What kind of life-writing emerges from Virginia Woolf's essays?

Abstract

The topic addressed is Virginia Woolf’s life-writing – which is approached as an investigation into her own and her family’s selfhood - with exclusive focus on a selection her essays, letters, diary extracts, and unfinished writings, including Moments of Being, The Platform of Time, The Modern Essay, The Decay of Essay Writing, and The New Biography. The discussion of Moments is partially informed by Freud’s concepts of ambivalence and screen memories. Two sets of secondary sources are used; scholarship on Woolf’s life-writing by Marcus, Pollentier, and Rosenbaum, and scholarship on the essay form in my second chapter, by Dillon, Hardison, and Mintz. The essay discusses the nature and significance of the essay form and draws on these readings in order to conclude upon the ways the essay form is relied upon by Woolf to best express her interests and concerns around the development of selfhood. The essay argues that the level of self-examination achieved by Woolf in my primary sources is aided by being written for the essay form, due to both the nature of the essay, and Woolf’s aim of self-dissection in life-writing.