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This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with the gestures and postures of logical language. This countermeasure surfaces first in the short stories she wrote during and just after the war, most notably “The Mark on the Wall” and “Solid Objects”. The liberation she enjoyed is witnessed in the new verbal textures of her characteristically modernist novels, most notably Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, where her stylistic experiments are matched with probing accounts of the historical legacy of the war.

This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.

This chapter deepens the connection between Woolf’s activity as a printer with the Hogarth Press and her formal literary experiments to showcase her commitment to exploring the subject’s fundamental entanglement with the object world. The unconventional page layout of Jacob’s Room, in which empty spaces of varying sizes separate the scenes of the narrative directs readerly attention toward the pages’ transmitting its text in a way that echoes the narrative’s attempts to situate intersubjective relationships within the larger affiliation we have with the object world external to the subject. As Jacob’s Room emphasizes the readerly subject’s own status as an object, it draws out the living reader’s place in the nonliving world, a profound belonging to the inanimate implicit in the embodied mortality that my earlier chapters begin to develop.

This chapter considers tone in three of Woolf’s very different narrative experiments. The discussions of each novel suggest how tonal cues both enable and destabilize ethical judgments that readers can feel justified in making. The chapter closes with a section addressing an apparently paradoxical question: What might be good about the ethical uncertainty that Woolf’s writing can prompt?

This chapter takes a look at Woolf’s Hope Mirrlees, first studying Woolf’s typesetting of Mirrlees’s poem ‘Paris’ during the early months of 1920. It then shows the impact of Paris on Woolf’s works, particularly in ‘Jacob’s Room’.

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf's allusions to sculpture and Greco-Roman figures that link death and desire, as well as desirability in Jacob's Room, through monuments of absence created and viewed in diverse historical moments. The multiple references to statuary in Jacob's Room have generated significant scholarly response over the years, and much of the prior discussion of statuary has focused on the elegiac. For instance, Kathleen Wall contends that “Greek art (and by association, statuary) is used to figure forth Jacob Flanders's mortality and other characters' sense of loss.” The rest of this chapter considers the eroticism apparent in specific statues and argues that most (if not all) references to statuary are imbued with complex nuances of desire. It also suggests that much of the statuary is directly associated with Jacob, particularly to his sexual allure and sexual ambiguity in the novel.

Woolf’s sense that the novel must respond to poetry is manifest in her first three novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922). In the first, she shows a keen ear for the sound of language, but poetry figures as patriarchal and arguably deadly. In the second, she explores conflicting attitudes toward the English poetic tradition, and poetry occupies a dual role, at once burden and aphrodisiac. And in the third, poetry serves as a tool Woolf adapts for her own use in prose. For four reasons, by 1922 Woolf was able to appreciate poetry of the past: a familiarity with contemporary poetry gained by printing at The Hogarth Press, the deaths of family members who had nurtured poetry’s discouraging associations, an interest in elegy after the personal loss of her brother and the collective loss during World War I, and a comfort with poetry’s techniques in the wake of the form’s diminished power. Strong evidence of Woolf’s turn toward poetry lies in the poetry books in her extant library.

Chapter 3 examines Virginia Woolf’s representation of real-world sound, which develops throughout her career and is crucial to her connection with the “common reader.” Woolf’s onomatopoeia indicates a desire to represent the sounds of the world without mediation—a drive that was helpfully modelled by the phonograph, which some hoped would allow composers to make music from recorded real-world sounds rather than relying on the mediation of musicians. Starting with Jacob’s Room, published in the modernist high point of 1922, this chapter evaluates Woolf’s use of onomatopoeia, which reaches a climax with her later works: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). These novels are overwhelmingly sound-driven, with characters consistently directed and influenced by the sounds they hear. While characters often feel alienated and scrutinized when they are looked at, the act of listening has the power to unite them, even if only temporarily. On the level of form, Woolf’s onomatopoeia stimulates one’s “reading voice,” so that the reader too can be momentarily united with the text through, for example, the “chuffs” and “ticks” that sound out beyond semantic meaning.

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

This conclusion returns to arguments about style and singularity set forth in the introduction. Virginia Woolf is situated as a writer whose work takes up or dynamically repeats some of the paths less travelled, offering modern experiments in sensibility, performativity, cumulative structures, negative capability, and above all, style as singularity. In Woolf's hands, style is a mode of recognition or witnessing, potent but also tragically limited in its power to capture and convey mortal singularities. Readings of Woolf's novels Jacob's Room and The Waves help illustrate and elaborate these concepts, emphasizing the potential importance of the novel as a forum for certain kinds of ethical and aesthetic experience. The conclusion thus suggests motives for novel reading that depart from both the nineteenth-century emphasis on epistemological gain and the twentieth-century emphasis on critical reading as a mode of social critique.

Woolf seeks out new realms in her 1920 diary. In January, she wonders how far she should allow herself to report indiscretion in her diary. In March, she ponders something more profound: whether she can write “a diary of the soul.” In April, she considers whether her diary can “trench upon literature”—another (but related) realm, as the soul holds her “precious art.” On her thirty-eighth birthday, January 25, 1920, she had conceived of “a new form for a new novel”—her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room. Declaring that she could “think [herself] a novelist” if she could record “talk,” Woolf experiments across her 1920 diary with different ways to render conversations. She practices, in short, for her public prose. In April, she is sent W.N.P. Barbellion’s famous Journal of a Disappointed Man. It spurs her exploration of the soul, offers her half the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, and helps her envision To the Lighthouse to come. In October, she publishes a lengthy commemorative essay on John Evelyn’s diary, probing the diary’s power—and also how this seventeenth-century diarist differs from his contemporary descendants.

What Woolf has Archer do unto Jacob in the opening pages of Jacob’s Room—‘Ja—cob! Ja—cob!’—I propose doing unto that most unWoolfian word: ‘Her—it—age!’ Now we have three words that truly do open up Woolfian portals, obsessed as her writing is by gendered pronouns and the passing of time. Further, just as Woolf’s syllabic breakage of ‘Ja—cob!’ may be read as supplementary rather than diminishing, and as cryptic, semi-mystical, affirmation of inter-species companionship, so might this supplementary, inter-species opening methodology be adopted for critical analysis of the text in which Woolf’s only recorded use the word ‘heritage’ appears. Woolf’s interruptive, syllabled portals open to the animal, this paper argues. Whereas the continuum ‘heritage’ never again occurs in Woolf’s writings after its singular appearance in ‘On a Faithful Friend’ (1905), its fragmentary, barked, syllables (‘her’ and ‘it’ and ‘age’), may be understood to run through her entire oeuvre, as its very spine.

This chapter places Virginia Woolf in conversation with Marcel Proust by reading passages from À la recherche du temps perdu alongside Jacob's Room and Orlando, as well as Woolf's letters and diary entries on Proust. There is what might be called a Proustian moment in Chapter 7 of Jacob's Room, but it is not really a Proustian moment, more a travesty of one. In describing how the whole of the Combray of the narrator's childhood emerges from a cup of tea, Proust deploys a conceit whose success depends on a flirtation with the bathetic and grotesque. Disproportion and the possibility of comic deflation are never far away when Proust is in this mood, especially in metaphors of transformation and creation. Proust's metaphor, like the novel itself for Woolf at the time, relegated to the order of gossip. Whether through a “Proustian moment” or a “travesty of one,” the chapter here suggests that both Woolf and Proust show a fascination with time, sexuality, and “metaphorical flights”.

This chapter examines Woolf’s conceptualization of sacred space in relation to her interest in the gendered division of space, and her interrogation of the concept of the sacred, with its implications of both exclusivity and holiness. The chapter examines Woolf’s experiences of churches and cathedrals, starting with her early journals and her formative encounter with Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in 1906. It then discusses her frequent references to English places of worship, most significantly St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, both as symbols of patriarchal and imperial power, but also as places for reflection, sanctuary and even prayer.

This chapter examines intertextuality in Jacob's Room, Orlando, and Three Guineas by focusing on the lineage of Virginia Woolf's religious references, where texts written by members of the Stephen family in the Victorian period inform her modern critique of patriarchy and its interconnections with organized religion. Woolf has often been described as an agnostic like her parents; more recently, she has been regarded as an atheist, on the basis of statements such as “certainly and emphatically there is no God.” It is therefore curious that the Woolfs' library at Washington State University includes a small but significant selection of books on religion. The religious books in the Woolfs' library include several that were written by her ancestors in the Stephen family. The chapter also considers Woolf's attitude towards Victorian evangelical theology, with particular emphasis on her representation of women as the slaves of patriarchy.

This chapter presents an illustrated chronology of important biographical moments and historical events, including the publication of various novels. It begins in 1840, when the U.S. population was estimated at 17 million and Transcendentalists published The Dial, to 1922, when James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room were published. Also cited is the publication in 1875–1876 of Henry James's first acknowledged novel Roderick Hudson.