In this talk, Dr Anne Reus will explore how Woolf’s autobiographical writing deals with female authorship. In spite of a wealth of materials (letters, diaries, and memoir fragments), Woolf – strikingly, for a writer so attuned to the importance of female biography – never accounts for her life as a writer. Although A Room of One’s Own and ‘Professions for Women’ can be read as semi-autobiographical accounts of her own experience as a woman writing, Woolf’s autobiographical fragments, largely written for a more private audience, don’t offer a sustained account of her life past 1910. Dr Reus will argue that these fragments again reflect an ongoing struggle with the Victorian period; both chronologically in her inability to move beyond it, and in their narrative strategies.
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What’s happening?
Reminiscences (1907) grapples with exactly those clichéd and euphemistic descriptions of character and family dismissed as the worst excesses of Victorian biography in ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’; while the artistic ambitions and achievements of Vanessa and Virginia remain unspeakable for narrator and subject alike. A Sketch of the Past in contrast ignores all outward signifiers of professional success but weaves Woolf’s writerly identity into the narrative to assert that writing was a social and biological destiny.
However, Woolf also enacts the ways in which her genetic legacies continue to shape her world socially by encoding her Victorian upbringing as an inheritance of femaleness: positing her identity as a woman and a writer as equally fundamental, they ultimately remain impossible to reconcile.
When?
Friday 20 November, 1.00 – 2.00pm
How can I book?
Due to social distancing measures, this session will be delivered remotely via a Teams meeting. To book your place, email Jane de Gay.
Biography:
Dr Anne Reus works at the Technische Universität Dresden. Her PhD thesis, Virginia Woolf’s Rewriting of Victorian Women Writers’ Lives, argues for the lasting impact of Victorian biography on Woolf’s representation of nineteenth century women writers. She was co-organizer of the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf and Heritage at Leeds Trinity University in 2016, and is co-editor of Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson UP, 2017). She has published on Virginia Woolf and Margaret Oliphant, and her forthcoming publications include a chapter on women and National Biography in Woolf’s early fiction; an article on visual arts in the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Margaret Oliphant; and a monograph (under contract with Edinburgh UP): Virginia Woolf and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers: Victorian Legacies and Literary Afterlives.