and silent fragments of inchoate narratives waiting to be pieced together, reconfigured and reimagined.10 Reading Woolf as a contemporary and maybe a fellow of such historians as Power and Bloch might seem a tall claim to make; Woolf precisely denies any ambition to write as a historian and repeatedly pictures herself rather as a hoarder, a gleaner of ‘scraps, orts and fragments’, as the narrative voice famously puts it in Between the Acts (Woolf 1978, 137). But her attention to these scraps and orts is precisely what makes her a historian of sorts. With Power and the historians of the Annales School, Woolf knows the hermeneutic potential of traces. She knows that these fragments will yield no stable meaning, but that they might channel a form of intelligibility allowing us to make sense of past experiences, of life as it was lived. In that sense, she already radically anticipated historiographic experiments to come, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory that was to bring history even closer to the minutiae of past lives in an undefeated ‘attempt to rescue from oblivion the lives of the marginal, defeated people’ (Ginzburg 682). In his manifesto History is a Contemporary Literature, French historian Ivan Jablonka for his part insists that ‘there is no “past” as such, or “facts” to be uncovered. There are only problems, that is questions asked of / to the traces—objects, documents, witnesses—left to surface’ (Jablonka 164; my translation). And for Jablonka, such questions can only be couched in a form that narrativises those traces at the juncture of history and story-telling.11

  • 12 I am grateful to my friend and colleague French historian Gabrielle Houbre for drawing my attention (...)

6Critics have amply commented on Woolf’s ‘humble’ ethics of language (Reynier 19–44), on her political reading of the material reality of ‘ordinary experience’, with Lorraine Sim for instance stressing how her humble take on ordinary material life develops into an ‘ethics of the ordinary’ that harbours a historical consciousness concerned with ‘community and our knowledge of others’ (Sim 175). Such ethics of the ordinary also goes with an acute sense of the historicity of experience and of cultural determinisms. In that sense, Woolf is indeed Marc Bloch’s and Lucien Febvre’s contemporary. But she is also the contemporary of the history of sensations and emotions, already defended by Lucien Febvre in a 1941 essay ’La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois ?’,12 and later on championed by Alain Corbin.

7Woolf is both of her time, a true contemporary of her own present, and also somehow writing back from the future of historiography. Her questioning of the alleged truth regime of history writing and her certainty that the past should above all be recaptured as a lived and embodied experience make her a contemporary of the historiographic innovations of her time and also luminously untimely in her capacity to anticipate the empirical imagination of historians writing against the grain of history, an imagination entangled in the flesh of the present. Her contemporaneity is thus a complex one; it lies in her anxious, conflicted relation to experience, whether past or present. Such a conflicted relation opens a rift between the experience of the present and its belated retracing, a disjuncture that is of the essence of her history writing. Crucial to what Angeliki Spiropoulou has termed her ‘fissured contemporaneity’ is thus her paradoxical mode of addressing her present, of being both of her time and always already distant, at one remove, both immersed in it and external to it, as if she addressed the present ‘from a time that does not belong to the contemporary world and which therefore allows its being addressed’ (Spiropoulou 2014, 155–156). Spiropoulou reads Woolf’s fissured contemporaneity as reminiscent of Baudelaire’s conception of the ‘painter of modern life’ who embraces the ephemeral and the timeless. Such untimeliness also anticipates recent Nietzschean readings of the contemporary, such as Giorgio Agamben’s in What is the Contemporary? (2008), and it might be interesting to mention that, in that essay, Agamben turns to a poem by Ossip Mandelstam, ‘The Century’, written in 1923, to understand how the poet / the writer both probes the wounds of the new century and heals them ‘with his own blood’. For Agamben, it is the poet’s conflicted ‘appointment’ with the present, her / his capacity to be both of now and of the future that will retroactively disclose the pattern concealed in the present:

It is important to realize that the appointment that is in question in contemporariness does not simply take place in chronological time: it is something that, working within contemporary time, urges, presses, and transforms it. And this urgency is the untimeliness, the anachronism that permits us to grasp our time in the form of a ‘too soon,’ that is also a ‘too late’; of an ‘already’ that is also a ‘not yet.’ (Agamben 47)

8Such untimeliness, Ivan Jablonka has recently argued, is inherent in the posture historians must adopt. It ensures a form of objectivity and detachment that also paradoxically binds them more strongly to what he defines as ‘the context of relevance defined by the question’ (Jablonka 165) asked to / of the traces and witnesses of the past. And such a posture is one already favoured by Woolf who often imagines herself standing behind her window, being both of the present and aloof from it, looking on. Towards the conclusion of A Room of One’s Own—the passage has become iconic of her reflexive involvement with the present—she imagines her persona looking on, as a man and a woman converge across two opposite corners of a square to hop into the same cab. In her 1926 diary, she also recounts how she observes London making do during the great Strike, and she meta-generically fantasises on a possible Strike diary:

Wednesday 5 May
An exact diary of the Strike would be interesting. For instance, it is now a ¼ to 2: there is a brown fog: nobody is building; it is drizzling. The first thing in the morning we stand at the window & watch the traffic in Southampton Row. This is incessant. Everyone is bicycling; motor cars are huddled up with extra people. There are no buses. No placards. No newspapers. The men are at work in the road; water, gas & electricity are allowed; but at 11 the light was turned off. I sat in the press in the brown fog, while L. wrote an article for the Herald. (Woolf 1982, 77)

  • 13 Melba Cuddy-Keane insists on Woolf’s exploration of ‘Historicist experience’ in her chapter ‘Virgin (...)

9Here, we might say, Woolf seems to learn empirically from a form of ‘raw’ anthropology, or ‘pensée sauvage’ (Lévi-Strauss), that same anthropology that was to inspire the history of sensibilities, as Alain Corbin explains in a 1992 article tentatively mapping the vast and complex tracts that history aims to encompass: ‘In short, historical anthropology, the history of sensibilities, that of emotions, of collective psychology, and that of the subject converge in the interwoven fabric of objects and processes’ (Corbin 1992, 125; my translation). In the entry of her May 1926 diary, Woolf turns anthropologist, an anthropologist of the present harvesting impressions and facts, archiving the present as she experiences it. An empirical confrontation with history is taking place, as the experiential reality of economic struggle and class relations is both imagined and lived, with Woolf extracting herself from the present even as she registers it to reflect on a question that is crucial to history writing: how do we elaborate the material of experience into a system of proofs? How can personal experience testify to a collective reality?13

  • 14 Paul Ricœur also insists on the empiricist nature of the reconstruction of past experiences in his (...)

10In that entry of her diary, matter-of-factness is held in tension with complex identity structures ruling over what, with Jacques Rancière, we might define as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2000). The window pane works as a glass case behind which a ‘we’—Woolf and Leonard, but, more impersonally the Londoners maybe and society at large—stands aloof, looking at the bustling crowd of people, at ‘the men’—indiscriminate and generic—working in the drizzle and the fog, while a no less impersonal, but all-powerful, authority decides whether water will ‘be allowed’ or ‘light . . . turned off’. The facts accumulate in their deceptively candid materiality, as if they were suspended in a timeless present. Only the return to a personal point of view will transmute this random harvest of facts into a narrative. The preterite eventually returns, the subjective narrative thus endowing the factual harvest with the density and clarity of personal history.14 The random archive of the present can at last become what Alain Corbin defined as an ‘inner / intimate archive’ (Corbin 2006, 7; quoted in Jablonka 168). Following in the steps of Alain Corbin, Ivan Jablonka insists that such transmutation of raw facts into an ‘intimate archive’ is of the essence of the intuitive, empathic comprehension of the past (Jablonka 168). And such transmutation is also of the essence of Woolf’s relation to her own time as history in the making.

Towards an Empathic Materialism

11Over and over, Woolf pictures herself, a committed observer, examining the power relations determining the distribution of the sensible as well as the identity formations presiding over political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement. In A Room of One’s Own, even as she is carried along by the flow of reflections and mental associations, the observer / narrator elaborates a phenomenology that turns sensations and impressions into the very material of political intellection. Whether in Cambridge or London, the observer / narrator harvests impressions and weaves them into a narrative that reconfigures the very mechanisms of hegemony. Hegemony is shown to be both inherited, and also of the present, buttressed by a more modern, more immediately effective kind of machinery.

12That machinery is, Woolf very early on intuits, that of the culture industry, of the mass media and of the new circulation of images. It is observed at work in a passage rarely noticed by critics in which Woolf’s persona is confronted with an ‘in-your-face’ instance of patriarchal hegemony. The recollection of her puzzling and somewhat painful trip to Cambridge is followed by her visit to the British Library, during which she tries to understand men’s anger against women, an anger that has to do with their positivist analysis of women as a species. Pretending to be nonplussed, she leaves the Library and ‘stroll[s] off to find a place for luncheon’ (Woolf 1992, 42). As she settles down in a small restaurant she wonders about the source of men’s anger. Her anthropological and ultimately political musings are already fully embodied in that moment of lull, as she waits for her lunch. At this point, her private reflections are frontally impacted by the present as captured on the front page of ‘the lunch edition of the evening paper’, ‘left by some previous luncher’ (42). In that in-between moment of suspension, she begins to read the headlines and is confronted with the raw and brutal conflation of items crystallising the complex apparatus of domination in which the leisure industry and the law, the media and history at large all work to consolidate patriarchy:

A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. Somebody had made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar. Mr Justice—commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. (42–43)

13In the contemporary economy of domination, every single aspect of what, in Marxist terms, must be defined as the base and superstructure of the system presiding over the law and the economy, culture and production, is placed in the hands of men:

His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. (Woolf 1992, 42–43)

14Woolf’s persona comes face to face with the workings of hegemony and her indictment is as direct and frontal as the visual manipulation of the front page is indirect. Turning her back on the British Library and its world of privileged and pampered knowledge, she plunges into the world of modernity, rendered here through montage: the restaurant scene being juxtaposed with the British Library scene and the front page evincing the visual short-cuts of modern journalism and news editing. The same montage technique was, as we know, also central, at the same moment, to John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, and the Dadaism of the likes of Kurt Schwitters or John Hartfield.

  • 15 The reference to Chamberlain in Geneva is no doubt a reference to the negotiations that had started (...)

15According to Patrick Collier, one of the few critics to have turned to this passage, the scene ‘replays . . . as a climactic theoretical scene’ the ‘climactic fictional scene’ of Mrs Dalloway, i.e. Septimus’s suicide (Collier 114). When ‘sacrificing [the] ready-made victim’ Septimus is cast to be, Woolf ‘thrust[s] him out of the fictional world onto the fencepost of historicity’ (Collier 114). In A Room of One’s Own the fencepost of historicity does not prove as immediately lethal for the essay’s persona, but is meant to be read as equally brutal: the frontlines speak of murder and international tensions,15 of the exploitative culture industry of Hollywood, of the overall collusion of judicial, political and financial power. She was of course to develop the same argument in Three Guineas nine years later. Her interpretation of the mass media and the new culture industry as instruments of hegemony and alienation is also reminiscent of her 1926 essay on cinema in which she vents her suspicions regarding the new hypnotic power of cinema on the passive spectator, a spectator immersed in sensation and unable to step back and reflect. As we know, Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, comes to similar conclusions when he cautions against ‘the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind’ (Benjamin 232).

16To the hypnotic power of the new mass media, Woolf opposes the typically avant-garde praxis of defamiliarising representation, of reading the image against the grain, that is against the numbing effect of the mass media. The repurposed headlines acquire an avant-garde capacity to disclose the surreptitiously seamless logic of the front-page and its collusion with the hegemonic structures of patriarchy and capitalism. Like Bertolt Brecht in his War Diaries—his Kriegsfibel—, which also try to come to terms with the visual language of history and its phenomenology, she undoes the ideological montage that governs the modern mass media. Georges Didi-Huberman’s commentary on Brecht’s War Diaries in volume 1 of The Eye of History seems here to apply. Just as Didi-Huberman argues about Brecht’s critical appropriation of montage and the leverage it offers him to reflect on history in the making, Woolf undoes the naturalised technique of journalistic montage in order to uncover the cultural apparatus structuring our historical horizon. And what she sees as instrumental to a pernicious strategy of containment has to do with the massification of culture, the dislocated juxtaposition of culture and politics, the deceptive autonomy of culture as regards politics.

17She builds and expands on this critique in Three Guineas, when she drops the mask of subtle irreverence and no longer adopts a persona, but writes as herself, an angry woman. Woolf’s sharp unpicking of discursive formations remained a hallmark of her reading of power relations and one can only be struck by the nascent intersectionality at work in her indictment of patriarchy. The headlines of the evening paper do not merely work as synecdochic traces of a day in the life of the country and of an increasingly globalised world. They are shown to articulate the very conditions of political and historical intelligibility. Their montage refracts history in the making, at the juncture of the private and the public, of experience and intellection, an entanglement of collective and individual history that is the very fabric of the history of sensibilities.

History in the Raw

18‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ and the revised version of the essay published as an introduction to the volume Life as we Have Known It edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies and published by the Hogarth Press in 1931 in association with the Women’s Co-operative Guild show Woolf at her most reflexive and her most incarnate. Both texts should also be read as experiments in self-reflexive history writing in which Woolf takes the paradox of the committed observer—who stands both within and without—as the very subject of her experiment.

  • 16 For a detailed exploration of the Woolfs’ involvement in the cooperative movement, see Jones, chapt (...)
  • 17 On the editorial history of the Yale Review essay and the ‘Introduction’, see Jane Marcus (1977, 28 (...)

19These two texts are crucial fragments in Woolf’s constant, if indirect and complex, engagement with history. They constitute crucial links between A Room of One’s Own, and the ‘history in the raw’ of Three Guineas (Woolf 1992, 159), while somehow anticipating on the political agenda of The Years. The complex history of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s versioning of the 1930 original text, published first in Yale Review at the invitation of Helen McAfee and reworked to serve as an introduction to Life as We Have Known It, is proof of Woolf’s conception of history as intimate and collective.16 The complex negotiations between Woolf and Llewelyn Davies over the aim and scope of the introduction may indeed be read, between the lines, as a poetics of history writing, a poetics that strikes a fine balance between the generic and the private and that is inherently embodied. In a letter to Llewelyn Davies, dated 14th September 1930, Woolf explains that she has made some of the changes suggested by Llewelyn Davies, in order to tone down the essay’s at times ironical phrasings and make sure the text does not ‘give pain’ and is not ‘misunderstood’ (Woolf 2009b, 239). She is also convinced, with Leonard, that going further than that would altogether change the perspective adopted by Woolf and consequently weaken it. The point of the introduction is, according to Woolf, ‘that it gives a particular persons [sic] impression’, and that the personal angle should not be tempered with too much: ‘The difficulty with impressions is that if you once start altering from the best of motives everything gets blurred and out of proportion’ (Woolf 2009b, 240).17

20What Llewelyn Davies seems to have objected to anticipates the discomfort later critics were also to feel concerning Woolf’s seeming snobbishness, her aloofness when looking on, from afar and from above, at lives too remote from hers to be truly meaningful to her. In Virginia Woolf. Ambivalent Activist, Clara Jones returns to the heated debate the essay has elicited. Mary M. Childers’ 1992 article ‘Virginia Woolf from the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women’, Kate Flint’s 1996 piece ‘Reading Uncommonly: Virginia Woolf and the Practice of Reading’ and Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) testify to Woolf’s elusive historical perspective. For Laura Marcus it is Woolf’s explicit reluctance at ‘imagin[ing] cross-class knowledge and empathy’ (Laura Marcus 2000, 223) that makes it virtually impossible to solve the inner contradictions opened by the text. For Mary Childers, ‘the preface remains a politically and stylistically problematic performance because it allows too much to be disavowed and too many contradictions to go unexplored’ (Childers 71), and Patricia Laurence understands Woolf’s final transcension of class differences as an effect of her aestheticising the working-class women’s gestures (Laurence 12).

21Angeliki Spiropoulou’s reading of Woolf’s historicity has shown how the argument of self-contradiction may in fact provide the required purchase to ‘redeem Woolf for materialism’ (Spiropoulou 2010, 10). In that sense, ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ and the ‘Introduction’ might be read as paving the way for Three Guineas; and Spiropoulou’s approach to Three Guineas might just as well apply to the two texts and to their critical awareness of Woolf’s own material conditioning: ‘Woolf displays an acute awareness of the difficulty and even the dishonesty of undertaking to represent a social category to which one does not belong and hence does not share common experiences’ (Spiropoulou 2010, 11). Such awareness underlies Woolf’s recalling of her 1913 visit to the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s annual congress in Newcastle. It accompanies the writer-historian’s evocation of those ‘lives of the obscure’ she consistently tried to bring back to the fore of our historical consciousness, the ‘unofficial knowledge’ historian Raphael Samuel also revives in Theatres of Memory, when he champions a plural history of practices and sensibilities:

  • 18 A very similar take on history as practice structures Michel de Certeau’s experimental series The P (...)

History . . . is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands. . . . [T]he point of address in any discussion of historiography should not be the work of the individual scholar, . . . but rather the ensemble of activities and practices in which ideas of history are embedded or a dialetic of past-present relations is rehearsed. (Samuel 8)18

22Some seventeen years after the Woolfs’ trip to Newcastle, Woolf looks back and confronts the traces left in her memory by that encounter with otherness. So doing, her recollection addresses a doubly complex historiographic process: that of remembering an experience that was already conflicted, and that of understanding how memory rewrites that past experience. In that dialectic, the new theory of empathy plays a crucial political role. Clara Jones reminds the reader that Vernon Lee’s introduction of the term ‘empathy’ also dates back to 1913, in The Beautiful. An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Jones 131). Lee’s conception of empathy is geared towards aesthetic contemplation and seems an extension of Paterian aesthetics. But in ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, and the ‘Introduction’, empathy weaves together private emotions and the re-articulation of those emotions within a collective, contested narrative. In the first part of the Yale essay, Woolf struggles with her inability to empathise with the co-operative delegates who spoke up for reform and demanded ‘divorce, education, the vote—all good things’ she adds in a seemingly patronising tone:

All these questions—perhaps this was the bottom of it—which matter so intensely to the people here, questions of sanitation and education and wages, this demand for an extra shilling, for another year at school, for eight hours instead of nine behind a counter or in a mill, leave me, in my own blood and bones, untouched. (Woolf 2009a, 178)

23The detachment, produced by class-differences, seems intractable. But one should not, I would like to argue, overlook the attention she grants to the factual content of the workers’ demands or the physicality of her metaphors. What Woolf’s puzzled and yet paradoxically embodied detachment also foregrounds is the material nature of that sense of communality that the co-operative was promoting. The difference between Woolf and the delegates is one of class as embodied, concrete experience. The difference is both of feeling and structure. It enacts the distribution of the sensible and the empirical reality of one’s historicity. It is what the very body politic is about. Woolf’s essay aims at exploring the political phenomenology of that difference. It also aims at opening up the possibility of bridging that chasm to think and feel collectively, from beyond and yet from within class differences. In that sense, Woolf is also an untimely historian of the present in the way she proposes what philosopher David Carr was, some eighty years later, to define as a phenomenological approach to historicity. With Carr, and in the tortuous wake of the Annales School and the history of sensibilities, Woolf experiments with ‘a phenomenology of the interplay of points of view’ (Carr 197) that has a ‘narrative existence’ (Carr 230) of words and flesh.

24The reality of physical experience is what opens up a sense of historicity. Throughout Woolf’s essay, the body plays a crucial part in the conjuring up of a reality that remains alien to her and yet which insists in all its physical and political stubbornness. Critics have often taken her fragmentary, modernist vision of ‘arms plunged in hot water’, of ‘thickset muscular bodies’ (Woolf 2009a, 180) as a symptom of her innate class-superiority (Light 204–205). Yet, as Childers also notes, what has been identified as ‘the failures of altruism’ goes with a not so covert capacity to turn her irony against herself and what the 1931 introduction derides as her ‘comfortable, capitalistic head’ (Woolf 2009b, 227), and one should not ignore the changes she made to her Yale essay, when she reworked it. As Jane Marcus underlines, the ‘cynicism is gone’ from the ‘Introduction’ and Woolf shows herself ‘more politically committed to the cooperative cause’ (Jane Marcus 1977, 282). Distance and irony go hand in hand with an intense consciousness of the materiality and corporeality of class determinisms and of life as it is lived across the class divide.

  • 19 One might also read Woolf’s embodied historicity and her empiricist approach to the historicised pa (...)
  • 20 In a curious mock-poetic text ‘Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Bu (...)

25As we know, the essay is made of two almost equal halves. The reminiscence of the 1913 congress is followed by another, more intimate reminiscence, that of the working women’s letters sent to the guild. The experience of puzzlement and alienness is here replaced by the highly Woolfian experience of a gaze turned in, while it turns to the other, through reading. Empathy is at last fully embodied, through reading, and imagination comes into its own to make sense of these disparate, fragmentary memories.19 The offspring of neo-empiricism, Woolf’s modernist take on communal life, and on the body politic, is one in which political materialism is always already embodied, a ‘child of the flesh’, as much as a child of the mind, as she suggests about her own incapacity to empathise with these women: ‘But after all the imagination is largely the child of the flesh. One could not be Mrs Giles of Durham because one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s supper’ (Woolf 2009a, 179). The full criticity of her paradoxical position is encapsulated in the adverb ‘whatever’ that may sound dismissive of the actual reality of a miner’s life and is an index of the no less actual determinisms inducing such dismissal.20 As often with Woolf, her self-fictionalising makes it impossible to fully tease out the contradictions of her ethical and political positioning. Yet, even as she returns insistently to the alienness of those working-class lives, she acknowledges her failure at imagining the lives of others, a failure that becomes a fully political experience.

  • 21 Woolf’s stance is here vastly different from what transpires in her ‘Report on Teaching at Morley C (...)

26Symmetrically, her attentive immersion in the written lives of these women affords the sense of communality that also opens up a space for a shared imaginary experience. Another figure of the common reader materialises here through an act of reading carrying a form of historiographic ethics. What eventually allows Woolf to truly revive these women as individuals rather than ‘militaristic automatons’ (Childers 68), as she seems to do in the first half of her essay, lies in her immersing herself in an act of readerly communion, when she is at last entrusted with the letters recording life as some of these working-class women ‘have known it’. As crucial to their emancipation as the improvement of her living conditions is, Woolf observes, their being passionate and obstinate readers.21 ‘The extraordinary vitality of the human spirit’ manifesting itself in that craving for reading seems at first to conflict with the alienating physicality of ‘childbirth and washing up’ (Woolf 2009b, 235). Yet the polar tension is itself misleading. That craving is just as embodied and material as the economic conditions stunting their cultural aspirations:

That inborn energy . . . had propped the poems of Burns against a dish cover while cooking. They read at meals; they read before going to the mill. . . . They read with the indiscriminate greed of a hungry appetite, that crams itself with toffee and beef and tarts and vinegar and champagne all in one gulp. (Woolf 2009b, 235)

27The empathic extended simile reads like a fragmented self-portrait of the young Virginia Stephen frantically immersing herself in her father’s library. It recaptures the childlike and complex wonder of indulging in reading at the risk of surfeiting. It also joyfully overlooks the economy of decorous taste and pairs beef and champagne, tarts and vinegar. Ultimately, Woolf’s encounter with these mirror experiences of emancipatory reading overthrows the exacting distribution of the sensible that maintains the experience of those obscure lives in a state of inchoate inarticulacy. By allowing us to hear the voices of Mrs Scott, the midwife, or Mrs Burrows—the ‘Introduction’ reinstates the names of the letter-writers—, she claims for the disenfranchised the right, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, to:

articulate an experience otherwise bound to remain mute because of the division of languages; phrases and phrase constructions that transform into a visible and utterable thing what had no vocation to be distinguished and was only heard as inarticulate noise. (Rancière 1992, 152, my translation)

  • 22 Ivan Jablonka defines the empathic method of the historian recollecting past lives as ‘footstepping (...)

28Here, Woolf’s re-articulation allows the suppressed yearnings of the voiceless to be heard and empathically recorded. She reads in the steps22 of Mrs Layton or Miss Wick with a sense of sisterly accountability. Experience is, in the Yale essay and the ‘Introduction’, the very stuff our body politic is made of. In those early years of the 1930s, as she was increasingly struggling with the necessity to find a language that would confront the material determinisms of one’s historical being, Woolf experimented with what might be defined as a form of critical empiricism, that is both of the here and now, lived and embodied, and of the mind, imaginary. At the juncture of literary experimentation, of political experience, and of historiographic reflexiveness, such critical empiricism redeems literary imagination for a utopian community to come, even as it also acknowledges the fractures at the heart of such a utopian empathic gesture. As we know, Three Guineas, The Years, as well as Between the Acts were to take that experimentation to even darker and more agonistic sites of the collective.

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Notes

1 See Anne Besnault’s Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories. Conversations with the Nineteenth Century (Besnault). Among earlier explorations, one must mention Jane Marcus’s ground-breaking edited collection, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (Jane Marcus 1981), and specifically her introductory essay in the collection: ‘Thinking Back Through our Mothers’; Jane Lilienfeld, Lisa Low, and Jeffrey Oxford, eds., Virginia Woolf and Literary History. Part I. Woolf Studies Annual 9 (2003); Jane De Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (De Gay). Part II of Virginia Woolf and the Essay, edited by Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino, is specifically devoted to Woolf’s engagement with literary history (Rosenberg and Dubino).

2 In her article ‘Who’s afraid of Rosamond Merridew?: Reading Medieval History in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”’ Leena Kore-Schröder retraces Woolf’s personal acquaintance with Maitland and situates her affinity with the medievalist in the broader context of the conflicted legacy of Whig progressivism. On this legacy also see Besnault (chapter 1: ‘Prescribed Books and the Possibilities of Knowledge. Making Sense of Tradition’).

3 Kore-Schröder is quoting from Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction.’

4 For a history of Power’s involvement with the LSE, see Pomata as well as Harte.

5 For a close reading of Woolf’s and Power’s distant acquaintance see Kore-Schröder (4–5); see also the parallel drawn between her and Woolf by Melba Cuddy-Keane (65). Interestingly Leonard Woolf mentions Eileen Power’s Medieval People in his 1927 essay ‘The Pageant of History’ in which he regrets Power does not turn more to ‘contemporary accounts of events, old letters, and ancient diaries,’ seemingly overlooking Power’s own words in her preface (quoted in Cuddy-Keane 65). Gianna Pomata insists, for her part, on the groundbreaking nature of Power’s appointments (Pomata 2004) and, more broadly, the way women took an intense interest in history writing in the early years of the 20th century (Pomata 2013).

6 Anne Besnault notes that Woolf did buy Power’s essay and that she read it alongside the work of American anthropologist Ruth Benedict (Besnault 171).

7 Marc Bloch reviewed Eileen Power and Michael Moissey Postan’s essay Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1933), in Annales de l’Histoire Économique et Sociale 7.26 (1934): 316–318. The same year Bloch gave three lectures at the LSE, entitled ‘Seigneurie anglaise et manoir anglais’ (see Fink 178).

8 On the implicit affinities between Eileen Power and Marc Bloch, see Natalie Zemon Davis: ‘History’s Two Bodies’. For Zemon Davis their shared belief in the relationality of past and present was instrumental to their challenging the established discursive regimes of history writing: ‘Both thought past and present should be in constant exchange, generating questions for historians, and perspectives, if not judgements, on the contemporary world’ (Zemon Davis  21). On the role of Eileen Power in the rise of social history in Britain see Crouch.

9 They thus also distanced themselves from what French historiography defines as histoire méthodique, i.e. the linear account of causal history in which political and military history—thus masculine history—dominated.

10 In her reading of A Room of One’s Own, in Virginia Woolf, Catharine R. Stimpson similarly notes that ‘at the same time as the Annales school in France was establishing modern social history, Woolf calls for a women’s history based on the kind of sources social history was to use: dietary customs, houses plans, “parish registers and account book”’ (Stimpson 169; she is quoting from Woolf 1992, 58). One should remember that the same year as Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, a date that has been considered as fixing the creation of the Annales school. In a different perspective, one should also mention the fact that Norbert Elias, who had been forced into exile in London, and was a ‘Special Research Assistant’ at the LSE in the early years of WWII, also wrote his pioneering sociological essay On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations in the second half the 1930s (it was published in German in 1939).

11 Anne Besnault also turns to Jablonka in relation to Woolf, in her 2021 essay (see 63–64, 84–85).

12 I am grateful to my friend and colleague French historian Gabrielle Houbre for drawing my attention to this key article and also for reading the present article with the acumen of a true historian.

13 Melba Cuddy-Keane insists on Woolf’s exploration of ‘Historicist experience’ in her chapter ‘Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience’. She links Woolf’s interest in observation to other experimentations with observation such as The Mass Observation Project, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrison, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings (Cuddy-Keane 65). From a very different perspective, we might argue that Woolf’s practice already intuits the situationality of knowledge analysed by Donna Haraway in her 1988 article: ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. In that article Haraway insists on the embodied and productively situated knowledge of women’s experience and the critical take such a contingent experience offers on the ‘“semiotic technologies” for making meanings’ (Haraway 579).

14 Paul Ricœur also insists on the empiricist nature of the reconstruction of past experiences in his analysis of historical truth in History and Truth (Ricœur 167–168).

15 The reference to Chamberlain in Geneva is no doubt a reference to the negotiations that had started in 1925, in the League of Nations in Geneva, over the issue of disarmament. Austen Chamberlain was then Foreign Secretary. Protracted negotiations went on for several years, even as Woolf was writing A Room of One’s Own.

16 For a detailed exploration of the Woolfs’ involvement in the cooperative movement, see Jones, chapter 3 and Wood.

17 On the editorial history of the Yale Review essay and the ‘Introduction’, see Jane Marcus (1977, 280–282); Clara Jones (116–118); and of course the editorial notes to the edition of Woolf’s collected essays (Woolf 2009a, 189–192, and Woolf 2009b, 239–241).

18 A very similar take on history as practice structures Michel de Certeau’s experimental series The Practice of Everyday Life, and specifically the second volume he devotes, with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, to Living and Cooking.

19 One might also read Woolf’s embodied historicity and her empiricist approach to the historicised past in the light of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne. In volume 2 of his essay, Lefebvre insists on the articulation of the ‘lived’ and the ‘living’: ‘le vécu’ and ‘le vivre’: ‘The lived is the present, living is presence. The lived is also the work—be it alive or dead—created by living: it is whatever I do, whatever I know, in my own light and within my own horizons: it is the part of a “living” which does not belong to me, since it is quintessentially social, but which I have been able to appropriate’ (Lefebvre 217).

20 In a curious mock-poetic text ‘Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville’, dated 1934, and that was never published in her lifetime, Woolf has more than a passing intuition of the economic realities of a life of hard work and gnawing disenchantment, while also acknowledging ‘how little we can grasp; / how little we can interpret’ (Woolf 1985, 241).

21 Woolf’s stance is here vastly different from what transpires in her ‘Report on Teaching at Morley College’, which she wrote in July 1905, and in which she despairs to see her pupils ever emancipating themselves culturally and intellectually. Quentin Bell included the report as Appendix B in the first volume of his biography of his aunt.

22 Ivan Jablonka defines the empathic method of the historian recollecting past lives as ‘footstepping’ (Jablonka 169), borrowing the coinage from Richard Holmes in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Viking, 1985).

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Catherine Bernard, « ‘The imagination is largely the child of the flesh’: Virginia Woolf’s Embodied Historicity »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 12 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16537 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gq

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Catherine Bernard

Catherine Bernard is Professor of British literature and Visual studies at Université Paris Cité. Her research has focused both on Modernism and on contemporary British fiction (Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Ali Smith . . .). She has also published extensively on contemporary art (from Francis Bacon to Gillian Wearing or Rachel Whiteread). Her research hinges on the history of forms and aesthetics as well as the politics of form. Her most recent monograph was published in 2018 with Sorbonne Université Presses: Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Among her other recent publications one can mention: ‘Vibrant Allegories: Questioning Immunity with Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020)’, ed. Sophie Vasset, Epidemic Notions, Études anglaises 75/1 (2022). She is currently working towards a book focusing on the poetics and politics of objection in contemporary British writing and visual arts.

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