ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1930

Abstract

This article examines some important historical, literary, and theoretical questions that are posed by the idea of “writing a life” in the early years of the twentieth century. Its focus is primarily on the constitutive relations between gender, literature and culture in the work of Virginia Woolf, and it proposes readings of a range of texts that were written by Woolf “on or about December 1930″ that engage with questions of life-writing. The texts analysed include Woolf's novel The Waves (1931) and Orlando: A Biography (1928). These are read alongside other texts from the same period in which Woolf deploys a first-person voice, including her Diary (for the years around 1930) and a long letter she wrote as a kind of preface to a published collection of letters by working women. Finally, the article also draws on a number of Woolf's essays to suggest ways in which the problems of writing a life might intersect with other political, historical and literary problems with which she was preoccupied in the early 1930s.

Keywords:

• gender
• life-writing
• Virginia Woolf
• periodization
• subjectivity
• modernist style
• biography

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction” in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008) 37–54 (38). The significance of the changes associated with the year 1910 for Woolf is further considered in Morag Shiach, “Periodizing Modernism” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, eds. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010) 5–6.

2 Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Michael H. Whitworth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).

3 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3, 1925–30, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 5 Oct. 1927, 161.

4 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” in Bradshaw, Virginia Woolf 6–12 (8).

5 Virginia Woolf, Diary: Volume 3, 1925–30, 28 Feb. 1927, 129.

6 Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” in Bradshaw, Virginia Woolf 95–100 (95).

7 Virginia Woolf, Diary: Volume 3, 1925–30, 28 Nov. 1928, 208–09.

8 Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography” in Bradshaw, Virginia Woolf 116–23 (119).

9 This passage can be compared interestingly to Woolf's discussion of androgyny in the final chapter of A Room of One's Own (1929).

10 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).

11 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912–1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson, assisted by Joanne Trautmann (London: Harcourt, 1976) 54, 59.

12 Virginia Woolf, “Introductory Letter” in Life As We Have Known It; by Co-operative Working Women, ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies (London: Virago, 1977) xvii.