Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives

This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical

novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary
productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fctional character or
a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological
features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnifed, reinforced or
distorted to serve the authors’ specifc agendas. Beyond general theoretical
issues about this fourishing genre, this study raises specifc questions about
the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fctional representations.
These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they
also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on
a close examination of twenty-fve works published between 1972 and
2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifst,
troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister
and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic
spirit, inspirational fgure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting
Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofction, whether to enhance or debunk
stereotypes about the historical fgure, the authors studied here contribute to
her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fctional portraits constitute a way
to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical
interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-frst century.

Monica Latham is a Professor of British literature at the English

Department of the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist
of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She obtained a PhD in 2003 from
Université de Nancy, France. Her thesis analysed the genesis of Woolf’s
frst novel, The Voyage Out, and was entitled ‘De Melymbrosia (1908)
à The Voyage Out (1915): l’invention allotropique du projet woolfen
d’écriture’. Since then, Latham has published over sixty articles on
modernist and postmodernist authors in many international journals and
academic publications. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism
and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015). She is the co-editor
of the series ‘Book Practices and Textual Itineraries’, ‘Biofction Studies’
and ‘Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks’.
Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Series Editor: Ricia A Chansky

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Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies
Edited by Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas
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Writing the Self in Post-Structuralist Theory
Dennis Schep
Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women
Translingual Selves
Natalie Edwards
A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography
Between Dissociation and Belonging
Ariel M. Sheetrit
Writing Life Writing
Narrative, History, Autobiography
Paul John Eakin
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Edited by Andrew J. Power
Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation
Overwriting the Dictator
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Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives
The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama
Monica Latham

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Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives
The Author as Character in
Contemporary Fiction and Drama

Monica Latham
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Monica Latham
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To Mike and Anita
Contents

Foreword ix

‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’:

Catching the Phantom 1
Biography, Fiction and Biofction: From ‘Bastard’ to
‘Hybrid’ 2
Visions and Designs 15
Postmodernist Truthful (Mis)representations 20
From Truthful Fictions to Travesties of Truth 25
Goals and Perspectives 30

1 Bioplay(giarisms)s 38
The ‘Little Cut-and-Paste Job’ 38
‘The Play’s the Thing’ 43
Virginia’s Feminist Companions 55
The Last Song of the Nightingale 59
Virginia and Vita: A Year in Love 64

2 Detecting Woolf 74
In the Shadow of WWI: Virginia as a Feminist
Sleuth 74
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five! 84

3 Virginia’s Daughters 98
Virginia’s Long Shadow 99
Virginia’s Biological Progeny 113
viii Contents
4 Vanessa and Virginia 126
A Tale of Two Sisters 126
Vanessa and Her Sister: ‘Twinned Always’ 129
Vanessa and Virginia: ‘Psychically Siamese’ 137
Vanessa and Virginia: A Biofctional Spin-off 148

5 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 156

Riding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘Sixty’s Gate’ 156
Adeline and Virginia 161
Mandril and the Marmoset 169

6 Biofctive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf/Virginia Dalloway 178

A Cameo Appearance 178
Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown: Death,
Birth and Survival 184

7 Bloomsberries Reimagined 199

Lytton and Virginia 200
Variable Geometries: Squares, Circles and
Triangles 203
Bloomsbury Legacies 209

Posthumous Lives: ‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’ 216

Biographical Woolfs and Fictional Virginias 219
A Summing-up of Woolf’s Afterlives 222
Biofction as Critical Interpretation 225
Virginia Woolf Legend: Keeping the Myth Alive 226

Bibliography 231
Index 243
Foreword

The community of Virginia Woolf scholars is massive, passionate, and

infuential. These are not just a few fgures who have authored obscure
but important studies read by only a handful of specialists. They are well-
regarded intellectuals who have had a signifcant impact on literary stud-
ies and academia more generally. One thinks of Mark Hussey, Pamela
Caughie, Christine Froula, Christine Reynier, Brenda Silver, Susan Stanford
Friedman, Anna Snaith, Hermione Lee, Ann Banfeld, Daniel Ferrer, Gill
Lowe, Madelyn Detloff, and so many others. Given the high-profle stature
of so many Woolf scholars, it might seem that academic events would be
exclusive affairs, but Virginia Woolf panels and conferences are a pleasure
to experience because everyone is so welcoming and engaged, as there is
always a desire to share stories about student responses to Woolf or new
facts about her life and work. But there are also some dangers in such a
community, and nothing more clearly discloses this than the relatively
recent rise and legitimization of biofction, which is literature that names its
protagonist after an actual historical fgure. Woolf scholars are protective
of their superstar, so if an author decides to write a novel with a character
named Virginia Woolf, then he or she runs the risk of invoking the wrath
of a whole group of experts who have devoted their lives to the study of the
famous modernist writer.
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a perfect case in point. Numerous
Woolf scholars have taken issue with Cunningham’s (mis)representation of
and alteration of facts about the author of Mrs Dalloway. But in 2012,
Monica Latham published ‘“Serv[ing] under two masters”: Virginia Woolf’s
Afterlives in Contemporary Biofctions’, which is an extremely important
contribution because she so clearly responds to all those scholars who use a
biography approach to assess and criticize biofction. Focusing specifcally
on Cunningham’s novel The Hours, Latham notes how ‘Woolfan critics
complained’ about some of the liberties Cunningham took. Latham, how-
ever, rightly retorts: ‘Cunningham is not a biographer, but a fction writer
whose method consists in fctionalizing biographical events. He breaks free
from biography, distorts it, and fabricates new events that seem authentic as
they encroach on real, biographical material’.1 I was in the early stage of my
x Foreword
research about biofction when I read Latham’s article, and I realized that
her distinct contribution was hugely signifcant, which is why I included her
essay in my anthology, Biographical Fiction: A Reader.
To put the matter clearly and simply, Latham has made a signifcant
contribution to the study of biofction, and she has made additional ones in
her groundbreaking book A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism:
Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015) as well as her insightful interview with
biographical novelist Laurent Binet, ‘Refections on Truth, Veracity,
Fictionalization, and Falsifcation’.2 But it is her dauntingly comprehensive
study Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary
Fiction and Drama that will frmly establish Latham as one of the most
prominent scholars of biofction and certainly the most eminent scholar of
Virginia Woolf biofctions today. Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives will be a valu-
able resource for scholars in various felds for years to come.
There have been a myriad of biofctions written about famous fgures like
Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Eliza Lynch, and Nat Turner. But
how can we explain the massive volume of works about Woolf in so many
different languages and countries? The answer surely has something to do
with Woolf’s extremely rich and complicated life as well as her creative
and critical works, but it also has something to do with the rise and legiti-
mization of the genre of biofction, and what Latham does so brilliantly in
Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives is to identify and defne those things in Woolf’s
life and work that contributed to the desire for and the realization of biofc-
tion, but also to clarify why Woolf is such an ideal fgure to feature in biofc-
tion. To execute this project, therefore, a commanding grasp of the life and
works of Woolf, biofction studies, and biofctions about Woolf is needed,
and Latham has a stunningly impressive command of all three.
To be more specifc, after intelligently documenting the mounting cri-
tique of the biographical novel, specifcally Georg Lukács’s claim about the
‘excess of the psychological’ in biofction, Latham says that what Lukács
‘judged weak and unconvincing […] is now considered as the essence of
the biographical novel of consciousness, which evolved out of the impulse
given by modernist aesthetics in general and Woolf’s daring experiments in
particular’. This is a paradox, as Woolf never wrote a biofction, nor could
she imagine her way to writing one. Moreover, this assertion is an extremely
bold proclamation, one that very few people would have the background
knowledge and intellectual capacity to clarify and justify. But Latham does
exactly that in the pages of this book. Given Latham’s claim, we can say
that Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives is less a study about Virginia Woolf and
her work and more a study about what her life and work have spawned,
which is totally in keeping with the central axiom on which biofctional
aesthetics is premised. Authors of biofction do not pretend to give readers
an accurate portrait of the real life fgure; they are authors of fction, not
biography. What authors of biofction do is to fctionalize a part of a real
 Foreword xi
person’s life story in order to give readers new ways of thinking and being
in the present and for the future. Authors do this because they believe that
there is something in the life and work of specifc historical fgures that is of
enduring value and societal importance for people in different cultures and
times, and Latham’s exhaustive study of biofctions about Woolf confrms
this biofctional view. To put the matter simply and directly, Woolf played
a crucial role in the rise and legitimization of biofction, and no one better
illustrates that this is the case and why this is the case than Latham, which
is why this book will come to be seen as a canonical work in both Woolf
and biofction studies.

Michael Lackey

Notes
1 Latham, ‘“Serv[ing] under two masters”: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in
Contemporary Biofctions’. Biographical Fiction: A Reader. Ed. Michael Lackey.
New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 415.
2 ‘Latham, ‘Refections on Truth, Veracity, Fictionalization, and Falsifcation’.
Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe.
Ed. Michael Lackey. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 33–48.
‘I Have Been Dead and Yet
Am Now Alive Again’
Catching the Phantom

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is one of the twentieth century’s most rec-

ognisable and celebrated authorial fgures.1 Eighty years after her death,
she has become an established ‘canonical superstar’ (Silver, Icon xvi) and
remains a solid ‘household name’ (102). As ‘the frst canonized twentieth-
century woman writer’ (Jane Marcus, ‘Pathographies’ 807), she is consid-
ered an exemplary foremother by many women writers today. Woolf has
persistently gained literary and cultural currency and is now a powerful icon
claimed by feminists, gender theorists, political activists and avant-garde
writers and artists. She also enjoys a relentless and ever-growing academic
reputation, consolidated by the numerous scholarly productions published
every year, new archival discoveries, translations of her novels and political
pamphlets into more than ffty languages, and active International Woolf
Societies that celebrate and promote her life and oeuvre around the world
(the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan and Korea).
Woolf’s visibility has continuously increased since her death and has
exceeded Western literary boundaries: she has attained mythical status in
popular culture, with fans from all over the globe and in all walks of life
appropriating her image and brandishing her name to fuel debates about
art, the canon, gender equality, feminism and patriarchy. In these particu-
lar circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Woolf has acquired a
reputation in our cultural consciousness which is independent of her literary
achievements.
Woolf’s celebrity is ‘unusual for writers, the living as well as the dead’
(Silver, ‘Icon’ 393); unlike Shakespeare,2 for instance, another ubiqui-
tous titan of Western literature who has also permeated popular culture,3
Woolf’s stardom is fostered by her capacity to provoke passionate contra-
dictory reactions: she is either vilifed and demonised or praised and valor-
ised. Woolf continues to intrigue, inspire, obsess and fascinate authors and
readers alike, and her status as both an iconic fgure in popular culture and a
canonical author in the history of Western literature has invited her literary
and cultural legatees to use and abuse her image in various ways. Woolf is
highly esteemed in intellectual literary circles, but her image is also degraded
as she becomes a commodifed product; her incarnations emerge from
2 Introduction
personal affnities but also collective imaginations. Thus, in the pantheon
of Western iconic fgures or most infuential people of all time, from Albert
Einstein to Marilyn Monroe, from Martin Luther King to Lady Diana, to
name just a notable few, Woolf remains unparalleled.4 To answer Edward
Albee’s catchy question, nobody is afraid of Virginia Woolf anymore, as
she has been domesticated and made accessible to the common reader and
the average consumer. Biofction authors now approach such ‘bigwigs fear-
lessly’ (‘New Biography’ 476), to borrow Woolf’s expression used to refer
to the new biographers’ subjects in her 1927 essay. The ‘market value of
Woolf’s name and face’ (Silver, Icon 8) is higher than ever, and popularised
versions of Woolf are to be found everywhere: her face is paraded on peo-
ple’s bodies5 and adorns tea towels and mugs, her de-contextualised quotes
are shared daily on Instagram and Pinterest and her sexual, emotional and
mental experiences are reimagined by numerous authors in their novels,
plays, graphic novels, flms and songs to mirror their personal preoccupa-
tions and convey their political agendas.
In this context of Woolf’s growing cult, at the confuence of academic
interest in her work and popular appropriations of her life, Virginia Woolf’s
Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama
aims at analysing the ‘versionings’ (Silver, Icon 13)6 of Virginia Woolf, that
is to say, the multiplication of textual constructs7 of her image in biographi-
cal novels and plays. More precisely, this book aims to examine how the
Virginia Woolf ‘icon’ has been transformed into a multitude of ‘heroines’
portrayed by contemporary American, British, Irish, Canadian, French and
Belgian authors in their novels, novellas, plays and tales from the early
seventies to the present. Biographical fction itself – ‘literature that names
its protagonist after an actual biographical fgure’ (Lackey, ‘Locating’ 3)
– is nothing new,8 but a specifc branch of the genre, the ‘biographical-
novel-about-a-writer’, ‘has recently acquired a new status and prominence’
(Lodge, Year 10)9 in the literary landscape, and Woolf is one of the authors
who has attracted the most diverse, captivating and surprising creative
responses from acclaimed authors and amateur writers alike.

Biography, Fiction and Biofction: From ‘Bastard’ to ‘Hybrid’

The literary practice of devising protagonists who are fctional recrea-
tions of actual historical referents has in recent years become the subject of
‘Biofction Studies’, an authoritative and dynamic scholarly discipline that
has emerged with recent key publications,10 which signal that biofction has
‘fnally emancipated itself from both historical fction and life writing and
has chartered a narrative space uniquely its own’ (Lackey, ‘Narrative Space’
3). Among these signifcant publications, a special issue of Virginia Woolf
Miscellany (2018, eds. Michael Lackey and Todd Avery) has been dedicated
to Woolf and biofction, illustrating the Woolf scholars’ pressing need to
understand Woolf in relation to this prolifc genre. These studies have laid
 Introduction 3
solid foundations for an emerging critical feld and refect the scholars’ wish
to keep up with the profusion of literary productions authored by many
contemporary writers around the world, investigate their work, fathom
their successful popular reception and provide a conceptual framework for
this fourishing literary phenomenon.
Before overviewing the vast corpus of this monograph and addressing
the reasons why Woolf has been portrayed as a character in twenty-fve bio-
plays and biographical novels, more than any other author across times and
cultures, I would like to trace the contours of the fuid, fexible, multifarious
genre of biofction mapped by scholars and practitioners of the genre, and
highlight its relationships and differences with other literary forms such as
biography and historical fction. The semantics of the portmanteau ‘biofc-
tion’, frst coined by Alain Buisine in a 1991 article in the Revue des sciences
humaines, indicate that biographical fact and fction, truth and untruth,
veracity and imagination, blend together in an oxymoronic literary work.
It reveals the transfers that are operated from biography to fction and the
crossover genre that combines two opposed representational modes when
narrating the imaginary lives of people who really existed. This transgeneric
literary product offers the reader a simulacrum of a real life, an author’s sub-
jective representation of their character’s life. Critical concepts of intertex-
tuality (Kristeva), hypertextuality (Genette), adaptation and appropriation
(Sanders), questions of ‘usage’ versus ‘representation’ (Lackey),11 various
degrees of creativity and invention – ranging from collage and montage of
primary sources, through imagination and fctionalisation, to falsifcation
and ‘travesty’ (Lodge) – must necessarily be considered when investigating
the authors’ uniquely diverse biofction productions. These helpful terms
will be amply invoked in this study to discuss the fabrication of Woolf’s
various portraits in contemporary fction and drama.
As many scholars and critics ‘are still struggling to understand the rela-
tionship between biography and biofction’, Michael Lackey has incited
them to ‘clarify the nature and role of the biographical within biofction’
(‘Narrative Space’ 13). Biographical novels and plays obviously depend on
minute factual research but also require a novelist’s or playwright’s creative
dexterity in order to shape the biographical material into an enticing and
imaginative narrative. In a traditional biography, with its codifed generic,
structural and narrative ‘rules’,12 the reader is confronted with an avalanche
of external events, decorous facts and documentary evidence. The ‘pleas-
ures of fction’, on the other hand, are immensely satisfying for a majority
of readers who read for the plot and relish the ‘scene-making, dramatic
tension, the immediacy of dialogues; plus stylistic devices such as imagery,
reiteration, and contrast’ (Sellers, ‘Postmodernism’ 214). Wrapping a his-
torical person’s life in a mantel of fction and imparting a compelling nov-
elistic narrative trajectory to it brings along the comfort and pleasure of
reading a different kind of story that appeals more to the modern reader,
as the resulting literary product has a more accelerated narrative rhythm,
4 Introduction
dramatic interactions and a captivating plot. Besides, fction gives writers
the freedom to play with chronology and be selective: novelistic time is
elastic and fuctuant, allowing prolepses and analepses as well as close-ups
and freeze-frames on details or epiphanic moments laden with utmost sig-
nifcance. ‘The novelist is free, the biographer is tied’ (181), Woolf perti-
nently stated in ‘The Art of Biography’: fction enables authors to freely
explore the blind spots of traditional biography, fll in its nebulous gaps,
amplify and prolong footnotes from historical documents, and penetrate
their characters’ minds in order to speculate about what they might have
thought and felt. Such fctional narratives map a wider territory and present
greater potential than biography: for example, as Woolf is put in imaginary
situations, the authors can delve into her supposed inner life, construct an
‘as if’ and bring the reader into her psyche. Authors of biofction do not
usually contradict biographical facts or historical events, but the genre they
adopt authorises them to incorporate original and personal elements, such
as their own experiences, in the text. In their respective works, they tran-
scend the limits and constraints of traditional biography: as the historical
fgure becomes a character in a fctional work, poetic licence allows authors
to go off the beaten track and give the reader a different image of the subject
from the ones contained in biographies.
While authors’ imaginations take off to explore infnite possibilities about
their characters’ lives and turn fact into metaphor, their fction remains
somehow ‘anchored’13 into the sea of biography. The common ground
between the two genres, biography and biofction, is the ‘life’ (from the
Greek bios) component, which is approached, handled and ‘written’ (from
the Greek graphein) differently in each genre to become a narrative in its
own right, with its own aesthetic and structural imperatives. The lexical jux-
taposition within the term biographical fction – composed of the adjective
‘biographical’ and the noun ‘fction’ – denotes that the biographical com-
ponent remains subordinated to fction, and therefore the author’s creative
vision – guided, not restricted, by biographical documentation – is preva-
lent. In other words, biofction uses biography in order to construct a fc-
tional narrative. For this purpose, biographical facts are more or less heavily
manipulated and distorted to produce a personal vision of a character. The
reader is given not the descriptive, factual life of a biographical subject, but
what the French would call a romanesque (novelesque) narrative path, that
is to say, the sentimental, adventurous, extraordinary, fantastic, imaginative
life of a character contained in a novel (roman). A novelist inevitably con-
fers their character’s life a dramatic arc. In this respect, Hermione Lee has
stated the following about Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004):

Biographers don’t, on the whole (unless they’re Peter Ackroyd) invent

their subject’s conversations, or take their clothes off and put them into
bed, or fantasise their secret memories and unacted desires. Biographers
(if they have any decency) don’t freely paraphrase their subject’s
 Introduction 5
writings, or quote from their letters without footnotes. But novelists are
allowed to make free.14

Creative writers are not limited in any way by biographers’ ‘decency’,

and some critics’ accusations of authors distorting the truth in biofction
by pointing at their responsibility to historical truth-telling are completely
irrelevant and unfounded, as their aim is certainly not to faithfully portray a
historical person and strictly follow the documented trajectory of their lives,
but to create a convincing, truthful character who reveals their personal
vision and with whom the reader can identify. Unlike biography, the bio-
graphical novel is not about factual accuracy, but primarily about exploring
the character’s complex inner life and illuminating the dark corners of his/
her motives and desires. To do so, novelists may take as much liberty as they
wish with their ‘character’ or ‘protagonist’, who is not to be confused with
the ‘biographical subject’. In an interview, Michael Cunningham, author of
The Hours (1998),15 stated the following:

As a novelist, I can go all the way into my characters, down to their very
hearts and souls. A biographer is restricted to what the subject is able
to tell him or her, and there are limits to what we can articulate about
ourselves. So on the one hand, I probably wasn’t dead accurate about
Virginia Woolf, but I think I had the freedom to imagine entering her
mind in a way that Hermione Lee, great as her biography of Woolf is,
wasn’t able to do.
(‘Biographical Novel’ 93)

While biographical accuracy is not what matters the most in biographical

novels, creating a truthful, believable character is paramount.
What Ernest Baker said about historical fction can very well apply to
biographical fction, too:

Historical fction is not history, but is often better than history […it]
may easily teach more and carry a deeper impression than whole chap-
ters of description and analysis […it] will probably succeed in making a
period live in the imagination when textbooks merely give us dry bones.
(viii)

In the same vein, biographical fction is not biography, but it may often be
better than biography, as it makes a character come alive in our imagination –
although supreme biographers like Peter Ackroyd today no longer give
readers mere ‘dry bones’ but borrow the tools and methods of the novelist
to recreate multidimensional subjects and make them appear before us in
the fesh. Beginning with modernist ‘new biographers’ at the beginning of
the twentieth century, biography and biographical fction have constantly
learnt from each other: biography has borrowed novelistic techniques and
6 Introduction
structures, and conversely, biographical fction has learnt how to use to its
best advantage biography’s rigorous research, selection and organisation of
primary sources.
Defnitions of the generic identity of biofction often rely on textile
images, culinary parallels, marital metaphors or territorial analogies.
Authentic facts and fction constitute the basic warp and weft used to weave
the biofctional fabric. In all biofctional products, the dosage or propor-
tion of biography and fction,16 the way biographical elements are folded or
incorporated into fction, and the fnal homogenous mixture of the ingre-
dients, are essential in the production of ‘truthful fctions’ (Lackey).17 The
most acclaimed biographical fctions are those which combine plausibility
and creativity, a savvy ‘fusion’ of truth and imagination. I am purposefully
using the term ‘fusion’, which is closely associated with gastronomic meta-
phors usually employed to explain the composition of this genre which con-
tains ‘no more than a pinch of the truth of real life and the truth of fction’
(Woolf, ‘New Biography’ 477). Indeed, ‘fusion’ implies a careful combina-
tion and confrontation of generic traditions, narrative and stylistic features
that are specifc to each genre, with their inherent representational modes,
just as a chef would associate unusual (and sometimes antithetical) favours,
mix ingredients to different proportions, stir them together and obtain an
innovative concoction to serve to the consumer. Just like in biofction, in
each unique dish, the ingredients are symbiotically combined, but one can
still distinguish the original favours.
As a practitioner, David Lodge defnes his biographical novels as ‘a seam-
less marriage of imagination and documented fact, so that the reader should
have reason to trust the discourse, but will be taken into areas of the subject’s
life where the strictly empirical biographer can’t go’ (‘Bionovel’ 127). These
seemingly incompatible generic bedfellows form a match made in heaven:
together they enjoy a fertile liminal status in between fction and biography
and beneft from the cross-pollination of the two genres; their gen(re)eti-
cally modifed hybridisation leads to robust progenies. Biographical novels
lie at the confuence of authenticity – conferred by biography – and imagi-
nation – as authors explore other possible avenues and give their readers
access to the imagined inner lives of the characters. Thanks to the freedom
granted by this hybrid genre, they can throw ‘decency’, honesty or accuracy
to the wind and can select and appropriate the primary sources that ‘history
has dropped at [their] door[s]’ (Banks 45) for their creative purposes. The
hybridity and fexibility of the biographical novel enable them to create a
whole range of ‘truthful; but fantastic’ (Woolf, Diary 3: 157) stories.
Biofction has also been perceived as a variety of the contemporary ‘his-
toriographic metafction’ (Hutcheon, Poetics 5) that is ‘characterized by [its]
overt historical referents’ (Middeke and Huber 4), that is to say, a self-
refexive text that lays claim to historical events and personages. As his-
tory, a human construct, is open to revision, the recreation of past historical
events is accompanied by a critical modus operandi explaining how and
 Introduction 7
why history is rewritten into a fctional version. This is a double creative
and critical movement, oxymoronic in a sense since authors strive to cre-
ate an illusion of historicity so as to critically destabilise it by pointing at
its fctionality. But although in this study there are quite a few examples of
metabiographical tendencies within Woolf biofctions, I would argue that
not all biofctions theoretically refect on their own status as hybrid liter-
ary products or raise questions about the relationship between fction and
reality.
Several academics and practitioners have suggested various terminology,
created typologies and detected the myriad nuances of these ‘biographoid
forms’ (Geffen 55): terms such as ‘novel-as-biography’ (Kendall 15), ‘novel
biography’ (Mailer 15), ‘fction biography’ (Jacobs xix), ‘fctional biogra-
phy’ (Schabert 9) and ‘roman vrai’ (Sartre 94) have fourished in literary
criticism; recently, more specifc concepts indicate that critics have chiselled
the features of the genre even more fnely to suggest that it is precisely the
fgure of an author who becomes a character in fction: ‘author fctions’
(Fokkema 39; Savu 9) or ‘the genre of author as character’ (Franssen and
Hoenselaars 11). As Lodge remarked, the ‘biographical-novel-about-a-
writer’ (Year 10) has become an increasingly popular genre and past iconic
writers have proved to be extremely attractive protagonists in fction.
Although novels about Woolf are very different from one another, in this
study I will use the capacious term ‘biofction’, just as Middeke and Huber
do when they discuss biofction as ‘fctional rewritings of the lives of […]
writers’ (3) who really existed, and I will propose distinctive gradations to
point at the authors’ strategies of composition. In the same way as Middeke
and Huber, I consider biofctions about Woolf as contemporary rewritings
and re-interpretations of her biographical and fctional hypotexts. In this
monograph, I would like to explore how contemporary authors use, shape
and incorporate the profusion of extant auto/biographical material about
Woolf – one of the most completely documented authors in Western litera-
ture – in their fction to produce seamless hybrid literary artefacts which
present alternative ‘realities’ or simulacra of Woolf’s life. I will address
questions about the authors’ strategic selection of biographemes (Barthes,
Camera 66)18 and about the way these fragments of truth are combined with
fgments of the authors’ imaginations in order to produce a truthful version
of Woolf – a Virginia who looks familiar and sounds authentic – with a
specifc purpose. These biographical considerations are further complexi-
fed by some authors’ practice of intertextuality and the incorporation of
Woolf’s literary and political writings in their novels and plays. Woolf’s life
and work have thus become a compound hypotext constantly rewritten and
updated by each contemporary author.
In the last decades, a period that has coincided with the proliferation of
biofctions about diverse historical personalities, many theorists of the genre
have analysed the motivations of the authors to bring past fgures to life in
their pages and the success these productions have enjoyed on the current
8 Introduction
literary market. They have offered various interpretations and explanations
of this phenomenon. As a matter of fact, the change in the critical perception
of this genre can be observed in the vocabulary critics use to qualify biofction,
which has evolved from the negative epithet ‘bastard’19 to the more sophis-
ticated ‘hybrid’. Lukács condemns what he deems a fawed, bastardised aes-
thetic form born out of its generic wedlock, an ancillary fashion of the loftier
and more potent historical novel, in his notable study The Historical Novel
(1937).20 What he calls ‘belletristic biography’ (314) was a very popular ten-
dency of the time to insert ‘authentic biographical facts into novels’ (309).
Lukács especially deplores the weakness of the ‘biographical-psychological’
forms of the historical novel that unveil the ‘hero’s lonely refections’ (318),
‘lonely rumination’, ‘lonely discussion with himself’ (321); the emphasis is put
on the inner, psychological representation at the expense of the hero’s ‘histori-
cal calling’ (314) and achievements. In his defence of biographical fction in
1957, Irving Stone points out how unfair and puzzling to him a comparison in
favour of historical fction is. He asks ‘why the historical novel, with its accu-
rate background but fctional characters, should have been more acceptable
to the academicians than the biographical novel, which is accurate not only
in background but in the people involved?’ (14). Although scholars today
still ‘treat the biographical novel as a form of the historical novel’, Lackey
has demonstrated that they are two distinctive literary genres and that ‘bio-
fction came into being as an aesthetic reaction against the historical novel’
(‘Death-bringing History’ 12). He provides a concise and edifying comparison
between the two concomitant aesthetic forms:

Instead of picturing the historical forces that shape and determine the
human, the biographical novel gives readers a model of a fgure that
defes or evades environmental conditioning or cultural determinism by
shaping and determining the world around him or her.
(12)

The biographical novel is therefore not a bastardised version of the his-

torical novel, as Lukács posited, but an autonomous literary genre, a nar-
rative space with its own distinctive features, methods and scopes, in which
the character does not function as a representative symbol of ‘the objective
socio-historical reality of the time’ (16), but in which the protagonist ‘tran-
scends the deterministic forces of an age’ (22) and is used to enable con-
temporary authors to achieve specifc aesthetic goals and a socio-political
critique of the present.
‘The excess of the psychological’ (Lukács 321) in the portrayal of a char-
acter, which was judged weak and unconvincing, is now considered as the
essence of the biographical novel of consciousness, which evolved out of the
impulse given by modernist aesthetics in general and Woolf’s daring experi-
ments in particular. Woolf as a character in contemporary fction is thus
portrayed in keeping with her deep aesthetic convictions and at the same
 Introduction 9
time, ironically enough, is born out of her incredulity as to the viability of
such a hybrid genre as today’s biofction. Although biofction has acquired
solid theoretical ground in postmodernism, it has deep roots in modern-
ist aesthetics and literary practices. For the frst time, the ‘new’ modernist
biographers at the beginning of the twentieth century, among whom Woolf
and her contemporaries Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson, envisioned
a new attitude to writing biography, shook up the pompous institution of
Victorian biography and started to incorporate novelistic elements into their
‘new biographies’.21 Their approach of blurring genres in life-writing paved
the way to postmodernist biofction today: the ‘new biographers’ primar-
ily set out to uncover the inner self of the public fgure and for this, they
used fctional techniques and gave free rein to their creative imagination to
explore a personal life and illuminate their subject’s consciousness.
For Woolf, the primal ‘truth’ in fction is located in the character’s ‘inner
life of thought and emotion which meanders darkly and obscurely through
the hidden channels of the soul’ (‘New Biography’ 473). Today’s ramifca-
tions of the genre of biofction must therefore be traced back to the context
of Woolf’s own discoveries and artistic credo. Indeed, many of the novels
examined in this book are novels of consciousness that follow Woolf’s advice
to ‘look within’ and examine the ‘semi-transparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (‘Modern Fiction’ 160), not
in a chronological way, as ‘life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged’ (160), but according to the arbitrary workings of the conscious-
ness and remembrance. Woolf encouraged writers to shed light on their
characters’ myriad thoughts, memories and impressions – some ‘trivial,
fantastic, evanescent’, others ‘engraved with the sharpness of steel’ (160).
Following their modernist predecessor’s advice, contemporary authors have
‘looked within’ Virginia’s own mind, with all its complex, meandering
thoughts, and captured her feeting impressions and lasting emotions, her
memories which shelter special moments of being and her tentative creative
ideas that gradually materialise into enduring stories. They have illuminated
the interior workings of her mind, focusing minutely on tracing the patterns
of her fuctuating consciousness. Susan Sellers highlights the supremacy of
the contemporary novel as a generic form which rests on this modernist
aesthetic and ‘can delve into consciousness in all its diversity and complica-
tions’ (‘Postmodernism’ 212).
Besides Woolf’s modernist aesthetic innovations, her own experimental
biographies and essays in which she discusses the genre of the ‘new biog-
raphy’ anticipated the emergence of biofction. Without knowing it, Woolf
set in motion the current forms of biographical fction. Her own interest
in the fusion of biography and fction was provoked by a combination of
two factors: frstly, her antipathy for the hagiographic Victorian biogra-
phy and dry facts that stand for ‘lives’, like in her father’s Dictionary of
National Biography, and secondly, the experiments of her friend and rival
Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1911), Queen Victoria (1921) and
10 Introduction
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928) as well as Harold Nicolson’s
Some People (1927). However, it is clear that she could not envisage the
advent of such a successful hybrid genre, its breadth and potential, when she
stated that writers cannot ‘serve under two masters’22 and have to choose
between biography and fction: ‘Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fction;
the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously’ (‘New
Biography’ 478). Taking the biofctional middle way, crossing the two
‘antagonistic’ (477) genres, biography and fction, can only lead to mutual
destruction, according to Woolf: ‘let them meet and they destroy each other’
(477); ‘no one […] can make the best of both worlds; you must choose, and
you must abide by your choice’ (‘Art of Biography’ 185).
And yet, when commenting on the evolution of biography from Sidney
Lee to Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson, Woolf notes that the combina-
tion of the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth with the ‘rainbow-like intangibil-
ity’ of personality is fundamental to convey the ‘truthful transmission of
personality’ (‘New Biography’ 471). Similarly, Henry James at the turn of
the twentieth century discussed the difference between the historical solid-
ity of ‘little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and
prints’ and the psychological interiority which he deems essential: this is
‘the real thing’ that the novelist is expected to capture, and it consists of
‘the invention, the representation of the old consciousness – the soul, the
sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things
that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent’ (202–203,
emphasis in original). In order to seize the character’s personality, Woolf
considers methods to lighten the load of factual research and the weight
of hard fact: ‘facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others
shaded’ (‘New Biography’ 471). The ‘monstrous’ (474) Victorian biography
is fawed, as the biographical fgure is ‘hampered and distorted’ (474); the
method of presentation is wrong, as the fgure is ‘always above life size in
top hat and frock coat, and the manner of presentation becomes increas-
ingly clumsy and laborious’ (475). The ‘conscientious biographer’ ‘toil[s]
though endless labyrinths and embarrass[es] himself with countless docu-
ments’, and the result is an ‘amorphous mass’ (475). Woolf argues in favour
of de-fossilising Victorian biography and rendering the character’s ‘voice’,
‘laughter’, ‘curse’ or ‘anger’ – traces that indicate that the subject ‘was once
a living man’ (475). The ‘new biographer’ chooses, selects and synthesises
their material and adopts a new method of writing about people ‘as though
they were at once real and imaginary’ (475), thus ‘making the best of both
worlds’ (475). The ‘biographer’s imagination’ is stimulated by the ‘novel-
ist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private
life’ (478). Nicolson’s Some People thus combines both ‘the substance, the
reality of truth’ and ‘the freedom, the artistry of fction’ (476). The ‘pith
and essence’ of the character emerge from minute observations: ‘the tone
of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in
passage’ (476). This initiates a new biographical mode of representation in
 Introduction 11
which the biographer ‘has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an art-
ist’ (475). The artist’s self-portrait emerges at the same time as his subject’s
personality and ‘by the end of the book we realise that the fgure which has
been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author’ (477).
Similarly, biographical novels about Woolf end up being as much a portrait
of Woolf as of the authors who endeavour to portray her in their novels,
and Woolf ‘holds up in […] her small bright diminishing mirror a […] refec-
tion’ (477) of these contemporary authors.
Woolf is thus aware of the necessity of mixing the two kinds of truths,
both of them ‘genuine’, namely ‘the truth of real life and the truth of fction’
(477), but ‘no more than a pinch of either’ (477), otherwise they ‘destroy
each other’ (477). She could thus open only half a door to the genre of bio-
fction. Today, the cautious pinches of the truth of fact and truth of fction
sprinkled in the new biography are no longer deemed antagonistic, destruc-
tive or explosive in biofction, which hosts and embraces both equally, and
which uses both in large proportions. The modernist biographical conun-
drum expressed by Woolf – the incompatibility and yet the fruitful combina-
tion of fact and fction – has become a postmodernist evidence and a regular
practice of biofction. Contemporary biofction is a vigorous offshoot of
the modernist ‘new biography’ and is ‘subtle and bold enough to present
that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of
granite and rainbow’ (478). The biographical method that still remained
to be discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘possible
direction’ (478) initiated by the ‘new biography’, is now fully explored by
postmodernist biographical authors. Interestingly enough, in 1939, in ‘The
Art of Biography’, Woolf was wondering: ‘[c]ould not biography produce
something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama,
and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact – its suggestive
reality, its own proper creativeness’ (184), thus providing us with a per-
spicaciously apt defnition of current biofction and pointing at its poten-
tialities. Strachey’s premature death prevented him from exploring ‘the
vein that he had opened’ (185), but he showed biographical novelists ‘the
way in which [they] may advance’ (185). Like the ‘miner’s canary’ (186),
Strachey ‘test[ed] the atmosphere’ (186) of an extraordinary gem of a genre.
The current postmodernist biofction therefore prolongs a long tradition
of life-writing which was given a new direction and a tremendous impulse
by modernist authors. Contemporary writers today revive the modernists’
engagement and experiment with the ‘forms and boundaries of biography
and autobiography’ (Saunders 294), by offering more ‘celebratory and play-
ful’ (293) versions of the genre.
Since Lukács’s formal objections of the genre, which put a dampener on
the fourishing production of biographical novels in the 1930s, more ethical-
aesthetic criticism has been voiced recently. In 1999, as the second boom
of biofction was in full swing, Jonathan Dee deplored the ‘practice of con-
scripting fesh-and-blood people into novels’, which has become a ‘veritable
12 Introduction
epidemic in the last twenty-fve years or so’ (77). He severely declared that
even the ‘most sophisticated of these books’ lower ‘the literary bar’ (83–84).
This criticism echoes some critics’ beliefs that biofction springs from the
laziness on the part of the creative writers and refects their lack of inventive-
ness, and that these authors merely dip into the historical and biographical
record and help themselves from ‘ready-made’ characters. In a 2014 article
in The Guardian, Jonathan Gibbs stated that ‘novels based on the life of a
famous person’ ‘are ten-a-penny’ and claimed that ‘[t]hey’re easy enough
to turn out’: ‘[o]ther people – the actual biographers – have done the hard
work. All the novelist has to do is to twist the “facts” to suit their own inter-
pretation of the life in question, and away they go’.23 Similarly, Phyllis Rose
argued that by basing a novel on a real person, the writers ‘need not be quite
so inventive […] they do not have to generate material from imagination’
(119). Biofctional novelists thus seem to be blamed for their lack of original-
ity. Oscar Wilde, however, would disagree – he once famously declared that
‘[i]t is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by
the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything’ (29). And
especially in Woolf’s case, critics have argued in favour of a different kind
of originality and creativity in the way authors ‘annex’ the authorial fgure
as well as her style, structures, characters and tropes to propose new visions
and versions of the author for twenty-frst-century readers. Postmodernist
originality resides in intertextual manipulation, creative collage and mon-
tage of past fragments: ‘incorporating the art of the past in its own processes
through reinterpretation and stylistic pastiche’ (Lodge, Year 10).
What seems to fuel the popularity of such novels today is our increas-
ing curiosity – which sometimes leads to obsession and addiction – with
famous people’s private lives. Biofction could be considered a literary man-
ifestation of our celebrity culture, a form of ‘fan fction’: ‘a kind of ele-
vated groupiedom, a subspecies of celebrity-worship’ (Gee, ‘Onceness’ 89).
Sellers has argued that technology has ‘changed our relationship to privacy’
(‘Postmodernism’ 208), and our gluttony is satisfed by easily fnding out
information within a click on the internet. Our natural curiosity and hunger
for authentic human stories – ordinary or sensational – was already noted
by Woolf in her time and was linked to the popularity of auto/biographical
genres:

Shall we read [biographies and autobiographies] in the frst place to

satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening
we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not
yet drawn, and each foor of the house shows us a different section of
human life in being? […] Biographies and memoirs answer such ques-
tions, light up innumerable such houses; they show us people going
about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, lov-
ing, until they die.
(‘How Should One Read a Book’ 575)
 Introduction 13
The voyeuristic interest in the past author’s life – harmless perhaps in some
respects – is nevertheless perceived by some critics as a way to promote and
enlarge the contemporary author’s reputation: by ‘impersonating geniuses
– ostensibly as an act of homage, but also, not coincidentally, as a way
of grabbing up the genuine cachet those geniuses still deliver’, the writer
‘enhance[s] the value of [their] own work’ (Dee 82). According to such
harsh critics therefore, the contemporary authors who give birth to a char-
acter named Virginia Woolf bask in her glory and take ruthless advantage
of her pervasive image and outstanding reputation in both high and popular
culture. Despite his heartfelt homage to Woolf in The Hours, which was
applauded by many critics and scholars, Cunningham could understand
how, by dissecting Woolf’s heart and mind – and borrowing her style – she
would feel doubly aggrieved because of the authors’ invasion of her privacy
and their undermining or degrading of her literary achievements:

I think [Woolf] would feel violated by authors who lower the high lit-
erary standards she tried to establish during her life. Despite all of her
copious letter writing and diary keeping, she was somewhat private.
And I think she would fnd the writing not up to snuff. You know, she
was very critical.
(‘Biographical Novel’ 93)

Other critics suggested that writing a novel about a famous author like
Woolf could be a marketing ploy to capitalise on her fame and the readers’
familiarity with her. It could very well be a ‘convenient way for a contempo-
rary writer to enlarge his or her currency’ (Schiff 366). Finally, this practice
of ‘stealing’ lives gives the novelist an unfattering, predatory image of a
ruthless ‘graverobber’ (Dee 76), a plunderer, a ‘necromancer’ (Jacobs 88),
a ‘vampire’ (Wilson),24 a nostalgic necrophile who over-idealises the dead
at the expense of the living, while stealing previous authors’ words25 makes
him or her a shameless plagiarist. The ethics of appropriating the author’s
life and work as material to be refashioned, played with and reimagined
have been at the centre of many debates about the genre. But practitioners
of biographical fction like Sellers have also understood that biofction can
constitute a privileged ‘arena in which it is possible to explore tentative
hypotheses ethically’ (‘Writing’ 224). The fctional dimension of the genre
allows authors to formulate speculative answers to their obsessive questions
about past authors’ lives and investigate the omissions and silences of biog-
raphy. Like any other artistic mode of expression, fction is a ‘mixture of
thieving and empathy’ (Sellers, ‘Postmodernism’ 221);26 Jeanette Winterson
also provocatively stated that writers, who are ‘ruled by Mercury, god of
thieves and liars’, are ‘vandals’ and ‘tomb raiders’ who take things which
already exist and ‘dress them up differently’.27 This is even truer for bio-
graphical novelists who display their ‘booty’ in their writing. But, as Sellers
argued, biographical novelists, by openly naming their inspirations, adopt a
14 Introduction
more ethical practice than writers in general who start speculating as soon
as their imagination is kindled by a real person or event and use them as
material for their fction.
Compared with its small number of vociferous detractors who have
had a condescending or dismissive attitude towards biofction and have
directed the debate towards either ethical issues or the authors’ waning
imagination, lack of creativity and poor craftsmanship, many more schol-
ars today have expressed their appreciation of the contemporary authors’
extremely diverse creative skills, pleaded in favour of this admirable genre
and pointed out its origins, present manifestations and infnite future poten-
tialities. There is no doubt that this writing practice implies a uniquely
narrative virtuosity and mastery of a skilful, complex fctionalising pro-
cess. Practitioners of biographical novels re-examine past lives to produce
a doubly hybrid literary product: an amalgam of biography and fction, as
well as genre and literary fction. These authors have the absolute merit
of crafting a powerful, resourceful and fascinating genre: they dig into
authentic historical and personal documents in order to assess what hap-
pened and offer the public an account that satisfes both its ‘hunger’ for
the real and the pleasure of reading a literary text. Beyond speculations
about events or situations, authors explore what might have happened
and how it could have happened; they reimagine the past and use it to
explain our present: for Middeke, for instance, biofction is ‘not character-
ized by a retrogressive but by a decidedly progressive movement to explain
and interpret the present’ (18). The representation of the past helps both
authors and their readers to make sense of their present historical and per-
sonal situations. Examining our literary, cultural and socio-political con-
text through Woolf’s eyes and understanding it is precisely what Maggie
Gee does in her satirical novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, in which
Virginia observes the evolution of the values Woolf28 fought for: gender
equality, pacifsm, rejection of patriarchy, aesthetic and sexual freedom.
As stressed previously, biographical likeness, accuracy and factual fdelity
is not the be-all and end-all in biofction, and poetic licence is used by con-
temporary authors to ‘give readers a vivid picture of the worldview’ and
‘use the[ir] biographical subject in order to project into being their own
aesthetic vision’ (Lackey, ‘Usages’ 12). Thus, several authors examined in
this volume have invoked Woolf and created a Virginia of their own, an
idol in their own image who articulates their aesthetic, social and political
concerns. Woolf has become an effective vehicle to express contemporary
authors’ daring visions of life because she had the inherent personality and
the resounding political voice of a spokeswoman. She has thus been used
by many novelists-ventriloquists as their fctional ‘puppet’ to communicate
their multiple truths.29 Indeed, contemporary authors’ personal experi-
ences and urgent preoccupations always simmer below the surface of the
narration and are often acknowledged in interviews. The autobiographical
dimension of some biographical novels allows contemporary authors to
 Introduction 15
explore their own experiences and foibles through their characters’ feel-
ings, reactions and motivations.
The aim of biographical fction is obviously not to inform or educate
readers, but to transport them to a past period and guide them through the
labyrinths of a historical fgure’s consciousness, ‘using the novelist’s licence
to imagine thoughts, feelings and spoken words which can never be reliably
documented by a biographer’ (Lodge, Year 13). Sellers clarifes the com-
parison between history/biography and fction by stating that while ‘history
and biography teach us about a period and people, fction takes us there’
(‘Postmodernism’ 210). The reader is no longer a ‘spectator’ who ‘stands
on the sidelines’ as when reading history or biography, ‘but a participant’
(Stone 2). It is not what happened that is important but giving the reader a
sense of what the protagonist thought or felt during certain events and the
impact external events had on their mind. The novelist enables the reader to
listen to conversations and be privy to the character’s innermost thoughts;
the novelist’s exploration of the character’s inner landscape allows us a bet-
ter understanding of the historical personage, their personality, their human
depths, the inspiration and genesis of their work that is still read and dis-
cussed today. These novelistic methods bring us closer to a certain type
of truth: not a factual one, but a symbolical, emotional truth, ‘the truth
of [the authors’] vision’ (Woolf, ‘Art of Biography’ 185). The biofctional
productions based on so many biographical subjects, with so many generic
varieties and offshoots, cannot obviously reach a consensual, unanimous,
unequivocal critical reception. It largely depends on who the protagonist
is, what the historical counterpart accomplished in their time and how we
can relate to this fgure today, which brings me to focus more specifcally on
Woolf’s case as a character in fction and drama. By examining a wide vari-
ety of biographical novels and bioplays about Woolf, I will offer answers to
crucial questions such as: Why has Woolf, in particular, been resuscitated
in so many biofctions and bioplays over the last ffty years? What are the
idiosyncrasies of each of them? Precisely what facets of Woolf’s life and
aspects of her oeuvre have been selected and highlighted by contemporary
authors and playwrights and to what specifc purposes?

Visions and Designs

Biofction about Woolf is abundant and extraordinarily diverse, ranging
from extremely refned, sophisticated and complex literary novels that
stimulate scholars, to thrilling, voyeuristic and sensational genre fction rel-
ished by the mainstream reader. Woolf’s growing fame in literary circles and
increasing visibility in popular culture are mirrored in these literary repre-
sentations, from the sporadic appearances in the seventies (Maureen Duffy,
A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square [1972] and Peter Luke, Bloomsbury:
A Play [1976]) and in the early eighties, around the year of the centenary
of Woolf’s birth (Edna O’Brien, Virginia: A Play [1981] and Ellen Hawkes
16 Introduction
and Peter Manso, The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of Espionage with
Virginia Woolf [1983]) until the mid- and late-nineties (Eileen Atkins, Vita
and Virginia [1995]; Elizabeth Steele, Virginia Woolf and Companions: A
Feminist Document. A Play [1996]; Sigrid Nunez, Mitz: The Marmoset of
Bloomsbury [1998]; Robin Lippincott, Mr Dalloway [1999]), in the wake
of successive waves of feminist movements which claimed Woolf’s image,
used her words as slogans and popularised her political ideas. Today, and
since the planetary success of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-prize-winning
novel The Hours (1998), Woolf has been occupying a predominant position
in the literary limelight, which is evinced by the numerous millennial rep-
resentations examined in this volume: Gillian Freeman, But Nobody Lives
in Bloomsbury (2006); Gabriel Thoveron, Qui fait peur à Virginia Woolf
(2006); Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia (2008); Stephanie Barron, The
White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2009); Lorae Parry, Bloomsbury
Women & the Wild Colonial Girl (2010); Clare Morgan, A Book for All
and None (2011); Christine Orban, Virginia et Vita (2012); Kyo Maclear
and Isabelle Arsenault, Virginia Wolf (2012); E.H. Wright, Vanessa and
Virginia (2013); Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister (2014); Maggie Gee,
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014); Norah Vincent, Adeline: A Novel of
Virginia Woolf (2015); Alienora Judith Taylor, Riding at the Gates of Sixty:
A Fictional Account of Virginia Woolf’s Death and Life (2015); Anne-James
Chaton, Elle regarde passer les gens (2016); Anne-Marie Bougret, Intrigue
chez Virginia Woolf (2019) and Emmanuelle Favier, Virginia (2019).
Cunningham’s The Hours marked a noteworthy turning point in Woolfan
representations: after the frst feminist versionings or re-interpretations of
Woolf – who was primarily ‘used as a talisman and model’ (Silver, ‘Icon’
393) and a fearsome political tool – Cunningham reached a superlative crea-
tive dimension and gave Woolf a particular aura, which, for better or for
worse,30 has imposed a dominant popular image of Woolf today for millions
of readers (and movie-goers) all over the world. Damaging as this prevalent
image may seem for some critics, The Hours has incited many readers to (re)
read Woolf’s oeuvre, thus reinstating the modernist author’s position in the
literary and cultural pantheon, and has acted as an inspirational motivation
for many other authors who have, since then, engaged with Woolf’s life and
oeuvre. Cunningham has given other contemporary authors an enormous
impetus to re-envision this complex authorial fgure and create a Virginia of
their own and of their own time, born from their personal obsessions and
communal concerns, and this has led to an extraordinary proliferation of
‘Virginias’ in fction since the turn of the twenty-frst century.
All authors considered in this monograph are ‘Woolfolators’: avowed
fans, groupies and worshippers inspired, obsessed and infuenced by
Woolf.31 Among them, a few are scholars who have devoted their whole
careers to Woolf studies. They are all indebted to Woolf and have openly
acknowledged their debt and familiarity with the prefgurative author in
numerous interviews. These ephebi, to borrow the Bloom-sian terminology,
 Introduction 17
are so immersed in Woolf’s life and work and they have absorbed and pro-
cessed Woolf in such profound ways that they can reconstruct her voice,
thoughts and writing style, as well as the geneses of her novels in their fc-
tional enterprises. Some of the biofctions examined in this book are pro-
duced by accomplished apophrades who extend Woolf’s work; these gifted
successors allow Woolf’s truthful voice to come alive again and speak to
our contemporary concerns and preoccupations, but their work has yet to
stand the test of time and prove as relevant for future generations of read-
ers. Other biofctional productions about Woolf have long been forgotten
and are currently out of print; they refect particular aesthetic contexts and
political concerns that initially spawned them.
The merit of this encyclopaedic survey of contemporary bioplays and bio-
graphical novels about Woolf is that it navigates a wide literary spectrum:
not only the acclaimed literary masterpieces like The Hours, but also genre
fction, popular, obscure, self-printed, second-rate novels. The contempo-
rary novelists and playwrights have a variable knowledge of the available
Woolfan material, which inevitably affects the way they (inter)textually
reconstruct their character, who is born out of specifc critical discourses
and made out of selected primary sources, which have evolved and densifed
through time. All these literary creations, irrespective of their circulation
and value, have a signifcant interest: they refect the different versions of
Woolf that have emerged throughout decades and contribute to reinforcing
her authorial aura over a span of almost ffty years, from 1972 to 2019.
This study focuses on the authors’ production of their works, based on
their necessarily subjective interpretations of Woolf’s life and work, but
also on scholarly receptions and analyses of the role of biofction in the
process of the iconisation of Woolf’s authorial fgure and canonisation of
her work. All these biographical products, irrespective of their popular and
critical reception, raise specifc literary and cultural questions, reinvigorate
Woolf’s authorial image and reinsert her past oeuvre into updated circuits
of meaning.
The aim of this study is to probe the eclectic confgurations of biofction
and biodrama and highlight the authors’ and playwrights’ versions of their
Virginia. Lily Briscoe’s inability to paint a satisfactory portrait of her sub-
ject, Mrs Ramsay, is similar to this biofctional enterprise. It is absolutely
impossible to draw an all-encompassing portrait, as Mrs Woolf is essentially
a complex, contradictory fgure. She is not simply one thing: one needs ffty
pairs of eyes to go round the larger-than-life authorial fgure. Instead, we
are offered facets of her personality intertwined with fragments of her art.
Thus, Woolf-as-a-character sometimes emerges as an articulate, industri-
ous, imaginative, self-absorbed writer and hypersensitive aesthete consumed
by her art; at other times she is an eccentric author, a fearless feminist who
has the courage to defend her opinions; yet at other times she is defned
by her sexuality: she is a lesbian or bisexual, an incest victim or a heroic
survivor of family abuse, a frigid virgin or a passionate, adventurous lover.
18 Introduction
Some authors focus on her unorthodox marriage: their Virginia thus vari-
ously appears as a grateful wife aware of the burden she represents for her
caring, self-sacrifcing husband, or a content, happy wife living in perfect
intellectual harmony with her Leonard, or even at times a free woman who
enjoys extramarital Sapphic adventures; on the contrary, sometimes she is
portrayed as a terrifed wife trapped in a sexless heterosexual marriage, tied
to the domestic sphere and resenting her lack of independence. But most of
the time the fctional Woolf is limned as a tragic, tortured fgure, continuing
the romantic myth of madness as the source of her genius: she is depressive,
prone to bouts of madness and ultimately suicidal. The repeated patterns of
madness and suicide are often central to her afterlives in fction and these
romanticised aspects dominate her personality and achievements. Many
authors feed their readers’ morbid fascination and fxation on Woolf’s
death-centred life, and their novels or plays inevitably offer clichéd versions
of Woolf as a troubled genius grappling with her prose and madness. As a
textual construct, Woolf unfortunately remains trapped in deeply rooted,
stubborn stereotypes despite many authors’ attempts to rescue and liberate
her from the dominant image of madness and tragic suicide, still ingrained
today in popular consciousness. For instance, a few contemporary authors
have taken more imaginative risks and have portrayed Woolf as a perspica-
cious feminist detective, a quirky old woman roaming the streets of today’s
Manhattan and Istanbul or a mother who regretfully abandons her secret
daughter. Other authors have imagined her as a purely spiteful, jealous and
malicious sister or, on the contrary, a loving, devoted, supporting sibling.
Finally, Virginia appears either as an introspective character in prose in
keeping with Woolf’s own signature or, on the contrary, as an outgoing
character endowed with agency in action-packed, plot-based page turn-
ers: she is therefore either a Woolfan character in novels of consciousness
or a very un-Woolfan character with a material life. Interestingly enough,
some authors ironically place Woolf, one of the bastions of high modern-
ist, literary fction, at the centre of consumable, mainstream genre fction.
Out of this vertiginous proliferation of magnifed, shrivelled or distorted
images, Woolf appears as a colourful, kaleidoscopic, magnetising character
in fction.
The biographical novels and plays studied in this book naturally provide
entertainment for readers, luring them with the promise of probing the pri-
vate life and puzzling death of a fascinating, recognisable celebrity, and feed-
ing their appetite for sensational stories as well as their voyeuristic interest
in Woolf’s fuid sexuality and suicidal impulses. However, these biographi-
cal novels and bioplays which stage Woolf as the main character certainly
have a deeper aim and critical scope. This monograph analyses how authors
today use Woolf’s authorial fgure to showcase their own literary, cultural,
social and political preoccupations. Woolf has many facets and represents
many things to many people; she ‘lends herself to infnitely various inter-
pretations’ (Lee, Virginia Woolf 3). The multiplicity of fctional ‘Virginias’
 Introduction 19
conceived by these creative writers constitutes an effective mouthpiece to
convey resounding messages and a symbolic cartridge that is flled with
personal meaning by each author. Some of the most sophisticated biofc-
tions examined in this book provide insightful metabiographical, metafc-
tional, metanarrative and metapictorial comments, as well as astute literary
criticism on Woolf’s work. A few authors embark on a feminist enterprise
to rehabilitate the damaged image of Woolf that has been perpetuated by
some biographers or by popular culture: they use the ‘truth of fction’ to
correct ‘the truth of fact’. Such multifarious appropriations of Woolf are
proof of her mobility and fexibility as a literary and cultural symbol whose
ideas refect our times. The fctional Virginia is made to defend many causes
Woolf herself fought for, which are still relevant today and which resonate
with people’s causes all over the world: women’s rights, pacifsm, sexual
and artistic freedom, emancipation from patriarchal oppression and fghting
against discrimination. This diversity of literary portraits raises the follow-
ing questions: why does Woolf, more than any other author, lend herself to
this creative practice, and what does she communicate better or differently
than other authors-as-characters in fction? What does this multiplicity of
fctionalised versions of Woolf ultimately tell us about the historical fgure,
but also about us, about our current literary practices, reading habits, hid-
den anxieties and ulterior motives?
It is actually easy to imagine why Woolf32 has proved to be such an
appealing authorial fgure with whom contemporary writers engage, more
particularly women writers who are deliberately following in her footsteps
and continuing her legacy. These women authors, who write in the formi-
dable shadow of their foremother, personally identify with Woolf and at the
same time wish to establish their originality: ‘the search for identifcation’
‘has to be balanced with the urge to establish difference, and perhaps, origi-
nality’ (Franssen and Hoenselaars 20). The fundamental difference between
respect and reverence was defned by Gee in an interview during which she
discussed her personal literary relationship with Woolf: ‘I didn’t want to
violate her voice, but at the same time I wanted to create my own twenty-
frst-century version of her. Reverence isn’t good for a writer. Respect is
important, and careful reading, but reverence doesn’t help anyone’ (inter-
view with O’Keeffe). There is certainly an umbilical cord linking women
writers with their foremother and a strong symbiotic, flial relationship,
but at the same time, they are striving to assert their individual talent and
respectfully write away from her ‘long shadow’.
Besides, collectively, Woolf has been an inspirational feminist author and
mentor for women all over the globe and has raised essential concerns for
them. Some are still valid and remain unanswered today. In some respects,
as Gee shows in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, little has changed in some
parts of the world. Woolf’s preoccupations back then resonate with ours
now. Woolf representations in fction thus enable contemporary authors to
provide comment on burning contemporary issues such as class and gender
20 Introduction
inequalities, patriarchal oppression and women’s emancipation, violence
and pacifsm, artistic and sexual freedom. Woolf thus helps us dissect and
understand our own time. Amanda Coe, the Bafta-winning screenwriter who
adapted Amy Licence’s Life in Squares (2015) as a three-part costume drama
for the BBC, has stated that ‘[a]t the moment, Virginia Woolf, especially,
seems to be in tune with the Zeitgeist in some way’.33 Woolf is defnitely a
relatable authorial fgure for our times and mores and her work lends itself
to new aesthetic uptakes, political updates and cultural re-interpretations.
The question one could ask is whether all these Woolf portraits, albeit
selective, subjective and biased, appear plausible to the reader. Fictional
portraits of historical fgures can be plausible in terms of personality, even
if there are historical inaccuracies like in Barron’s The White Garden or
Hawkes and Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth, or if the character is trans/
re-contextualised in a different time and place, like in Gee’s Virginia Woolf
in Manhattan. Authors ‘may play with [historical material], may even invert
it, if necessary, and still arrive at a heuristically impressive and plausible
interpretation of that life’ (Middeke and Huber 3). However, ‘plausibil-
ity’ is a highly subjective impression that varies with the reader’s variable
pre-knowledge of the historical subject: the more familiar we are with
Woolf’s life and oeuvre, the less plausible any of these versionings of Woolf
may seem, even when we willingly and completely suspend our disbelief.
Could Woolf as a character appear more plausible for readers who have
little knowledge of her? Conversely, could any of these Woolf portraits
ever be plausible for Hermione Lee, the epitome of the Woolf biographer
and scholar? It seems fairly obvious that Lee will always be ‘squeamish[ly]
reluctan[t]’ about Woolf being ‘made over into a fctional character, with
made up thoughts and speeches’: she will always fnd Virginia’s ‘nose’ to be
too big or too small and her ‘tone of voice’ (Nose 50) to ring not quite true
in particular circumstances.

Postmodernist Truthful (Mis)representations

This ensemble of snapshots of Woolf in fction and drama are actually ‘no
more false than they are true’,34 and none of them can possibly give a com-
plete overview of the complex authorial fgure – neither do they claim nor
aim to do so. To borrow the oft-quoted truism enunciated by Barthes, all
these versions of Woolf are ‘partially true, therefore totally false’ (Camera
66). Each of them is a truthful fctional representation or an ‘expression of
truth’ (109); each of them communicates a truth – the authors’ own emo-
tional truths – yet not the truth. Together, all the biofctions and bioplays
examined in this volume give a sense of what Woolf might have been and
thought and how she might have behaved in specifc situations. The ‘true’
Woolf – although there is little consensus about this even among her biogra-
phers – remains completely inaccessible and yet is persistently and continu-
ously reconstructed anew by each novelist and playwright.
 Introduction 21
In ‘The Futures of Biofction Studies’, Lackey states that ‘the most gifted
biographical novelists’ give their readers ‘certain types of “truths”’ (345).
He raises essential questions about what kind of truths, how and why they
differ from truths presented in biographies or history books and ‘how the
“truths” of biofction can supplement the historical record’ (345). He ends
his article about the future of the genre by urging scholars to ‘answer these
and other questions’ (345) in their studies. Taking my cue from his incen-
tive, this monograph aims at answering these important questions by focus-
ing on one of the most represented authors in contemporary fction and
drama, and the various truths that contribute to an expansive, global, poin-
tillistic portrait of Woolf as a character, which is still largely in progress and
open to future additions.
These truthful portrayals of Woolf in fction are not faithful representa-
tions done with absolute factual fdelity, but artistic (mis)representations
and critical acts of (re)interpretation. Thanks to their artistic licence, authors
have the absolute freedom of imagining and drawing an impressionistic,
cubist, sketchy, fragmentary, simplifed or distorted version of their subject.
Cunningham’s analogy with twentieth-century portraiture is aptly relevant
to illustrate this point: ‘Think of Picasso’s portraits. They’re not precise ren-
ditions of those people, and yet his portrait of Gertrude Stein, for instance,
gives us more about Gertrude Stein than any of the photographs of her’
(‘Biographical Novel’ 92). The representations of Woolf by contemporary
authors in a way refect Picasso’s daring experiment with non-conventional
forms of representation because although he ventures far into the abstract,
he never completely abandons the real. Similarly, authors in this study pro-
duce their own Picasso-like versions of Woolf, which do not exactly resem-
ble Woolf, but remain anchored in the biographical realm and communicate
the authors’ sense of Woolf, which is, of course, different from what we
get from photographs, memoirs or biographies of Woolf. The technique of
Cubism was also discussed by Jay Parini in an interview with Lackey:

Picasso defned Cubism as a dance around the object. Whether the

object is Tolstoy or Walter Benjamin or Herman Melville, I use these
many voices to dance around this object, trying to open up the truth,
looking for recesses where I can dig in and try to grow truth.
(‘Refections’ 211)

In the same way, all the creative writers who have ‘danced around’ their
Virginia Woolf have used their unique perspectives and voices to create a
collective cubist version of her, each contributing their own vision or frag-
ment of her, each presenting their readers the truth of their own vision.
Although forms of the genre have been practised since Antiquity, the
current biofction genre, fertilised by modernist innovations, as pointed
out previously, has found particularly fecund ground in the postmodern-
ist philosophy, which emphasises historical relativism and epistemological
22 Introduction
uncertainty.35 The death of authority applies to all narratives, be they his-
toriographic, biographical or fctional. Biofction writing exposes universal
postmodernist interests, such as the authors’ (inter)playing with truth and
illusion, the impossibility of or incredulity towards36 a ‘true’, unique, con-
sensual, authoritative, legitimate representation, and the questioning and
refecting on the act of writing, which resurfaces in the text in metafctional
observations. The fctional stories and character constructs are meant to
give the illusion of historically and factually accurate life stories. Stimulating
confusions between fact and fction, growing fctional ramifcations from
factual accounts or flling in the interstices between historical or biographi-
cal available facts are common techniques favoured by the postmodernist
imagination.
Biofction writing is a postmodernist genre par excellence and refects our
current writing practices. It gives authors the absolute creative freedom to
experiment with the spectacular encounters between biography and fction
and exploit the infnite potentialities of their confuences. Playing with the
truth, recycling iconic historical fgures and creating simulacra of real lives
are typically postmodernist devices. The novels and plays I address here use
postmodernist techniques that are similar to sampling in music, or montage
and collage in the visual arts; these intertextual practices consist of select-
ing fragments from previous works and integrating them in contemporary
productions. Besides, the fundamental process at the heart of Woolf biofc-
tions is manipulating the truth and fabricating a reality that can appear
‘hyperreal’ (Baudrillard 1), that is to say, constructing a character who com-
bines features of the historical Woolf and an imaginary Virginia born out of
authors’ fantasies, the two blending seamlessly together. Whether in meta-
fctional comments inserted in their novels or in interviews, many authors
defend the argument that the representation of their Virginia is ‘truer’ to life
than a biographer’s and that their subjective poetic truth may be more valu-
able for the reader than purely factual accounts. This echoes Woolf’s own
statement that ‘the life which is increasingly real to us is the fctitious life;
it dwells in the personality rather than in the act’ (‘New Biography’ 478).
Biofction writing refects the general postmodern epistemological sus-
picion and uncertainty and fts the postulate that absolutely objective his-
torical truth is an illusion. Because truth does not consist of a single, fxed,
monolithic, authoritative position, there cannot possibly be one complete
Woolfan grand narrative, but a multitude of petits récits (little stories)
(Lyotard 60). All the biographical novels and plays presented in this study
are the equivalent of petits récits, a plurality of alternative or parallel worlds,
‘whether real, possible, fctional’ (McHale, Constructing Postmodernism
147), which gain more and more legitimacy in our postmodern world, as
opposed to biographical grand narratives. The postmodern deconstruction
of meta- or grand narratives leads to the emergence of more diverse, per-
sonal, marginal and secondary narratives; thus, biographical authors adopt
particular points of view and narrative flters: they use not only well-known,
 Introduction 23
established fact, but also gossip and marginal, trivial anecdotes and expand
minor footnotes in the historical fgure’s life. The declining beliefs in unique,
complete, offcial biographical stories or historical accounts compel post-
modernist authors to refute the accepted narratives and offer in exchange
subjective, deeply personal stories that undermine the authority of existing
totalitarian discourses. Max Saunders has stated that postmodernism has
contributed to the renewal of auto/biographical forms: ‘Postmodern theo-
ries of subjectivity as constituted through narrative, combined with its scep-
ticism about both subjectivities and about grand narratives, have renewed
the sense of the indistinguishability of autobiography and fction; and thus
also the energies of autobiografction’ (293). According to him, the interac-
tions between auto/biography and fction have become ‘the dominant mode
of postmodernism’ (484).
In Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia, the character of Vanessa states that ‘the
truth has many sides to it, many changing shapes and forms’ (137), which
constitutes an astute postmodernist metanarrative observation. It refects
the scepticism about the absolute truth in all kinds of representations as
well as the critical stance that all narratives are necessarily a form of fc-
tion. This postmodernist attitude to truth is commented by Sellers herself
in an interview with Bethany Layne: ‘We are more aware than we used to
be how narratives of events can change depending on who is telling them
and for what purpose’ (‘Postmodernism’ 207). Sellers attributes the prolif-
eration of biographical fction to postmodernism and its ‘twin suspicion of
truth and fction’ (207). The growing scepticism about a unique historical
truth thus explains the tight link between postmodernism and the rise and
popularity of the biographical novel. It raises crucial questions, such as the
impossibility of knowing and capturing a past and a past historical person-
age, and draws attention to the constructions and representations of autho-
rial fgures who are variously appropriated by contemporary authors with
their personal agendas, but also collectively adopted as symbols by diverse
critical, political and ideological movements, and made to ft their common
interests.
Many authors in this study attempt to get at the ‘real truth’ of Woolf’s
life and death through fction and go beyond the consensual historical and
biographical information. Thus, some biographical novels present con-
spiracy theories that suggest that what we know about the past and hold
as true is a story fabricated by a higher power in order to hide the real,
inconvenient truth. These biofctions posit an alternative reality made of
other facts, events and plots which take place beyond offcial narratives
and claim to reveal the ‘truth’. Hence, the fgure of the biographer or the
scholar as a detective in search of the truth in postmodern biographical
novels. As an observant reader of signs and a shrewd literary critic who can
interpret these signs, Virginia makes a convincing detective who reaches the
truth through deductive reasoning. Fiction is thus conceived as a ‘corrective’
account which fnally restores the truth. These ‘what if’ biofctions about
24 Introduction
Woolf require the readers to forget what they know and follow the new
versions of events that spring from biographical lacunae and take incredible
proportions. Postmodern biofction manipulates the real and plays with dif-
ferent layers of truths, pluralism of realities and postures of the character.
The ‘real’ Woolf that is being reinvented for the twenty-frst-century reader
is a mosaic of all her personae, the summing-up of all the past and present
fabrications. This concept is in keeping with the postmodernist assumption
that simultaneous, discordant, competitive, heteroglossic discourses – off-
cial and unoffcial, central and marginal – coexist. Contemporary authors
offer their readers the promise of fnding in their pages or on stage a Virginia
who appears truthful in different contexts and circumstances. Woolf thus
becomes a postmodernist textual construct who is transposable to differ-
ent generic, social and historical settings; because since her death she has
been a vector of continuously pressing messages throughout decades, she
appeals to successive generations of readers with different literary, cultural
and political expectations.
In Lector in Fabula, Umberto Eco claims that every proposition must
be either true or false within a possible world: it cannot be both true
and false. Postmodernist writers and critics, whose ontological concerns
are at the centre of their philosophies, have re-examined the possible
world theory; for them, both true and false, the real and the possible, are
compatible and do coexist in a postmodern narrative, which deliberately
plays with the entanglement of ontological levels.37 They have shown a
particular interest in the collusion of two worlds, curiously ‘suspended
between existence and non-existence’ (Doležel, ‘Truth’ 23).38 What the
readers are offered is ‘if not the real world, at least a real world’ (McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction 197, original emphasis), if not the real Woolf,
at least a real Woolf: the illusion of reality is constantly activated with
the addition of plausible elements ‘in terms of the consensus of what is
known’ (Sellers, ‘Postmodernism’ 215). The rich potentialities and large
capaciousness of biofction today spring precisely from this very hybridity
that Woolf, despite her visionary theories and experiments in Orlando
and Flush, could not quite acknowledge, and which enables the writers
to ‘make the best of both worlds’ rather than having to choose. They
are thus able to maintain ‘the suggestive reality’ of fact while resorting
to the ‘intensity’ and ‘excitement’ of fction (Woolf, ‘Art of Biography’
122). Woolf’s own venture into this shifting generic zone and her vision
of bringing together the ‘granite-like solidity of fact’ and the ‘rainbow-like
intangibility’ of personality ‘into one seamless whole’ (‘New Biography’
473) has since been followed and taken to new levels by contemporary
writers examined in this study. By resorting to both the Woolfan method
and ingenious postmodernist tropes, they have made ‘the truth of fact
and the truth of fction’ (478) coexist harmoniously and blend homogene-
ously. Contemporary biographical novels have managed to produce what
Woolf thought to be inconceivable or impossible by paying allegiance to
 Introduction 25
both biography and fction and adopting a convenient narrative position
situated ‘betwixt and between’ (‘Art of Biography’ 187).
Bringing together these antithetical genres has been made possible by
postmodernist writers who have succeeded – arguably, some of them bet-
ter than others – in ‘serving under two masters’. The origins of Woolf as a
character in contemporary fction is thus ironically to be found both in the
author’s aesthetic beliefs and in her own incredulity towards the viability
and success of the hybrid genre. Today, as if by some quirk of literary his-
tory, the wheel has fnally come full circle: Woolf’s theories of characters
in ‘modern fction’ and ‘new biography’ are being used by contemporary
biographical novelists to portray her as a Woolfan character in a prose
that mimics her recognisable stylistic signature. Her brand of modernism
and inventive biographical novels are reproduced and updated in several
postmodernist novels studied in this book. Woolf-as-a-character in contem-
porary fction is chiselled out of Woolf-as-an-author’s own material and
depicted with the tools she herself conceived and promoted at the beginning
of the twentieth century.

From Truthful Fictions to Travesties of Truth

This book examines how contemporary authors fnd imaginative stimuli in
the narrow chinks of offcial biographies and use their poetic licence to fll
the silences of Woolf’s life and death. Their portrayal of Woolf is either very
much in keeping with historical and biographical truth – as some authors
adhere quite closely to published documentation and archival material – or
a defance of the bounds of plausibility and credibility – as their images
of Woolf are stretched and distorted in scenarios which veer into fanciful
magical realism, sometimes to the point of ‘travesty’ (Lodge, Year 9).39 I
would like to study the representational spectrum from truthful fctions to
travesties of truth, as well as the more nuanced novels and plays in between,
in which authors and playwrights successfully manage to walk the biofc-
tional tightrope. By examining the diversity of the bioplays and biofctions
about Woolf published over a period of almost ffty years, I am taking into
account a wide gamut of phenomena of literary hybridity, from bioplays in
which biography is incorporated in large chunks and intertextuality remains
intact to biographical novels that take a counterfactual turn and become a
complete ‘travesty’ of truth.
In order to structure this monograph, I deliberately intended not to
embark upon an obvious chronological survey – which would admittedly
have allowed me to examine the evolution of Woolf’s dramatic and fc-
tional representations and draw conclusions on how they refect critical
and epistemological contexts in which they remain moored – but to fol-
low the subtle gradations of biofction, further and further removed from
the hard biographical core and incorporating heftier proportions of fction.
After examining biofction which relies on objective documentary evidence,
26 Introduction
then biofction which increasingly leaves more room to authors’ subjectiv-
ity and imaginativeness, I will broach the highly speculative recreation of
Woolf’s life or ‘travesty’ to the point of untruth.40 On the biofctional scale
against which I measure the bioplays and biographical novels about Woolf,
the zero-degree biofction constitutes the ground base. This notion applies
to any biography about Woolf and is based on the postmodernist postu-
late outlined previously that there is no such thing as a completely accurate,
objective representation and that any biography contains the biographer’s
conjectures, hypotheses and theses about the subject’s life, events, thoughts,
motivations and actions. As Lee stated in respect to Woolf biographies,
‘[t]here is no such thing as a neutral or objective biography, particularly not
in this case’ (‘Biomythographers’ 95). Like any constructed discourse shaped
by language and ideology, I therefore suggest that biographies do not tell the
truth, but a truth: an ‘invented truth’,41 a made-up truth, a plausible truth.
A biography displays the biographer’s vision of their subject and their inter-
pretation of a life – inevitably incomplete and biased, as any interpretation.
As Lackey explains, it is an ‘inadvertent misrepresentation’: ‘an informed
reader will know that the author’s ideological orientation will infect their
representation of the biographical subject, so what readers get in a biog-
raphy is a biased version of their subject’s life’ (‘Narrative Space’ 9). All
biographies contain the biographer’s selection, analysis and conclusions of
facts, and their particular arrangement of documented evidence when tracing
their subject’s life and shaping its narrative. Biography, like all postmodernist
discourses, is a subjective narrative fabrication which involves the manipula-
tion of the primary sources. In this sense, Jay Parini, one of the most accom-
plished practitioners of biofction, aptly quoted Bernard Malamud’s character
Dubin (Dubin’s Lives, 1979) who categorically says that ‘all biography is
ultimately fction’ (Angels 252). ‘[N]o single biography is ever defnitive’ but
is instead ‘a particular story from perhaps dozens of stories one could tell’
(252). Following Parini’s conclusion that ‘biographies are really novels in
disguise’ (253), I would therefore contend that all biographical ‘subjects’ are
somehow ultimately ‘characters’, that is to say, textual constructs. All Woolf
biographies are thus zero-degree biofctions: they contain not so much fction
per se, but a subjective orientation imprinted in the narrative.42
Based on this initial postulate that any biography is a narrative fabrica-
tion, in Chapter 1, ‘Bioplay(giarism)s’, I will start by examining the frst step
on the biofctional scale, namely frst-degree biofction, illustrated by Eileen
Atkins’s bioplay Vita and Virginia. The fctitious dimension of this bioplay
is conferred by the creative selection, manipulation, collage and montage of
Woolfan auto/biographical material. Atkins straight-forwardly and system-
atically copies and pastes snippets of the primary sources and creates a dia-
logic structure with them. This frst case study is followed by Edna O’Brien’s
second-degree bioplay, Virginia: A Play. I perceive the process of biofc-
tionalisation as ripples that become larger and larger, moving further and
further away from the auto/biographical impact, expanding and absorbing
 Introduction 27
more and more fabricated material. O’Brien’s bioplay is further removed
from the raw, primary autobiographical source, which is more processed
and interwoven with fragments of fction from Woolf’s own work. Atkins
and O’Brien do not contribute any fctional components and do not tamper
with existing historical fact, biographical record, autobiographical material
or Woolf’s fctional oeuvre. However, Woolf’s biographical representations
remain subordinate to the playwrights’ creative imagination, as they art-
fully and playfully (re)assemble and dramatise Woolfan primary sources.
After studying bioplays in which playwrights incorporate both Woolf’s
auto/biography and fction, the end of the chapter focuses on third-degree
bioplays such as Elizabeth Steele’s Virginia Woolf and Companions: A
Feminist Document. A Play, which draws from auto/biographical, fctional
and non-fctional works by Woolf as well as other authors’ lives and works.
In Maureen Duffy’s A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square, auto/biographi-
cal material is not presented in verbatim quotes as in the previous cases,
but as paraphrase; the dramatic text leaves more and more room for the
author’s original poetic images, which refect and prolong those of Woolf.
In Virginia et Vita, Christine Orban resorts to the same artisanal process of
fabrication as Atkins and O’Brien, and the same creative enterprise as Duffy,
but unlike Atkins, who manipulates only autobiographical documentation,
O’Brien, who additionally incorporates fragments of Woolf’s oeuvre, and
Duffy, who combines almost quotes and paraphrases of Woolfan material,
Orban’s fourth-degree biofction is more imaginative insofar as it fctional-
ises Woolf’s life and work.
I envisage the frst-, second- and third-degree biofctions as a craft or
an artisanal manipulation of various sources, a creative act of bricolage
or ingenious recycling from pre-existing available documentation, which
consists of combining, imbricating and welding together bits and pieces of
authentic material. This literary practice involves specifc creative skills of
materially fashioning or shaping the Woolfan oeuvre. In contrast, fourth-
degree biofctions acquire artistic dimensions, as they rely more on the
imaginative power of the novelist, and are based on a more ‘purposeful and
strategic alteration of fact’ (Lackey, ‘Narrative Space’ 9). The majority of
biofctions studied in this book are fourth-degree biofctions. Although the
novelists take certain liberties with biographical and historical fact, they
usually do not contradict it. Biography is processed, paraphrased or sum-
marised, precise descriptions from Woolf’s diary and letters are extended,
and Woolf’s poetic images from her novels are reworked and act as a spring-
board for the authors’ own metaphors. Finally, ffth-degree biofctions are
counterfactual or supernatural stories that veer towards ‘travesty’. The
implausibility of these biofctions does not derive so much from the repre-
sentation of Woolf as a character – as the authors’ Virginia remains ‘correct
in personality’ (Middeke 3), that is to say, she is portrayed in keeping with
Woolf’s auto/biographical documentation – but from the far-fetched plots
and heavily manipulated historical evidence.
28 Introduction
Chapter 2, ‘Detecting Woolf’, focuses on examples of fourth-degree bio-
fctions: Ellen Hawkes and Peter Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel
of Espionage with Virginia Woolf, Stephanie Barron’s The White Garden: A
Novel of Virginia Woolf and Anne-Marie Bougret’s Intrigue chez Virginia
Woolf. In The Shadow of the Moth, the authors use the historical context of
WWI and invent a fanciful conspiracy in order to fabricate a fctional origin
for the feminist and political ideas that Woolf formulates in her real pam-
phlets. From investigator in The Shadow of the Moth, Virginia becomes the
object of investigation in The White Garden. The Shadow of the Moth and
The White Garden spring from Woolf’s denunciation of war, fascism and
patriarchy as voiced in Three Guineas, the pamphlet which constitutes a
rich political substrate for both novels. Intrigue chez Virginia Woolf shares
generic similitudes and thematic features with The Shadow of the Moth
(both are feminist detective biographical novels which aim to rehabilitate
Virginia’s image and debunk her pervasive legend as a mad, frail, suicidal
genius) as well as with The White Garden (as Virginia’s life becomes an
object of investigation while the main character-biographer is caught in a
romantic relationship and an impossible imbroglio). These fanciful scenarios
provide a transition to the ffth-degree biofctions examined in Chapter 3,
‘Virginia’s Daughters’: Clare Morgan’s A Book for All and None and
Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. The two authors move further
away from the ‘bio’ and set fewer limits to the ‘fction’, thus stretching the
limits of plausibility. Gee’s Virginia resurrected in the twenty-frst century is
a ‘what if’ scenario taken to its extreme: the reader is plunged into the mael-
strom of fanciful magical realism. Similarly, the revelation about a specifc
detail in the life of Morgan’s Virginia remains physically, biographically,
biologically and historically impossible and defes all credibility. Both novels
raise important critical questions about the death of the author in general
and of Woolf in particular, about her literary daughters’ duty to preserve
her legacy in the twenty-frst century despite the ‘anxiety of infuence’ or
their fear of writing and living in the ‘shadow’ of the formidable Woolf.
In Chapter 4, ‘Vanessa and Virginia’, I will study Susan Sellers’s Vanessa
and Virginia, E.H. Wright’s Vanessa and Virginia, Priya Parmar’s Vanessa
and Her Sister and Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault’s Virginia Wolf.
The authors focus on various aspects of the sisters’ multifaceted bond: their
similarities, complementarity, alliances, rivalry, dualities, antagonisms, psy-
chological tug-of-war, betrayals, mutual love and infuence. Most biogra-
phers and critics delimitate and oppose the sisters’ personalities, behaviours
and artistic realms and pit them against each other. A convenient dualistic
structure dominates common representations of the sisters: ‘the virginal,
barren woman versus the sensual, maternal one; the domestically inept ver-
sus the practical and competent; the dependent versus the independent; the
conversationalist versus the silent listener; the mentally unstable versus the
sane’ (Gillespie 5). The authors studied in this chapter adopt or challenge
this accepted premise of the sisters’ dualism. While Maclear, Arsenault and
 Introduction 29
Parmar play along with these defning differences – with Parmar, I would
argue, adopting a more soap-operatic approach of accentuating the sisters’
rivalry – Sellers rejects these dichotomies, as her portraits of Vanessa and
Virginia are superimposed to the extent of becoming symbiotic. Sellers’s sis-
ters have similar personalities and function as a mirroring pair. The sisters’
portraits examined in this chapter are to be found at the confuence between
the poetic and the pictorial and borrow from both Woolf’s and Bell’s arts.
The themes of duality and mirroring selves are also prevalent in the nov-
els studied in Chapter 5, ‘Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms’: Norah
Vincent’s Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf, Alienora Judith Taylor’s
Riding at the Gates of Sixty and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of
Bloomsbury. In the frst two novels, Woolf is portrayed as a tragic fgure,
and the fctional accounts converge towards her death. Their narrative,
made of signifcant episodes in the life of their character, is given a tele-
ological, dramatic arc, which explains and leads to the expected outcome.
In Vincent’s Adeline, polarity constitutes the novel’s main contraption. The
novel focuses on Virginia’s schizophrenic self and offers the joint portrait
of two Virginias: the adult, ageing Virginia and her eternally thirteen-year-
old self, named Adeline. Nunez’s Mitz is not just the mock biography of
Mitz – the marmoset who is depicted as Virginia’s unusual rival – but also
an oblique representation of Woolf as the author of Flush, through Nunez’s
close imitation of Woolf’s recognisable narrative technique conceived for
Flush: Nunez’s Virginia is thus portrayed with Woolf’s own tools. In this
chapter, discussions about stylistic pastiche lead to broader considerations
about the potentialities of biofction, which can function as a matrix for
digested, popularised literary criticism with a pedagogical aim for the main-
stream reader.
Nunez’s stylistic pastiche is taken to a new level by Robin Lippincott and
Michael Cunningham, whose novels are examined in Chapter 6, ‘Biofctive
Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf/Virginia Dalloway’. Mr Dalloway and The Hours
display the authors’ extraordinary Woolfan narrative virtuosity and tech-
nical artistry. This chapter prolongs the previous chapter’s refections on
ventriloquism and simulacra of geneses, as Cunningham fctionalises the
long and complex creative process of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. His Virginia
is covered ‘very remarkably’ with Woolf herself: she is not only made from
Woolf’s authentic auto/biographical sources, but also with bits and pieces of
her characters. Lippincott and Cunningham borrow fragments of Woolf’s
life as well as her stylistic palette and modernist tools and Dalloway-ise their
Virginia. Through these creative responses to Woolf’s canonical novel, this
chapter addresses questions about the inscription of the past in the present,
about appropriating and recontextualising previous works in new cultural
and literary spheres with specifc gender, sexuality and political issues that
refect our current contemporary concerns.
The novels and plays studied in Chapter 7, ‘Bloomsberries Reimagined’,
are Peter Luke’s Bloomsbury: A Play and Gillian Freeman’s But Nobody
30 Introduction
Lives in Bloomsbury. This last chapter focuses on fctional representations
of the fascinating, infamous social circle that formed around the Stephen
sisters at the beginning of the twentieth century. The unconventionality of
Bloomsbury and the scandals surrounding the members’ love and sexual
lives provides excellent primary material naturally endowed with dramatic
and novelistic potential. The authors examined in this chapter have explored
different amorous triangular confgurations – shapes which defne most
Bloomsbury friendships and relationships. More particularly, this chapter
offers discussions about the fctional portrait of Woolf in her personal rela-
tionships with her friends, as well as the depiction of the stimulating social
milieu and fertile artistic exchanges that conferred new dimensions to her
prose and contributed to her intellectual and artistic education.
The structure of the book and the organisation of its chapters have been
determined by a specifc internal logic and unfolding, starting with playful
creative games conceived as a respectful homage to Woolf, then moving on
to biofctions with clear critical motivations or strong political messages.
Furthermore, I have gathered all the literary productions around thematic
clusters and focused on Virginia in her interaction with other characters:
Vita, Vanessa, other feminist companions, Leonard, her own self, Adeline,
the marmoset Mitz and fnally, many of her Bloomsbury friends. I will start
by examining interactions of doubles or mirror effects and fnish with more
complex triangular confgurations. In the last chapter, Virginia is presented
as part of a constellation of friends, of which she remains the brightest star
which continues to shine despite her earthly death.

Goals and Perspectives

The aim of this monograph is certainly not to disentangle fact from fction,
but to understand the metabolism of biofction – that is to say, how authen-
tic primary sources are ingested and digested into fction –, what fact and
fction accomplish together as they coalesce into truthful fctions and what
(necessarily partial or subjective) image of Woolf contemporary authors
offer their readers. I would like to raise important questions such as: How
does Woolf migrate from her original biographical context to inhabit fc-
tional texts? Why are there so many different versions of Woolf placed in
various settings, involved in fanciful plots and extraordinary scenarios? This
would allow me to examine and problematise the various representations
of Woolf as a character in fction and drama – which contribute to reinforc-
ing her iconic image today – and the messages addressed by contemporary
authors and playwrights.
Many authors examined here have expressed their admiration for and
fascination with Woolf. They have even confessed to being obsessed with
Woolf and haunted by her spectre. The fctional phantoms they recreate
in their novels are offered as acts of homage to their predecessor but are
also a way to assert their individual talent and overcome their anxiety of
 Introduction 31
infuence: the ‘life blood’ of their biofctional projects is ‘subversion as much
as homage, confrontation as much as celebration’ (Layne, ‘Biofction’ 21).
For these Bloom-sian ephebi, it is important to clear an imaginative space
for themselves through a creative ‘misreading’43 of the strong poets of the
past. Similarly, for biographical novelists, fnding a literary space away from
Woolf’s shadow amounts to a creative misrepresentation of her authorial
fgure.
Writing novels or plays about past luminaries allows contemporary
authors to connect with their predecessors, pay homage to such impressive
fgures and continue their legacies. Whether they embrace, celebrate, chal-
lenge or confront the predecessors’ work, they certainly assert their differ-
ences and individuality against the formidable precursor. In ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot argued that the work of contemporary
authors is valued against their predecessors’ and must be ‘set […] for con-
trast and comparison, among the dead’ (4). In the particular case of bioplays
or biographical novels about Woolf, playwrights and novelists appropriate
the authorial fgure, but they also engage with her oeuvre. This amounts to
both a creative and critical act: while reshaping the precursor’s life accord-
ing to their personal visions, they also inevitably offer a re-interpretation of
her work.
Furthermore, inhabiting Virginia’s mind in biographical novels of con-
sciousness allows contemporary authors to better get to know themselves.
In this respect, Norah Vincent stated the following: ‘I disappeared into
[Virginia], and I emerged as myself’.44 In Adeline, she created a fctional
space in which she could relate with Woolf and in which she could explore
her own traumas through Woolf’s in order to fnd a healing resolution. Her
Adeline/Virginia speak with Woolf’s own words, but also voice Vincent’s
ideas, in a literary product which is ‘both fction and non-fction, novel
and memoir, blended so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable’ (Vincent,
‘Suicide’). Some writers thus explore their (physiognomic and psychologi-
cal) resemblance and ‘connectedness’ (Duncan 99) with Woolf. This kind of
immersive experience and process of identifcation with their predecessor is
often perceived as highly benefcial for the contemporary author. Writing a
novel or a play about Woolf has not only a creative aim but also a thera-
peutic value and helps them come to terms with themselves as well as with
Woolf. Their novels or plays constitute effcient two-in-one psychoanalyti-
cal tools that allow them to both understand themselves and free themselves
from Woolf’s overwhelming infuence.
Other biofctions about Woolf are conceived as the authors’ defence of
their literary foremother who has been repeatedly mishandled by biogra-
phers, critics or popular preconceptions. These literary productions are
the equivalent of what scholars accomplish in their essays or articles. In
some very particular cases, authors like Hawkes, Gee and Sellers are advo-
cates of Woolf on both fronts. They re-evaluate and re-interpret Woolf’s
life and oeuvre not only in the academic sphere, but also in their fction,
32 Introduction
which contains popularised forms of critical discourse. They endeavour to
remedy a certain damaged image of Woolf, which is stubbornly persistent
and widely spread in popular culture. Indeed, Woolf is too often reduced
to a gifted depressive, an eccentric woman with lesbian proclivities, and
one of literature’s most famous suicides. But Woolf is so much more, and
her biographers have often pointed out the complexity of her personality.
The revisionary biofctions have a clear reparative aim of fxing certain mis-
representations and debunking tenacious stereotypes; they can therefore be
considered benefcial for Woolf’s image. These authors create a dramatic
or narrative space in which Virginia is endowed with agency and can speak
freely against patriarchal, matrimonial or medical oppression and overcomes
all types of hindrances. In their stories, they counter the popular legend of
the chaste, sexless Sappho, the ethereal, traumatised, isolated, insane genius,
and create an empowering character: a sexual, down-to-earth, strong,
sociable, outspoken woman who lives her life (or afterlife) fully. These
biofctions constitute a form of corrective justice in which feminist authors
are committed to a creative crusade, offering resistance and reaction
against popular myths surrounding Woolf, but also providing a counter-
narrative to some biographical representations, especially Quentin Bell’s
1972 biography. Creative writers thus rewrite what they deem a biased
biographical hypotext in which Woolf was placed and trapped, at least
before Hermione Lee’s 1996 authoritative biography.
As authors highlight different facets of Woolf’s personality, different
truths about her life and different assets of her oeuvre, Woolf as a char-
acter becomes a symbolic cartridge invested with personal meanings. The
fctional Virginia is a useful ‘concept’, an empty shell that each author, cause
or generation flls and uses in order to convey their visions of the world.
She is a ‘historically specifc and empirically based literary symbol’ (Lackey,
‘Narrative Space’ 5) that serves contemporary authors to advance their ideo-
logical agendas. These authors thus repurpose Woolf’s life and death to pro-
vide readers with a compass and an ‘existential map’ (Lackey, Conversations
9) for living in the present and in the future. For instance, in Gee’s Virginia
Woolf in Manhattan, Woolf is resurrected to deliver social commentary on
our world, which fts Lackey’s theory that the fgure of the author is used,
not represented in biofctions, because the author-character functions as a
potent metaphor to shed light on contemporary authors’ worldviews. In
such biofctions, the authorial fgure is used as political fodder and consti-
tutes a springboard for the authors’ own ideas and current preoccupations.
These biofctions and bioplays are valuable insofar as they have popular-
ised and globalised Woolf’s image and her oeuvre. The audience’s passion
for this genre all over the world confrms the fascination they have for the
lives of past personalities who have had a signifcant impact on our liter-
ary, cultural or artistic traditions. Some of these novels, like Hawkes and
Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth, Bougret’s Intrigue chez Virginia Woolf
or Barron’s The White Garden ‘sell’ an erudite and literary content by using
 Introduction 33
a commercial format and borrowing features from genre fction: this generic
hybridity attracts a wide range of readers lured by the promise of fnding out
juicy details about Woolf’s secret life and tragic death. Despite the profu-
sion of autobiographical documentation left by Woolf and her entourage,
which allows us to reconstruct almost every day of her life, Woolf remains
a perplexing mystery. Hence, the popularity of passionate, obstinate, pos-
sessive and obsessive biographer-detective characters who follow clues and
investigate, unscrupulously steal, cheat and lie in order to fnd the ultimate
truth about Virginia’s life and death. In these novels, Woolf is romanticised,
sensationalised, dramatised, soap-operatised and woken up from a lethar-
gic slumber in which other slow-paced, introspective novels or monologued
stream-of-consciousness plays contain and restrict her.
Biographical novelists and playwrights make Woolf and her oeuvre more
accessible to a wider readership with specifc expectations. For instance,
Cunningham offers a mainstream or middlebrow writing, which is more
readable than Woolf’s high modernist prose, by ‘clip[ping] [Woolf’s] style
and populariz[ing] her techniques’ (Schiff 369). Although naturally, Woolf
scholars will always deplore the oversimplifed, digested representations of
Woolf’s oeuvre and the diluted, or distorted images of the author, we may
also argue that these proliferations of ‘Virginia Woolf lite’ (Rubenstein 3)
constitute a way to carry on her legacy and reach a larger and more diverse
contemporary readership. As long as ink fows about any kind of literary,
visual or artistic portrayals of Woolf, and readers and viewers are attracted
to them, Woolf’s work will live on.
Woolf ‘continues to be reinvented – made up, and made over – with every
new adapter, reader, editor, critic, and biographer. There is no owning her,
or the facts of her life’ (Lee, Nose 62). As Lee argues, no one owns Woolf,
but many playwrights and creative writers, obsessed with catching her
‘phantom’, have appropriated her and brought her back to life on stage and
in their pages. In the following chapters, I would like to assess what physi-
cal and psychological features they have captured and which of Woolf’s
personal, artistic or ideological values they have illuminated in order to
serve their specifc agendas. Beyond considerations of their literary value
and target audience, what particularly concerns this study is the diversity of
confgurations or manifestations of the genre as well as Woolf’s portrait as a
multifaceted character. The numerous case studies evince how these authors
have, each in their own way, negotiated the fusion of truth and invention,
how they have transmuted Woolf from her original biographical context
into original fctional universes and how they have transformed the bio-
graphical subject into a literary symbol. By reanimating Woolf, dramatising
her life and glamorising her death, they have contributed to the multiplica-
tion of her afterlives in literature and to her remarkable longevity on the cul-
tural scene. At the same time, they have popularised her oeuvre and taken
her legacy into the twenty-frst century. Because of Woolf’s iconicity and
cultural reputation, such literary representations are not purely aesthetic
34 Introduction
endeavours: Woolf’s textual representations are certainly not neutral; they
are endowed with underlying ideological dimensions. By refashioning
Woolf, authors invest her with a multitude of personal and collective values
and make her a spokesperson for our age. Woolf’s fctional portrayals are
all relevant insofar as they mirror our immediate political concerns. Woolf
lends herself to multiple representations and interpretations, and each of
the authors examined here dreams up a Virginia of their own, reimagining
ever-newer versions of her. The summing-up of all the unique, personal ver-
sions and visions of one of the most fascinating authorial fgures in English
literature contributes to her continuing process of mythifcation. By resur-
recting Woolf in contemporary biofction, whether to enhance or debunk
stereotypes about the historical fgure, the authors studied here reinforce her
literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and
augment her cultural capital.

Notes
1 ‘I have been dead and yet am now alive again’ (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 58); ‘“Come
and catch me if you can.” […] Few [novelists] catch the phantom; most have to
be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair’ (Woolf, ‘Character in
Fiction’ 421–422).
2 On Virginia Woolf’s status as an icon of Western civilisation in the eighties, ‘on
a par with Shakespeare’, see Silver, ‘Icon’ 394.
3 See Prescott, ‘Shakespeare and Popular Culture’ and Franssen, Shakespeare’s
Lives.
4 See ‘Time 100: The Most Infuential People’ every year, which is divided into
several categories: pioneers, artists, leaders, icons and titans. See also Chaton’s
experimental novel Elle regarde passer les gens (2016), which engages with
thirteen iconic women, among them Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo,
Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Janis Joplin, Margaret Thatcher, Lady Diana
and Virginia Woolf.
5 See Marie, ‘Reading #WoolfLiteraryTattoos as Recycling’ and ‘An International
Portrait Gallery of Virginia Woolf Tattoos’.
6 See also Silver’s defnition of ‘versioning’ Woolf in her more recent article ‘Icon’.
The term ‘evokes the practice of publishing all the different versions of an indi-
vidual work’, which ‘challenge[s] and substantially undermine[s] the authority
of any one version of the work’ (396).
7 The visual constructs of Woolf in high and popular culture, which are ‘crucial
to her visibility and her resonance’ are beyond the scope of this monograph. For
this aspect, see Silver, Icon and ‘Icon’. Studies of biopics about Woolf could be a
valuable addition to this panoramic textual analysis.
8 See Franssen and Hoenselaars, The Author as Character 11–28, and Schabert, In
Quest of the Other Person 42–44.
9 Lodge defnes the biographical novel as follows: ‘the novel which takes a real
person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration,
using the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objec-
tive, evidence-based discourse of biography’ (Year 8). In 2005, in the wake of his
publication of Author, Author, he stated that the biographical novel ‘has become
a very fashionable form of literary fction in the last decade or so, especially as
applied to the lives of writers’ (8). However, the fact that this literary form has
 Introduction 35
existed since Plato and Aristophanes (see Franssen and Hoenselaars 11–28) indi-
cates that it is not just a contemporary postmodernist invention and a matter of
fashion but may continue to shift and grow in scope in the future.
10 See Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2017), the American Book Review
issue with a focus on biofction (2017) and Layne, Biofction and Writers’
Afterlives (2020).
11 See Lackey’s argument about the contradictory demands of (representational)
biography and (creative) fction: ‘biographical fction fctionalizes rather than
represents the biographical subject’ (‘Narrative Space’ 11). However, I would
contend that literature and therefore biographical fction is also representational,
as I understand the concept of representation in fction not as a faithful, accu-
rate, mimetic, factual depiction of real things and people, but as artistic repre-
sentation, which necessarily involves the shaping of language and therefore the
authors’ inherent manipulations, misrepresentations, distortions and projection
in fction of their visions of a real object, person or period of time. Literary repre-
sentation is similar to pictorial representation of referential objects or people, as
I will show further by drawing an analogy with Cubism. On literature’s capacity
to represent, see James Young, ‘Representation in Literature’.
12 In fact, after enumerating nine possible ‘rules’ for writing biography, Lee con-
cludes with the tenth one: ‘There are no rules for biography’: ‘the only rule that
holds good is that there is no such thing as a defnite biography’ (Biography 6–18).
13 See Tóibín, ‘The Anchored Imagination’.
14 Lee, ‘The Great Pretender’, The Guardian, 20 March 2004, available at: www.
theguardian.com/ books/ 2004 / mar/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview17
(accessed September 2020).
15 Lackey contends that since the publication of the Pulitzer-prize-winning The
Hours and the ensuing Oscar-nominated flm, ‘biofction has become a domi-
nant literary form’. This signifcant novel constitutes a renewed impetus for bio-
graphical fction since the previous biofction boom in the thirties, the decline of
which he associates with Lukács’s virulent accusation of biographical novels as
an ‘irredeemable aesthetic form that necessarily distorts and misrepresents the
objective proportions of history’ (‘Locating’ 3).
16 While composing her biographical fantasy Orlando, Woolf herself considered
the relationship between (biographical and historical) fact and fction and stated
that ‘the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful’ (Diary 3: 162).
17 This is the title of Lackey’s volume of interviews with creative writers.
18 Barthes defnes biographemes as kernels of truth or biographical shortcuts that
condense the biographee’s whole life.
19 Stone argued that the biographical novel was perceived by academics as a ‘bas-
tard form, the result of an unfortunate indiscretion on the part of its otherwise
eminently respectable parents, biography and the novel’. He sums up the various
criticisms that were voiced against it: ‘It is said to debase the biography and the
novel, discrediting both and adding to the stature of neither. Allegedly it mines
biography without regard for the verities, strains history through the author’s
personality, reshapes that history to ft the novel form, oversimplifes, prevents
the reader from separating fact from fction, chooses only those subjects which
allow for a lively sale, violates the privacy of people long dead, and makes char-
acter the victim of plot’ (16). Kendall also analyses the ‘novel-as-biography’ in
which the fctionaliser has no limits and is encouraged to invent and transpose as
much as he wishes. The result is, according to him, a ‘faccid compound of fact
and fancy, ill-mated, a sort of mutant’ (127).
20 For discussions of Lukács’s criticism of the biographical novel, see Lackey’s
introductions to Truthful Fictions 4–5 and Biographical Fiction 1.
36 Introduction
21 On the characteristics of the ‘new biography’ written over a period of about
forty years at the beginning of the century, see Lee, Biography 72–92.
22 See Latham, ‘Serv[ing] Under Two Masters’.
23 ‘The Top 10 Fictitious Biographies’, The Guardian, 27 August 2014, available
at: www.theguardian. com/books/2014/aug/27/top-10-fctitious-biographis-jona
than-gibbs-nabokov (accessed September 2020).
24 In ‘The Nourishing Blood of the Novelists’, published in The New Statesman on
11 May 2015, Frances Wilson gives a defnition of ‘vampiric writers’: ‘A vam-
piric writer is one who sinks his, or her, fangs into the fesh of another writer,
and in so doing gives him or her a second life as a fctional fgure (who is often,
but not always, similarly vampiric). In many ways vampiric writers do the job of
biographers and I am a great admirer of this hybrid form, which works within
the constraints of the facts while using fction to tap into a deeper truth’. Wilson
contends that currently the most ‘vampirised’ writer is Woolf. Article available
at: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/05/nourishing-blood-novelist
(accessed September 2020).
25 See Michel Schneider’s Voleurs de Mots (Word Thieves).
26 See Latham, ‘Thieving Facts’.
27 See Winterson’s interview with Moyers, available at: billmoyers.com/story/jean-
ette-winterson/ (accessed September 2020).
28 In order to avoid confusion, ‘Virginia’ will be used throughout this book to refer
to the fctional characters created by the different authors; conversely, ‘Woolf’
will be used to refer to the biographical subject or the historical fgure.
29 This is an allusion to Gee’s statement in the ‘Acknowledgements’ of Virginia
Woolf in Manhattan: ‘this Virginia is a phantasm, one of Thackeray’s fctional
“puppets”, always and only my own’ (474).
30 See Lee’s argument in Nose that The Hours will inform and shape the percep-
tions of Woolf to a generation of cinemagoers (58 and 61).
31 On questions of authors’ originality while imitating, absorbing, assimilating,
reinventing or rewriting Woolf’s work, see Latham, Poetics.
32 Besides this present study of Woolf as a character in fction and drama, two recent
monographs have been devoted to male authors who are also profusely portrayed
as characters in fction: William Shakespeare (Franssen’s Shakespeare’s Literary
Lives, 2016) and Henry James (Layne’s Henry James in Contemporary Fiction,
2020). On reasons why Woolf is a central fgure in many contemporary returns,
see Silver, ‘Icons and Iconicity: Why Virginia Woolf?’ in Icon 6–13 and Stanford
Friedman, ‘Why Woolf’ in ‘Introduction’ to Contemporary Revolutions 14–16.
33 See Gilbert, ‘Life in Squares: Were the Bloomsbury Group sexually incontinent
snobs or free-thinking “punk rockers” of their generation?’, The Independent,
19 July 2015, available at: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/featur
es/life-squares-were-bloomsbury-group-sexually-incontinent-snobs-or-free-th
inking-punk-rockers-their-generation (accessed September 2020).
34 This is the last line of Mark Doty’s poem entitled ‘The Hours’, which appeared
in the London Review of Books, 14 November 2002, 8.
35 Earlier examples of biographical fction in which authors (Plato, Petrarch,
Edmund Spencer) were resuscitated rely less on the readers’ decoding, involve-
ment and participation. Biofction has taken a new dimension from the late
nineties on, as it demands a more active, critically and literary-informed reader
who is aware of various postmodernist tricks (regularly used and popularised by
other entertainment media) and the authors’ works and legacies.
36 Lyotard’s formulation, ‘incredulity towards metanaratives’ (xxiv).
37 The possible worlds theory, developed by literary theorists such as Eco and
Doležel, implies that reality is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct
 Introduction 37
worlds. Every world that respects the principles of non-contradiction and of
the excluded middle (where a statement can be either true or false) is a pos-
sible world. See also McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, in which he exposes Eco’s
theory of possible worlds: ‘Worlds which violate the law of the excluded middle,
about which, in other words, certain propositions are both true and false, Eco
refuses to regard as fully-fedged, self-sustained worlds’ (33).
38 See also Doležel, Possible Worlds.
39 ‘The biographical novel makes no attempt to disguise its hybrid nature, though
each writer sets himself or herself different rules about the relationship of fact
to fction. Some keep very closely to the historical record […] and others invent
freely, sometimes to the point of travesty’ (9). See also Schabert’s distinction
between ‘imaginative biography’ and ‘fctional biography’, two genres which
‘differ in degree rather than in kind’ (60): the frst is ‘based upon a profusion of
documentary evidence referring not only to the outer but also the inner circum-
stances of the subjects’ lives’ (60), while the latter ‘resort[s] to unrealistic modes
of narrative proper to fction only’ (61).
40 Clifford and Kendall also adopt a graduation system to categorise biography.
Clifford discerns fve gradations of biography of increasing subjectivity. The
biographer of the ffth category, ‘Fictional Biography’, gives free rein to his imag-
ination and ‘the result reads like a novel, and largely is one’ (87). Conversely,
Kendall’s gradation on ‘the radical left’ starts with the most subjective, specu-
lative or ‘literary’ forms of biography, the ‘novel-as-biography, almost wholly
imaginary’ (126) and moves towards the ‘scientifc’ right fank occupied by
‘increasingly dense “research” biography, the “life and times” biography, what
[he] venture[s] to call the “Behemoth biography”’ (127).
41 This is an allusion to Holmes’s article, ‘Biography: Inventing the Truth’.
42 For a survey of Woolf’s biographies through time, see Layne, ‘Supreme Portrait’,
Marler, Pie, Lee, ‘Biomythographers’ and Gindin. Each new biographical ver-
sion has its own thesis, allegiance or agenda, and implies the denial or erasure of
previous others.
43 One of Bloom’s six revisionary ratios in Map, clinamen or the poetic misreading
or misprision of the earlier poet consists in ‘swerving’ away from the precursor
and taking a new poetic direction, with the implication that the precursor was
correct up to a point, but that the ephebe has made the right turn in his new
poem (191).
44 ‘On the Subject of my Suicide’, available at: lithub.com/on-the-subject-of-my-
suicide/ (accessed September 2020).
1 Bioplay(giarisms)s

Virginia Woolf has been dead for eighty years and yet she is ‘now alive
again’1 haunting her literary heirs: many of them have given birth to Woolf
as a character in their novels or conjured her up on the stage to re-live her life
and re-enact her death. The authors examined in this chapter, Eileen Atkins,
Edna O’Brien, Elizabeth Steele, Maureen Duffy and Christine Orban, have
created unique stories about their Virginia made with old, borrowed mate-
rial from Woolf. Although the material they dip into is much the same, the
creative processes of selection, assembling and arranging the Woolfan inter-
textual fragments are different; so are the writers’ imaginations and visions
of their Virginia, and this necessarily leads to distinctive fctional portraits.
For all these authors, who have confessed in interviews being obsessed with
and possessed by Woolf, their biofctional works may be viewed as a ‘neces-
sary act’ to exorcise the authorial ghost that haunted them, in the very same
way Woolf herself ‘ceased to be obsessed’2 with her mother and reconciled
herself to her sudden, tragic death, after capturing her and completing her
artistic vision in To the Lighthouse. Thus, giving life to the character of
Virginia amounts to both a creative and therapeutic exercise, which has
allowed these contemporary authors to fnally let Woolf rest in peace.

The ‘Little Cut-and-Paste Job’

Eileen Atkins, the British stage actress, playwright and screenwriter – and
currently Honorary President of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
– is one of the many legatees who have had a long-standing artistic rela-
tionship with Woolf. She played Virginia Woolf in Patrick Garland’s 1989
one-woman show adaptation of A Room of One’s Own, and adapted
Mrs Dalloway into a screenplay for the 1997 flm with the same name directed
by Marleen Gorris. She also played the role of Virginia in her own play,
Vita and Virginia, alongside Penelope Wilton in 1992 and Vanessa Redgrave
in 1994. In several interviews, Atkins has acknowledged her lifelong affnity,
fascination and even obsession with her idol, who has been a constant inspi-
ration and a muse for her. According to the actress, their physical resem-
blance helped her inhabit the role of Virginia Woolf.3 Manipulating Woolf’s
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 39
literary work as a playwright and impersonating her as an actress are acts
of (re)interpretation that amount to a double process of ‘playing’: playing as
creative ‘playgiarism’ and playing as acting on the stage/screen.4
In order to create her two-character two-act epistolary play, Vita and
Virginia (1995), Atkins pored over the profusion of letters and diaries left
by Woolf and Sackville-West and focused on the evolution of their relation-
ship from 14 December 1922, when they frst met at a dinner party given
by Woolf’s brother-in-law Clive Bell, to Woolf’s suicide in March 1941.
Atkins selected and combined Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s own words and
reshaped them to ft her dramatic mould: her script is made entirely of a
compilation of fragments from authentic material woven together into an
intimate conversation between two dramatis personae, Vita and Virginia.
Atkins straight-forwardly and systematically copies the primary sources,
pastes them into her play and presents it as dialogue. As a matter of fact,
Atkins herself has referred to her play as ‘[her] little cut-and-paste job’.5
Atkins’s textual arrangement gives the long relationship between Vita
and Virginia a dramatic spin. The fctional dimension of the bioplay is thus
conferred by the generic product, the play, which contains this reworked
material, and ultimately by the medium of the stage. The real, factual data
contained in the epistolary format – the written material originally intended
to be read in private by the recipients of the letters – is adapted to the stage
and becomes dialogic exchanges to be performed in front of an audience.
This performative aspect of the letter exchanges imparts a theatrical and
fctive aspect to the play: Vita and Virginia, as dramatis personae, are arti-
fcially summoned on the stage to orally perform the written exchanges of
their historical counterparts.
Atkins compiles specifc autobiographical fragments so as to create a mir-
roring diptych portrait of two women and show the complexity and dynamic
of their relationship, with its changing shades of excitement, passion, eroti-
cism, pain, jealousy, and fnally, deep, lasting friendship and affection.
Virginia’s life and personality are constantly measured against Vita’s. She
appears as an introverted character who is afraid of physical and sexual con-
tact. On the contrary, the sensuous, famboyant, vibrant Vita has a ravenous
appetite for life and an insatiable passion for many women. Her exotic travels
and adventurous life as the wife of a diplomat are contrasted with Virginia’s
restricted social and domestic interactions with her circle of Bloomsbury
friends and husband at home. Vita has an aristocratic pedigree and ances-
try that is part of her appeal to Virginia. Conversely, Virginia’s interesting
mind is extremely attractive to Vita. While their personal rapport is based
on Vita’s dominance over the more submissive and introverted Virginia, in
literary discussions and professional rivalry, Virginia has the upper hand.
Virginia is in awe of Vita, the woman, whereas Vita, the ‘second-class’ but
popular poet and novelist, admires Virginia, the ‘writer of genius’.6
The playwright draws from Woolf and Sackville-West’s epistolary
exchanges to portray the two women-artists in relation, as well as in
40 Bioplay(giarisms)s
opposition, to each other throughout their evolving relationship. As the
historical fgures were extremely prolifc and eloquent letter writers, the
challenge was undoubtedly to select suitable fragments from the hundreds
of letters they wrote and make them sound dialogic, short and instantane-
ous. Atkins resorts to specifc autobiographical material to create dialogues
(letter exchanges between Sackville-West and Woolf) and monologues
(extracts from the women’s diaries or epistolary exchanges with other peo-
ple). Indeed, the diaristic format provides confessional, private material that
naturally lends itself to the monologue style, while letters are dialogic or
conversational by nature.
When Vita and Virginia get together in the play, after long separations
during which they exchange letters, they paradoxically seem apart, as the
playwright chooses to resort to monologues. These moments of physical
encounter are ironically staged as an interaction not with each other, but
as a one-way interaction with the silent audience. The characters are physi-
cally present together in the same place, but their verbal contact is absent;
conversely, when they are physically apart, they are emotionally connected
and talk to each other at length. Intimacy is actually created through words
rather than through physical contact. The dramatis personae’s articulacy
and expressive words thus succeed in bridging the physical distance between
them.
Once familiarity between the characters is reached – from ‘Dear Mrs
Woolf’ / ‘Dear Mrs Nicolson’ to ‘My dear Virginia’ / ‘My dear Vita’ – the
greeting formula is mostly dropped and one forgets the letter exchange con-
vention that constitutes the starting point and the underlying contraption
of the play. Atkins chooses and alternates specifc portions from Woolf’s
and Sackville-West’s long letters to make them respond to each other. She
arranges this material so as to suggest the give and take of dialogue, which
constitutes the very foundation of the dramatic genre. For this purpose,
she resorts to several montage methods and transgeneric adaptations7 –
from written letters on paper to oral conversations on the stage: frstly, she
selects and cuts portions from Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s successive sent/
received letters – a few words, a few short sentences or whole letters copied
as such; secondly, she juxtaposes fragments from several non-consecutive
letters and brings them together in one exchange; lastly, and conversely, she
splits one letter into several exchanges in order to allow the correspondent’s
replies to be inserted immediately and concomitantly. Indeed, Atkins inter-
rupts or suspends the fux of one letter at the right moment to allow splin-
ters of responses from another letter to break and pause the writerly blocks
of the frst letter. The division of the long letters into smaller portions makes
the exchanges more conversational, interactive, direct and instantaneous.
This structural refashioning calls for minimal linguistic adaptations: dif-
ferent punctuation, the creation of simple coordination hinges (‘and’/’but’)
between selected fragments, or the explanation of pronouns from the
original letters. When selecting, cutting and pasting portions from Woolf
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 41
and Sackville-West’s correspondence, the lengths of the verbal exchanges
between the dramatis personae depend on the play’s dramatic needs. Vita
and Virginia either voice long discussions or quick, passionate, immediate
exchanges.
Atkins follows the women’s correspondence in chronological order and
accelerates time from 1922 to 1941 by gluing together fragments taken
from letters written over time, thus creating simultaneity for events that in
reality happened and were recorded days, months or even years apart. The
playwright also creates the illusion of immediate, spontaneous conversa-
tions by eliminating the time factor between posting and answering letters,
and therefore between actual events. Thus, Atkins’s challenge is twofold:
frstly, to create synchronised conversations in which the characters respond
to each other and interact as if they were speaking in each other’s presence.
For this, she liberates the letters from their original temporal and to-and-fro
spatial constraints. The second challenge is to operate a judicious selection
from the profusion of material in order to give an accurate overview of
the evolution of the characters’ relationship. For this, she simplifes events,
choosing only signifcant ‘moments’ or verbal exchanges that fesh out the
characters’ relationship. The concatenation of these moments must ft the
temporal requirements of a two-hour play to be performed in front of an
audience.
Through this strategic selection of specifc fragments of letters, Atkins
manages to show the panorama of Vita and Virginia’s evolving relationship
within the short time framework of the play: from infatuation, love and
passion, through jealousies triggered by Vita’s other affairs and, fnally, a
sort of resigned devotion and close intimacy. At the beginning of their rela-
tionship, when they are separated, Vita and Virginia exchange passionate
declarations of love. Their intense impassioned love is often punctuated by
Virginia’s pangs of jealousy, as Vita is simultaneously engaged in a string of
affairs with poet Dorothy Wellesley, Mary Campbell and other women. The
writing and publication of Orlando marks a turning point in their personal
relationship. The project seems to stem from Virginia’s ‘melancholy’ and
‘despair’ (24) of being replaced in Vita’s affections. Virginia’s jealousy spurs
a renewed creative energy and a desire to capture, take control, possess and
immortalise Vita in the pages of her ‘biography’. This ‘frst-rate’ artistic gift
to her lover is meant to clearly differentiate herself from Vita’s ‘second-rate’
(25) friends. On the background of heated exchanges tinged with acrimony,
the reader/spectator follows the germination and the ongoing creative pro-
cess of a very special kind of literary ‘love letter’,8 from Virginia’s frst sparks
of imagination to Vita’s reading it and falling in love with it: ‘Also you have
invented a new form of Narcissism, – I confess, – I am in love with Orlando
– this is a complication I had not foreseen’ (31). These exchanges highlight
the ‘complicated’ intersections between life and art and give the reader/spec-
tator glimpses into both the constructive progression of Orlando and the
deteriorating passionate love relationship between Vita and Virginia.
42 Bioplay(giarisms)s
Atkins selects illuminating extracts from the metacreative discourse
expressed in Woolf’s letters that chronicle the main steps and phases of
her work in progress: her beginning of the novel on a ‘clean sheet’ (24),
the structural and generic design of her ‘little book, with pictures and a
map or two’ (25), the conception of the last chapter, and the last line, writ-
ten on 17 March 1928 at fve minutes to one, and ending with ‘three little
dots’ (27). For the dramatic and temporal needs of her play, Atkins obvi-
ously accelerates the real creative progress and takes shortcuts to Virginia’s
complex refections and long phases of textualisation of the novel.9 The
genesis of Orlando seems idyllically effortless and straightforward: after the
design and prospective plans, Virginia mentions her writing the novel’s last
chapter.
The playful biography that immortalises Vita as Orlando is dedicated to
Vita as a farewell love letter to their bygone passionate relationship. When,
four years after Virginia Woolf’s death, Vita Sackville-West and her hus-
band Harold Nicolson compiled an anthology of poetry, Sackville-West
included a passage of Orlando and split it up into lines, so that it looked and
sounded like a poem. This very poem constitutes the fnal lines of Atkins’s
play, and is voiced by the character of Vita, then by Vita and Virginia in
unison, then by Virginia alone:

Vita: Let us go, then, exploring

This summer morning.
When all are adoring
The plum blossom and the bee.
And humming and hawing.

Virginia joins in.

Vita/Virginia: Let us ask of the starling

What he may think
On the brink

Vita stops and Virginia fnishes the poem.

Virginia: Of the dustbin whence he picks

Among the sticks
Combings of the scullion’s hair.
What’s life we ask:
Life Life Life! cries the bird
As if he had heard. (42)

The prose poem conveys the idea of resurrection and life after death, with
the character of Virginia reciting the end of her own poem, despite her phys-
ical death that occurred a few lines/minutes previously in the play. Virginia
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 43
‘died and yet she is alive again’, just like in O’Brien’s Virginia, which implies
that Woolf’s poetic legacy survives and her voice as a writer continues to be
heard after and beyond her death. The last words of the play are both an
indication of Virginia’s resurrection on the stage and the heartfelt expres-
sion of her love for Vita (‘life’ in Latin). Mitchell Leaska commented on this
allusion in relation to Woolf’s last, posthumously published novel, Between
the Acts, and a very specifc line where ‘birds [are] syllabling discordantly
life, life, life’ (45–56). Thus, Atkins’s ‘curtain’ at the end of her bioplay is
just a temporary interruption that promises new ‘acts’, new beginnings, new
lives for Virginia.
Virginia is resuscitated and lives on in ‘Another World than This’ – the
very suitable title of Sackville-West and Nicolson’s poetry anthology –,
which provides a perfect analogy with the current prolifc literary trend of
resurrecting authors or famous people in biofctions, that is to say reim-
agining their lives and permanently adding new acts to them, in other
worlds than those in which these historical fgures lived: parallel, fctional
worlds in which they come alive. Atkins has proven that these new worlds
can be successfully constructed and sustained with Woolf’s old words in
a bioplay which commemorates Woolf’s literary legacy and immortalises
her ‘life life life’.

‘The Play’s the Thing’

Like Atkins, many authors who have appropriated Woolf in their biofc-
tions or bioplays have confessed in public epitexts that they have been ‘pos-
sessed’ by their subject and that their work, in which they have captured
Woolf as a character, constitutes a homage to this haunting literary fgure
who inspired them or had a formative infuence on them. This is the case
of Irish novelist and playwright Edna O’Brien, who, in several interviews,
has praised Woolf, the woman who encompassed a multitude of facets and
paradoxes:

The thing that engrossed me was the woman herself, the woman who
laid bare so much of herself in her letters and diaries, the woman who
for all the proclaimed elitism could write about the state of England
during the General Strike or the abdication of King Edward, or a wet
dream; the woman in confict between the claims of the mind and those
of the body, an adored and adoring wife and yet not a wife in the conju-
gal sense, a woman whose books were her children yet who longed for
real children, a woman who was obsessed with her sister, Vanessa, and
for a time besotted by Vita Sackville-West.10

O’Brien’s fascination with Woolf has stemmed from and has been fuelled
by the wealth of primary sources and autobiographical material that the
modernist author left to posteriority, in which she ‘shamelessly’ (O’Brien,
44 Bioplay(giarisms)s
interview with Guppy) unveiled herself as a writer, wife, sister, friend or
lover. This prompted the playwright to dramatise Woolf’s life and ‘do [her]
vision of Woolf’, ‘subjective as that may be’:

I went around for months possessed by this woman, wondering how

she herself would dramatize her own life. Then one day I decided that I
would have to be daring and that I would simply have to do my vision
of her, subjective as that may be.
(‘Three Dramas’)

O’Brien has explained how, by reading everything Woolf ever wrote, from
essays and novels to diaries and letters, she came to ‘know her and love her’
(O’Brien, interview with Guppy).
The copious existent Woolfan corpus can have a double-edged effect:
it can both further and hinder creative imagination. Indeed, one can legiti-
mately ask if such an available manna constitutes an invaluable, useful
reservoir for biofction writers, or else a curse, as there is necessarily less
room left for imagination. When almost every day in Woolf’s life has been
recorded, how easy is it to split wide open the few fne undocumented chinks
and fll them with fction? O’Brien seems to have solved this challenge in an
original way in Virginia: A Play (1981), as her ‘harvest’11 of Woolfan mate-
rial has produced a unique bioplay. Compared with Atkins’s frst-degree
bioplay, in which the playwright manipulates only auto/biographical mate-
rial and preserves it intact, O’Brien’s second-degree bioplay12 incorporates
both fragments of auto/biographical documentation and fction – Woolf’s
own fction. Like Atkins, O’Brien selects fragments of Woolfan primary
sources, rearranges them and creates articulations between them in order to
fabricate a mosaic portrait of Virginia.
My interest in O’Brien’s Virginia/Virginia is twofold. Firstly, I perceive
the playwright as a skilful ‘bricoleuse’13 who uses the ‘means at hand’ and
whose main tools to manipulate and transform pre-existing textual elements
are a saw and a welding torch: O’Brien cuts auto/biographical and inter-
textual fragments from a diverse range of Woolfan primary sources and
assembles them so as to produce a seamless portrait of Virginia. Her crafts-
manship consists of drawing a fragmentary portrait that does not show its
numerous joints and articulations. Like Woolf, who talks about her method
of writing in painterly terms (she records in her diary that she likes to work
‘with a wet brush over the whole, and join parts separately composed and
gone dry’ [Diary 2: 323]), O’Brien creates a smooth dramatic ‘reality’ with
some of Woolf’s own auto/biographical facts and bits and pieces of her
fction, which, in turn, often has autobiographical roots. Secondly, while
these intricate ontological levels are skilfully brought together in O’Brien’s
bioplay, the collected material (Woolf’s ‘true facts’ and ‘true fction’) is
reworked to sound dialogic, which is in keeping with the generic require-
ments of drama.
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 45
A particular line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s monologue, ‘The play’s the
thing’ (Hamlet II.2.530), quoted by O’Brien herself in one of her interviews
in which she has discussed Virginia, suggests that her play openly displays
its strings and mechanisms of production. The playwright’s impressionistic
portrait of her subject is entirely drawn from Woolf’s heritage, that is to
say, Woolf’s own words are ‘copied’ ‘shamelessly’ from her life records and
oeuvre and ‘pasted’ in a play with its own intrinsic rules. Indeed, O’Brien’s
freedom of selection from the wealth of available material is somehow
restricted, and her strategies of assembling the Woolfan extracts into a
coherent whole are guided by generic constraints.
O’Brien’s practice is akin to Raymond Federman’s concept of playgia-
rism, that is to say, a playful re-appropriation, re-use and re-mixing of
existing material and sources.14 As a playgiariser, the playwright plays with
imbricating fragments of borrowed material from her predecessor as well
as with her palette and technique. In Michel Schneider’s words, O’Brien is
a ‘word thief’,15 although it could be argued that what she actually ‘steals’
or ‘usurps’ from Woolf is given back to Virginia/Virginia. O’Brien pays
a personalised homage to Woolf by appropriating16 raw materials and
assembling them. Thus, the ‘word thief’ proves to be a crafty wordsmith,
a craftswoman who recycles, rewrites and intertwines Woolf’s life and
oeuvre. O’Brien strings together the facts and events from Woolf’s life that
‘chart […] her march towards suicide’ (Kersnowski 33). This teleological
approach imparts a particular interpretation of Woolf’s life in the light,
or more precisely in the shadow, of her death. Virginia’s suicide thus ret-
rospectively places a seal of tragedy on her whole life. The selected major
events in Virginia’s life unfold chronologically: Julia Stephen’s death and
the damaging effect this life-shattering event has on Virginia, the ambigu-
ous relationship with her tyrannical father after her mother’s death, the
traumatising molestation by her half-brother, moving from the family home
in Kensington to a new life with her brothers and sister in Bloomsbury, her
marriage to Leonard, the foundation of the Hogarth Press, Virginia’s rela-
tionship with Vita and the seclusion of the Woolfs in the country during the
cataclysm of WWII.
O’Brien devises different techniques of montage: whether we choose to
call this creative endeavour an art or a craft, her compositional method is
remarkably simple and complex at the same time. It consists in choosing,
editing and combining heterogenous bits of fact and fction, and creating
transitions and articulations between them in order to confer unity to the
ensemble of borrowed auto/bio/fctional material. At the same time, O’Brien
creates a play with its own theatrical requirements: as a playwright, her
primary challenge is to transform historical reality into dramatic realism – a
diffcult task, especially when the historical documentation mainly consists
of introspective, private writings and writerly fctional material. Woolf’s
words on paper become a three-dimensional world on stage: O’Brien fash-
ions the available documentation into scenes and dialogues, thus giving it a
46 Bioplay(giarisms)s
dynamic theatrical impulse. She attributes convincing voices to her charac-
ters, distributes plausible lines and creates lively conversations.
Virginia thus springs from O’Brien’s dramatic imagination, as well as
from her material manipulation of Woolf’s bio/fctional hypotext.17 I would
argue that O’Brien is a ‘conservationist’, as she devises a series of ingenious
operations and strategies to preserve this raw, authentic material; she trans-
poses, rearranges it in her play and assembles the ‘true facts’ from Woolf’s
auto/biography and her ‘true fction’ from the ensemble of her oeuvre. It
is a Lego-like building enterprise of imbricating ready-made elements and
creating a unifying whole. O’Brien’s objective is not so much a matter of
creating a brand-new edifce from scratch, that is to say, a fctional universe
in which a character named Virginia evolves, but to make the second-hand,
ready-made, prefabricated blocks she selects from Woolf’s life and oeuvre
ft perfectly together in order to produce a coherent discourse of its own.
As O’Brien manages to produce such a fuid, seamless discourse, identifying
these blocks or fragments is not so important or useful for the audience.
The playwright’s artistry thus remains largely undetected, and therefore,
unappreciated by the public. However, the Woolfan scholar can recognise
the extraordinary craftsmanship involved in the concatenation of frag-
ments that make the scenes and dialogues work and therefore ring true in
O’Brien’s play.
The fexibility and fuidity of Woolf’s fctional material, which usually
overfows traditional, rigid generic moulds,18 lends itself perfectly well to
O’Brien’s creative transgeneric operation. The dramatic genre is naturally
based on dialogues, soliloquies and the creation of vivid scenes to be enacted
on a stage. Thus, various facets of the private and public Virginia are brought
to light in different scenes staged in two theatrical traditions, restoration
comedy and modern drama, as clearly intended by the playwright herself:

The really diffcult part was the shuttling back and forth between the
two Virginias, the one who wrote and lived inside herself and the other
who existed and contended with the world. She who addressed herself
on every subject under the sun could not just be contained in scenes
with others, she would have to exist alone also, and above all she would
have to claim the audience in the very frst instance by a bold and diz-
zying declaration. It was necessary for me therefore to use two forms
– restoration and modern. Once I saw the method the play wrote itself.
(O’Brien, ‘Three Dramas’)

On the one hand, O’Brien’s modern two-act play features realistic dramatis
personae (Virginia, her parents, sister and husband), in real-life environ-
ments (in London at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in Bloomsbury, or in the country,
at Rodmell, at Monk’s House). On the other hand, the comedy of manners
mainly resurfaces in farcical and licentious scenes that involve the ‘dashing’,
‘bohemian’, ‘sensual’ Vita (Virginia, ‘The Characters’ n.p.) at Knole. Vita
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 47
and Virginia ‘play at romance, sometimes using “acting” voices. Each alter-
natively masquerades as courtier and object of desire’ (Helle 205).
O’Brien gives minimal guidance to the reader/actors and uses laconic stage
directions after her main characters (Virginia, The Man [her father, then her
husband] and Vita) are presented in more detailed introductory stage direc-
tions on the frst page. Virginia appears both as a young woman and as a
grown woman. She is a ghostly presence on stage and is given a voice whose
tone is varying ‘drastically’: it is this voice, to which O’Brien confers texture
and nuance, which sustains the whole play. Facets of Virginia’s personality,
her moods and states of mind emerge through this voice, with its ‘modes of
talking’:

She is at times quick, high-spirited; other times ruminative, and once

like a somnambulist. She talks to THE MAN, to herself, and to the
audience and when she is talking her ‘writing’, it is in another vein alto-
gether – refective, rapturous, dreamlike.
(Virginia, ‘The Characters’, n.p.)

A wide range of emotions are conveyed through Virginia’s voice and the
ways she addresses ‘The Man’, the audience and herself. Through the cali-
bration of the intensity of Virginia’s voice, the raw auto/bio/fctional mate-
rial is given directions and impulses: it reaches a climax in the mad scene
(I. 3), followed by lulls, and then ultimately culminates in the death scene
(II. 4).
The meticulous selection of useful auto/bio/fctional fragments handed
down by Virginia Woolf herself, Leonard Woolf and biographer Quentin
Bell – ranging chronologically from Julia Stephen’s death when Virginia was
thirteen (1895) to her own death (1941) – allowed the playwright to refash-
ion them so as to form monologues and dialogues and unveil Virginia’s
many selves and states of mind. Some of these dialogues and monologues
are taken verbatim from the primary sources, others are slightly re-worked,
linguistically adjusted, transfocalised and transcontextualised to ft the needs
of the play. For instance, O’Brien extracts Woolf’s family members’ and
friends’ remarks that she recorded in her memoir published posthumously
as Moments of Being, unhusks them from their narrative autobiographical
shell and renders them their original function as dialogue in conversations.
In the following example, O’Brien discards most of Woolf’s descriptive
reminiscences, preserving only her mother’s raw, direct speech as the basic
material for the play:19

What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone
of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful fgure, so upright
and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain
angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you.
‘Come children,’ she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic
48 Bioplay(giarisms)s
farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and
one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, ‘Quick,
quick’. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds
[…] ‘Don’t keep father waiting.’
(Woolf, ‘Reminiscences’ 36–37)

A single phrase, or her voice, or that beautiful fgure so upright in the

ground, in her long shabby cloak, the head held high, so upright and so
distinct and the eyes that look straight ahead, hurrying saying, ‘Come
along, quick, quick; don’t keep Father waiting’
(O’Brien, Virginia 4)

The playwright edits Woolf’s long narrative, explicative fow of memories,

takes Julia Stephen’s voice out of the original context and re-contextualises
it in her play. In the same way, Woolf’s narrated conversations chronicled in
her diary become dialogic exchanges again in O’Brien’s play.20
O’Brien’s dramatis personae also appropriate and ventriloquise the pri-
vate, written thoughts and observations recorded in Woolf’s letters. For
example, the verbal exchanges between Leonard and Virginia that lead to
Leonard’s proposal are based on the real correspondence of the Woolfs.
O’Brien selects snippets of their letters and slightly edits them to create
shorter, tighter dialogues:

My dear Virginia, I must write to you before I got to bed & can,
I think, probably think more calmly. I have not got any very clear
recollection of what I really said to you this afternoon but I am sure
you know why I came – I don’t mean merely that I was in love but
that that together with uncertainty drives one to do these things.
Perhaps I was wrong, for before this week I always intended not to
tell you unless I felt sure that you were in love & would marry me. I
thought then that you liked me but that was all. I never realised how
much I loved you until we talked about my going back to Ceylon.
After that I could think about nothing else but you. I got into a state
of hopeless uncertainty, whether you loved me or could ever love me
or even like me.
(Leonard Woolf’s letter, qtd. in Quentin Bell, Biography 180)

Leonard:
My dearest Virginia,
I must write you – I have not got any very clear recollection of what I
said to you this afternoon but I am sure you know why I came – I never
realised how much I loved you until we talked about my going back to
Ceylon. After that I could think about nothing else but you. I got into a
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 49
state of hopeless uncertainty, whether you loved me or could ever love
me or even like me.
(O’Brien, Virginia 14–15)

Just like in Atkins’s play, the authentic correspondence between Leonard

and Virginia lends itself perfectly well to the creation of verbal exchanges on
stage, although O’Brien’s method of creating dialogues is not as straightfor-
ward as Atkins’s, since she does not systematically attribute the content of
the real person’s letter to the equivalent character. For instance, sometimes
remarks belonging exclusively to Virginia Stephen are split into portions to
provide lines for both the characters of Virginia and Leonard. The following
extract from Woolf’s letter, ‘We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps
we shall get it; then how splendid! (Letters 1: 496), becomes a discussion
between O’Brien’s Virginia and Leonard: ‘Virginia: We ask a great deal of
life, don’t we? / Leonard: Perhaps we shall get it’ (Virginia 16).
O’Brien’s dialogues are a synthesis of several primary sources: real
facts extracted from Woolf’s correspondence, diary and memoirs, but also
Woolf’s real fction.21 The playwright borrows Woolf’s characters’ fc-
tional dialogues, assigns them to her own dramatis personae, and reworks
narrative excerpts from Woolf’s novels and short stories in order to ren-
der them dialogic or conversational for the purpose of her play. When
O’Brien selects fctional Woolfan material to fabricate her characters’ ver-
bal exchanges, it is not a simple cut-and-paste mechanical procedure like
Atkins’s practice, but it involves more methodical editing, rewriting and
creating of transgeneric adjustments. O’Brien’s stitching and sticking tech-
niques and strategies of adaptation are multiple. For example, Virginia’s
frst and last monologue,

Virginia:
I dreamt that I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down. I went under
the sea; I have been dead and yet am now alive again – it was awful, awful,
and as before waking, the voices of the birds and the sound of wheels chime
and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper
feels himself drawing towards the shores of life, the sun growing hotter,
cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen.
(Virginia 3; 73)

originally belongs to Woolf’s Septimus Smith. O’Brien rearranges the origi-

nal quote, changes the focus and point of view, re-appropriates Septimus’s
traumatic experience and gives it to her own character, Virginia:

But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a

rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went
under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest
still; he begged (he was talking to himself again – it was awful, awful!);
50 Bioplay(giarisms)s
and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels
chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and
the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself
drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder,
something tremendous about to happen.
(Mrs Dalloway 58–59)

The editing job consists in erasing the third-person narrative interventions

(in keeping with the narrative form that reports thoughts) and the origi-
nal pronoun markers in order to create a frst-person monologue (in keep-
ing with her dramatic form). O’Brien attributes Woolf’s Septimus’s inner
visions and mental vagaries to her Virginia, who thus speaks with Septimus’s
voice and enacts his hallucinations. Septimus’s thoughts are exteriorised and
become verbalised discourse; the stream of his inner consciousness becomes
Virginia’s stream of verbal monologue. It is noteworthy to point out that
O’Brien’s Virginia resembles Woolf’s shell-shocked character, Septimus,
who, in turn, was partially born from the author’s own experience. People
and characters from different ontological worlds mirror each other, and
their words create echoes in O’Brien’s bioplay.
Some other narrative extracts from Woolf’s novels become dialogic
scenes in Virginia. For example, the following extract from Orlando is
transformed into a dialogue between Virginia and Vita:

[…] and then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity,
whipped her pearls from her neck, stripped her satins from her back,
stood erect in her neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary noble-
man, and rang the bell.
(Orlando 119)

Virginia: And then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity,
whipped her emeralds from her neck.
Vita: Stripped her satin from her back.
Virginia: Stood erect in her neat black silk knickerbockers and … (does
it) rang the bell.
(Virginia 37)

The original, monolithical narrative strand from Orlando bifurcates and

becomes a double-voiced dialogue in Virginia. Woolf’s hypotext, slightly
transformed and adapted to the intrinsic structural requirements of the dra-
matic genre, prompts the cues of O’Brien’s Vita and Virginia.
Woolf’s characters’ dialogues extracted from different fctional universes
become the script of O’Brien’s dramatis personae. Such is the case of the
portions of conversation between the newlyweds Rosalind and Ernest, who
play a fantasy love game in Woolf’s short story ‘Lapin and Lapinova’. Their
exchanges are borrowed and recycled by O’Brien for her own characters,
Virginia and Leonard:
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 51
‘It’s because you’re like a rabbit, Ernest,’ she said. ‘Like a wild rabbit,’
she added, looking at him. ‘A hunting rabbit; a King Rabbit; a rabbit
that makes laws for all the other rabbits.’
[…] Rosalind was always fnding new qualities in him. But above all he
was a great hunter.
‘And what,’ said Rosalind, on the last day of the honeymoon, ‘did the
King do to-day?’
‘To-day,’ said Ernest, twitching his nose as he bit the end off his
cigar, ‘he chased a hare.’ He paused; struck a match, and twitched
again.
‘A woman hare,’ he added.
‘A white hare!’ Rosalind exclaimed, as if she had been expecting this.
‘Rather a small hare; silver grey; with big bright eyes?’
‘Yes,’ said Ernest, looking at her as she had looked at him, ‘a smallish
animal; with eyes popping out of her head, and two little front paws
dangling.’
(‘Lapin and Lapinova’ 261–263)

Virginia: [Happily] A wild rabbit. A king rabbit. A rabbit that makes

laws for all other rabbits.
[…]
Virginia: Lapin … lapin … king lapin … I am always fnding new
qualities in you, and every day I shall say, ‘And what did the King do
today?’
Leonard: ‘Today,’ said the King, twitching his nose as he lit his cigar,
‘today I chased a hare. A woman hare.’
Virginia: A white hare, with big eyes.
Leonard: Yes, with eyes popping out of her head.
(Virginia 24–25)

Excerpts of Woolfan ‘real fction’ are used in this passage to fabricate a

‘real conversation’ in O’Brien’s play. Woolf’s characters’ conversation is
thus transposed to another fctional universe and made to ring true and in
conformity with Virginia and Leonard’s marital relationship.
In the fnal scene of Virginia, O’Brien uses a few signifcant lines from
the last paragraph of Woolf’s The Waves. Her Virginia speaks with Woolf’s
Bernard’s words:

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware
once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud
horse whose rider frst spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do
we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we
stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy.
It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair fy-
ing back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India.
52 Bioplay(giarisms)s
I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fing myself, unvan-
quished and unyielding, O Death!
(The Waves 254)

Virginia:
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back, it is death…
My hair fying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s.
Against you I will fing myself, unvanquished and unyielding … o, death.
(Virginia 72)

The playwright borrows extensively from the words, feelings, moods and
states of mind of Woolf’s characters, and gives them to her Virginia, who
emerges as a collage of various fctional personae, more or less recog-
nisable according to the spectator’s/reader’s capacity of identifying these
fgments.
Just like Atkins, O’Brien creates a series of dualities in her bioplay, built
through the opposing masculine forces in Virginia’s life, through the polar-
ising relationship with Vita, but also with her own self, as Virginia is bat-
tling against the dark, aspiring forces of her mental illness. The playwright
communicates her own vision and interpretation of Woolf’s volatile state in
the stage directions that accompany and guide the hotchpotch of disquiet-
ing fragments collected from various primary sources. She builds a growing
crescendo of Virginia’s torments until ‘[s]he is now in real terror and like
an animal’ (Virginia 20). The rising emotional wave, fuelled by harrowing
moments, fnally breaks and Virginia ‘walks downstage into darkness’ (20).
Through Virginia’s monologues, the reader/spectator is given glimpses into
the character’s inner world, distressing thoughts, fears of the looming mad-
ness and attempts to overcome it. In several scenes, Virginia ‘walks talks’
excitedly on the stage in a trance-like state. Latent forms of madness seethe
under every monologue throughout the play and occasionally erupt in
intense mental bouts. In such scenes, which reveal Virginia’s inner turmoil,
unpredictable visions and hallucinations come randomly and unexpectedly
from everywhere. Virginia’s incoherent speech during the mad scenes is
created by the accumulation and collage of various haunting scenes and
moments from Woolf’s oeuvre.
Thus, in Act I, Scene 3, many Woolfan characters impart their tor-
mented thoughts and visions to O’Brien’s character, beginning with Rachel
Vinrace’s delirium, in which time becomes fuid and elastic, and, like every-
thing else around the heroine, escapes her control: ‘Eleven o’clock, twelve
o’clock, thirteen, fourteen and so on, until they reached twenties and thir-
ties and then forties and ffties and sixties’ (The Voyage Out 312 / Virginia
18). Other impassioned outbursts are borrowed from Septimus Smith
(‘human nature is upon you’ [Mrs Dalloway 78 / Virginia 19]), Bernard
(‘What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us?’ [The Waves 254 /
Virginia 18]) or Rhoda (‘Must, must, must – detestable word’; ‘I must haul
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 53
myself up, and fnd the particular coat that belongs to me’ [The Waves 254]
/ ‘Must muffe up against the night air. Must haul myself into this particular
coat that belongs to me… Must, must’ [Virginia 20]). Besides, Woolf’s own
words, compiled from several letters and diary entries, join in this fctional
cocktail stirred to perfection by the playwright to participate in the disturb-
ing madness scene.
Virginia’s feelings of enclosure and terror, the ‘gates’, ‘locks’, ‘bolts’
that restrain her physical and mental freedom,22 can lead to a relapse any
moment. Symptoms of her mental illness constantly resurface until, aware
of the madness closing in on her, Virginia ends her life. The last scene (Act
II, scene 4) echoes the previous madness scene (Act I, scene 3) and is fash-
ioned in the same way by drawing simultaneously from both Woolf’s fc-
tion and autobiographical material. O’Brien’s Virginia borrows words from
Bernard’s fnal soliloquy and Septimus’s thoughts, as well as from Woolf’s
own suicide letter addressed to her husband. As the very last paragraph
echoes the incipit of the play and Virginia’s terrifying dream, it appears
that Virginia’s whole life was lived in the ominous shadow of death. Death
is a start, a leitmotif throughout Virginia’s life, an end, and a beginning
again. The last scene represents the end of the character’s mortality and
the beginning of her immortality (‘I have been dead and yet am now alive
again’ [73]). Thus, death is by no means an end. Despite physical death,
life prevails: Septimus is ‘alive again’ and Bernard vows to keep fghting
death incessantly after Percival’s death. Both Woolfan characters commit
to life in the face of death and continue to live despite, and beyond, death.
In the same way, Woolf’s literary representations in contemporary fction
keep the author alive through the ‘summing up’ of her own words, which
give texture to her life as a character. The Woolfan image of the collecting
and breaking wave that ‘rises’, ‘swells’, ‘arches its back’ (The Waves 254
/ Virginia 72) replicates the movement of life towards death, then rebirth
again, and so on, in a never-ending renewable cycle, as also exemplifed
by the circularity of O’Brien’s play, which begins and ends with the same
Woolf quote.
O’Brien hence borrows and plays with different aspects of Woolf’s mate-
rial: she draws on well-known symbols from Woolfan cosmogony (water
imagery, waves), themes recurrent in Woolf’s fction (life, death, sanity,
madness) and the modernist author’s narrative techniques that she trans-
poses to the dramatic genre. By following the fuidity of Virginia’s thoughts,
O’Brien builds a ‘stream-of-consciousness play’ (Duncan 103): Virginia’s
monologues, an equivalent of the stream-of-consciousness technique used
by Woolf in her prose, give the reader/spectator access to the character’s
thoughts and motivations. And because O’Brien’s bioplay is made of
Woolf’s own words and patches of her fction, they bring along the mod-
ernist author’s palpable lyrical style and impart a Woolfan favour to the
play. O’Brien thus gives birth to her character Virginia and at the same time
traces and perpetuates Woolf’s literary lineage.
54 Bioplay(giarisms)s
As Woolf may be one of the most thoroughly documented literary fg-
ures of the twentieth century, the major challenge for biofction writers
who appropriate her life is certainly to squeeze imaginative material into
biographical chinks. O’Brien’s personal response to this challenge was to
adhere very closely to Woolf’s historical and fctional truth, to give birth to
a Virginia that comes out of Woolf’s own prose, and to endow her character
with a polyphonic voice that speaks with Woolf’s own words. O’Brien ima-
gines a character, Virginia, who is faithfully modelled on Woolf, and at the
same time preserves the author’s modernist credo and literary legacy. This
Virginia, who becomes alive on the stage, thus looks familiar and sounds
authentic.
By weaving her play from a multiplicity of meticulously selected Woolfan
skeins, O’Brien produces a particular, subjective23 version of Virginia Woolf.
She focuses on Virginia’s relationship with her entourage, on her ebullient
creativity and success as an author, and also on her madness, her attempts
and failure to overcome it. The ‘real’ patches taken from different authentic
sources are uprooted from the original context, trans- and re-contextual-
ised, and sewn together into a new textual patchwork. O’Brien’s bioplay
is unique insofar as the playwright cuts, bends, twists and manipulates her
primary sources in an almost physical way. The outcome is an artisanal
literary product, and a very special kind of craftsmanship is involved in the
act of selecting and borrowing the appropriate material, then recycling and
assembling it in a new, creative way.
O’Brien resurrects the fgure of Virginia Woolf and at the same time
inscribes the theme of resurrection in her bioplay through the circular struc-
ture of Septimus’s/Virginia’s emergence from their death dreams, through
the motif of the waves, through Bernard’s/Virginia’s fnal monologue and
through the symbol of the eclipse. As the character of Leonard explains to
his wife, after the sun’s sudden plunge into darkness, light ‘miraculously’
(55) returns to the world. Like an eclipse, Woolf’s death was just a momen-
tary, physical absence: since then, the author has ‘miraculously’ emerged in
her literary heirs’ fction and has been ‘alive again’ in the spotlight, on the
stage and on the present-day literary scene. Our contemporary writers keep
remembering, representing and reinterpreting24 the fascinating fgure of the
modernist writer, offering the public ever-newer reproductions, simulacra
or hyperreal25 variants of her and propagating versions of her based on
specifc features that they wish to put forth and enhance. In our postmod-
ern age, it is impossible to catch a ‘real’ glimpse of the ‘real’ Woolf, the
modernist ‘ffty pairs of eyes’ being now utterly insuffcient. The process
of representation is constantly becoming more convoluted since it relies on
ingenious postmodernist mirroring effects, Chinese-box-narratives, untan-
gling ontological levels and a subtext of sophisticated critical metatext to
suggest refections on the authors’ creative process. Buried under such a
complex fctional production, Virginia remains an elusive character, ‘lightly
attached to life’. 26
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 55
Virginia’s Feminist Companions27
Elizabeth Steele’s two-act play, Virginia Woolf and Companions: A Feminist
Document. A Play (1996), was produced several times between 1979 and
1995 for different academic events. It is noteworthy that the play was written
by an American Woolf scholar with extensive knowledge of Woolf’s essays.28
The design of the play was inspired by Eve Merriam’s feminist play, Out of
Our Fathers’ House, which focuses on six real-life leaders of the women’s
suffrage movement. The dramatis personae’s monologues and dialogues are
made from the diaries, journals and letters of these historical fgures. Steele
reproduces the same format for her play, but casts six British feminist fgures
gravitating around Virginia, who acts ‘as a kind of arbiter’ (‘Introduction’,
Companions 6). The life stories of the seven women ‘alternate and intertwine’
(3). Virginia is the nodal point which brings the women’s destinies together;
she is, in Steele’s words, the author ‘who understood and could sympathize
with each of these roles’ (3). Act I stages the interaction between Virginia
and three companions: Margaret Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle,
1627–1647), Mary Wollstonecraft (the early feminist, 1759–1797) and
Harriette Wilson (one of the most popular courtesans of her time, 1786–
1845); Act II focuses on Virginia and three other companions: Geraldine
Jewsbury (a journalist and novelist, 1812–1880), Eleanor Ormerod (the
frst woman entomologist, 1828–1901) and Ellen Terry (a Shakespearean
actress, 1847–1928). The playwright follows the chronological progress of
the dramatis personae’s lives, from girlhood to womanhood, as they take
turns talking about their childhood, successes, failures and death. The stage
directions qualify these women as ‘unique individuals representing different
backgrounds and occupations, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth
and twentieth centuries’ (9). These strong women, who come alive together
on the stage, had varied career paths in their times: some were pioneers in
their felds while others were forgotten by history, and Woolf had a keen
interest in bringing to light all their fascinating lives in her essays.
The play was envisaged as a ‘feminist document’, as indicated by the
subtitle, and was born out of the social and critical context of the late seven-
ties, with the development, recognition and institutionalisation of feminist
scholarship in American universities. It was designed as part of ‘the large
current enterprise of rediscovering and revisiting the history of women in
the past as doers and thinkers’ (8). Steele thus ascribes all her dramatis
personae militant and feminist roles for a receptive contemporary audience.
The content of the characters’ monologues is mostly composed of authentic
material. Steele dramatises two kinds of primary sources: the six women’s
autobiographical writings and Woolf’s essays dedicated to these women in
which she often reviews or discusses their autobiographical sources in order
to sketch their personalities and outline their life trajectories.
Steele operates a careful process of selection, truncating, cutting and
pasting fragments from the existing authentic material to compose the
56 Bioplay(giarisms)s
fabric of the dramatic text and adapt it to the requirements of the stage.
She fabricates dialogues out of primary sources, and in this sense she is,
just like Atkins and O’Brien, a skilful bricoleuse: she chooses meaning-
ful segments, re-arranges them, re-punctuates and coordinates them. The
invented material, on the other hand, is useful to devise transitions between
the monologues and create a semblance of ongoing, fuid conversation on
the stage. However, unlike Atkins’s and O’Brien’s frst- and second-degree
bioplays, fashioned exclusively from primary autobiographical and fctional
Woolfan sources, I would argue that Steele’s Companions corresponds to a
third-degree bioplay, which ripples further away from the auto/biographic
impact. Indeed, this is more of a creative stretch than the previous two
examples, as it combines the historical fgures’ personal accounts of their
lives, Woolf’s reprocessing of these lives in her published essays – which
involves re-writing and necessarily presenting her personal spin on them
– and fnally Steele’s textual mortar which binds together the fragments of
primary and secondary sources to make them dialogue with one another.
The fctional and playful dimension of Steele’s play arises from the contrived
situation of resurrecting women who lived in different historical times and
bringing them together on the stage, extracted and detached from their tem-
poral context, as opposed to Atkins’s play, for instance, in which Vita and
Virginia’s interaction on stage is based on the historical fgures’ documented
friendship, physical relationship and epistolary exchanges.
In this bioplay, aspects of Virginia’s life are interwoven and resonate with
the other women’s lives. Steele selects particular biographemes, anecdotes
and events gleaned from their autobiographical papers and imagines a dia-
logue among them, with Woolf as a conductor who orchestrates this con-
versation about their personal and professional lives, accomplishments and
failures. Thus, the dramatis personae’s monologues are made with the his-
torical fgures’ own words recorded in their memoirs or fragments of their
letters. The character of Virginia, too, speaks with Woolf’s words taken
from letters addressed to various friends or members of her family (Violet
Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West, Janet Case, Jacques Raverat, Vanessa Bell
and Leonard Woolf) as well as with Steele’s invented words.
Virginia’s main role on the stage consists of briefy introducing her com-
panions, after which she self-effaces in order to give them the foor, allowing
them to fully express themselves and tell their stories in their own words. In
turn, Virginia is introduced in Act II as a central literary fgure of her time
by Geraldine Jewsbury, who speaks with Steele’s words. In this privileged
feminist space opened for the seven women, Virginia’s condensed career
progression is ironically described as patriarchally dominated. Her writing
and publishing were given impulse by the strong masculine forces present in
her life, frst her father, and then her husband. She thus emerges as a liter-
ary fgure mainly defned as having been the ‘daughter’ of Leslie Stephen
and the ‘wife’ of Leonard Woolf, and whose life is reduced to a few vague
accomplishments.
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 57
The story of her life presented by Jewsbury thus sounds to ‘impatient’
Virginia like a stereotypical, unsatisfactory, patriarchal fairy tale, which
implies that containing one’s rich life in a few words necessarily seems
incomplete and hollow:

Woolf: (impatiently) And when the clock strikes two, the Princess turns
into a rat. Is that the story of Cinderella? […] That is quite enough
about me. (21)

Encouraged again by Ellen Terry to speak about her girlhood, Virginia

shares with her companions a few defning moments of her life, starting
with her half-sister Stella’s wedding day and her death three months later,
a happy event that turned to tragedy, probably chosen to illustrate the
series of tragedies in her life, and typically Woolfan moments encompass-
ing both happiness and sadness, dream and nightmare. This event voiced
by Virginia is a truncated and dramatised form of Woolf’s diary entry of
10 April 1897:

Woolf: […] I was ffteen … My sister Stella’s wedding day … (Reads)

‘The morning was a hurly-burly. Huge boxes of fowers arrived and had
to be arranged. Goodness knows how we got through it all. Certainly it
was a dream, or a nightmare. Stella was almost dreaming, I think; but
probably hers was a happy one. […]’ (Pause; closes the book.) Stella
died three months later.
(Companions 24 / Woolf, Apprentice 68)

The next defning moment chosen by Virginia to be shared with her com-
panions is her marriage to Leonard. This announcement is a truncated ver-
sion of Woolf’s real letter to her friend Violet Dickinson:

Woolf: I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry … I’m going
to marry Leonard Woolf. He’s a penniless Jew and (defantly) I’m more
happy than anyone ever said was possible.
(Companions 26 / Woolf, Letters 1: 500)

The companions and the audience get an idea of Virginia’s ensuing fulflling
marriage through the metaphor of the fower and the blossoming garden,
which is entirely down to the effort of her passionate husband:

Woolf: Our garden is the envy of Sussex. We have discovered a purple

tulip which you plant one week and it comes up the next. Needless to
say, this is all Leonard’s doing; he works like a navvy, and climbs to the
top of pear trees like a monkey. Now wasn’t I right to marry a man like
that? […] You see, I’m very famous in some circles – rather famous, I
mean! Americans want to buy my manuscripts. I’d like you to have a
58 Bioplay(giarisms)s
high opinion of me, and yet – how interesting one’s own psychology
is – I can’t talk to you about my writing.
(Companions 26)

This particular monologue is a non-chronological compilation of two por-

tions of letters cut, re-punctuated and glued together by Steele: a letter to
Janet Case written on 1 September 1925 (Letters 3: 202), then a letter to
Jacques Raverat written a year before, on 4 September 1924 (Letters 3:
130). Steele keeps the content of the letters intact, but the new dramatic
context implies a change of addressees, her companions on the stage.
Virginia’s speeches are also made from Woolf’s diary entries. Their pri-
vate, introspective tone similarly lends itself to fashioning long monologues
on the stage:

Woolf: I wish to record for phycological purposes that strange night

when I went to meet Leonard. What an intensity of feeling was pressed
into those hours! [...] Really, it was a physical feeling of lightness and
relief and safety, and yet there was something terrible behind it.
(Companions 28 / Diary 2: 270–271)

Virginia thus shares with the companions her signifcant, intimate moments
of being and the atmosphere of marital harmony which pervaded her
domestic sphere.
From the early 1920s, Steele fast forwards and skips almost two decades
to focus on Virginia’s life during WWII. This is briefy illustrated by an
emblematic conversation she has with Leonard during a dangerous bomb
raid, which was originally recorded in Woolf’s diary:

Woolf: The planes came very close. Leonard and I lay down under the tree.
The sound was like someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay fat on
our faces, hands behind head. Don’t close your teeth, said Leonard. Will it
drop? I asked. A horse neighed in the marsh. Very sultry. Is it thunder? I said.
No, guns, said Leonard. Then slowly the sound lessened.
(Companions 29 / Diary 5: 168)

In her very last monologue of the play, Virginia voices the farewell letter
Woolf left to her husband before committing suicide. She is heard ‘reading
painfully a letter’ composed of truncated fragments from Woolf’s frst unde-
livered note to Leonard, written on 18 March 1941:

Woolf: (reading painfully from a letter) Dearest Leonard, I feel certain that I
am going mad again. And I shan’t recover this time. So I’m doing what seems
best to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been
in every way all that anyone could be. I know that I am spoiling your life,
that without me you could work. (Her voice breaks. Then resumes) What I
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 59
want to say is – I owe all the happiness in my life to you. Everything has gone
from me but the certainty of your goodness. I don’t think two people could
have been happier than we have been. Virginia.
(Companions 30 / Letters 6: 481)

Steele’s selection of Woolfan moments that compose Virginia’s life is both

unusual and predictable. Indeed, unexpected choices are operated by the
playwright to include more obscure episodes and anecdotes such as, for
instance, the Woolfs’ stay with Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova at
Studland in September 1923. But Steele also resorts to better-known events
such as the looming war, Woolf’s encroaching madness and of course, her
tragic suicide. Finally, after Virginia ‘drifts away’ (Companions 30) from
the stage, Ellen Terry gives voice to a brief obituary-like homage which
condenses Virginia’s life and career:

Terry: Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in March of

1941. Through her writings she advocated a type of feminism which
inspires today. (30)

The conclusion to Virginia’s life and career seems to be her suicide by

drowning and her feminist legacy which continues beyond her death. This
ultimate portrayal of Virginia as a tragic fgure and a feminist writer refects
the shortcuts that persist in popular culture. In this short ‘feminist docu-
ment’, Virginia’s life as rendered by Steele does not have a ‘feminist’ trajec-
tory, nor does it constitute a complete ‘document’ that could satisfactorily
refect Woolf’s multifaceted, complex life.

The Last Song of the Nightingale

Woolf’s rich inner life is the focus of English poet, playwright and novelist
Maureen Duffy in her one-act play A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square,
which stages the last hour of Virginia’s life. In the 1972 performance and
the ensuing 1974 published version in Factions, Virginia discusses her
past life with two other dramatis personae, Freud, the ‘father-confessor’
(Factions 181) and Vita, the ‘mother-lover’ (Factions 181). In a more recent
edited version that I am examining here, the double-bill Hilda and Virginia
(2018), Virginia’s long, confessional monologue is a continuous stream of
consciousness witnessed by the audience only, with no antagonist on the
stage to confront her verbal fow like in the original performance.29 Duffy
selects what she deems signifcant episodes, impressions and memories
gleaned from the array of published material at the time. This third-degree
bioplay is based on several historical fgures’ letters, diaries, memoirs and
auto/biographies that are presented not as a chronological montage of
exact quotes as in Atkins’s and O’Brien’s bioplays, but as processed, para-
phrased primary material peppered with a few key quotes and shaped into
60 Bioplay(giarisms)s
a dramatic monologue. The playwright uses all the auto/biographical data
at her disposal, but also fashions her own striking, poetic metaphors out of
Woolf’s own images.30
The setting is not Bloomsbury, as implied by the play’s title, but Monk’s
House, Sussex, where Virginia lives her last minutes before plunging into
the River Ouse on 28 March 1941. Virginia, the ‘nightingale’, is looking
back on her life and is singing her melancholy death song, both a lament
and a confession about her depression, madness, the laborious composition
of her novels and her relationships with her parents, Vanessa, Leonard and
Vita. Her last thoughts are verbalised in the uninterrupted twenty-six-page
soliloquy in which she muses over her achievements and ruminates on the
demons and traumatic memories which have shaped her. Just like O’Brien’s
Virginia, she recalls memorable events which have guided her life’s trajec-
tory, have left a deep impact on it and have inevitably led to the tragic
present situation. Duffy chooses to start with Virginia’s imminent death,
which allows the audience to witness Virginia’s retrospective assessment
of her life and work and understand her fnal gesture. At the outset of the
play, Virginia is on the brink of committing suicide, having already written
suicide notes to her husband and sister. ‘There’s nothing more to be done’
(7), she declares, but to put her premeditated suicide plan into action. She
explains why she wishes to be ‘wiped away’ (21) and escape her life, her
obsessions, her guilt of being a constant burden for her entourage and her
feelings of failure.
Virginia’s ‘old arches and fears are back’ (26) as WWII rages on. The war
needs active, ‘practical people’, whereas Virginia spent all her life ‘perfecting
thought and feeling’ (30). In this artistically arid context, she feels useless,
as books are now a luxury, not a necessity, unlike Vita’s and Leonard’s
gardens which continue to be ploughed for vegetables ‘as part of the war
effort’ (29). Virginia is contemplating the devastated geography of London,
her beloved city, which ‘is ravished’ (31) by bombers. A personifed London
is imagined as a big mouth whose dental topography has been destroyed
by an unexperienced, vicious dentist: ‘London is maimed and gutted as if a
butcher had turned dentist and torn the houses out of their sockets leaving
bleeding holes’ (16). This devastated external landscape refects her ‘inner
destructions’ (16). Virginia keeps hearing disturbing, harassing voices which
‘mock and scream and beckon’ (16) and urge her to die. In this particular
state of mind, she feels attracted to the soothing water of the river, which
reminds her of the happy moments of her childhood. The aquatic lure prom-
ises a ‘mothering comfort’ (17), like an amniotic liquid which would envelop
her again, but also an erotic embrace of a ‘faithful lover’, which tempts the
‘bride of death’ to his ‘cold sheets of consummation’ (30). Virginia com-
pares her overwhelming thoughts to big monsters that she is fshing from
‘the bottom of [her] mind’ (14): ‘Sometimes I hooked a leviathan so big it
almost pulled me down to drown before I could land it’ (15). These power-
ful, dangerous thoughts are clearly linked to death by drowning.
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 61
Minutes before her death, a candid Virginia tells the audience the whole
truth about the lies she has just told in her letters to Leonard and Vanessa.
She openly admits that she is a liar: a fction writer, who fabricates stories
from events in her life and turns people into characters, is by defnition a
professional liar: ‘I’m a liar. Everyone knows I’m a liar, that I fantasize
about people, make them ft the Procrustean bed of my imagination’ (18).
In her farewell letters, she concedes she was ‘mad’ because ‘that’s what they
believe, want to believe’ (7). But on stage, in front of a privy audience,
Virginia discusses her so-called madness with lucidity, which she confesses
is just a façade. She is impersonating an identity for the beneft of her entou-
rage: ‘I’m not mad. I never was, have never been and now I will never be’
(7). Her ‘mad’ public persona gives the audience access to her true, private,
‘sane’ self. The audience is thus the privileged ear who is listening to her last,
real, uncensored confdences.
A reproachful, bitter Virginia blames her entourage and doctors for their
violent treatment that threatens to erase her very essence, and for their
intrusive way of curing her by emptying her head of its thoughts, which is
compared to spooning down an egg’s yolk. They try to nip her emerging
thoughts in the bud, the promising ‘speck[s] that might have grown into
winged thing[s]’ (7). Virginia tells the audience how she inserted her doc-
tors’ discourse in her novel Mrs Dalloway, and made her character Clarissa,
who is thinking about Septimus’s fate in the hands of evil Dr Bradshaw,
voice her own distrust of the medical profession:

Suppose he had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her
obscurely evil […] if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William
had impressed him, might he not have said, Life is made intolerable:
they make life intolerable, men like that?
(Nightingale 8 / Mrs Dalloway 157)

Like O’Brien, Duffy uses portions of Woolf’s fction to construct her

Virginia’s thoughts.
The restrictions set by doctors are not only limited to social barriers and
intellectual obstructions, as Virginia accuses them of being at the origin of a
deeper and greater private sufferance. Virginia’s crushing feelings of failure
are amplifed by the emptiness in her life, the absence of children, who were
replaced by ‘dream children’ (Nightingale 11), her books. As an old woman
on the brink of death, she believes that a child could have saved her life
and ‘could have been a constant link to life’ (13). As the desire to give birth
to children was thwarted and control over her body was denied, Virginia
maintained control over her art and gave birth to her novels instead. But
this particular labour seems to have been even longer and harder: ‘A child
doesn’t have to be remade over and over as every new book must be made.
Every book is a birth and a death at once’ (13). Virginia thus emerges as a
writer for whom the gestation and birth of each of her children is a draining
62 Bioplay(giarisms)s
experience, except for Orlando, her ‘easiest’, ‘quickest’ ‘brightest’ child
(15), conceived out of her love for Vita. Giving birth to a book usually leads
to ‘post-natal depression’ (21); this is the reason why, in her farewell letter
to Leonard, she wishes for her latest child (Between the Acts) to be ‘aborted’
(24). Duffy’s Virginia is therefore limned as a woman defned by her work,
her only purpose in life, and as a mother to her ‘book-children’ (23). When
her passion leads to ‘still-birth’ (21) and post-natal depression, she loses her
whole reason for living.
Virginia’s portrait further acquires a feminist hue through the character
of Leonard, who plays a key role in her life and prolongs the masculine
oppression initiated by her tyrannical father and later by medical coercion.
In his obsessive nursing attention, Leonard keeps a close eye on his wife’s
‘every fuctuation in [her] health’ (11) and records it scrupulously in his
diary, just like he records ‘every penny [they] spen[d]’ (11). His ‘adding and
subtracting’ (11) reveals his attachment to the materiality of life and the
corporeal envelope of the self, as opposed to Virginia’s interest in the life of
the mind. Virginia suggests that Leonard’s masculine obsession with count-
ing and accounting follows the tradition of her father’s despotic control of
household expenses, with his ‘accounts and accounting’ (22): ‘Are all men
the same, endlessly adding and subtracting from one?’ (11). The masculine
control that Virginia resents thus originates in the paternal tyranny, in her
father’s ‘great horny bill that tore and savaged in one’s softest fesh’ (12). As
a result, Virginia developed a sharp ‘tongue’ from a young age, a means of
counteracting and responding to the masculine oppression and a weapon to
hurt back. Virginia, ‘mistress of words’ (27) has learnt how to manipulate
language to ‘create things so clever and so beautiful’ (27) but also to ‘wound
the others’ (27).
Despite Leonard’s masculine characteristics which remind Virginia of her
father’s, the Woolfs have managed to build a different marital relationship,
based on mutual support and understanding. Virginia expresses her love for
her faithful companion through the gesture of ending her life, which is justi-
fed as a way to preserve Leonard. She feels guilty of ‘drag[ging] him down’
‘to the verge of [her] madness’ (21). Without this burden, Leonard can con-
tinue his vocation, his ‘political work’ (31). A few minutes before her immi-
nent death, Virginia looks back on her marriage and her special relationship
with Leonard. Her memories of their ‘cold honeymoon’ (14) are made from
Woolf’s letters exchanged with her future husband and sister. Virginia also
remembers her childhood shame and confusion of the masculine, incestu-
ous intrusion, when her half-brother intrusively explored her young body:
‘I could only think of our half-brother George Duckworth standing me on
a ledge when I was six or thereabouts and exploring my private parts. I still
shiver with the shame of it’ (14).31 These traumatic childhood memories that
have shaped her life as a woman have resulted in her dislike of her mon-
strous ‘demanding body’ (10). The heavy body dulls ‘the edges of the mind’
(21); it is a mechanical, processing machine that only produces decay and
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 63
excretion: eating is ‘shameful and flthy’ (21), and being forced to eat during
her breakdowns, deemed a universal remedy by her entourage, becomes a
form of utmost oppression.
Duffy implies that Virginia’s ideas about ‘[m]ale aggression, the desire
to possess and dominate’ (13) spring from her familial environment and
medical situation. These personal circumstances lead to her public, political
opinions, forcefully voiced in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
‘[L]ust and wrath’ (29) are masculine vices, and so are war and aggression.
The deadly bombs that fall on the Sussex landscape are seen by Virginia as
‘obscene sperm from the belly of an aircraft’ (30). Virginia thus establishes
tight links between war and masculine sexuality and denounces both at
once.32 As a woman writer, she also expresses her regrets of not having been
daring enough during her lifetime, having lacked the courage to express
herself fully and execute her vision: she was ‘too ladylike’ (25) and ‘born
and bred into female cowardice’ (25), as opposed to her contemporary male
peer, Joyce, ‘whose pages reeled with indecency’ (24): ‘[b]ecause he was
a man he could write of things I didn’t dare to touch’ (24). She thus feels
excluded from a tradition which follows a patriarchal literary lineage. Joyce
has the advantage of continuing an itinerary traced by his male predeces-
sors, ‘while there was no tradition for [women] to follow’ (28). As she is
about to disappear from this world, Virginia is concerned about the position
she will gain in the literary canon among the privileged educated male writ-
ers, ‘in order of merit’ (21).
As death draws nearer, Virginia summons the long-dead ghosts which
have continuously haunted her throughout her life. ‘Obsessed by both [of
her parents], unhealthily’ (17), Virginia has undergone her own psychoa-
nalysis by writing her novels, especially To the Lighthouse. This necessary
artistic and therapeutic exercise allowed her to resurrect ‘their shadows’
from the dead and ‘exorcise them’ (Nightingale 17). Although Virginia
thought she had previously ‘exorcised them with To the Lighthouse’ (17),
her parents’ voices resonate in her thoughts and accompany her to the river.
Another antagonist that resurfaces obsessively in her mind as she is on the
verge of committing suicide is Freud, and Virginia vividly remembers that he
presented her with a narcissus when they met (see Diary 5: 202), a gesture
which haunts Virginia and prompts her to ask again and again her rhetorical
question: ‘Why did Freud give me a Narcissus when Leonard and I went to
see him at Hampstead when he was dying?’ (Nightingale 9); ‘Why did Freud
give me that fower? The delicate narcissus leans to admire its own face in
the water until it topples in’ (22). This appropriate gesture is all the more
signifcant as Virginia is imminently drawn to the water and drowns. In
her relationship with Freud, yet another doctor and father fgure, ‘Virginia
establishes herself as a fellow writer, not a patient’ (Sizemore, ‘A Portrait’
208). Indeed, they have two different conceptions of the human conscious-
ness, one scientifc, the other one literary, and each defends their own dis-
coveries, like ‘two nightingales singing out [their] territory’ (Nightingale 8).
64 Bioplay(giarisms)s
Duffy’s Virginia is therefore a nightingale who prevents Freud from invad-
ing her intimate ‘thicket’ (8), like her previous doctors.
Among all the dark fears, doubts and frustrations, a few blissful
moments resurface in Virginia’s thoughts before she commits suicide,
mainly related to memories of her passionate love for Vita. Virginia
remembers Vita’s ‘glowing in the grocer’s at Sevenoaks on her pink legs
like beech trees, wearing pearls like peacock’s eggs’ (24), a colourful
description that Duffy takes almost verbatim from Woolf’s diary (Diary 3:
52). The epitome of their love is the ‘full rich week’ (Nightingale 15) they
spent together in Burgundy. Virginia fondly remembers that week ‘drop
by drop’ (15), like an elixir which kept her alive and happy. Sizemore con-
tends that Duffy’s representation of Virginia in love with Vita is perhaps
more accurate than other asexual, virginal portraits that emerge from the
readily available primary sources: Duffy’s Virginia is ‘a more outspoken
lesbian’ (‘Foremother’ 126); ‘Virginia’s lesbianism is […] more overt in
the play than in the diaries or the Bell biography’ (‘Portrait’ 212). Duffy
gives her Virginia a voice that was stifed by male biographical representa-
tions; she therefore sets out to ‘correct’ or ‘re-vision’ the image fabricated
by Quentin Bell and Leonard Woolf by proposing her audience an overt
lesbian-feminist Virginia who clearly links ‘male sexuality and aggression’
with ‘her reaction of disgust to heterosexual sex’ (‘Foremother’ 126). This
political dimension of biofction, as well as its reparative aim, will be fur-
ther discussed in Chapter 2.

Virginia and Vita: A Year in Love

As evidenced by the works examined in this chapter, Woolf’s love rela-
tionship with Sackville-West has proved to be extremely attractive to play-
wrights for its dramatic potential, but also to novelists for its romanesque
appeal. French writer Christine Orban fctionalised the two historical fg-
ures in her novel Virginia et Vita (2012), which was frst published in 1990
under the pseudonym Christine Duhon and the title Une année amoureuse
de Virginia Woolf. The former title highlighted the duration of their affair,
1927–1928, during which Virginia writes a passionate love letter dedicated
to Vita, namely her novel Orlando. However, the more recent title puts
forth the interactions between the two women, their duality and comple-
mentarity, and their mutual love relationship out of which Orlando is born.
Throughout Virginia et Vita, Virginia is constantly riddled with thoughts
about her fundamental differences with Vita. Forty-fve-year-old Virginia
feels old, unattractive and inadequate when compared with thirty-year-old
vibrant, strong, optimist Vita. Vita is an aristocrat, is beautiful, confdent,
extravagant, exuberant, charismatic, worldly and at ease in all circum-
stances. She is also a more successful author, despite being a traditional,
unoriginal writer, according to Virginia. She is always caught in a whirl of
mundane, literary and familial activities: she is ‘a woman, a housekeeper, a
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 65
writer, a celebrity, a wife, a lover, a mother’ (Virginia et Vita 22).33 Virginia,
on the other hand, ‘had nothing of all these, not even a child’ (22). Drawing
from Woolf’s and Sackville’s autobiographical and fctional material, Orban
imagines how Virginia and Vita’s short-lived love relationship becomes
immortal art. Vita’s personality sparks Virginia’s prolifc imagination and
gives her the idea for the character of Orlando, who transcends epochs and
centuries and embraces different masculine and feminine qualities and fea-
tures. Virginia pours all her mixed feelings of fascination and frustration,
desire and jealousy for Vita into her character. These strong passions give
life to Orlando and guide his/her progress from the ffteenth to the twentieth
century.
Orban’s title, Virginia et Vita, provides a mirror effect to Atkins’s Vita
and Virginia and shares similitudes with its mode of composition, as well
as with other works studied in this chapter. Orban resorts to the same
artisanal process of fabrication of her biofction as Atkins and O’Brien,
and the same creative enterprise as Duffy. But unlike Atkins, who manip-
ulates only autobiographical documentation in her frst-degree bioplay,
O’Brien, who additionally incorporates fragments of Woolf’s oeuvre in
her second-degree bioplay, and Duffy, who combines almost quotes and
paraphrases of Woolfan material in her third-degree bioplay, Orban’s
fourth-degree biofction is more imaginative insofar as it fctionalises
Woolf’s life and work.
Virginia’s year-in-the-life is made out of elements from Woolf’s letters
and diary as well as portions of Orlando (a French translation published
by Stock). Some of the letters and diary entries that Orban transposes into
fction are dated, thus providing biographical and temporal marks for the
reader. The primary sources are processed to various degrees and several
techniques are used, some of them quite similar to Atkins’s, O’Brien’s and
Duffy’s compositional methods. For example, Orban selects passages from
Woolf’s diary and her correspondence with Sackville-West and transforms
them into exchanges between Vita and Virginia.34 Other private, frst-
person confessions selected from Woolf’s diary are transposed into the
third-person narration as Virginia’s reported thoughts. They are linguisti-
cally adapted and give the illusion that they come straight from Virginia’s
conscience:35

I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that
people will understand every word. But the balance between truth &
fantasy must be careful.
(Diary 3: 162)

She wanted to write this epic in a parodic style, very clear and very
simple, while being careful to preserve the balance between truth and
fantasy.
(Virginia et Vita 65)
66 Bioplay(giarisms)s
[…] Orlando – begun on 8th October, as a joke; & now rather too long
for my liking. It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too
frivolous for a serious book.
(Diary 3: 177)

Orlando is too long for a farce and too frivolous for a serious book.
(Virginia et Vita 147)

Virginia’s thoughts about the design of her novel, her doubts about the
parodic style she adopts, the balance she wants to maintain between reality
and fantasy are all ideas taken straight from Woolf’s diary. Like O’Brien
and Steele, Orban selects, de-contextualises and re-contextualises these frag-
ments, slightly refashioning them to ft her narrative.
Orban also transcribes and incorporates fragments of authentic letters
exchanged between Woolf and Sackville-West, rendered in the text in ital-
ics, and attributes them to Virginia and Vita. These textual manipulations
or transpositions take a more creative direction when Orban adds her own
imaginative material. For instance, Sackville-West’s frst lines of her letter of
11 October 1927 are quoted verbatim by Orban up to ‘Yes, go ahead, toss
up your pancake, brown it nicely on both sides, pour brandy over it, and
serve hot’, after which she invents the following line: ‘I’m expecting you for
tea right now’ (Virginia et Vita 47); similarly, Woolf’s letter of 20 March
1928 ending with ‘Do you exist? Have I made you up?’ followed by three
dots, is completed by Orban: ‘I think of you all the time, under different
aspects’ (Virginia et Vita 96). Orban thus produces additional pastiched
portions of letters and pastes them onto Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s real
correspondence. This fusion of fabricated and real materials is smooth and
the seams between them remain imperceptible even for an expert reader.
The author’s art of ventriloquism is so masterfully executed that even the
entirely invented, long letters contained in the last pages of the novel sound
authentic.
While recreating Vita and Virginia’s relationship between 1927 and
1928 through the verbal or epistolary exchanges between the two charac-
ters, Orban imagines Virginia writing Orlando. In order to show the direct
links between life and art, she uses numerous quotes from Woolf’s novel,
all signalled by quotations marks. These short extracts throw light on the
evolution of the characters’ love affair and mirror the progress of the mock
biographical novel Virginia is writing for Vita. Virginia et Vita calls for spe-
cifc quotes from Orlando, which are not necessarily taken in the order of
the unfolding of Woolf’s text. This montage of authentic quotes refects the
events that take place in the lives of Vita and Virginia and the ups and downs
of their relationship. The collage, montage, adaptation and transposition of
primary (autobiographical and fctional) materials used by Orban and all
the authors examined in this chapter give a distinct Woolfan favour to both
characters, but unlike Atkins’s and O’Brien’s bioplays, Orban’s novelistic
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 67
tools give more depth and confer a richer imaginative life to the character
of Virginia. Indeed, besides providing snippets of biographical information
scattered throughout the narration and fabricating thoughts and dialogues
from accurate primary sources, Orban enters Virginia’s mind and imagines
her character’s inner life, her inspiration, motivations and tortuous process
of creation of Orlando. She sets ‘the mechanisms of [Virginia’s] brain’ in
motion in order to give us a sense of how the author-character is ‘weaving
the threads of a new novel’ (30).
Six years before Cunningham’s The Hours and his fctional account of
Virginia Woolf’s composition of Mrs Dalloway, Orban had a similar idea.
Her year-in-the-life biofction focuses on the writing progress of Orlando
and the creation of her memorable eponymous male and female charac-
ter, as compared with Cunningham’s exploration of Virginia’s mind during
a single day in June 1923, when she conceives another famous character,
Clarissa Dalloway. The fctional genesis of Orlando traces the birth and
evolution of Orlando while its author’s love relationship with Vita, which
provides inspiration for this character, is slowly drawing to an end. Despite
the women’s drying and dying passion, Orlando is built as a permanent link
between them and survives their waning love affair.
Just like Cunningham, Orban imagines the creator at work and con-
fers a romantic vision of the creative genius, implying that when inspira-
tion comes, it is instantly and permanently materialised into words on
a page: the frst ideas which take shape in Virginia’s mind immediately
lead to the fnal version we are reading. The author invents the favour-
able circumstances which lead to Virginia taking her pen and writing
down the frst words of her novel, frst its title, ‘Orlando, a biography’
(36), then, a few pages later, its frst sentence. The novel takes shape
gradually, day by day, sentence by sentence, guided by new events in her
life and the contradictory feelings she has for Vita. Orlando is initially
conceived as a ‘long love letter to Vita’ (36), fction allowing Virginia to
hide behind characters and a third-person narrator in order to declare
her love: ‘It would be She, it would be He, but never Me, never I: a cal-
culated, planned, premeditated spontaneity’ (36). In 1927 England, this
narrative disguise constitutes a safe way for a married woman to express
her love for another woman.
But Virginia’s fertile creative spurs and innovative ideas are often fol-
lowed by less propitious periods, and Orlando becomes a torture for its
creator. Virginia is then simply unable to ‘breathe life into her character’
(63). It is especially her jealousy for Vita’s new lovers that paralyses her cre-
ation. These strong, hindering feelings have an impact on her prose, colour
the personality of her character and incite her to mistreat him. Virginia then
uses her Orlando as a weapon to get to Vita by clearly stating in a letter:
‘through him I abuse you’ (203). Her powerlessness to keep Vita for herself
in reality incite her to enclose her lover in a novel-biography over which
she has complete control, allowing her to dominate her subject, distort her
68 Bioplay(giarisms)s
body and sex and manipulate her mind. Vita is transformed into literature,
‘treated as a subject’, ‘built as a chapter’, ‘spread out like a phrase’ (33)
and handled like malleable ‘dough’ (42). Virginia shapes her character the
way she wishes, puts words in his/her mouth, thoughts in his/her head and
‘dress[es] and undress[es]’ him/her (43). Vita ultimately becomes Virginia’s
supple ‘puppet’ (44) and Virginia, the omnipotent demiurge, is the one who
‘pulls the strings of her marionette’ (156).
The portrait of Orban’s Virginia is a physically and emotionally frag-
ile woman, and a writer who feels spent and depressed after fnishing her
previous novel, To the Lighthouse. At the outset of Virginia et Vita, she
is tormented and psychologically unstable. In this state, she is depend-
ent on Leonard who takes care of her and looks for the slightest sign of
‘madness’ (10) in her gestures. He is depicted as a ‘devoted, loving’ (26)
protective and supportive husband, ‘her double, her benefactor’ (26),
who sacrifces his life and career to ‘help her go to the end of her writer’s
path’ (33). As well as looking after his wife, Leonard constructs a con-
venient public image for her, one of a ‘frigid woman’ (33) who does not
need men to be happy and whole. But Virginia’s love relationship with
Vita proves that she is not what Leonard conveniently wishes her to
appear.
Leonard sees Virginia’s illness as a ‘long battle’ (10) between ‘her and
her’ (10), an inner confict between her split self that needs to be reconciled
in order to establish her balance and sanity. Virginia, on the other hand,
perceives these particular states as sources of inspiration: she is convinced
that ‘her madness is part of her creative genius’ and that ‘healing would
amount to an amputation or annihilation’ (19). She would not exist as
a novelist without ‘her fantasies, her terrors, her weaknesses, her inner
cacophony’ (16). However, during the process of creation, the anguished
author becomes obsessed with her ‘tyrannical’ ‘paper character’ (196):
Orlando inhabits her consciousness and haunts her sleep. The only ‘rem-
edy’ to save her sanity is to quickly put an end to her story, but the end
of a novel automatically brings about despair. By focusing on the 1927–
1928 year during which Virginia completed two novels, To the Lighthouse
and Orlando, Orban seems to suggest that Virginia’s whole life is made
of a succession of uplifting creative moments followed by a descent into
madness.
The process of fctionalising a life is aptly voiced by Atkins’s Vita who
comments on her own representation in Virginia’s Orlando: ‘having drawn
and quartered me, unwound and retwisted me […] you ought to dedicate it
to your victim’ (Vita and Virginia 25). Literary products that ‘twist’ lives in
so many ways are seen as homages dedicated to the delighted, fattered ‘vic-
tims’; it is also a process of idealising and showing them off: from unnoticed
‘poor pegs’ they become admired ‘wax fgurines’ dressed in ‘jewel-studded
robes’ and ‘splendid garments’ (31). Vita’s metabiofctional remarks, as she
comments on having been ‘Orlando-ised’ (Lee, Virginia Woolf 489), throw
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 69
light on the transformative power of fction. By using both the research
methods of biographers, the playwrights’ dramatic imagination and the
novelists’ fctional techniques, the contemporary authors examined in this
chapter have tailored Virginia’s ‘garments’ out of Woolf’s autobiographical
and fctional fabric.
In a letter, Orban’s Vita tells Virginia that a novelist and great admirer of
Virginia’s, a certain Mrs Bottome that she met abroad, has written a short
story in which Virginia is the main character: this process of fctionalisation
born from love or admiration is what Virginia does in Orlando and, on
another level, what Orban herself does in Virginia et Vita. Virginia’s ‘vam-
piric’ process of ‘feeding’ on her lover and transforming her into an eternal
character is similar to Orban’s drawing from the historical subjects’ lives
to create her ‘paper characters’. Orban’s Virginia believes that creating an
immortal character who lives across centuries makes its creator immortal,
too. She is convinced that she will not die, as Orlando will ‘perpetuate [her]
in the readers’ eyes’ (141). Virginia thus voices the idea that authors live
on if their characters endure, and indeed, Woolf lives on for generations of
readers who continue to read her novels and writers who update her unique
style and memorable characters.
In Duffy’s Nightingale, Virginia also appears as a necrophile vampire
who feeds on the dead in order to produce eternal fction. She ‘sucks’ their
bodies until they become ‘weightless ghost[s]’ and ‘feed[s] [her] vision of
[them]’ (19). This creative process of fabricating characters out of real peo-
ple is similar to what biographical authors do with Woolf herself: just as
Virginia’s family members are voraciously cannibalised as prime material
for her novels, Woolf is used in contemporary fction and drama to exor-
cise writers’ obsessions. As ghosts of the past, Virginia’s relatives survive in
her novels; similarly, Woolf’s ghostly presence endures in the contemporary
authors’ literary works. All of them, in their own way, ‘suck’ Woolf’s body
and mind to ‘feed their visions of her’. As all authors’ usual creative prac-
tices – including Woolf’s own – consist of drawing from real people’s lives
and creating characters in fction, Duffy’s Virginia raises the sensitive issue
of the ethics of intruding into one’s consciousness and bitterly expresses her
disapproval when it comes to herself. ‘You’re all the same’ (7) can be read
as a reproach to authors who invade her utmost privacy. She denounces the
predatory violence of their invasive methods, a symbolic act of ‘slice[ing]
the top off [her] head’ and breaking the private room of her fragile brain in
order to ‘spoon down the yolk’ (7); they ‘prod about’ until they come up
with the ‘dripping yellow’ (7). All of them unscrupulously crack her head
open to feed on her thoughts and make her private, intimate essence public.
All these fctional portraits are necessarily partial and subjective, in
keeping with their authors’ aesthetic allegiances or political agendas. For
instance, Duffy’s stream-of-consciousness play is both a homage to Woolf
as a modernist writer and a reparative bioplay in which she strived to fx
the public image of her foremother created by biographies published in the
70 Bioplay(giarisms)s
seventies. This play was most certainly intended as corrective justice, just
like Hawkes and Manso’s novel The Shadow of the Moth, which will be
further examined in Chapter 2. However, critics have argued that in her
crusade to correct a biased biographical representation, Duffy has created a
partial, distorted, oversimplifed, caricatural Virginia: a portrait ‘that misses
[Woolf’s] kindness, her sense of humor, the ethereal side of her intelligence’
(Sizemore, ‘Portrait’ 213).
‘No one is ever truthful. Everyone shifts, makes shift, is shifty and shift-
less, is a chameleon and a shape-changer. Most of all they use words to fog
or blind’ (Nightingale 9): this metadramatic comment about the impossibil-
ity of knowing someone, uttered by Duffy’s Virginia, can explain why seiz-
ing someone’s true self is necessarily doomed to failure. Virginia’s pertinent
statement can be applied to the contemporary authors’ impossible task of
ever being able to capture such a shifting character as her. Virginia further
implies that her last, true thoughts will never be recorded by her, but they
will be imagined by others:

You will not know my thoughts as I drown for that is the one experi-
ence, as I myself have written, that I shall never describe, but you may
imagine the rush and pull of the cold water, its slightly muddy taste in
full equinoctial March spate.
(32)

Making up her last thoughts is precisely what Duffy and many other authors
examined in this book do, by dreaming up in great detail Virginia’s fnal
thoughts just before she takes the fnal plunge.
As she is about to disappear from this world, Virginia muses about her
legacy and her position ‘among the English poets’ (24) after her death and
expresses her concern that the literary canon has always been judged by
patriarchal standards. In Nightingale, her last words, her own epitaph,
before ‘posterity will have the last word’ (32), is a poem which communi-
cates her vision of her future legacy. She is about to go to a peaceful place
where ‘authors know no pain / Beyond the critics’ reach to praise or blame’
(33). After her death, her afterlife in scholarly circles is seen as benefting
‘a throng of dusty PhD’s [sic] / Who gut her books to further their degrees’
(33). Just like writers who act like vampires sucking her essence, academ-
ics appear like vultures who take advantage of authors’ labour in order to
further their careers. Their ruthless ‘academic rape’ (33) translates the same
kind of unwelcome, intrusive, violent action as the contemporary writers’
breaking her head open and dipping into her thoughts. Virginia is ultimately
pleading with academics, critics and creative writers who use her life and
tear her work to pieces to at least treat her with kindness ‘once [she is] out of
sight’ (33). The chorus of fctional Virginias examined in this chapter voice
the idea that biofctions about Woolf paradoxically constitute both gentle,
reverential homage and violent, intrusive aggression at once.
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 71
Notes
1 ‘I have been dead and yet am now alive again’ (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 58 /
O’Brien, Virginia 3; 73).
2 ‘But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be
obsessed by my mother. […] I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts
do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotions.
And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest’ (‘Sketch’ 81); ‘I used
to think of him [father] and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them
in my mind. […] I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them
was a necessary act’ (Diary 3: 208).
3 See ‘The Wylde Interview’ with Atkins at: https://wyldemag.com/interviews/201
7/8/12/the-wylde-interview-eileen-atkins (accessed September 2020).
4 Although I am closely reading and analysing the play as a written text, and
commenting on the playwright’s method of fabricating her text by adapting the
Woolfan hypotext, I am, of course, aware of its intrinsic performative nature
and of the role of actors in performing, giving life to the characters and, at the
same time, imprinting their own, subjective interpretation of the characters.
5 See Nathan, ‘Unafraid of Virginia Woolf’, available at: https://www.nytimes.
com/1998/02/15/movies/flm-unafraid-of-virginia-woolf-unrelentingly (accessed
September 2020).
6 In this respect, Leonard Woolf stated that ‘[n]ovels by serious writers of genius
often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are
written by second-class writers’ (qtd. in Leaska 38).
7 On the adaptation from one medium or one genre to another, from ‘the telling’
to ‘the showing’ mode, see Hutcheon, Adaptation 38.
8 Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, qualifed Orlando as ‘the longest and most
charming love-letter in literature’ (Portrait 202).
9 On the real genesis of Orlando, see DeSalvo, Hoffmann, Briggs 187–215, Love,
and Lee, Virginia Woolf 505–521.
10 See ‘Three Dramas’, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/03/theater/
three-dramas-of-emotional-confict-053539 (accessed September 2020).
11 ‘Such was my harvest, a wealth of material, their several ghosts – Virginia,
Leonard, Vanessa, Vita, and the voice of Hamlet pounding in one’s ears: “The
play’s the thing”’ (‘Three Dramas’).
12 French writer Anne-James Chaton’s original poetic novel Elle regarde passer les
gens (2016) is another type of second-degree biofction which does not alter bio-
graphical facts. The author operates a selection from auto/biographical available
material, compiles these fragments and devises transitions between them. All
‘the facts are accurate, but the composition fctitious’ (Rigeade, ‘Author’ 220).
Virginia’s portrait, made with a long fow of free indirect discourse composed
of paratactic sentences – with the same, repetitive pattern of subject-verb-com-
plement – all beginning with the anaphora elle (she), is largely based on Woolf’s
diary, which is either quoted verbatim or paraphrased. See precise examples in
Rigeade, ‘Author’ 220–221, as well as Rigeade’s interview with Chaton in a/b:
Auto/biography Studies 36.1 (Winter 2020) in which the French author discusses
how the accumulation of factual details and the rhythm of the prose give his
book the effect of fction.
13 I am referring here to the concept developed by Lévi-Strauss and Derrida. In The
Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss used the term ‘bricolage’ to describe the characteristic
patterns of mythological thought, which attempts to re-use available materials in
order to solve new problems. Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. ‘The
bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand”, that is,
the instruments he fnds at his disposition around him, those which are already
72 Bioplay(giarisms)s
there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for
which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them,
not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of
them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous’ (‘Structure’
285).
14 ‘You’re born a playgiarizer or you are not. It’s as simple as that. The laws of
playgiarism are unwritten, it’s a tabou, like incest, it cannot be legalized. The
great playgiarizers of all time, Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud,
Proust, Beckett, and Federman have never pretended to do anything else than
playgiarizing. Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse
plagiarism with playgiarism. These are not the same. The difference is enormous,
but no one has ever been able to tell what it is. It cannot be measured in weight
or size. Plagiarism is sad. It cries, it whines. It always apologizes. Playgiarism on
the other hand laughs all the time. It makes fun of what it does while doing it’.
See interview with Federman, ‘The Word-Being Talks’, available at: http://www.
altx.com/interviews/ray.federman (accessed September 2020).
15 In Voleurs de mots, Schneider studies different forms of literary borrowings (pla-
giarism, palimpsest, pastiche) and deals with essential questions concerning rep-
etition, authority, origin and ownership.
16 On appropriation and adaptation, making literature out of previous texts, see
Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation. However, in appropriating Woolf’s
material, O’Brien does not adopt a posture of critique but of homage: I would
therefore call her practice ‘blank appropriation’, a neutral form of appropria-
tion, without any ulterior political motive or message.
17 Hypotext is an earlier text that is imitated or transformed; hypertext is a text
that derives from the hypotext. See Genette 5.
18 Woolf often refers to her novels as ‘plays’, ‘essays about [herself]’ (Diary 2: 248),
‘elegy’; ‘prose yet poetry; a novel and a play’ (Diary 3: 128); a ‘playpoem’ (Diary
3: 139), ‘biography’ and ‘fantasy’, constantly looking for new terms and generic
concepts to contain her vision of ‘modern fction’. The novel of the future ‘will
be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry.
[…] It will be dramatic, yet not a play. It will be read, not acted’ (‘Poetry, Fiction
and the Future’ 434).
19 I am transcribing the fragments selected and used by O’Brien in italics. The same
convention is applied everywhere in the book.
20 In this sense, it could be said that O’Brien has managed to fnd ‘another use’ for
Woolf’s ‘loose, drifting material of life’, as wished by Woolf herself: ‘I might in
the course of time learn what it is that one can make out of this loose, drifting
material of life; fnding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more
consciously & scrupulously, in fction’ (Diary 1: 266).
21 O’Brien uses portions from Mrs Dalloway, The Voyage Out, The Waves, To the
Lighthouse, Orlando, Between the Acts, A Room of One’s Own, ‘A Haunted
House’, ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘Lapin and Lapinova’, ‘A Mark on the Wall’, ‘A
Summing Up’ and ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Party’.
22 ‘There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind
[…] And for me neither, no gate, no lock, no bolt’ (Room 75 / Virginia 19).
23 As Grogan points out, ‘Edna O’Brien has been criticized for failing to separate
herself from her characters and their experiences suffciently, thereby committing
a major breach of modernist etiquette. […] [S]he has been accused of a damaging
and self-defeating subjectivity’ (9).
24 ‘the use of a writer as a character in a work of fction amounts to a kind of inter-
pretation, an act of literary criticism, and just as opinions differ wildly about
 Bioplay(giarisms)s 73
Woolf’s work and its meaning, so will the depiction created by fction writers
provoke argument’ (Shannon 153).
25 Hyperreality is a postmodern concept which implies that in our culture and
entertainment industry, reality is a simulation or a construct that is made to
look ‘more real’ than our real lives; the postmodern individuals seem to be more
in tune with the fabricated hyperreal world than the actual, physical world. In
the same way, the hyperreal character of Virginia appears as a ‘real’ person,
especially when fabricated with real portions of Woolf’s life and oeuvre. See
Baudrillard, Simulacra.
26 This is an allusion to Woolf’s statement: ‘Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached
ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners’ (Room 41).
27 The friendship and literary rivalry between Woolf and another of her contem-
porary companions, Katherine Mansfeld, were dramatised by Lorae Parry in
Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl (2010). This play focuses on
the ‘colonial girl’, Mansfeld, in her interaction with women who played an
important role in her life, among them Woolf. It explores the two women’s feel-
ings of admiration and affnity, but also jealousy and hostility. Panthea Reid
aptly argues that drama is a ‘useful vehicle to explore [the] confict’ (103) at the
heart of the two women-writers’ particular relationship. The verbal exchanges
between the dramatis personae are fabricated entirely from their own words,
selected by Parry from Woolf’s and Mansfeld’s letters, diaries and fction. It is
a similar creative method of selection and collage as in O’Brien’s and Atkins’s
bioplays.
28 Steele is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Rediscovered Essays (1987).
29 In ‘Portrait’ and ‘Foremother’, Sizemore discusses the original play which was
structured as an Oedipal confrontation with Freud and debates with Vita.
30 For example, Sizemore discusses Woolf’s image of getting to know people by
sucking their marrow out: ‘Thus one gets to know people, sucks the marrow out’
(Diary 2: 232). ‘Duffy develops this last phrase into a much more active and can-
nibalistic image when she has her character Virginia say, “I liked to go out and
crack people’s bones at parties, to taste the pith of them, gulp and cannibalize an
evening of all of its oddity and excitement and salt every experience away until I
need to take it out and unfurl it”’ (Sizemore, ‘Portrait’ 210–211).
31 In fact, it was her other half-brother, Gerald, who explored her body as a small
girl. See Woolf, ‘Sketch’ 69.
32 On the coarse language and explicit imagery of the act of copulation used
by Duffy’s Virginia to denounce male sexuality and aggression, see Sizemore,
‘Portrait’ 208 and ‘Foremother’ 127.
33 All translations from French are mine.
34 For specifc examples, see Dion 34–35.
35 For more examples, see Rigeade, ‘Author’ 218–219.
2 Detecting Woolf

Ellen Hawkes and Peter Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of
Espionage with Virginia Woolf (1983) and Stephanie Barron’s The White
Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2009) are quite similar not only in their
subtitles, which clearly indicate they belong to the genre of biofction, but
also insofar as the two Virginias evolve in a world of masculine complots,
violence, manipulations and shady, nefarious wartime activities. Both nov-
els are plot-driven stories replete with sleuthing, spies, real murders and fake
suicides, which lead to investigations by characters who fnd solid proof for
their conspiracy theories. In The Shadow, Virginia is a feminist sleuth who
is endowed with a novelist’s instinct and feminine intuition, which make her
a perspicacious analyst of other characters’ words and behaviours. Thanks
to these qualities, she foils all the masculine plots, power games and secret
decisions of war and peace, and as a result, gains independence and agency.
The three detective-fgures in The White Garden, Jo Bellamy, a gardener,
Peter Llewellyn, a Sotheby’s rare book expert, and Margaux Strand, his
ex-wife, an Oxford professor and Woolf scholar, fnd and interpret a Woolf
manuscript notebook which contains the ‘real’ truth about Virginia’s myste-
rious death. From investigator in The Shadow, Virginia becomes the object
of investigation in The White Garden. This chapter examines how the two
fourth-degree biofctions use masculine detective tropes to highlight Woolf’s
feminist beliefs.

In the Shadow of WWI: Virginia as a Feminist Sleuth

In The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of Espionage with Virginia Woolf,
the character of Virginia imagined by American authors Ellen Hawkes
and Peter Manso is inadvertently caught in the conspiracies of WWI. It is
November 1917, and everything starts when Virginia is intrigued by a short
news item in the Daily Mail about a Belgian woman, Anna Michaux, who
was found drowned in the Serpentine. This anodyne suicide turns out to be
a murder, which is the result of a bigger political mechanism that is set in
motion by war, politicians, spies, double agents and secret military coups.
Virginia starts her own investigation, helped by a young American female
 Detecting Woolf 75
reporter, Bobbie Waters, despite the opposition of her husband, her doctor,
police offcials and politicians. Virginia fnally solves the murder and, in
the process, becomes instrumental in the Allies’ surprise tank attack at the
Battle of Cambrai.
The Shadow stems from arguments voiced by Woolf in Three Guineas,
while conversely, Hawkes and Manso, in typically playful postmodernist
fashion, imply quite the opposite: the events in The Shadow give Woolf food
for thought and pave the way to her political pamphlet. The authors digest,
novelise and popularise the complex ideas expressed in Three Guineas and
transpose them into an action-packed, plot-driven, genre-fction novel in
which Virginia awakens to political and feminist beliefs. In this respect,
The Shadow could be considered a sort of fctional prequel to Woolf’s real
pamphlet. Hawkes and Manso create subtle connections between the plot
of their novel and Woolf’s political philosophy. Virginia, a fervent critic
of patriarchy, realises that her oppression in the private sphere is refected
at a higher level and more generally in the oppression of women in soci-
ety. Women’s exclusion from political matters and war is seen as a product
of men’s natural appetite for competition and domination. It is inferred
that the masculine political machinations that Virginia uncovers during her
investigation help her understand the dynamics of war and give her the
necessary ‘knowledge of politics, of international relations, of economics’
(Guineas 91), which will be useful to support her future arguments in Three
Guineas.
At the beginning of the novel, Virginia feels like a prisoner trapped at
Hogarth House, in the Richmond suburb: this ‘enforced solitude’ (Shadow
2) is meant to overcome illness and depression. The special diet, the rest1
outside the hustle and bustle of the city as well as her manual work for her
new printing press are part of her therapy. She feels ‘caged’ (2) and spied
on, as Leonard charts the variations of her health in his diary. Leonard,
whose ultimate mission is to be her ‘keeper’ (2), is depicted as patronising
and overprotective of his unstable wife, who has recently tried to commit
suicide. Virginia’s doctor, ‘Dr Wright – the beast with the faming snout’ (2)
joins in the masculine oppression and invasiveness. Assisted by Leonard,
he forces Virginia to eat and rest, treats her like a disobedient, irrational
patient who does not want to cooperate and threatens to send her again to
Miss Thomas’s nursing home. Virginia naturally resents both her husband’s
and her doctor’s inquisitiveness and coercive rules that restrict her freedom.
In Three Guineas, Woolf puts forth the idea that tyranny and war are
rooted in the power dynamics of the private sphere as well as in the mascu-
line domination of the public sphere, and a similar double-levelled stifing
oppressiveness is created in The Shadow, as men in Virginia’s domestic,
social and public environment hinder her investigation and quest for truth.
The masculine authority in her life fnds an echo, at a higher level, in the
national and international authorities who manipulate and rule popula-
tions. Both Virginia and her sidekick, Bobbie, rebel against the shackles of
76 Detecting Woolf
domestic patriarchal domination as well as the institutional male-centric
police. They evolve in a world where only men have political and military
power and plot to change the course of the war. The two women are ‘manip-
ulated’ and ‘choreographed’ (233) by various men, caught in the maelstrom
of political action and power struggle. However, they refuse to accept these
men’s suspicious ‘truth’ and join their minds to investigate together. In the
process, they save the Cambrai offensive and contribute to the advent of
peace, putting an end to the raging war in which the powerful men revel.
Bobbie and Virginia’s most effcient weapons are ‘a mind of their own’ and
‘a will of their own’ (Guineas 140; 163), which they use ‘to abolish the
inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war’ (163).
The novel starts as a murder mystery and continues as a spy novel, as
Scotland Yard, MI5 and Belgian Intelligence gradually become involved in
the case. Virginia discovers that Anna worked for Henri Giraud, the Head
of Belgian Intelligence, who is trying to fnd out who is leaking informa-
tion to the Germans about the Allies’ war strategy. Before her death, Anna
was trying to prove that the traitor was her employer, Henry Cranford,
an arms manufacturer, for whom she worked as a governess. In order to
prove Anna’s suspicions, Virginia needs more evidence. She thus inadvert-
ently ends up playing a vital international role during a pivotal historical
moment that changed the course of the war. Virginia’s habit of resisting and
opposing authority – be it patriarchal, domestic, marital or medical – in her
everyday life proves to be an asset when confronted with highly infuential
politicians. Her feminist attacks are ultimately directed against all forms
of masculine power and domination: ‘You want to dominate and control,
whether it be women or men, servants or countries’ (Shadow 255). She sug-
gests that it is men’s political ambitions and their unquenchable thirst for
power which make them ruthless manipulators.
Hawkes and Manso imagined a particular portrait of Virginia as a femi-
nist sleuth, depicted in accordance with Woolf’s feminist voice expressed in
her pamphlets, in which she encourages women to believe in themselves, ‘to
maintain the integrity of their values, to preserve their status as outsiders
and to exclude from their society all masculine values of hierarchy, com-
petition, dominance and power’ (Hawkes, ‘Magical’ 57). In the context of
the war, these masculine values are exacerbated, and Virginia and Bobbie
provide an ‘alternative to patriarchal structures and […] authoritarianism’
(57). In this ‘murder’ mystery biofction, the authors enact Woolf’s idea of
‘killing the Angel in the House’ (‘Professions for Women’ 640): it is there-
fore necessary for the women characters to rebel against convention, show
determination and courage and acquire new professions they are extremely
competent at: detectives, investigators and journalists.
The explosive political situation in The Shadow is implied to have shaped
the feminist ideas that Woolf would express twenty years later in her politi-
cal tract. The authors have created a fctional origin that seems to justify per-
fectly well the historical author’s future reality: they thus insinuate that this
 Detecting Woolf 77
particular episode raised Virginia’s awareness of the links between power
and gender and the role of patriarchy in forging these established links. In
the Epilogue of The Shadow, Virginia is presented as the future author of
Three Guineas, ‘her indictment of masculine aggression, German fascism
and incipient totalitarianism’ (n.p.). Hawkes and Manso thus clearly point
at the connections between the historical events in their spy novel, in which
Virginia plays a major role, and the real author’s evolving political trajec-
tory: her ethics seem to have sprung right from the situation she experienced
during WWI.
The authors further speculate about Woolf’s death, hinted to be a dis-
guised suicide, a murder which was necessary for the beneft of a greater
national cause: ‘Four years later, in 1941, her body was found in the River
Ouse behind Monk’s House, her home in Sussex. To this day, her death is
commonly believed to have been a suicide’ (n.p.). The novel’s fnal twist
clearly implies that just like Anna’s cover-up suicide, Woolf’s suicide may
very well be a huge conspiracy, and she may have been murdered for her
outspoken ideas and political ideals. This casts a shadow over the accepted
‘truth’, which now seems highly questionable and suspicious and invites the
reader to become a detective, just like Virginia, and discover what really
happened. The readers are made aware that they should not trust appear-
ances and be content with offcial (biographers’) explanations: nothing is
what it seems to be on the surface, and just like Virginia in The Shadow,
they should have the curiosity and courage to investigate and fnd the truth.
Not only do Hawkes and Manso imagine an unusual experience for Woolf
that will prove useful for her future philosophy, but they also fabricate the
origins of Woolf as a modernist writer. As a creative writer, Virginia fnds
great inspiration in this adventure. At the opening of the novel, she leads an
uneventful, sheltered life in front of the fre; she is ‘bored’, ‘even losing inter-
est in her new novel’ (Shadow 2), Night and Day. Her heroine reminds her
of herself: ‘cold, aloof, unsure of what she wanted, unwilling to take risks’
(2). The process of creation ‘numb[s] her emotions and deepen[s] her loneli-
ness’ (2). She is frustrated with just observing and recording the ‘ordinari-
ness of a Monday or Tuesday, or in this case, a Wednesday and Thursday’
(135) and longs to be involved in what is thought to be ‘big’, ‘tak[ing] it for
granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in
what is commonly thought small’ (Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ 161). However,
she discovers the meaning and value of the ‘small’, as her ‘small private
act’ ‘propel[s] history forward’ (Shadow 135). The small is no longer the
attribute of her own private, domestic or psychological sphere, but has big
historical repercussions. Hawkes and Manso thus insinuate that Woolf’s
essence as a modernist writer is based on this very particular event which
not only inspired Woolf’s political ethics but also changed her philosophy
of writing.
During the investigation, after she impulsively kisses Bobbie, Virginia
has an ‘illumination’ which gives her profound insight into her sexual
78 Detecting Woolf
identity. She suddenly becomes aware of her ‘many selves’ (147). While
with Leonard her identity is reduced to that of a patient subjected to her ill-
ness, she now feels hungry for the passion that this adventure fnally brings
her, both with female and male partners. The visual image she conceives for
love is ‘a fame burning in a fower’ (147), which is a direct hint to Woolf’s
Clarissa Dalloway’s epiphany and the sexual image of a match burning in a
crocus. The expression of lesbian desire, only alluded to in Mrs Dalloway,
is here fully acknowledged. Virginia ponders over two momentous kisses,
one she gave Bobbie, and one Henri gave her, which changed and defned
her as a woman.
Virginia’s thoughts about Anna’s suicide echo her own death fantasies
and her past suicide attempts, which are amply alluded to throughout the
novel. She dreams she is jumping out of a window and diving into water,
which gives her ‘the purest experience of freedom’ (60). These two gestures
hark back to Woolf’s character Septimus Smith, who experiences hallucina-
tions of drowning and ends up jumping out of the window. Hawkes and
Manso’s Virginia is indeed a fusion between Woolf’s Clarissa and Septimus,
with very recognisable features borrowed from both of them; Virginia thus
seems to come straight from the pages of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. ‘I once
tossed a copper into the Serpentine’ (6), says Virginia in The Shadow, bor-
rowing Clarissa’s own thoughts. When she feigns a ft of madness, Virginia’s
words ‘Fear no more’ belong both to Septimus and Clarissa, and her hal-
lucinations are similar to Septimus’s feeling of ‘falling down, down into the
fames’ (261). In such passages, Hawkes and Manso’s prose acquires clear
Dalloway-esque stylistic and thematic undertones.
As the authors attempt to render Virginia’s ‘thoughts [that] bubble
forth, uncensored’ (225), they replicate Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness
technique. The reader is directly plunged into Virginia’s creative mind, as
words and sentences materialise into poetic words. Such specifc introspec-
tive passages confer The Shadow a Woolfan shimmer, as opposed to the
more dominant descriptive and action-packed episodes in which a neutral,
omniscient narrative voice pulls the story forward and regularly provides
biographical and historical information for the reader. Hawkes and Manso
use fragments of truth – Woolf’s biographical details – and fragments of fc-
tion – intertextual material selected from Woolf’s work. Thus, their Virginia
is a recognisable, believable fgure, as she is made with bits and pieces of
Woolf’s own characters, who, in turn, have deep autobiographical roots:
they are all born from the real author’s life experience and medical history.
Woolf’s harrowing and fertile states of mind fed her own fction, which in
turn continues to fuel contemporary authors’ creative imagination.
Hawkes and Manso incorporate Woolf’s literary heritage and political
philosophy in a feminist detective novel which subverts generic expecta-
tions. Indeed, despite the novel’s formulaic core, two main features of the
detective novel, ‘a male-based genre because of its ratiocinating puzzle-solv-
ing element’ and ‘an inherently conservative genre because its resolution
 Detecting Woolf 79
involves the reinstatement of a hierarchical status quo’ (Makinen 92), are
undermined. Thus, in The Shadow, the detective is a woman who has all
the intellectual abilities to solve the mystery and unveil the conspiracy, and
the hierarchical, patriarchal status quo is not reinstated after the return to
order, as the dominant male power that constitutes an obstacle to Virginia’s
life and art is replaced by egalitarian relationships between the male and
female characters. The ending announces social and historical renewal,
hope and peace, but also a balanced marital relationship, as Leonard gives
up being Virginia’s guardian. Similarly, Bobbie manages to obtain a job
position equal to that of her male partner at the Daily Mail and she may
even be sent to the Front, her ultimate aim as a journalist, denied until now
on the grounds of her being a woman. The formula of traditional detective
fction is thus altered to offer an open feminist resolution.
The Shadow was born from the collaboration of Hawkes, a Woolf femi-
nist scholar,2 and Manso, a bestselling crime fction author and biographer,
and thus combines both their interests and expertise. Hawkes contributed
to the development of Woolf studies, more particularly feminist and lesbian
criticism, and this aspect clearly fnds echoes in her novel. There is a close
relationship between Hawkes as a theoretically informed, feminist critic and
Hawkes as a creative writer, who transposes into fction the critical issues
that preoccupy her in her scholarly work. For Hawkes, the detective/spy
novel constitutes yet another means of debunking the stereotypical image
that Woolf holds in the popular imagination, which she discussed in her
scholarly articles, and portraying a feminist character in keeping with her
critical stance. As Virginia fnds herself involved in murder and espionage
during the last years of WWI, she is at the heart of bloody action, intrigue,
plot, power and domination. The investigation allows her to free herself
from masculine infuences and become an active, ‘controlled and methodi-
cal’ (Shadow 251) fgure, who speaks for herself, tells her own story and
follows her feminine intuition.
Hawkes’s feminist reading and response to Quentin Bell’s controversial
1972 ‘offcial’ biography of Woolf,3 which she strongly criticised in several
published articles, is refected in Virginia’s behaviour and personality, and
gives impulse to the plot. In ‘Woolf’s “Magical Garden of Women”’, Hawkes
deplores that women’s distorted portrayal in biographies, shaped by domi-
nant masculine values and forces, is the cause of the public’s perpetuation
of stereotyped images: ‘Biographies of women writers are sometimes more
like funhouse mirrors than true refections of the subject’s life. Pulled out of
shape here, lengthened there, one side diminished, the other grossly exagger-
ated, even a familiar fgure becomes unrecognisable’ (31). Bell’s biography
of Woolf praises Leonard’s courage in handling his genial yet depressive
wife and highlights his positive infuence on her, his role as a nurse, editor
and caring companion. Although Hawkes welcomed the ‘new facts’ and
‘many engaging anecdotes’ presented in this biography, she mostly stated
her ‘disappointment’ and ‘basic reservations’ (‘Virgin’ 96). She therefore
80 Detecting Woolf
intended to set the record straight and correct Bell’s subjective biographical
reconstruction of Woolf, frst in her ‘The Virgin in the Bell Biography’ essay.
Hawkes criticises Woolf’s portrayal as a ‘pale fgure of a neurotic virgin
cloistered from experience’ (96), and the fact that instead of dispelling, Bell
reinforced certain clichés about Woolf’s personality: ‘the biography fails to
resolve the inherent ambiguities and complexities of Woolf’s personality,
and specifcally, of her sexuality’ (98).
Secondly, in parallel with the scholarly responses to this controversial
biography, Hawkes set out to remedy the portrayal of Woolf in the popular
imagination. Written in a particularly fertile historical, cultural and critical
context in the eighties, when feminist scholars4 like herself focused on the
female body, sexuality and gender difference, The Shadow, through the bias
of fction, intends to offer insights into the ‘ambiguities and complexities
of [Woolf’s] sexuality’. At the beginning of the novel, Virginia is perceived
as a frail, neurotic woman by most of the male characters, but the events
in which she is involved unveil her as a strong woman with a sexual body,
political voice and ethical stance. Hawkes thus fghts a battle on two fronts,
both in academia and in popular culture, for the rehabilitation of Woolf as
a feminist icon.
Hawkes’s creative endeavour amounts to a remedial5 biofction, as it aims
at rectifying through fction certain biographical defects, wrongs, or damage
done to the image of Woolf. She thus ironically resorts to fction for a sup-
posedly more accurate, truthful portrait of Woolf. This feminist detective
biofction therefore is meant to act as an antidote to a fawed portrait drawn
in certain biographies published at the time and perpetuated since then in the
popular imagination. Hawkes’s fctional representation of Woolf as a femi-
nist sleuth cannot be separated from her critical work, as the latter informs
and infuences the former. Beyond the absorbing, surprising, suspenseful
investigation, the novel is ultimately about Virginia’s emancipation from the
stifing masculine forces in her life that constantly undermine and infantilise
her. Hawkes’s own scholarly and feminist preoccupations about Woolf per-
colate in the portrait of Virginia and participate in the revision of representa-
tions of Woolf as an ‘apolitical, frail, asexual and private’ person (Snaith 3).
As a critic, Hawkes also examined the relationships Woolf had with other
women in her life, especially in the 1981 essay ‘Woolf’s “Magical Garden
of Women”’, written at the same time as The Shadow. This specifc interest
allowed her to imagine a fctional feminine and feminist character, Bobbie
Waters, Virginia’s companion during this investigation, and create emotional
attachments between the women characters that are similar to those Woolf
had in real life. ‘Magical Garden’ provides metacritical guidelines on how
to read and interpret the dynamics between the two women characters in
The Shadow. A ‘mirror of identity’ (‘Magical Garden’ 32) is held up by this
American journalist, a fellow woman writer who is a constant ‘source of
strength and support’ (34) for Virginia. Conversely, Virginia, a more experi-
enced writer, encourages younger Bobbie to write freely, just like other women
 Detecting Woolf 81
in her entourage encouraged her. Bobbie is a younger version of Virginia,
with writing ambitions and aspirations to be a professional journalist.
Bobbie confers Virginia the much necessary balance, as she acts as a coun-
terpart to her dreamy, imaginative, introspective, fction-concocting side.
Together, they form a formidable tandem of female sleuths. Their intui-
tive, feminine, psychological investigating techniques stand against the more
physical, aggressive, provocative masculine abilities. Bobbie and Virginia
are supportive of each other and become complementary: they function
together as ‘granite and rainbow’ or ‘night and day’, a theme which is at
the very core of Virginia’s novel in progress. The solidity of fact and the
freedom of imagination are brought together by pairing these characters,
one based on a real person, the other one completely fctional – ironically
enough the fctional one standing for accurate, objective, true facts while the
‘real’ one resorts to the power of fction.
Virginia and Bobbie form an ‘alliance’, ‘a very close conspiracy’, just like
the real one Woolf formed with her sister Vanessa against the tyranny of
‘many men, coming and going’ (Woolf, ‘Sketch’ 143). Hawkes explains how
frst ‘Woolf sought refexions of herself in her sister’ (‘Magical Garden’ 35)
and shared ‘values derived from their special experiences as “outsiders”’
(32). Thus, Virginia and Bobbie’s relationship is modelled on the relation-
ship between Virginia and Vanessa: their rebellion against their father’s and
brothers’ ‘patriarchal machinery’ (35) and their position as outsiders refect
Virginia and Bobbie’s status as women and amateur investigators who inter-
fere in political affairs and offcial detective work, which traditionally con-
stitute men’s privileged domains.
The relationship between Woolf and another woman who played a
prominent part in Woolf’s life, Violet Dickinson, was examined by Hawkes
in her introduction to ‘Friendships Gallery’,6 a ‘spoof biography’ written
by Woolf in 1907 in which she expressed her affection and admiration for
Violet. It ‘shows Dickinson and Woolf changing the society in which they
live’ (‘Magical Garden’ 41). In the third part of ‘Friendships Gallery’, a sort
of mythic tale, ‘[b]oth Dickinson and Woolf are towering goddesses who
combat little evil creatures who threaten destruction’ (‘Magical Garden’
41). The Shadow provides an alternative myth of two women fghting
together ‘little evil creatures’, a feminine and feminist version of Sherlock
Holmes and Dr Watson. In this light, Woolf’s ‘Friendships Gallery’ consti-
tutes a palimpsestic background to The Shadow, as if Hawkes and Manso
created a hypertext based on Woolf’s primary fctional account. Many ideas
and facets of the character of Virginia are taken from ‘Friendships Gallery’,
in which Hawkes fnds evidence of Woolf’s development as a woman and
writer. This mock biography includes serious themes that the young author
considered at that time:

there are traces of her ideas about the limitations placed upon young
women by society; their meagre education; their special relationships
82 Detecting Woolf
with their women teachers; their desire to be themselves, to have a life
and a room or a cottage of their own; their need to experiment, to rebel,
to bring about change in others’ lives.
(273)

Hawkes contends that Woolf’s ‘immature’ piece has nevertheless contrib-

uted to her development, as ‘Woolf insists upon a woman’s revolutionary
spirit, that “active agent in her blood” which throughout her life she praised
in other women writers and tried to cultivate in her own work’ (273). In the
same way, the rather ‘immature’ The Shadow has the merit of cultivating
Woolf’s own legacy by portraying Woolf as a rebel against the frm patriar-
chal rules, a revolutionary fgure, an active agent that is in keeping with her
own feminist ideas expressed very early in her piece ‘Friendships Gallery’
and later in her pamphlets A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
The Shadow has an open militant feminist message concerning the value
of women’s professions, the importance of their socio-economic status and
their desire to overcome masculine barriers, forces, restrictions and precon-
ceived ideas about their social place and intellectual abilities. Virginia and
Bobbie’s investigation becomes a way for them to affrm their individual-
ity as women and writers who take control of their professional choices.
Through these characters, the novel clearly promotes women’s mobility and
agency: this particular experience allows Virginia and Bobbie to enter the
masculine public sphere, while still keeping the status of outsiders which
enables them to enjoy a better critical perspective of the masculine world
from the margins of their dominant culture.
Through the medium of genre fction, Hawkes and Manso reach a main-
stream readership, revise the image that Woolf holds in the popular imagi-
nation and reinject it straight back into popular culture. The contemporary
authors re-appropriate Woolf’s authorial fgure, proposing a remedial response
to a certain biographical construction available in the eighties. Hawkes and
Manso’s Virginia is portrayed as a woman and writer who refuses to be at
the mercy of her ‘madness’ or masculine constraints, a character with a fuid
sexuality and a feminist political voice. The portrayal of Woolf as a feminist
sleuth is largely informed by Hawkes’s critical work: when read in dialogue
with her scholarly essays, echoes from one to the other can be detected, and
The Shadow can be considered as the transposition to genre fction of her
feminist critical discourse on Woolf’s life and work. Hawkes’s critical essays
thus function as guiding commentary, subtexts or hypotexts of The Shadow.
The Shadow alters the formula of traditional male-centred detective fc-
tion to offer an open feminist resolution. It should thus be put in the context
of Woolf’s real feminist beliefs and political positions. As a ‘foremother’
of feminist studies, especially through her essay A Room of One’s Own,
that most certainly infuenced Hawkes’s critical discourse, Woolf ‘created’
Hawkes as a scholar and ‘anticipate[d] the concerns of feminists in the
future’ (Barrett 36). In turn, Hawkes created Woolf as a character in her
 Detecting Woolf 83
biofction; this mutual creation is refected in the phrase from The Waves
that Hawkes so aptly quotes twice in her critical essays: ‘Let me then create
you. (You have done as much for me)’ (‘Friendships’ 271; ‘Magical Garden’
53). The version of Woolf she offers us in The Shadow refects her critical
concerns: Woolf as an inspirational feminist, a model to follow, a writer
who is not afraid to follow her feminine instincts, her aesthetic and political
beliefs, and who challenges patriarchal attitudes and conventions. Hawkes
thinks and writes in the ‘shadow’ of her feminist foremother, just like the
characters I will be examining in Chapter 3.
The novel conveys a clear feminist message which refects our modern
concerns: it teaches readers what it means to be a brave woman in a man’s
world. The Shadow offers a version of Woolf as a heroic, clever, inquisi-
tive and intuitive woman endowed with a great power of observation and
deduction. Virginia breaks free from the domestic sphere and leaves the
safety of the ‘room of her own’ where she practices her art. Despite mas-
culine and institutional obstacles, Virginia is not afraid of following her
instincts and beliefs and succeeds in being instrumental to a historical mili-
tary victory. In the process, she learns how to speak freely and confront the
power of authority. The feminist orientation of The Shadow and the specifc
portrayal of the character of Virginia is perfectly in keeping with Woolf’s
later preoccupations, convictions and aspirations: this Virginia thus seems
to be coming out of Woolf’s own pamphlets and embodies her beliefs.
While Hawkes considers that biographies offer subjective ‘versions of
Woolf’s life’ (‘Magical Garden’ 40), I would argue that her novel re-appro-
priates the authorial fgure and proposes yet another distorted version of
Woolf. Although her Virginia is in keeping with the political Woolf, the
character deviates so much from the biographical truth and believable, real-
istic circumstances that she ended up fabricating a ‘funhouse mirror’ rather
than a truthful refection of her subject’s life that could ring true: ‘[p]ulled
out of shape here, lengthened there, one side diminished, the other grossly
exaggerated’ (‘Magical Garden’ 31), Woolf’s familiar fgure has become
quite a caricature. While striving to debunk popular stereotypes, Hawkes
created other clichés in the process. Ironically enough, her essay ‘Magical
Garden’, while it justifes the raison d’être of The Shadow and guides its
interpretation, can also backfre on it, as it could also be used as a critical
tool to point at its inherent faws.
As a fourth-degree biofction, The Shadow ultimately raises questions
about the extent to which the ‘bio’ is successfully integrated with the ‘fc-
tion’ and how, as a literary artefact, it presents an alternative ‘reality’ of
Woolf’s life. This leads us to formulate interrogations about the authors’
selection, use and incorporation of biographemes and intertextuality, and
the way these fragments of truth are bound by fctional mortar. The fl-
aments of truth that compose Virginia’s portrait as a feminist sleuth are
pulled, twisted and manipulated until they wear thin and break the illu-
sion of reality. By using a coarse yarn to darn the image of Woolf, Hawkes
84 Detecting Woolf
and Manso distorted or elongated their fabric, creating bigger holes in it
and therefore an extravagant image of Woolf. Along with their crusade to
correct a biased biographical representation, they created a caricature in a
formulaic novel which does not always process and ingest the biographical
patches, often presented to the reader as unpolished blocks of factual infor-
mation which openly display the novel’s biofctional stitches.

Who Killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five!7

Biographical novelists are walking a tightrope and must strike the right bal-
ance between fact and fction: some authors are better funambulists than
others. Stacking up factual information and biographical evidence can prove
to be jarring and detrimental to the smooth reading experience, as proved
by The Shadow. The biographical authors’ challenge consists in fabricating
a ‘real enough’ story to satisfy the reader’s hunger for real, individual stories
but also their desire to be entertained by an absorbing novel. The following
example of fourth-degree biofction, although historically more far-fetched
and biographically counterfactual, nevertheless offers a more truthful, plau-
sible portrait of Woolf than The Shadow. Stephanie Barron (pseudonym
of American author Francine Mathews and author of historical suspense
novels) seems to have found the right recipe for biographical fction in her
successful Jane Austen Mystery series in which Jane is the solver of murder
mysteries.8 With this popular series, Barron has proved to have great talent
for creating suspense, a keen eye for period detail and an ability to make
purely fctional characters rub shoulders with characters based on real-life
people. Barron’s biofctional technique consists in focusing on missing bio-
graphical information in Austen’s life, especially her early undocumented
years, and flling in these gaps with imaginative stories. The same winning
formula was used for The White Garden, a thrilling murder mystery which
flls in the absence between Woolf’s disappearance from Monk’s House on
28 March and the appearance of her body in the River Ouse on 18 April
1941.
The White Garden casts serious doubts about Virginia’s death and
advances the hypothesis that she was murdered. For different personal moti-
vations, the three contemporary characters, Jo Bellamy, Peter Llewellyn and
Margaux Strand, embark on a quest to fnd out who put an end to Virginia’s
life and why. The notebook that Jo fnds in a tool shed at Sissinghurst has
an emotional and personal signifcance for her, as it is intricately linked with
the explanations of her own grandfather’s unexpected suicide. For Peter,
the Sotheby’s expert, it has an obvious fnancial interest. For Margaux,
the manuscript has literary value and would give a boost to her academic
career. It would lead to new interpretations of Woolf’s life and work and
would ‘turn all sorts of academic assumptions on their heads’ (279).
With the chase for a lost manuscript, The White Garden borrows the
generic, structural and thematic features of the literary and popular bestsellers
 Detecting Woolf 85
Possession (A.S. Byatt, 1990) and The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2003).
These page turners create suspense with their episodic structure and chap-
ters ending with cliff-hangers. While the investigation progresses, the char-
acter-detectives in The White Garden are involved in triangular romantic
relationships. In their pursuit of the truth, which oftentimes amounts to a
‘wild-goose chase’ (121; 139; 279; 289) or a ‘treasure hunt’ (156), they do
not hesitate to lie, manipulate, manoeuvre, ‘pilfer’ (174), ‘steal’ (175) and
backstab each other in order to be the frst one to ‘possess’ the precious
Woolf manuscript, ‘the fnd of the century’ (96) that will shatter the bio-
graphical record about Woolf’s fnal days. The mystery thriller is full of plot
twists, speculations and conspiracy theories surrounding academics, librar-
ians, gardeners, familiar fgures of the Bloomsbury group and especially the
Apostles and the Cambridge Five, clandestine societies of intellectuals and
men with hidden agendas.
However, despite this tortuous scenario, Barron portrays a Virginia very
much in keeping with Woolf’s documented life and work. I would like to
examine Barron’s funambulist biofctional stunts and the way she manages
to walk the tightrope between fact and fction in such a counterfactual novel.
She transforms historical characters and biographical facts into fction and
combines real literary material with a pastiche of letters, diary and poems.
Throughout the novel, many comments voiced by Barron’s characters about
their quest and situation in the diegesis acquire a metafctional dimension
and can justify their author’s own practice of biofction.
The White Garden brings together two sets of characters involved in
parallel plots, with constant shifts from the present (2008) to the past
(1941): fctional contemporary characters, who are the pure product of the
author’s imagination and who are following the tracks of the second type
of characters, those with historical referents or real-life counterparts. The
plot alternates between surprising developments in the spring of 1941, at
the beginning of WWII, and the convoluted present investigation which
sheds light on the past events. In 2008, the thirty-four-year-old American Jo
Bellamy comes to England for a specifc mission as a professional gardener.
She is to reproduce Sackville-West’s famous White Garden at Sissinghurst
for her wealthy employer, Graydon Westlake, in East Hampton, Long
Island. This simple act of horticultural pastiche sets in motion unexpected
personal and historical events.
Jo is recovering from the terrible blow of her English grandfather’s sud-
den suicide. Jock Bellamy unexpectedly and inexplicably hanged himself
after his granddaughter’s announcement of her trip to Kent to model the
White Garden. When he was seventeen, he was himself an apprentice gar-
dener at Sissinghurst Castle, and something happened there that left him
severely traumatised and pushed him to commit suicide seventy years after.
Jock left a farewell letter which was not written on the day he committed
suicide, but in September 1943. It was addressed to his parents, while he
was fghting in Italy during WWII. In his letter, he mentions a mysterious
86 Detecting Woolf
‘lady back home’ (30) and expresses feelings of remorse for her death. After
‘that day’ – a turning point in his life – he ran away from Sissinghurst and
enrolled in the army. Jo’s grandfather remained haunted by this lady, and
what happened to her, until his death. Thus, Jo’s professional mission in
England acquires a personal ulterior motive: she will try to uncover a hid-
den secret in her own family and fnd out why her grandfather committed
suicide.
At Sissinghurst, in an old tool shed, she discovers a box containing a
ffty-page manuscript notebook entitled ‘Notes on the Making of a White
Garden’. The notebook belonged to a lady, ‘a lover of Vita’s, who’d had
the ability to write’ (63, italics in the original text): the stunned characters
soon realise that this must be the famous Virginia Woolf. The notebook is
in fact a diary, which fulfls many functions: it is a container of stories to be
developed and a personal account of an anguished middle-aged woman who
escaped her home in fear. The frst diary entry is dated 29 March 1941, the
very next day after the events in the novel’s ‘Prologue’, when Virginia leaves
her house in Rodmell and goes to the river with the intention to commit sui-
cide. This diary therefore suggests that on 29 March, Virginia was alive at
Vita’s place and started taking notes on making a white garden. The follow-
ing fve diary entries are disseminated in short instalments throughout the
novel, the past events recorded in it giving the present character-detectives
signifcant clues about what happened to Virginia and propelling the action
forward.
The characters investigate the ‘what if’ situation opened by the discov-
ery of the diary: ‘But what if [Virginia] didn’t go into the water on March
twenty-eight? What if she just walked to the local train station and skipped
town instead?’ (89). The temporal gap in the historical continuum – the
unaccounted time between Virginia’s disappearance on 28 March and the
moment her body surfaced in the River Ouse on 18 April – sustains this
speculation and contributes to the plausibility of the characters’ conjectures
and hypotheses. Together, Jo and Peter accumulate evidence and conclude
that Virginia certainly did not commit suicide on 28 March. This prem-
ise creates suspense and mystery throughout their investigation, especially
when it turns out that the diary is incomplete, somebody having cut its end-
ing which contains the ultimate circumstances of Virginia’s death, hence the
characters’ relentless quest for the lost material. At this point, Barron weaves
another strand into the plot based on a real historical event: the suicide of a
Dutchman, Jan Willem Ter Braak, a ‘Nazi spy’ (191), which was reported
in The Times on 1 April 1941. A few days before running away from home,
Virginia witnessed something disturbing concerning this Dutchman’s ‘fshy’
(192) suicide and recorded it in her diary. While at Sissinghurst, Virginia
has a conversation with Harold Nicolson about this traumatising event,
which prompts Harold to inform Maynard Keynes, who works for the gov-
ernment. In turn, Keynes asks Leonard to destroy Virginia’s compromising
account.
 Detecting Woolf 87
These developments, along with the secrecy surrounding the Cambridge
Apostles (an intrigue which emerges through the character of Maynard
Keynes) and the Soviet connection (brought about by the character of
Leonard Woolf) lead Jo and Peter to fnally conclude that Virginia was
betrayed by her Bloomsbury friends and even by Leonard. The hypothesis
formulated by the characters is that Leonard, his Apostle friends and MI5
covered up the murder of the Dutchman. Virginia, who witnessed this, is
prevented from spreading her true account, as during wartime her country’s
interest takes precedence over individual sacrifces. The ultimate clue, a note
written by young Jock on Vita’s cigarette paper, is found by the contem-
porary characters in the middle of the White Garden, inside the statue of
the Little Virgin, in an old gardening glove. Jock’s testimony reveals that
while feeing from Sissinghurst with his help, Virginia was abducted by the
‘Westminster men’ (289) whom she feared and mistrusted. A covert war-
time British agency (The Cambridge Five) murdered her so she would not
reveal a double-agent system they were using against the Germans: just like
in The Shadow, Virginia’s death has a clear link with politics and her mis-
trust of masculine machinations, ‘the complicity of the men of Westminster’
(The White Garden 249) ‘in their Apostolic hats’ (265), their complots and
power games – all these subplots springing from Woolf’s denunciation of
war in Three Guineas.
As readers of this murder mystery, we willingly suspend our disbelief
and adhere to a truth that Barron is building with true elements. While
creating a highly implausible plot, manipulating historical events and dis-
torting biographical facts, the numerous references to historical reality and
events in historical fgures’ lives sustain the heavy web of counterfactual
fction. Barron’s story is lodged in the chinks and silences of history and
biography, that is to say, the three weeks between Virginia’s disappearance
from Monk’s House and the appearance of her body in the River Ouse.
The author exploits this intriguing period of absence, a mysterious por-
tion of time that is conducive to speculation and imaginative creation. She
has stated that this ‘tantalizing’ period of silence incited her to ‘consider
an alternative in which things were different, the inversion of what history
believes to be true’ (The White Garden, ‘A Note from the Author’ 324).
The White Garden thus flls a temporal silence in Woolf’s biography which
coincides with the absence of her body. This allows Barron to fabricate an
alternative biographical truth that springs from real elements but takes a
completely different ramifcation. Her biofctional uchronia offers a bold,
speculative hypothesis about the circumstances of Virginia’s death.
This ‘what if’ theory starts with the ‘Prologue’, which takes place on the
day Virginia disappeared and was reported missing, 28 March 1941. In the
very frst paragraphs of her novel, Barron accumulates hints and clues about
Virginia’s imminent death. The reader accompanies the character from the
moment she writes her farewell letter to Leonard to the moment she arrives
at the bank of the river, looking for stones to put in the pockets of her
88 Detecting Woolf
fur coat. Barron’s ‘Prologue’ ends abruptly before Virginia walks into the
river, with a bird around her chirruping ‘Life, Life, Life’: ‘In Latin, the word
would be vita’ (6). The bird song creates a direct link with Vita, and the
plot follows this newly given direction. The fatal moment is never actually
described and remains just a possibility in Virginia’s thoughts. On the bank
of the river, after having chosen a few stones on the way, Virginia is consid-
ering putting an end to her life. This thought is presented like a razor’s edge
moment, an indecisive, perfectly balanced instant which could tip either
way. In the balance between the strong, heavy attraction of death and the
celebration of life suggested by the bird song, which seems to incite her to
go to see Vita, Virginia fnally chooses Life/Vita.
The ‘Prologue’ consists of two sections separated by a blank space, which
constitutes a transition towards the counterfactual: the frst section is imag-
ined, while the second one is fctionalised. The frst part is supported by doc-
umented biographemes and intertextuality: it is a cold day and Virginia goes
out to the Lodge in the morning to write a farewell letter to Leonard. We
have access to portions of her letter (rendered in italics), which translate her
torments: the fear of war, of going mad again and anguish about her latest
book which has left her emotionally drained, like a post-natal depression.
We are given the physical and mental portrait of a frail, depressed Virginia
who has ‘bony fsts’, ‘jutting hips’ (3), a ‘wasted frame’ (4) and is aware of
her ageing body: ‘the ugliness of her rib cage; the sag of nearly sixty years’
(5). Through snippets of her farewell letter,9 the reader is plunged in her
agony and her determination to put an end to her life. Just like Cunningham
in the ‘Prologue’ of The Hours, Barron imagines her character’s state of
mind and gives us direct access to Virginia’s ‘stuttering thoughts’ (3) as she
is gradually approaching the banks of the River Ouse ‘in her fur coat and
galoshes, her walking stick in one hand’ (5).
After Virginia puts on her fur coat, takes her walking stick and goes
out to the river, the next section of the ‘Prologue’ is completely fctional-
ised. Virginia changes her mind: instead of committing suicide, she goes
to Sissinghurst, where she is comforted by Vita. Her change of heart is
made believable through the parallel Barron draws with Virginia’s previous
aborted drowning attempt, ten days before, when her instinct prompted her
to fght her way out of the river and go back home to Leonard. It is therefore
implied that this is Virginia’s second aborted suicide attempt. This part of
the ‘Prologue’ opens wide the realm of fctional possibilities, fantasy and
speculation: we are moving away from the ‘bio’ – which helped the reader
suspend their disbelief – and willingly embracing the ‘fction’, thanks to the
springboard created by the ‘biographical effect’ in the frst part.
Narrative continuity is created between the ‘Prologue’ and the frst pages
of the notebook-diary that Jo fnds at Sissinghurst and reads. Virginia’s
experience and the aquatic atmosphere surrounding her walk to the river,
as described by the narrator in the ‘Prologue’, is written down in her diary
the following day. Virginia records in very similar terms her impressions,
 Detecting Woolf 89
thoughts, memories and observations about her planned escape, writing
her farewell note to her husband and choosing stones to weigh down her
pockets. The typical Woolfan water imagery has both negative and positive
connotations: water is threatening and uncontrollable, but the bird’s ‘liquid
sounds’ also produce a peaceful feel and prevent her from walking into the
river and putting her decision into practice. This inner ‘peace’ makes her
receptive to the bird singing ‘life’, which incites her to ‘go to Vita’ (52).
The frst entry of the diary, on 29 March 1941, dated the day after
Virginia ‘allegedly’ killed herself, echoes the thoughts she had the day before
when she escaped from Rodmell. These carefully wrought connections cre-
ate subtle articulations between the events in the ‘Prologue’ and the diary Jo
is reading. In an ingenious mise en abyme, Virginia fctionalises her experi-
ence: she appears as the ‘she’, an anonymous female character in her ‘Notes
on the Making of a White Garden’. It is a very thinly veiled description (just
a change of pronoun) of what happened to her: ‘she’ longs to escape from
‘her husband and the smears of lead on his fngers’ (50), the ‘boiled cabbage
smell of the kitchen’, the ‘dead pages’ (51) of her fnished book, so ‘she’ runs
away from her fears and her stifing domestic environment and longs to be
‘unrecognisable’ (50).
Virginia is already ‘unrecognisable’ as she is hiding behind a third-person
pronoun in her own diary. ‘She’ has become a character who ran away from
her husband, who put her boots on, took her walking stick, left the farewell
note on the mantelpiece and walked to the river. Long before Jo discovers
the identity of the diarist, the reader understands that the Virginia in the
‘Prologue’, who was about to drown, is in fact the author of this notebook
who is describing the same experience, in the same exact words. Besides,
the pages of Virginia’s notebook-diary create a typographical continuity
with the events in the ‘Prologue’, through the use of italics, which mim-
ics handwriting: this suggests that same person authored both the farewell
letter in the ‘Prologue’ and the mysterious notebook-diary. The fact that
Virginia starts a new diary on 29 March clearly implies that the bird’s song
dissuaded her from putting an end to her life the previous day. Under the
impulse of the bird, the razor’s edge moment that ends the ‘Prologue’ fnally
tilts in favour of life: Virginia decides to leave Leonard in order to fnally live
her life freely and become the master of her destiny.
The transition from an imagined scene on 28 March to a fctionalised
story starting on 29 March is thus facilitated by the plausibility of the note-
book that the contemporary characters read. Barron’s pastiche diary is made
with real intertextual elements taken from Woolf’s life and fction. In the
‘fake authentic’ diary entries, many ontological layers are brought together
and fuse. Virginia invents a female character in her notebook to hide her
‘real’ identity. Oddly enough, this invented character sometimes resembles
Woolf’s fctional characters Lapinova or Clarissa Dalloway, and other times
Woolf herself. For instance, in the frst entry on 29 March, there are hints
to Woolf’s short story ‘Lapin and Lapinova’, which applies to Virginia’s
90 Detecting Woolf
married situation, her domestic trap and ‘treacherous escape’ (The White
Garden 53). Virginia is afraid of being caught by Leonard, just like Woolf’s
character Lapinova is tracked and hunted by Lapin: ‘He will come hunting.
Lapinova in the snare’ (52). In the same diary entry, Virginia’s account has
strong, recognisable Dalloway-esque undertones. After Virginia runs away
from her husband, she walks through London:

Big Ben was striking as she stepped into the street. Something solemn
in the deliberate swing of the strokes; the murmur of wheels; the shuffe
of footsteps. There is much more to be said about us than that we walk
the streets of Westminster; but she had loved London in the old days,
loved it far more than walking in the country.
(60)

At the same time, Virginia’s description of Mecklenburgh Square on that

day is a direct echo to several authentic diary entries written by Woolf in
October 1940 after she visited the ruins of her London home:

Mecklenburg Square, a jumble of brick and Portland cement. Book

bindings scattered like dead leaves.
(The White Garden 60)

Three houses, I shd. say gone. Basement all rubble. […] Otherwise
bricks & wood splinters. One glass door in the next house hanging. I cd
see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote
so many books. […] Books all over dining room foor. […]
(Woolf, Diary 5: 331)

The veil covering Virginia’s third-person novelistic account sometimes slips

and reveals her ‘real’ diaristic self. From the fctional third-person narration
featuring a ‘she’ walking around in London (‘Big Ben was striking as she
stepped into the street’ [60]), the diary entry eventually switches to a frst-per-
son chronicle (‘I had no bag, it was an embarrassment to me’ [61]). Having
temporarily hidden under a fctitious identity, the ‘she’ gives way to the ‘I’, the
‘real’ autobiographical self of the diarist who fnally pierces the veil of fction.
Emboldened by this newly acquired freedom, Virginia, from obliquely refer-
ring to herself as ‘this old woman’ (61), fnally reveals her ‘true’ identity and
can now write freely, by using the frst-person singular pronoun.
Barron selects and transforms Woolfan autobiographical and fctional
material, but she also fabricates her own Woolfan-sounding prose by rep-
licating Woolf’s stylistic and punctuation idiosyncrasies. The notebook dis-
plays a profusion of dashes, semicolons and paratactic sentences. It also
contains typical Woolfan imagery and precise descriptions of olfactive and
visual sensations in keeping with Woolf’s poetic prose. Thus, the whole
heavy weight of Barron’s counterfactual story rests on the thin pages of
 Detecting Woolf 91
the fabricated notebook-diary, which refutes Woolf’s death and established
historical evidence.
In order to back up the fanciful theory, which is supported by this
manuscript notebook, Peter carefully analyses Virginia’s handwriting: ‘the
looping, hurried script, certain of the letters elided’ (69), which is ‘Devilish
hard to read’ (62). He is an expert in the materiality of manuscripts, a
codicologist, who, just like a detective who interprets clues, can establish
with certainty the chronology of the notebook from ‘the typeface and the
cloth, binding and the nature of paper’ (241). Besides relying on objective
information, Peter is also good at ‘making abstruse connections’ (222)
and has ‘an instinct for what [is] true’ (228), unlike Margaux, who is a
different, complementary type of ‘detective’. As a Woolf literary critic, she
can interpret the text and establish the notebook’s authenticity from its
content:

Whole phrases lifted from certain works. The frst few lines are almost
a direct quote of an unpublished fragment – the bit about characters
in books, haunting the minds of those who read them, like ghosts. She
cribs ‘Clarissa Dalloway in Bond Street,’ too, when she describes her
walk through the London Blitz. And she mentions Lapinova in the
snare – that’s from a rather obscure short story about a couple who
pretend they’re rabbits, and are fond of each other as rabbits might be,
until the husband declares that Lapinova – who stood for the wife – was
strangled in a snare. It’s generally interpreted as Woolf’s veiled com-
ment on her marriage.
(110)

The common reader is guided by this expert character who guarantees the
‘authenticity’ of the prose they are reading:

A few things leap out. Little things, but hallmarks of Virginia’s style
nonetheless. The quotation from The Wasteland, ‘Come under this red
rock,’ would ft, of course; T.S. Eliot was a friend of the Woolfs’ and
the Hogarth Press was one of the frst to publish him. Then there’s a
reference to Westminster, or the men of Westminster […] Westminster
came to symbolize for Virginia everything she hated about male domi-
nance, convention, the establishment world she regarded as hostile
to art.
(281)

As a Woolf scholar with extensive knowledge of the literary period, Margaux

can detect the stylemes or Woolfanisms that authenticate the manuscript.
She can spot modernist intertextuality as well as Woolfan intratextuality,
and her convincing scholarly explanations fnally help Jo and Peter ‘tie the
[notebook] to Woolf’ (281) with utmost certainty.
92 Detecting Woolf
Margaux is an academic who reads Woolf’s life and work from a femi-
nist interpretative perspective. In the notebook, she fnds evidence that
Virginia’s death is clearly linked to masculine oppression: ‘The snare can be
read as his [Leonard’s] attempt to strangle her selfhood. […] her madness
was invented by those around her as a method of stifing her independ-
ent genius’ (111). She explains that Woolf’s suicide is ‘a woman’s ultimate
weapon to fght the social forces limiting her self-expression by withdraw-
ing from that same society – by negating it through noninvolvement’ (111).
This incendiary, ground-breaking manuscript discovery entails a revision
of all biographical certainties about Woolf’s life and a reconsideration of
previous literary analyses of her work. It is ‘a discovery of the rarest order’,
a ‘priceless’ document (302) for academics like Margaux because it brings
solid new arguments to her feminist interpretations. Her detective work is
therefore motivated by her scholarly ambitions, as the manuscript would
establish her as a major feminist Woolf scholar, giving her the ‘means of
being feared and envied for the rest of her literary days’ (171). Establishing
the manuscript’s authenticity is therefore vital for Margaux’s career and
reputation as a scholar.
In parallel with all the detective work done by the contemporary charac-
ters to prove the authenticity of the manuscript, the readers become detec-
tives, too, and they can guess from the very beginning the identity of the
author who wrote the notebook, through visual clues or typography, as
the manuscript notes are clearly linked to Virginia’s suicide letter in the
‘Prologue’. The job of all the detectives is to constantly prove to themselves
and others that the notebook is authentic: they have many certitudes based
on objective and tangible clues, but many doubts, too, as the notebook is
often suspected to be a fake, ‘a packet of lies’ (93) made with ‘phrases and
passages’ (86) from Woolf’s work. On a different level, this is also the case
of The White Garden, in which Barron constructs a Virginia with ‘phrases
and passages’ from Woolf’s own work.
Combining the real and the fake authentic is not only used to create a
convincing Virginia, but other characters with real-life referents who gravi-
tate around her. Barron uses fragments of other historical fgures’ authen-
tic autobiographical documents and additionally creates other pastiches of
their works. For example, she incorporates a real letter written by Sackville-
West, as well as a pastiche of a letter written by the character of Leonard.
After Virginia disappears from home, Vita goes to visit Leonard at Rodmell
on 7 April, where she fnds him grieving his wife’s absence. In a letter to
Harold, Vita describes this visit:

[Margaux] scrolled down through a text pulled up on her screen: ‘The

house full of fowers and all Virginia’s things lying about as usual. […]
I said Leonard, I do not like you being here alone like this. He turned
those piercing blue eyes on me and said it was the only way…’.
(283)10
 Detecting Woolf 93
In addition to this letter taken almost verbatim from Sackville-West’s cor-
respondence, Barron creates a pastiche of Leonard’s typewritten letter,
mimicking a typeface he might have used at the Hogarth Press. His letter,
addressed ‘To the Graverobbers’ (241) and written on a piece of folded
paper, accompanies the fnal pages of Virginia’s manuscript notebook,
which was typeset by Leonard before he burnt the original. Thus, real and
fabricated material coexist in the narration and authentic elements sustain
the veracity of fctional ones.
Barron also incorporates the historical fgures’ literary creations as well
as various pastiches, which are attributed to the author-characters. For
instance, a portion of a real poem written by Sackville-West, ‘Sissinghurst’,
dedicated to Virginia Woolf and written in 1930, when Sackville-West and
her husband purchased the castle, follows the suspenseful ‘Prologue’ and
provides a speculative answer to it. The poem can be read as an indication
that Virginia, like a ‘tired swimmer’, goes to fnd her friend’s ‘castle and the
rose’ (7) at Sissinghurst. The liquid atmosphere and the foral hint in the
poem reverberate in the ensuing narration. Barron makes use of a second
poem written by Sackville-West and published in the Observer in April 1941,
‘In Memoriam: Virginia Woolf’ (311), which is recited by Margaux. This
real poem has a pastiche counterpart written by Barron’s Vita and found
by the contemporary characters in the Tower at Sissinghurst at the end of
their investigation. The poem, entitled ‘In Memoriam: White Garden’ (312),
is said to have been written at the same time as ‘In Memoriam: Virginia
Woolf’, but unlike its real-world counterpart, it was never published. ‘In
Memoriam: White Garden’ is a parallel, alternative version of the offcial,
published ‘In Memoriam: Virginia Woolf’, just like The White Garden pro-
vides an alternative story of Woolf’s documented death. ‘In Memoriam:
White Garden’ constitutes a homage to the ‘real’ originator of Vita’s white
garden, Virginia, who, one night during the blackout, while walking in
Vita’s ‘blackened garden’ (102), has the idea of ‘light in the darkness’ (81)
coming from white fowers: ‘You should have white fowers here […] fairy
lamps, lighting your way to bed’ (81). The character-detectives interpret
this poem as Vita’s ‘apology’ and ‘farewell’ (313) to Virginia. The fabri-
cated poem – which sounds ‘real enough’ when read in conjunction with
authentic ones included in the novel – claims to tell ‘the truth’ about what
happened to Virginia if interpreted in the right way, that is to say, in light of
the conspiracy theory that the contemporary characters have just unveiled.
The White Garden contains an amalgam of authentic and fabricated mate-
rial – both auto/biographical and creative. Real letters and poems impart
verisimilitude to the invented ones, and as they coexist in the narration,
they are both read on the same level. Barron is a convincing pasticheur who
produces ‘fake authentic’ documents, and also a ventriloquist who allows
her characters to express her true ideas. Indeed, some contemporary char-
acters’ statements can be interpreted as comments on the challenging art of
writing biofction.
94 Detecting Woolf
In the handwritten diary that Jo fnds in the tool shed, its author ‘men-
tions Vita’, a ‘real’ person, which, according to the character-detectives,
makes this account ‘real enough’: ‘You think it’s … some sort of fction? But
the writer mentions Vita. That’s real enough’ (63). It is therefore implied
that if historical people feature in imagined stories, their ‘real-ness’ spills
over and imparts verisimilitude to the whole account, which thus appears
‘real enough’ for the reader. Besides, the authors of biofctions may share
creative similitudes with the character of Jo who is commissioned to repro-
duce the White Garden; having spent so much time ‘copying’ or ‘rip[ping]
off’ other gardens, other people’s work, she cannot ‘tell the difference
between real and fake any more’ (91). This could constitute a parallel with
biographical novelists who copy, use and ‘rip off’ Woolf’s work.11 However,
just like the new sculpture in the new White Garden in Long Island, which
is supposed to replace the Little Virgin in the middle of the White Garden at
Sissinghurst, ‘gesture[s] towards the original’ without copying it ‘slavishly’
(30), Baron ‘gestures’ towards the original author, but does not copy her
slavishly.
These metafctional passages hint at Barron’s mode of fabrication of The
White Garden. At the diegetic level, Jo copies the White Garden, whereas
at an authorial level, Barron pastiches Woolf’s work. Issues of re-creating
this garden point to questions of creating by reproducing original features,
of giving a sense of ‘the real thing’. Jo’s mission is to transpose Vita’s garden
to new soil and a new country, and by doing so, she adapts it to a different
time and place. Jo copies the garden, but not ‘slavishly’, as plagiarism is
said to be ‘infuriating and pathetic’ (13). A parallel with Barron’s pastiche
of Woolfan prose in the manuscript notebook can be drawn here through
the symbol of re-creating a garden, a growing, living organism with roots
anchored in certain traditions, but with ramifcations that fourish in differ-
ent literary environments.
Peter draws Jo’s attention to the fakeness of the manuscript notebook
that she has found: it uses Woolf’s work and makes references to Vita as
Orlando, which leads him to conclude that it can only be a forgery, as eve-
rything else, starting with the date of Woolf’s diary (29 March 1941) con-
tradicts historical evidence. He is at this point convinced that it must be the
work of a forger who took great pains to imitate Woolf’s stylistic signature
and diaristic voice. Peter’s belief can also function as a metafctional com-
ment: Barron makes use of Woolfan intertextuality in a novel that is written
to pass as the real thing and give us the illusion of reality. However, The
White Garden can only be a forgery (or fction), even if its author did a fne
job creating a believable Virginia by imitating Woolf’s style.
Ample documentation on Woolf is available to us today and is extremely
useful for authors of biofction. Such personal material gives writers access
to the author’s statements, discussions, verbal interactions but also her con-
sciousness, thoughts and feelings. What Jo thinks about Keynes’s autobio-
graphical material can apply to Woolf, too: ‘It was obvious that Keynes had
 Detecting Woolf 95
lived in a vanished era of paper and ink, when the smallest thought of every
day was recorded and dispatched to somebody. Accessing the collection,
Jo thought, was like wandering through Keynes’s brain’ (178). Thanks to
the wealth of autobiographical documents left to posteriority by Woolf, it
is easier for the novelist to delve into Virginia’s consciousness or ‘wander
through [her] brains’.
In their quest for the truth, Jo and Peter become ‘graverobbers’: they sneak
into the Woolfs’ Monk’s House garden and illegally dig it, at night, against
the wishes of the dead, and ‘disturb’ a ‘sacred ground’ (227). Leonard, who
‘expected the place never to be disturbed’ (227), anticipated the future hunt
for his wife’s private secrets and left the graverobbers a letter. According to
some critics of the genre,12 literary graverobbing is exactly what biofction
authors do: they dig to fnd juicy details and capitalise on their roman-
tic and dramatic potential. There are many ways in which the past haunts
and resurfaces in the present in The White Garden, and the contemporary
characters Jo, Peter and Margaux are all eager to get their hands on the bur-
ied treasure. The manuscript which contains the account of Virginia’s last
moments and the shocking events that she witnessed haunts both its author
and all those who read it. In his letter to the graverobbers, Leonard warns
them: ‘But know that the unquiet mind of the author lives in it still, and will
haunt you. As she has always haunted me’ (231). Barron’s novel is fnally
the living (published) proof that Woolf still haunts both creative authors
and literary critics today beyond her grave, and they will not hesitate to ‘dig’
and disturb her sacred ground in order to have access to her ‘body’ of work.
The Shadow and The White Garden are perfect examples of the inter-
section and exchanges between feminism and crime fction, two antitheti-
cal concepts that bring together feminist beliefs and masculine tropes. The
two detective-spy novels challenge the stereotyped active/passive masculine/
feminine patterns within a traditionally male-dominated genre of classi-
cal detective fction.13 They are set in two belligerent contexts, WWI and
WWII, and they both spring from Woolf’s denunciation of war, fascism and
patriarchy expressed in Three Guineas. Woolf’s political pamphlet and its
emphasis on the correlation between the personal and the political provides
a rich political substrate for both novels which offer a portrayal of Virginia
in keeping with Woolf’s feminist credo and political inklings. Hawkes and
Manso’s and Barron’s Virginia feels restricted by patriarchal limitations
and fghts against them. She has strong passions about normative domestic
and political issues and is not afraid to voice them, despite many attempts
by male characters to silence her. Interestingly enough, the strong mascu-
line and conservative genre of crime fction becomes the perfect medium
for female characters to fght masculine oppression. Their frank voices and
audacious actions can become inconvenient, and Virginia is seen as a liabil-
ity and a casualty during the war when the greater interest of the country is
at stake. These spy novels provide the ideal setting for a female character like
Virginia to question and defy the status of women in the male-dominated
96 Detecting Woolf
public and social sphere. Virginia – certainly not an ‘angel in the house’
fgure, a dependent wife who conforms to a conservative model of woman-
hood – ventures out of her confning domestic sphere to speak her mind and
live her life unrestrictedly.
The Shadow and The White Garden are situated at the opposite end of
Woolf’s own literary spectrum; it is both unusual and ingenious that such
a literary author is depicted as a character in genre fction. However, the
portrayal of Virginia as a detective in The Shadow fts her personality and
intellect. She is an excellent observer, commentator and reader of human
character. The silence surrounding her death in The White Garden also
opens investigative fctional possibilities. Virginia’s testimony beyond the
grave allows contemporary characters to investigate her mysterious death,
trace her very last moments, fnd out the ‘real’ reasons of her death and
offer unprecedented explanations. Thus, more than seventy years after her
death – the time necessary for an author’s legacy to enter the public domain
– Virginia becomes the object of their investigation and allows them to for-
mulate new revelations about her life and death and offer new interpreta-
tions of her literary heritage.
In both The Shadow and The White Garden, these new revelations are
completely fanciful, but their authors strive to blend and balance fact and
fction. Biographical facts and historical events are admittedly bent, changed
and re-written to suit the plot, but they remain largely supported by docu-
mented material, which buttresses the plausibility of the story, makes it ‘real
enough’ and allows it to have more fanciful ramifcations. From the two
illustrations of fourth-degree counterfactual biofction to the next examples
of ffth-degree transgressive biofction, it is merely a question of moving
further away from the ‘bio’ and setting fewer limits to ‘fction’. Fabricating
‘lies’,14 although admittedly entertaining and proftable, can sometimes lead
to falsity when it entirely changes the established history and biography. In
these cases, the creative authors’ freedom and imagination are greater, but
their creative challenge is even trickier: they must be more resourceful in
order to make the complete ‘travesty’ believable for the reader. This is clearly
the case for Clare Morgan’s A Book for All and None and Maggie Gee’s
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, which trample the bounds of plausibility.

Notes
1 On the authoritarianism of the medical profession towards women and the com-
bination of rest cures and excessive feeding (milk and meat diets) prescribed
to Woolf by her different doctors, see Lee, Virginia Woolf. Lee contends that
‘[t]here is no doubt that the development of her political positions, her intellec-
tual resistance to tyranny and conventionality, derived to a great extent from her
experiences as a woman patient’ (172).
2 Hawkes was co-founder and editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany. The frst issue
appeared in 1973.
3 On the multiplicity of Woolf’s biographical representations through time, see
Hussey.
 Detecting Woolf 97
4 Other feminist Woolf scholars reacted to this representation of Woolf and exchanged
heated opinions with Quentin Bell. See Quentin Bell, ‘Hawkes Exchange’ and
‘Reply to Jane Marcus’ as well as Jane Marcus, ‘Bogey’ and Brenda Silver’s discus-
sion of Bell’s portrayal of his aunt in Icon 117–127. Feminist criticism has contrib-
uted to ‘explode the image of Woolf as apolitical, etiolated, or weak’ (Daugherty
107), and revealed her as ‘a brilliant, capable, political’ person (112).
5 See Latham, ‘Biofction as Corrective Justice’.
6 Hawkes transcribed and edited Woolf’s ‘Friendships Gallery’ in Twentieth
Century Literature.
7 The answer to this question is ‘Oswald Blackwood’ in French writer Anne-Marie
Bougret’s Intrigue chez Virginia Woolf (2019), which shares generic similitudes
and thematic features with both The Shadow and The White Garden. Intrigue is
a biographical feminist detective novel whose mission is to rehabilitate Virginia’s
image and debunk her pervasive legend as a mad, frail, suicidal genius. It is also
a romance in which Virginia’s life becomes an object of investigation while ama-
teur biographer-sleuth Clara is caught in a sentimental relationship. The new
evidence Clara fnds about Virginia and the perplexing revelations she makes in a
new biography entitled Les derniers jours de Virginia Woolf shatter biographers’
certitudes about Virginia’s life and death. Clara proves that Virginia’s suicide did
not happen as is commonly believed, but that she was killed by a serial killer
named Oswald Blackwood. Like Barron’s Virginia, Bougret’s character writes
her letters to her husband and sister and is headed to the Ouse to commit sui-
cide. However, on the banks of the river she suddenly changes her mind. As she
catches Blackwood in the act of burying a woman he has just strangled, he kills
her, too, and throws her body in the river.
8 Between 1996 and 2016, Barron wrote thirteen Austen mystery novels. Vickers
contends that the image of Austen as a detective fts the author’s personality and
‘reputation as a clever commentator on manners and as an accurate portrayer of
personality and character’ (213).
9 ‘I feel certain that I am going mad again; I feel we can’t go through another of
these terrible times’ (4); ‘I begin to hear voices. I can’t concentrate’ (4); ‘You
have given me the greatest possible happiness… I don’t think two people could
have been happier than we have been’ (5). The letter used by Barron is the frst
suicide letter that Woolf wrote ten days before committing suicide, on Tuesday,
18 March, not the last one written on 28 March. See Lee, Virginia Woolf 744.
10 See Sackville-West’s real account of her visit in almost these exact words in
Glendinning 315.
11 This is a reference to Cunningham’s statement: ‘I ripped off Virginia Woolf in so
many ways’ (‘Biographical Novel’ 95).
12 See Dee’s article, ‘The Reanimators: On the Art of Literary Graverobbing’.
13 The novel of the Belgian author Gabriel Thoveron, Qui fait peur à Virginia
Woolf ?: Élémentaire, mon cher Lupin ! (2006), is also a detective novel in which
the characters of Virginia and Vita are caught in a strange political conspiracy
linked to Harold Nicolson’s role as a diplomat and secret agent in the Middle
East. However, unlike the feminist representations of Virginia in The Shadow
and The White Garden, in Qui fait peur, a masculine Franco-British tandem,
Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, investigate and protect the two defenceless
women. Virginia is not endowed with agency and is portrayed as a weak, fragile,
frightened lady who is physically and emotionally vulnerable and is ill-equipped
to face threats and handle the truth. In order to shield her, the characters hide
information from her, and throughout the novel she is mostly silent, immobile,
sleeping or fainting.
14 Fiction is nothing more than ‘telling lies for fun and proft’ (Lawrence Block,
quoted by Barron in ‘A Note’, White Garden 323).
3 Virginia’s Daughters

Changing the time of Woolf’s death to three weeks after she actually com-
mitted suicide, when her body was fnally found foating in the River Ouse,
slightly stretches the limits of forensics and takes minor freedoms with tem-
porality but remains within the realm of plausibility in The White Garden.
However, in this chapter, the conceit of a resurrected Virginia in the twenty-
frst century in Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) is a ‘what
if’ scenario forced to its extreme limit: the reader is taken further away
from the veracity of biographical fction and is plunged into the maelstrom
of magical realism. Bringing Woolf back from the grave was intended by
the author-necromancer as ‘an act of cheek, an attempt not to be afraid
of Virginia Woolf’ (Manhattan 474),1 and remains an impossible premise
throughout this time-slip novel. Opened by a science-fction-like time fs-
sure, the fanciful universe in which Virginia evolves constitutes an ideal
platform from which Gee delivers a scathing satire of our present-day liter-
ary, cultural, religious and political attitudes and concerns. The topic of
the dead authorial fgure coming to life is therefore not just an amusing
plot stunt; it refers to the serious literary practice of resurrecting authors in
biofctional novels and raises sensitive questions about the ethics of such a
creative practice. Virginia’s physical resurrection in the twenty-frst century
is also an obvious symbol of the authors’ midwife-like expertise and deter-
mination to bring out Woolf’s legacy on the contemporary literary scene.
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is ultimately a novel about the past writer’s
future, about her progeny, lineage and fliation, and about how her heritage
is being revived and updated with every generation of writers, here embod-
ied by Angela Lamb, a middle-aged successful English novelist, and Gerda
Lamb-Kaye, her thirteen-year-old daughter. In Clare Morgan’s A Book for
All and None (2011), the revelation about a specifc detail in Virginia’s life
remains physically, biographically and historically impossible and ‘defes
credibility’ (Catherine Taylor), just like Gee’s supernatural resurrection of
her Virginia almost eight decades after her death. From Virginia’s meta-
phorical daughter, who continues her literary legacy in Gee’s novel, Morgan
takes one step further into fantasy and invents Virginia’s real biological
daughter, who continues her tragic destiny.
 Virginia’s Daughters 99
Virginia’s Long Shadow
The frst lines of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan initiate the magic premise of
the novel: ‘There is thunder as Angela fies to New York with Virginia Woolf
in her handbag, lightning crackling off the wings of the plane’ (9). Angela is
going to New York to peruse Woolf’s manuscripts at the New York Public
Library in order to fnish writing a plenary speech she is going to deliver at a
‘university gig’ (10) in Istanbul. Virginia will literally come out of Angela’s
handbag, in a reverse metonymic process in which the ‘Woolf’ in her bag,
‘Professions for Women’, turns into the physical author herself. The hypo-
thetical encounter envisaged by Angela on the plane (‘if I’d met Woolf, if
she had met me, on the same loop of the ribbon of space time, what would
she have thought of me?’ [11]) becomes a ‘reality’, when the meteorological
phenomenon with its mystic lightning brings Virginia back to life after eight
decades spent ‘in the dark’, ‘in the night of unknowing’ (13). Somehow the
space/time continuum is disrupted and Virginia appears in fesh and bones2
at the New York Public Library where her manuscripts are archived, but
ironically enough, she is not allowed to touch them, as they constitute valu-
able ‘original material’ (20) that has become enshrined like a museum item.
When Virginia wakes up after decades in the ‘dark’, she frst refects on
her previous life and the way she put an end to it. She comes from the dead
with a specifc smell of mud, roots and pondweed: at the beginning of her
new life, her body smells of her old life; it bears the imprint of the aquatic
environment that engulfed her. Like Cunningham, Gee resorts to a stream-
of-consciousness poetic phrasing, with typographical effects that mimic
Virginia’s hesitations and interruptions in the fow of thoughts, and uses
fragments of Woolf’s suicide letter, transcribed in italics. Virginia remem-
bers her resentment of having been constantly scrutinised and supervised
by doctors and by Leonard, and everybody ‘gang[ing] up on [her]’ (39).
She also recalls the degradation of her mental state and her battle with ‘The
Furies’, invasive visions embodied by ‘hideous old women’ who ‘bare their
claws at [her], wet-mouthed, whispering as they crawl towards [her], brown
scaly talons and hanging fesh’ (40, italics in the original text). In her bat-
tle with these menacing Furies, they prove to be stronger than her, and she
takes refuge from them in ‘the green tangled water’ (43). Her death was
then perceived as a victory against them, but she now expresses regret for
abandoning the living.
In her ‘second’ ‘happy life’ (427), despite occasional dark thoughts,
Virginia’s joie de vivre, hunger for life and deep desire to fully live each
moment are largely predominant. Gee’s Virginia is essentially a happy, mis-
chievous character who enjoys the ‘thrill of life’ (55) and ‘savour[s] each
moment’ (436). By portraying a Virginia who stands in sharp contrast to the
tragic fgure depicted by the majority of contemporary writers, Gee reha-
bilitates Woolf and debunks the stereotypes largely perpetuated by popular
culture. She offers a refreshing representation of Virginia as a joyful, comic
100 Virginia’s Daughters
fgure rather than an emblem of suicide and madness. Her Virginia enjoys
life, laughs, discovers her body and carnal pleasures and is happy to be alive.
It is not only a rebirth for Virginia, but also a renaissance, as she comes back
to life as a different Virginia from the one she was. Gee therefore presents
a redeeming, reparative portrayal of Woolf and gives back to Virginia the
most precious thing that her ‘Furies’ stole from her: her life.
Gee’s Virginia thus turns out to be a completely different person from
Woolf’s usual representation in the popular imagination. The oversimplif-
cation of Woolf’s complex personality is exemplifed by Angela, who takes
shortcuts in order to sum up Virginia for her teenage daughter in an e-mail,
and reduces her to a few generic, clichéd features: ‘famous’; ‘beautiful’;
‘clever’; ‘every sentence she writes is poetry’; ‘she went mad and killed her-
self’ (144). Virginia does not emerge as a fully fedged writer from Angela’s
sketchy description: these commonplace stereotypes always reduce her per-
sonality and talents, and she is always ultimately defned by her tragic death.
It is no wonder that Gerda thinks that her mother ‘made Woolf sound like
a total mong’ (144). After reading and meeting Virginia in person, Gerda
realises that Virginia’s image was belittled by her mother’s crude, quick por-
trait – an intimation that, after direct contact with Woolf’s oeuvre, readers
always change their impressions of Woolf’s distorted and simplistic image,
born out of ignorance and hearsay.
However, Angela will fx this hasty, stereotypical portrait of her idol in a
lengthy, eulogistic homage at the conference. In her plenary speech, Angela
destroys the popular image that does not correspond to the Virginia that
she got to know very closely. Attributes such as ‘elitist’, ‘snobbish’, ‘self-
indulgent’, ‘art for art sake’ (391); ‘stultifying’, ‘ivory tower’, ‘bloodless’,
‘anaemic’ (392); ‘frigid’, ‘lesbian’ (396); ‘daughter of privilege’; ‘precious’
(447) that people usually associate with Woolf, are exposed one by one
and proven wrong. This popular misrepresentation is, according to Angela,
‘spiteful nonsense’ ‘promulgated by male critics’ (447). Angela’s speech at
the Woolf conference thus amounts to a feminist defence of her literary
foremother.
This particular image of Woolf that is spread in popular culture today
comes from people’s conviction that they already know the author. Some
readers ironically reconstruct the authorial fgure through her fctional
characters. Even Angela, an informed reader and writer, confesses that she
had this image of Virginia: ‘I’d thought all her characters were part of her-
self, that by adding them together, you came up with the author, a shift-
ing composite, the details uncertain but the basic shape, against the light,
constant’ (420). Woolf has inevitably become a nebulous authorial fgure
made of vague fragments of her work: ‘How many of you’, Angela asks
her audience during the conference, ‘consciously or not, have superimposed
Virginia’s face on Mrs Dalloway’s privileged body?’ (450). Just like Angela,
readers unconsciously imagine and reconstruct the author. The result is not
the ‘real’ person who lived and wrote books, but our invented, subjective,
 Virginia’s Daughters 101
romanticised idea of that person. The ‘implied author’,3 that is to say, a con-
struct of the author produced by a reader with elements from the author’s
text, is a fantasised image which does not coincide with the author’s real
personality traits. The author that emerges from the written page is not the
same as the author who has a real existence in fesh and bone, and this is
precisely the point of Gee’s novel: the ‘real’ Virginia materialises to prove
Angela that she is not what Angela thought she was, a shifting composite
made of all her characters. Besides, these metacreative comments voiced by
Gee’s characters are ironically exactly what the author herself does, as her
Virginia is built with intertextual fragments of Woolf’s oeuvre and charac-
ters. For instance, echoes of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Waves resur-
face in Virginia’s portrait: ‘There she was’ (24); ‘here she was’ (28); ‘a fn
surfacing’ (23); ‘Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup …
things in themselves, myself being myself’ (33). Thus, Virginia’s physical
resurrection brings about Woolf’s textual memory.4
On contact with the new world to which she gradually adjusts, Virginia
ultimately undergoes an extreme transformation, from the beginning of the
novel when she is an old, smelly, dusty woman dressed in ‘old rags’ (65),
to an elegant, young-looking, coquettish lady who takes care of her appear-
ance. Virginia discards her ‘bedraggled green and grey’ suit (65) and adopts
the light colours of the twenty-frst century: pink, apricot and yellow. After
so much time in the dark, the ‘sunshine colours’ she chooses for her clothes
make her want to ‘be warm again’ (115). She feels free and bold to wear
the outfts and colours she likes, and these new colours suit her joie de vivre
in the twenty-frst century. The new Virginia likes attracting people’s atten-
tion, is extravagant, ‘eccentric-looking’ (204), spendthrift, loves shopping
and has luxury tastes – the exact opposite of what the real Woolf was.5 Gee
gives her a life in which she fully enjoys these small, down-to-earth, material
pleasures.
These physical pleasures and her awakening to femininity gradually
bring about an awakening of her sexuality and bodily pleasures – again,
very much unlike Woolf. In her autobiographical essay, ‘A Sketch of the
Past’, Woolf wrote: ‘I could feel ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and
intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they
were disconnected with my own body’ (68). In Gee’s novel, Virginia is
reborn as a woman who accepts her body, feels connected to it and fully
embraces her sexuality. Virginia overcomes her sexual inhibitions: ‘At 120
or so years old, something inside me had stirred and softened. I had been
dead; I was alive again. Now I was ready to fnd a lover’ (Manhattan 397).
Constantinople, the location of Orlando’s sex change, will also be the site of
Virginia’s sensual reawakening: she fnds adventure and romance with both
a man and a woman, and enjoys sexual freedom and fuidity.
The clash between Virginia’s past experience of her own time at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century and her perception of our twenty-frst-century
world is a great source of humour6 in Gee’s novel. Virginia absorbs and
102 Virginia’s Daughters
processes the ‘newness’ (134) around her. For instance, she is intrigued and
annoyed by twenty-frst-century hygiene expectations and Angela’s obses-
sion with bathing. Angela forces her to wash her body of its whiff of death.
Virginia’s ‘washing’ of her persistent, overpowering smell is symbolic, as
at the same time Gee washes away a stereotypical representation of Woolf
and makes us forget that the powerful, tenacious, deeply engrained image of
Woolf in popular culture is rooted in her death. After taking a shower, with-
out the lingering death odour, ‘her beauty [shines] through’ (118). Similarly,
without the constant death halo maintained by many contemporary writers
around her, readers can discover the real beauty of Virginia’s personality.
Angela is often exasperated and embarrassed by Virginia’s blunt com-
ments and questions and tries to explain to her modern notions such as
laptops, the internet, remote controls, a credit card, geopolitics, gender
politics, breast enhancement and political correctness – all new, puzzling
concepts for someone who died in 1941. Virginia is confronted with these
new realities and tries to make sense of them. By the end of the novel, she
not only understands modern technology – she is especially fascinated by
the internet and enjoys ‘internetting’ (228) – but also calibrates her language
and register to ft twenty-frst-century linguistic standards or speech habits.
As she observes and tries to catch up with the modern world she now lives
in, she expresses her perplexities about us. This original representation of
Virginia as an inquisitive, keen observer of the baffing twenty-frst-century
world serves a specifc satiric purpose. She is a shrewd commentator on our
habits and gives us a compelling picture of our current literary, cultural and
political scene.
Indeed, the curious, funny Virginia allows us to investigate our moder-
nity and question our habits. She becomes a useful device to comment on
the differences between what she left behind in 1941 and the new world
she wakes up to. She notices what has been accomplished since she died but
also our foibles. From the very beginning, she is struck by the opulence and
abundance of the twenty-frst century. She sees a colourful age compared
with her own and a century full of bright lights. Virginia compares this
new world with the vision she had of the future during her time in 1930s
England. When she visits the Statue of Liberty with Angela, this symbolic
icon triggers an exchange about freedom and equality. Angela tells Virginia
that ‘[e]veryone is free. Everyone’ (209). Virginia observes people around
her – ‘women’, ‘Africans’, ‘servants’, ‘homosexuals’ (209) – and realises that
some freedoms have been gained and society has moved forward in some
respects since 1941, but other things have been lost and people are moving
backwards in other respects. For example, in the twenty-frst-century con-
sumer society, time is accelerated, changes occur quickly and people, events
and cultural treasures are easily forgotten.
By closely observing Angela’s behaviour, Virginia notices our con-
stant preoccupation with success and making ever more money. Angela is
‘obsessed with money’ (116) and is anxious about ‘haemorrhaging’ it (95).
 Virginia’s Daughters 103
It is suggested that we need tragedies to teach us that our material con-
cerns are shallow and living our life to the fullest is more important. Angela
explains that we do behave differently now that we have been confronted
with death on a massive scale, that we understood that life is fragile and
can unexpectedly be ended: ‘It changed the way Americans thought about
themselves. Three thousand people died in one day’ (164). Human life is
vulnerable, and so are big cities when confronted with terrorism.
The portrait of Virginia as a lively and inquisitive mind opens an investi-
gative window to our current society and its evolution since Woolf’s death.
It points at the differences between our Western values that we take for
granted today and the struggles of other people, in other cultures, to put
into practice the ideas that Woolf expressed in her political and feminist
essays. Virginia observes and thinks about the forms of oppression that are
still practised in the new world. This prompts her to ask Angela if Three
Guineas, her pamphlet on the disastrous effects of patriarchy, had any effect
at all on people. Angela keeps evading answering the question, which con-
stitutes proof that we have not learnt much from Woolf’s denunciations
and her efforts to open our eyes and enlighten our understanding. War and
violence still exist in today’s world and Virginia is disappointed that her
ideas did not change the belligerent nature of men: ‘My thoughts about
aggression were in Three Guineas. I hope it had … some infuence’ (254).
If there are still wars and conficts waging around the world, Virginia indi-
cates it is maybe because women have not reached a level of education that
she advocated for in her pamphlet. If these luminous ideas did not have the
expected impact on women, it is clearly suggested that we have not debated
them enough. This is the reason why Angela feels bound to spread Virginia’s
words at the plenary speech, addressing mainly the Turkish students in the
audience. She encourages young people to express their opinions, even if
they inconvenience political authorities.
In Virginia’s opinion, the ‘madness of [Angela’s] world’ (220) today con-
sists of the radicalisation of religion: ‘[r]adical Christians, radical Muslims,
even Buddhists are getting het up’ (220). Virginia is utterly puzzled that
the Jewish woman next to whom she sits on the plane is a playwright
who is proud to write plays in the spirit of her ‘forefathers’. Her beliefs
clearly clash with Virginia’s: ‘“Your forefathers?” […] “What if they were
wrong?”’ (226). In her frst life, Virginia realised her condition as a woman-
writer sprang from patriarchy; she thus fed her ‘father’s terrible groans in
the night’ (226) and she deliberately avoided following her own mother’s
path, an ideal ‘angel in the house’ fgure. This is the reason why Virginia is
shocked to see that her mother’s path is still followed today, with renewed
beliefs and great zeal, by some women who are deliberately walking back-
wards in the steps of their ‘forefathers’. While observing veiled women in
the streets of Istanbul, as well as symbolically enough, a boy and a girl –
the little ‘modern’ boy in shorts and T-shirt’ which ‘read SPIDERMAN’
‘prodding his small, veiled sister’ (297) with a plastic gun – Virginia justly
104 Virginia’s Daughters
concludes that there is still no equality between men and women, boys and
girls. Turkey, in general, enables Gee to depict a vast canvas of a politically
perturbed place, which functions as a sounding board of Virginia’s beliefs
on governments, gender and class, and which makes us realise how little
some parts of the world have evolved since Woolf formulated her revolu-
tionary political ideas.
Our cultural and literary scene is not spared either, as Gee’s Virginia
observes current trends and habits. While during her lifetime she was a
writer whose job was to record life on paper with a pen in her hand, she is
resurrected in a world in which ink, pens and paper are antiquated. In this
world, Virginia’s vision of writing and recording the world around her is
‘out of date’ (107). Through her eyes and considerations, we clearly see our
relationship with books and literature. Angela explains our reading habits
to Virginia and implies that fewer people read nowadays, and most of the
people who do read, do not necessarily read literature. Angela is initially
proud to show Virginia the huge and varied production of literature in her
century. However, their visit to ‘Barnes and Noble’ and ‘Borders’ shows a
different reality from the ideal image Angela had of the book industry of
her time: the book shops are closing down one by one, and Angela can only
show Virginia a big place of ‘emptiness’ (171). Through the interaction of
two authors, past and present, Gee offers harsh criticism of a collapsing
book industry, with wave after wave of destructive coups, coupled with
today’s readers’ ignorance and disinterest in literature. Virginia compares
her self-publishing situation, which gave her the freedom she needed, with
Angela’s job today: she sees Angela as a ‘chained monkey’ (300) depend-
ing on so many people: her agent, publisher and her British and American
editors.
The job of a twenty-frst-century writer is to keep ‘everyone’ happy: their
public, their editors and their publishing houses. If they are not lucrative
enough and do not manage to maintain the sales fgures, writers are simply
discarded by their publishing house. In this ruthless literary world, ‘mature’
writers, unless they sell well, are immediately disposable. No time is given
to allow them to age and mature their writing style. Angela is thus disil-
lusioned by this capitalist attitude to literature and would like to go back
to an idyllic period in which authors like Virginia wrote out of passion.
Angela, the present author, imparts a pessimistic vision of literature, which
is engulfed by visual culture; Virginia, the past author, is nonetheless more
optimistic and visionary and tries to comfort Angela: ‘The books themselves
will live elsewhere. Maybe they are going to live in your … laptops?’ (172).
Without knowing their existence, Virginia has an intuitive vision of elec-
tronic books after understanding and accepting the disappearance of pens
and paper from the writing habits of this century. Books will undoubtedly
have other lives and will materialise in different ways: the leitmotif quote
from Woolf’s Between the Acts, ‘We have other lives, I think, I hope…’
(Manhattan 172), can be applied to authors who live beyond their deaths
 Virginia’s Daughters 105
as well as to their productions which metamorphose and fnd new ways of
coming into being.
Virginia is surprised by our excessive consumption of visual entertainment
and addiction to the screen, which leads to a lack of real communication.
She realises that in her own time ‘people were rooted in reality’ (229); on
the contrary, in this new century, we are all ‘lost in fancy’ (230). Our enter-
tainment is ‘a mixture of soporifc and overwhelming’ (230), and Virginia
frmly believes it is much better to ‘live on the wave of the moment’ (230).
Angela, like all modern people, needs her laptop ‘on her knee, like another
baby’ (300) everywhere. The fact that Virginia thinks Angela favours her
‘baby’-laptop more than her own daughter is here comic, but points to
the numerous serious discussions in Gee’s novel about symbolic mother/
daughter relationships and allegiances. Beyond light comedy, adventure and
observational comments on current issues, Gee’s novel is primarily about
writers – past, present and future – and their writerly concerns.
Virginia, Angela and Gerda have different preoccupations related to
their writing. Firstly, Virginia is anxious about the legacy that she left
behind and the survival of her oeuvre decades after her death. She feels the
pressure of being a pioneer and a foremother for the generations of admi-
rative women writers. Secondly, Angela is in awe of Woolf but feels that
her literary heritage is a burden: it is diffcult for writers like her today not
to be eclipsed by Woolf’s ‘long shadow’. Lastly, Gerda’s emerging writer’s
voice cannot break through yet, as she does not have a receptive audi-
ence: Angela, preoccupied with her own career and success as a writer,
and constantly under the pressure of an industry which discards ‘mature’
writers who do not maintain sales fgures, does not fnd the time to read
her daughter’s e-mails to which she attaches her autobiographical saga ‘My
Battle with the Furies’.
Virginia’s central concerns are about her modern reputation and the
posthumous value of her oeuvre. When she is summoned from the dead, she
has no idea about her success, so she is plagued with doubts about it. She
is wondering if the new world still reads her: ‘People still read me?’ (60);
‘People still read me in the twenty-frst century?’ (61); ‘But I have a public?
– Still? Now?’ (64). She fnds out with great joy that she has not been forgot-
ten, unlike most of her Bloomsbury friends. She is not only literally alive,
as she physically materialised into a body, but also metaphorically, as she
is still read eight decades after her death: for an author, this truly amounts
to ‘being alive’ on the literary scene. But the truth is that Virginia is ‘alive’
or ‘popular’ only in certain circles. On the one hand, the common reader,
embodied by the character who sells fountain pens in Manhattan, does not
know who Virginia Woolf is: ‘I ain’t heard of you. You’re not Jackie Collins.
You’re not Stephen King’ (109). Other readers amalgamate her with Sylvia
Plath ‘because they’re both a bit dark’ (176). However, on the other end of
the intellectual spectrum, there are other more informed readers and schol-
ars who are highly specialised in Woolf’s oeuvre: they organise international
106 Virginia’s Daughters
conferences about her and study her manuscripts that are archived like a
treasure in a museum.
Virginia is amazed by the value of her frst editions that are now ‘part of
literary history’ (96). She is so ‘valuable’ that she has become museum mate-
rial and is therefore untouchable, unreachable and unattainable. At the Berg
Collection in the New York Public Library, Angela ‘can’t wait to get [her]
hands on [Virginia]’ (17), that is to say, metonymically, on her manuscripts.
However, because of their value and fragility, Angela can only read Woolf
on microflm. This reading experience is not the same for Angela, who,
like all Woolf specialists, fetishises the author and would like to touch the
material which was produced by the author herself. For absolute fans like
Angela, the author’s aura transpires not only in the intellectual legacy but
also in the material things she left behind. But Angela is going to become a
privileged fan, and after the odd, fantastic set of circumstances, she is fnally
going to literally ‘get her hands on Virginia’.
Virginia has many ‘fan[s]’, or ‘groupie[s]’ (21) like Angela who are highly
impressed with the formidable modernist ‘leviathan’ (34). She realises that
she has been appropriated by her fans and followers. By calling her by her
frst name, ‘Virginia’, Angela shows how intimately she knows her. Virginia
is surprised that she seems to ‘belong’ (21) to everybody and will learn that
this familiarity that at frst bothers her is a positive sign which proves that
her work ‘belongs’ to the literary heritage of twenty-frst-century readers
and has been an inspiration for many other writers like Angela. In the world
in which she now lives, Virginia’s ‘children’ (her body of work) survive,
even the last one, Between the Acts, the novel she never saw being born
because of her ‘Furies’ (123). The value of her offspring is measured by its
relevance and popularity with today’s readers. Virginia is wondering in par-
ticular about one of her favourite ‘children’: ‘[h]ad today’s young women
read A Room of One’s Own?’ (281), and her interrogation fnds a positive
answer during her conference, when Gerda reads a passage from Virginia’s
pamphlet to the receptive students in the audience.
While Virginia is comforted by her own survival and success in the
twenty-frst century, she cannot help conjecturing about other authors’ and
artists’ disappearance from the present-day cultural scene. She wonders why
only a few writers survive and why only certain books make it to the canon.
Many of her Bloomsbury friends’ names are now completely unknown to
the public. Unlike her own manuscripts, their work is not displayed in muse-
ums. Only a few, exceptional writers leave a signifcant ‘trace’ beyond their
time and have an impact on the future: only ‘great poets’, like Virginia,
‘never die’: they survive in future writers, like Angela and Gerda, who con-
tinue their work. Virginia has managed to ‘throw the rest into shadow’
(185): unlike most of the famous writers and artists in her time, Virginia
eclipsed them all.
Not only is she the one who survives, but she and her work have the abil-
ity to cross cultures. The title of the conference Angela is going to in Istanbul
 Virginia’s Daughters 107
is symbolical and functions as a metacritical statement: ‘Virginia Woolf in
the 21st Century: Cross-cultural and Transformational Approaches’. In
Gee’s book, Virginia does indeed materialise in the twenty-frst century, geo-
graphically crosses the ocean to the West and the European continent to the
East and is culturally transposed to New York and Istanbul. For Virginia,
this displacement implies various physical, cultural and literary transforma-
tions, when in contact with new ideas, customs and cultures. If some critics
believe that Woolf remained stuck ‘in the early twentieth century, and in
London, England, very far away’ (449), Gee’s novel evinces Virginia’s capa-
bility of crossing countries and cultures: she feels at ease in New York and
Istanbul, and her prose is read all over the world and continues to infuence
many women, irrespective of their religion, culture, language or nationality.
Virginia’s work also crosses cultures and borders through translation into
many languages, as seen in the Spanish, French and Italian translations of
her books that Angela fnds in a small bookshop in Manhattan.
Virginia is therefore alive and kicking on the literary scene and across
cultures. She exists thanks to writers like Angela, her literary daughter,
whom she literally follows everywhere, like a shadow. Virginia also has a
‘part’ to ‘play in the future’ (122) through Gerda, her literary granddaugh-
ter, who seems ready to continue her legacy. Through the relationships
between the three women writers, Virginia, Angela and Gerda, Gee’s novel
deals with literary fliation and the anxiety of infuence, an idea which was
clearly expressed by the author in her ‘Acknowledgements’: ‘Virginia Woolf
is an overwhelming presence in modern English literature, especially for
women who write. We who come after have to cope with her genius’ (474).
Gee thus explores the relationship between the two ephebi7 and their pre-
cursor. Angela is highly impressed with the greatness of ‘monumental’ (67)
authors that preceded her. Woolf haunted her even when she was dead but
has become even more intimidating now that she is alive. It is impossible
for Angela to ‘ever get rid of her’ (111). Although she idolises Virginia and
enjoys her company, at times, her presence becomes too much of a burden
and she would like to ‘escape her’ (211). Through her own relationship with
her daughter, Angela understands the necessity for the children to ‘forget’
their parents in order for them to be able to ‘shine’ (235). She is aware that
the current generation needs to leave the ancestors behind in order to create
their own, new path.
The title of Angela’s paper at the Istanbul conference, ‘Virginia Woolf: A
Long Shadow’, is signifcant for the critical debate it opens about contem-
porary authors’ ‘anxiety of infuence’. The metaphor of the shadow rever-
berates throughout Gee’s novel. Woolf casts a ‘long shadow’, which means
that she is a powerful literary fgure who set very high literary standards for
future generations of writers. Virginia follows Angela everywhere, not only
literally in New York and Istanbul, but also in her literary life. The shadow
is ‘long’, that is to say overwhelming, but also long-lasting, as it has already
endured for eight decades. It is therefore diffcult for Angela to ‘shine’ in
108 Virginia’s Daughters
Virginia’s shadow, as she has ‘eclipsed’ (15) other women writers, is taught
in universities and is ‘fetishize[d]’ (16). This overwhelming presence crushes
all her successors unless they are strong enough to emerge from her shadow
and fnd their place in the sun to ‘shine’. In this sense, Angela is rightly won-
dering, ‘Could I ever exist, so near such greatness?’ (238).
Although Angela pretends she is not a ‘jealous’ competitor (16) but a
grateful ‘daughter’ (158), she envies Woolf’s prose and its ‘clarity’, ‘aston-
ishing reach’ and ‘perception’ (16). She often compares her achievements
to Virginia’s and tries to assert her ‘individual talent’.8 Angela may be a
bestselling author, winner of the ‘Iceland Prize’ and the ‘Apple Martini
Prize’, but she has legitimate doubts when she compares her current work
to Virginia’s oeuvre which visibly stands the test of time, and often feels
belittled by her foremother: ‘Would she always, somehow, make me feel a
failure?’ (95). Angela admires what Virginia accomplished during her time
and the fact that she paved the way for other women to write: ‘she wrote
like an angel […]. A pinioned angel, not the household kind’ (51). Virginia
is compared to the Statue of Liberty, a ‘female warrior’: ‘tall, kindly, an
amazon. The mother brave enough to hold up the light’ (205).
But in Gee’s novel, Virginia is both a literary ‘foremother’ (354) and a
dependent child: indeed, while her prose and ideas have inspired contem-
porary writers like Angela, now she depends on them to go on living and
being read in this century. In her new life, most of the time Virginia relies on
Angela, follows her everywhere and needs her constant attention. Virginia
is like a newborn who needs guidance in this overwhelming new world, and
Angela must patiently explain everything to her. Just like Virginia taught
her to write and was a literary guide for her, Angela becomes Virginia’s
guide in the twenty-frst century. She is Virginia’s chaperone, ‘a parent fg-
ure’ (72) who often talks to Virginia ‘as if [she] were a child’ (79) and who
grows impatient after too many questions. Virginia is often curious and asks
awkward, uncomfortable questions, and complains that Angela’s job, like
that of any other mother, is ‘mostly saying ‘No’ to [her]’ (318). Little won-
der that exasperated Angela regularly feels she ‘needs a rest from Virginia’
(289).
Angela’s parental attitude is that of a grown-up who teaches a child the
appropriate social behaviour to adopt in public. She explains to Virginia,
who lacks ‘cultural awareness’ (341), that some things are ‘culturally’
‘wrong’ to say (335). Thus, she asks Virginia to moderate her outspoken
ideas and control her blunt words – which is socially, culturally and politi-
cally expected in the twenty-frst century. Language has also evolved, along
with social, technological and cultural habits. Virginia learns she cannot call
Jewish people ‘Jews’ (224) or African people ‘Africans’ (229); she must toler-
ate and respect people’s religious practices in public, even if she deems them
excessive, ‘archaic’, ‘medieval’ (224) or ‘primitive’ (230). She also learns that
obsolete words can turn into hurtful insults when used inappropriately, and
modern-day people are sensitive about the way they are collectively called.
 Virginia’s Daughters 109
Virginia’s outdated language is not appropriate to describe today’s realities
and feelings. She is a ‘dinosaur’ (245) who needs to ‘update [herself]’ (245).
Finally, Virginia understands that some ‘thoughts [aren’t] allowed in the
twenty-frst century’ (296) and that she now must use the right names and
terms, as antiquated words can be a form of political oppression or cultural
appropriation. Just like Virginia, as a literary foremother, taught Angela to
write, it is now Angela’s turn to help Virginia write with new tools: the old
writer needs the guidance of the younger one. Their two hands are super-
posed when they sign Virginia’s frst editions together. Symbolically, it is
signifcant that Virginia needs a twenty-frst-century hand and pen to exist.
Today’s literature can only be written by a new hand that is superposed over
Virginia’s: ‘the only way of re-inscribing the past is to channel it through the
present’ (Smith 226).
Despite her physical materialisation in the present, Virginia remains an
eminent writer of the past. She has already ‘entered the canon’ (Manhattan
156), and despite her greatness and the long shadow she casts on contempo-
rary authors, she is unable to write today. This is symbolised by the antique
dip pens she cannot fnd to purchase, the fountain pen and the biro which
she cannot use, the keyboard on the computer she cannot type on. Paper,
just like Virginia’s old habits of writing are of another time. The ‘chasms of
time’ (81) are refected in such material differences, and Virginia’s obsolete
tools, voice and language are inadequate to capture contemporary realties
for a contemporary audience. Despite ‘getting the hang of the twenty-frst
century’ (290), Virginia remains anchored in a particular epoch: ‘Yes, I had
my vision. But that was decades, a life ago. I had my vision in my own cen-
tury’ (210). When she takes the foor at her own conference, she publicly
declares that it is time for other women to continue, having paved the way
for them. It is now their turn to get out of her shadow and shine in the sun:
‘But I am only a visitor. I ached to write … But for me, that’s over’ (469).9 It
is Angela who takes over, as she is the right writer for her time.
While Angela stands for the present literature, Gerda embodies its future.
As her mother and Virginia before her, she has the ambition of becoming
a successful writer, thereby continuing the family tradition. There are con-
stant parallels between Gerda, a burgeoning, aspiring writer, and Virginia,
the ‘leviathan’ (34) of literature. Gerda also fghts her ‘Furies’, that is to say,
the school bullies at her boarding school who ‘eat her brain’ and, ‘like actual
Devils’, ‘jeer’ and ‘sneer’ at her (137). She records her battle with her Furies
in a sort of diary, part stream-of-consciousness autobiographical story like
Woolf’s diaristic prose, part heroic odyssey in the spirit of Hans Christian
Andersen, which could be interpreted as a postmodernist attempt to braid
genres and update literary traditions. She is Woolf’s neomodernist heir in
the way she uses a very Woolfan poetic language and fne, microscopic,
colourful observations about the natural world that surrounds her: she is
attentive to the ‘tiny green leaves’ in spring, the sun that shines ‘in a bar
on the table, a bar of gold that reached to [her]’ (102). Gerda has the same
110 Virginia’s Daughters
lyrical sensibility as Virginia who, at the same time in New York, observes
spring and nature coming to life:

[s]pring has scattered the park with beauty […] the sun on the plane
trees was fresh & bright, each tiny leaf was blowing, dancing […]. A fur
of tiny yellow-green crystals electrifed the outline of branches, mauve
and white crocuses starred the grass. (105)

Through the similar poetic prose she writes, Gerda clearly follows in
Virginia’s footsteps.
Woolf infuenced Angela at the outset of her career, but now Angela won-
ders where her writing is going. Her writing defnitely has Woolfan roots,
but Angela seems to have no visibility as to its future. In this context, Gerda
is going to take over, as she is symbolically gently pushing her mother away
at the conference to take the foor. It is Gerda who ‘will help Virginia go on
into the future’ (446). She confdently joins in the debate on writing, despite
her young age, at the conference. Angela is a writer for our times, Gerda a
writer for our future and Virginia’s infuence and heritage are truly alive in
both of them. Two new writing lives spring from her precepts and prose,
and Angela and Gerda carry out her legacy in different ways. Angela’s mes-
sage at the Woolf conference, an event organised by scholars to celebrate
Virginia’s legacy, is that like Shakespeare’s imagined sister from Woolf’s A
Room of One’s Own, who lives on in other women writers in the future, so
does Virginia: ‘she lives; for great poets never die; they are continuing pres-
ences: they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the fesh’ (457).
This Woolfan metaphor constitutes the basis of Gee’s plot: Virginia is a
‘great poet’ who ‘never die[d] entirely’ (472). Gee gave her the opportunity,
within her novel, to come back to life and walk among her characters, ‘in
the fesh’. On the plane back from Istanbul, Angela, Gerda and Virginia sit
‘side by side in another world’, a symbolic stance which suggests that there
is room for past, present and future authors to coexist on today’s literary
scene. Woolf survives in all her literary daughters and granddaughters, and
in their words: ‘We live in others. We live in words’ (472).
What happens today, at the beginning of the twenty-frst century, when
literary criticism has moved on and beyond post-structuralist theories such
as ‘the death of the author’? Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is the novelistic
response to this question, and Gee’s Virginia seems to authorise her own
birth as a character when she debates this notion with Angela and strongly
disagrees with it. This literary concept no longer seems to be relevant in
today’s critical landscape and academic theory. Angela voices the critics’
outdated arguments: ‘some modern scholars think authors don’t know any-
thing about their work’ (317).10 Virginia, the resurrected author, on the
contrary, believes she is the best equipped to talk about her work; she is the
ultimate specialist of her creation: ‘If the paper’s about me, I’m a specialist’
(316). Critics can only offer interpretative speculation, as opposed to the
 Virginia’s Daughters 111
author’s deep insight into her own work: ‘I know this will sound strange
to you, but they won’t believe what you say about your work’, Angela tells
Virginia. ‘Because I am dead?’ asks Virginia. This leads Angela to explain
the concept of ‘intentional fallacy’: ‘It’s because some modern scholars don’t
believe authors know anything about their work’ (317).11
But Gee’s Virginia is the ‘living embodiment’ (317) that such literary
theories are ‘ridiculous’ and don’t ‘make sense’ (317). As an author who
used to permanently record her metacreative process in her private papers,
Virginia argues that authors are the ones who wrote their work and their
conscious intentions do count and cannot be as easily dismissed. She there-
fore concludes that it is the critic who ‘killed’ the author in order to gain
power over their own work. Virginia justifes this conspiratorial putsch in
terms of the politics of power, as critics have gained too much authority
over the author – an explanation which is in keeping with her vision of
the twenty-frst-century power balance and domination: the power men still
have over women, the power politicians have over populations which some-
times turns into dictatorships, and the religious power which makes some
people fanatics.
In her satire of academic literary theory, Gee implies that the critic’s job
seems to be to coin and spread clever-sounding critical concepts such as
‘the death of the author’ or ‘intentional fallacy’. In academia, ‘subjective
approach[es]’ (462) are suspicious: literary interpretations must be scien-
tifc; one needs to have a ‘theory’ (462) to support such interpretations. This
is exemplifed at the conference by the vociferous Professor Moira Penny
who criticises Angela’s heartfelt speech, based on familiarity with Virginia,
and not on solid critical theories. Angela admits that her speech remains
unorthodox in post-New Criticism academia: ‘Perhaps it was true. I had
not cited. I had abandoned my written draft, which made many nods to
academics. I trusted the text, Virginia’s text, and tried to please the audi-
ence’ (463).
Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ concept is here ironically ‘killed’ by the
dead and resuscitated author, Virginia. She asserts her own authorial voice
and autonomy at the conference dedicated to her oeuvre. This implies that
authors regain legitimacy to discuss their work with their audiences at lit-
erary events such as conferences, but also book fairs, library readings, or in
interviews. The author and her readers can exchange and share the foor:
indeed, at the conference in Istanbul, Virginia is part of the audience, takes
the microphone and imparts her ideas of her work and vision of writing.
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan constitutes Gee’s contemporary novelistic
response to Barthes’s untenable theory. This fctional, supernatural trick
of resurrecting Virginia also works as a justifcation of the raison d’être
of the practice of biofction,12 which consists of resurrecting past autho-
rial fgures. Virginia is extremely happy to have been given the oppor-
tunity to come back to life and meet her new readers. However, at some
point she has doubts: ‘Why did I come back? Couldn’t they let me be?’
112 Virginia’s Daughters
(58). This could be read as an argument against the proliferation of this
genre. Shouldn’t dead authors like Woolf be allowed to rest in peace and
shouldn’t we stop capitalising on her fame, iconic status and brand image?
What are the ethics of exhuming great authors, of rummaging through
their private lives and bringing out information (for proft) that was not
intended to be shared?
In an interview, Gee talks about contemporary writers who take advan-
tage of this literary trend and use a ‘powerful and charismatic fgure whose
audience may in some way perhaps increase theirs’, but confesses that this
was not her personal motive, as she considers this as a ‘form of parasitism
in other writers’ historical fction’. Her intention was not to ‘steal [Woolf’s]
soul’13 but to use the resurrected character as a device to comment on our
world and its evolution, which does not always mean progress. Virginia is
a ‘fctional puppet’ (Manhattan 474), a ‘fctional avatar’ (Gee, ‘Depression’)
through which Gee uninhibitedly tells the truth about our world. Her
satire is thus a perfectly executed act of ventriloquism. Virginia Woolf in
Manhattan, as Gee conceived it, is also a ‘twenty-frst-century love letter’
to an author who has been her inspiration since the age of seventeen. Her
character Angela’s conference paper constitutes a paean to Woolf and her
powerful writing that still inspires readers and writers today. Homage and
the relationship between past writers and their readers decades later are
also at the heart of Cunningham’s The Hours, through Woolf’s haunting
presence in Laura Brown’s life. Cunningham connects the Laura Brown and
Virginia Woolf sections to show the power Woolf still has to reach her
readers. These connections across time and space become a ‘real’ dialogue
in Gee’s novel, as her Virginia meets her reader in person.
However, contrary to Cunningham, Gee does not glorify or romanti-
cise suicide and depression but makes Virginia’s reader realise the terrible
loss suicide was for Virginia, a funny, lively, passionate, curious person, as
well as for her legatees. Gee’s novel is an act of reparation for Woolf, who
has entered public consciousness in a stereotypical, distorted way, having
been misrepresented by writers who constantly and deliberately focus only
on the dark, dramatic and sensational sides of a complex personality: a
whole life full of extraordinary achievements cannot be reduced to her ill-
ness and tragic death. Gee’s novel about resurrecting Woolf thus amounts
to corrective justice, just like Hawkes and Manso’s feminist detective novel
The Shadow of the Moth, but goes further in its implications. It is ulti-
mately a way to assert that the past remains alive in our lives and can be
redeemed in the present: Virginia is given a second chance in Virginia Woolf
in Manhattan to live a more fulflled life. Beyond Virginia’s literal coming
back to life in this fantasy scenario and the interaction of the comic duo of
Angela and Virginia, Gee’s novel explores our serious relation with great
literary fgures of the past and the heritage they left us, which presents a
double bind: we are immensely indebted to them, but we are also eager to
emerge from their burdensome ‘long shadow’ and initiate new paths. We
 Virginia’s Daughters 113
now have Virginia’s encouragement and blessing to do so: ‘Your turn now
… I shall write no more’ (470).

Virginia’s Biological Progeny

In The Year of Henry James, Lodge outlines two main directions usually
taken by biofctional authors: some of them stick very closely to the histori-
cal record, while others ‘invent freely, sometimes to the point of travesty’
(9). Just like Gee, Morgan clearly takes the second path and goes to the end
of it, stretching and defying the bounds of plausibility in her novel A Book
for All and None. In her ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end of A Book for All
and None, Morgan explains how she used Nietzsche’s and Woolf’s lives to
create her ‘what if’ world (360). The imagined material was prompted and
authorised by the ‘cracks and interstices’ in the ‘documented lives’ (360)
of the two historical fgures. However, Morgan does much more than just
flling in the fne ‘cracks and interstices’ of biography, as she heavily manip-
ulates biographical truth and forges historical records: ‘The factual is repo-
sitioned, or sometimes ignored, in an entirely cavalier manner. Characters,
events and exchanges are conjured out of nowhere. Chronology is subverted’
(359). Morgan crafted a story in which she took enormous liberties with
existing, recorded biography, and many surprising episodes or incidents are
mere ‘fgments of [her] imagination’ (359).
Morgan plaits together several strands of past and present stories, which
intersect in unexpected ways. We follow German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche’s instant falling in love and intense, obsessive relationship with
Russian émigré Louise von Salomé in Orta, Italy, in 1882, and his incar-
ceration in a mental asylum in Jena, Germany, seven years later. In parallel,
we also pursue Virginia’s mysterious sojourn in a Pembrokeshire village in
1908, followed by her second visit in 1915 and a third one in 1930. The
stories which take place in the present, in 2005, revolve around Beatrice
Kopus, a Woolf scholar in her forties, and Raymond Greatorex, a Nietzsche
scholar and an Oxford don in his sixties. Skipping from story to story at
convenient moments creates suspense, which culminates in the fnal sensa-
tional revelations in the last pages of the novel. The story of two academics
and their consuming research on Woolf and Nietzsche harks back to Byatt’s
Possession, with obvious echoes of the two modern-day academics’ pas-
sions and obsessions for past writers. While Beatrice and Raymond research
the love lives of their subjects, their professional relationship also gradually
turns into romance. The progress of their affair is interwoven with details of
Nietzsche’s involvement with Lou von Salomé as well as Woolf’s encounter
with a mysterious German sailor.
The dates interspersed in the plot function as clues that retrospectively
explain the fnal surprise: in August 1908, Virginia is placed in Manorbier,
Pembrokeshire; on 8 May 1909, Zeena Lightfoot (Greatorex) is born; on 8
May 1930, Virginia visits Pembrokeshire again for the grand unveiling of
114 Virginia’s Daughters
a stained church window designed by her sister Vanessa Bell and Duncan
Grant an event also attended by Zeena on her twenty-frst birthday. The
ultimate revelation goes beyond what Beatrice sensed at the beginning when
she set out to prove Nietzsche’s infuence on Woolf. She discovers deeper,
more mysterious and unexpected links between Woolf and Nietzsche, which
reverberate down to the present day and converge in the very person of
her lover, Raymond, who is connected to both Woolf and Nietzsche by
blood: he is Virginia’s grandson and Nietzsche’s great-grandson. Beatrice
also eventually fnds out that she is pregnant with Raymond’s child. Thus,
as a scholar, through the book she is writing, Beatrice carries on Woolf’s
and Nietzsche’s literary legacies, and as a woman, in her body, she carries
both Woolf’s and Nietzsche’s heir.
At the beginning of the novel, Beatrice would like to resume her work on
‘Virginia Woolf and Time’ at Oxford and seeks out Raymond, a Nietzsche
specialist, for help with her research. She ends up examining a very spe-
cifc slice of time in Virginia Stephen’s life, from 1908 to 1909, when she
was twenty-six -twenty-seven years old, before her marriage to Leonard,
while she was creating her frst literary ‘child’,14 The Voyage Out, as well
as – Beatrice will fnd out – conceiving her fesh-and-blood child, a daugh-
ter. Beatrice initially has the conviction, but no solid, scholarly proof, that
von Salomé, who was tangentially linked to the Bloomsbury group, might
have acquainted Virginia with Nietzschean philosophy. She thus sets out to
establish that ‘linkage’ (278) upon which she intends to rest her scholarly
interpretations.
Beatrice is convinced that there are some secrets which never resurface in
biographies. Nobody is ‘wholly traceable’ (70): some details always remain
buried, undocumented and unknown to posteriority. This truism justifes
the secrets that have not been previously ‘traced’ by respectable Woolf biog-
raphers and legitimises Beatrice’s own fndings. Besides, biographers cannot
explore their subjects’ secret consciousnesses. For this, one needs novelistic
means, and this is what Beatrice’s ‘speculative piece’ (69) is about: she gives
free rein to her imagination and dreams up what remains hidden, unre-
corded, or silenced. The character of Raymond could be considered the bio-
graphical novelists’ defender and spokesman in his convictions that doubts
and speculation are better means of exploration than the ‘implacable solid-
ity’ (237) of evidence. This paradoxical comment coming from a scholar is
an interesting metabiofctional comment: doubts, hypotheses and the explo-
ration of possibilities constitute a more fruitful investigative approach and
tell the readers more about the ‘true’ personality of a historical fgure than
any biography. Besides, Raymond is critical of the scholarship he has to
constantly produce in order to keep his job and is convinced that the arid,
useless academic articles that he publishes do not tell much about his sub-
ject. Fiction is therefore seen as a more rewarding intellectual and creative
endeavour which engages with and ‘illuminates’ (81) the subject’s spirit,
mind and emotions.
 Virginia’s Daughters 115
Raymond also voices the idea that there is a ‘gap between how we
imagine [people] and what they are’ (36). The concept of the implied
author or the reader’s ‘own sense’ of an author echoes the literary preoc-
cupations of Gee’s characters, too. The epigraph that Morgan selected for
her novel is illuminating insofar as Nietzsche’s resonant phrase from Thus
Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–1885) has guided
her creative impulse: ‘to transform every “It was” into “Thus would I
have it!” – that only do I call redemption’ (n.p.). With this quote, the
author draws our attention to the fact that transformation is inevitably
involved in the process of recording the past. Morgan thus chose to record
the events not exactly how they unfolded, but as she wishes they did.
Shaping the available material according to her vision is deemed ‘a central
impulse in the creation of fction’ (Book 360). It is implied that past lives
are diffcult to trace and capture from today’s perspective, which is why
we always resort to speculation and even fction. Someone’s past life is
only ever available to us as conjecture, and all we can do is modulate it
into a satisfactory narrative. No wonder that Beatrice’s academic paper
on Woolf eventually reads like a novel. Speculation, although it has no
scientifc value and is completely rejected in the academic world – scholars
do not allow themselves to ‘indulge in’ it (21) – has nevertheless the merit
of pushing the boundaries of the known or provable and opening the vast
realm of fction, and it is suggested that it is in this very realm that the
‘truth’ can be found. In this sense, Beatrice contends that fction’s imagi-
native engagement might be the best way to approach such ‘idols’ rather
than traditional scholarship.
Beatrice puts these specifc ideas into practice and reconstructs her
Virginia from meagre fragments, as the 1908–1909 period she focuses on
presents many ‘cracks and interstices’. She amasses disparate scraps of let-
ters, diary entries and photographs and designs a narrative arc that makes
sense to her. The reconstruction of her subject almost a century after the
events took place amounts to a work of detection based on following clues
and relying on hard facts, but also on her intuition, imagination, deep con-
victions and identifcation with her subject-character Virginia. Like other
character-detectives in Barron’s The White Garden, Beatrice has ‘intui-
tions’ or ‘sixth senses’ (74) about a connection between Woolf, Nietzsche
and von Salomé. She therefore ‘embark[s] on a quest’ (9), ‘investigate[s]’
(9), ‘hunt[s]’ (248) for clues, ‘excavate[s]’ (277), ‘track[s] down’ evidence
(278) and is determined to ‘resolve [the] mystery’ (278) which links the two
authors. She gradually becomes obsessed with her ‘Woolf project’ (277)
which is ‘constantly in her head’ (278). Just like Margaux in The White
Garden, Beatrice’s aim is to explore little-known ground and be the frst to
‘dig’ where other scholars have not looked in order to unbury new, revolu-
tionary evidence. Beatrice’s conception of scholarship is similar to detective
work: scholars’ work often originates in their ‘gut instinct’ (39) but must
ultimately be supported by evidence.
116 Virginia’s Daughters
As a Woolf scholar, Beatrice revises old arguments, fnds new critical
space and puts forward original theories. Despite the ‘considerable resur-
gence of interest in [Woolf] in the last ten years’ (18), Beatrice knows that
‘very little had as yet been written about [Nietzsche’s] relation to Woolf’ (9).
The only ‘tenuous’ (9) link so far that scholars established is that ‘Nietzsche’s
rejection of God is refected in Woolf’s desire to break the hegemony of the
logical sentence’ (10). However, the scholars’ subjective arguments do not
rest on any solid ‘evidence’ (10), which is what Beatrice herself is looking
for. The frst step in any scholarly work, before the more rewarding act
of interpretation or conjecture, is to establish ‘irrefutable’ ‘linkage’ (278).
The intriguing coincidence that places Raymond’s mother, on her twenty-
frst birthday, at the celebration of the Pembridge Window in the company
of Virginia – the records indicating that Virginia was strangely using her
maiden name, Stephen, and was surprisingly not accompanied by her omni-
present husband Leonard – constitutes perfect material for a ‘good arti-
cle’ (175). All these startling fndings raise pressing scholarly questions for
Beatrice: ‘What had Virginia Woolf been doing there? Why was the event
not mentioned in the diaries or letters? Why had no critic, no scholar of
Woolf or Bloomsbury, picked up on it?’ (176), as well as obsessive personal
questions for Raymond: ‘What were his own people doing there? Was it just
by chance, a coincidental invitation on Zeena’s coming-of-age?’ (176). The
‘simultaneous living of these people’ (99) that arouses Raymond’s curiosity
turns out to be made of surprising intersections of circumstances that lead
back to him.
Beatrice relies on ‘authentic documents’ – fabricated by Morgan from
real material – to prove her theories. For instance, in Manorbier, Beatrice
fnds a facsimile postcard which consists of a compilation of primary
sources (fragments of letters written by Virginia Stephen to Vanessa and
Clive Bell from Manorbier between 19 and 30 August 1908). Several pri-
mary sources are reshuffed by Morgan to compose the text of Virginia’s
postcard:

But I feel so full of ideas at this moment, for a book I am going to

write; […] and I believe I can care less than ever before for what peo-
ple say.
(Letters 1: 366, to Vanessa Bell, 30 August 1908)15

I am surprised to fnd how beautiful it all is […] how lovely, and how
primitive.
(Letters 1: 355–356, to Clive Bell, 19 August 1098)

It pours, beneath a drifting mist, and I have been writing the frst pages
of Mlle de la Valliere, and snapping my fngers at all the storms […] in
the world.
(Letters 1: 357, to Vanessa Bell, 20 August 1908)
 Virginia’s Daughters 117
Just like Atkins in Vita and Virginia, Morgan cuts and pastes portions of
Woolf’s real letters and assembles them in a postcard that Virginia sends
Clive while in Manorbier:

My Dear Clive […] I have been writing the frst pages and I believe it is
a real beginning but I cannot be certain. I feel so full of ideas and care
less than ever before for what people say. How beautiful it is here, how
lovely and how primitive. It pours beneath a changing mist, but I snap
my fngers at all the storms in the world.
(Book 98, italics in the original text)

Beatrice also digs out other ‘authentic’, unpublished documents from

archives – this time, completely fabricated by Morgan – and brings to light
new elements that ‘come into equation’ (38) and change established inter-
pretation and biographical records.
The scant written evidence that Beatrice fnds concerning this precise
period in Woolf’s life prompts her to leave the confned space of libraries,
archives and traditional scholarship, go to Manorbier and physically follow
Virginia’s traces. Beatrice fnds the cottage called ‘Sea View’ where Virginia
stayed in 1908 while writing her frst novel, The Voyage Out, and sees the
lighthouse which she is convinced later inspired the author to write To the
Lighthouse. Beatrice collects impressions and sights to get a ‘sense of what
[Virginia’s] imagination was doing at that time’ (69). It is a ‘monumental
task’ (69), as a century after Virginia’s sojourn here, there are no tangible,
physical clues left. Beatrice must therefore trust her impressions and resort
to imagination in order to reconstruct the Virginia who lived at the time.
Her scholar’s quest for her ‘subject’ thus turns into a novelist’s explora-
tion of her ‘character’. What Beatrice ‘wishe[s] to construct’ (76) is not the
exact replica of reality, but an idealised, romanticised, fantasised version of
it. Virginia resurfaces from decades of silence through Beatrice’s personal
vision of her. In her third-person narration, based on the evidence she has
previously amassed, Beatrice imagines Virginia’s slightest gestures, thoughts
and states of mind, as well as the atmosphere that surrounded her:

Woolf turns, comes down from the headland. It is a stormy August. The
weather is uncertain. It has started to rain. The wind tugs at her hat and
she laughs as she holds on to it. Down, down she comes. It is unsea-
sonably dark and a light or two has already come on in the village. She
picks her way carefully over the uneven cobbles. The castle is blackened
out on the ridge above.
(71, italics in the original text)

The intimation about the atmosphere (the predominant wind and rain) is
based on precise weather details gathered from Woolf’s diary: ‘tonight I
was fairly whirled round by the wind & the rain’; ‘The wind is really high’
118 Virginia’s Daughters
(Apprentice 381) as well as from her letters to Vanessa: ‘It pours, beneath a
drifting mist’ (Letters 1: 357). Beatrice’s reconstruction rests on such minor
documented facts but develops into an intricate, detailed conjecture.
Just like Morgan who confessed in her ‘Acknowledgement’ that ‘the
factual is repositioned, or sometimes ignored’ (359), her character Beatrice
deliberately chooses to distort reality, select facts and rearrange them to her
convenience:

I know, as a matter of fact, that Thoby and Adrian would have got down
too […], but I prefer to think of its being just [Vanessa and Virginia].
It was raining and a trap came up from the village to fetch them. But
Virginia Stephen walked, I am convinced of it.
(72)

Beatrice envisions the past not as it actually was, but as she prefers to think it
was, according to her knowledge, convictions and intuitions, which fully ech-
oes the epigraph Morgan chose for her novel as a guiding creative principle.
Beatrice imagines Virginia waiting for someone and the whole weight
of her fabricated account rests on this premise. All the information she
subsequently fnds fts her initial intuitions. Virginia falls in love with a
mysterious sailor, Stephan, and conceives a child with him. It is quite obvi-
ous for Beatrice that Virginia, before becoming Woolf, had a passionate
love life. Unlike the usual representation of Woolf in the popular imagi-
nation, Beatrice is not interested in Woolf’s tragic, spectacular, sensa-
tional side (that still fascinates people today), but in the rich potential of
her love life. However, while Beatrice focuses on the buoyancy of young
Virginia’s life, other characters in A Book for All and None who have simi-
lar Woolfan fates, indirectly unveil Virginia in a completely different light
from Beatrice’s own reconstruction. Other portrayals of Virginia as fragile,
unbalanced, depressive and suicidal resurface through oblique comparisons
with her biological daughter and grandson and through the genetic legacy
she transmits to them.
Morgan creates echoes, parallels and connections between her charac-
ters’ experiences which hark back to the Nietzschean philosophy of the
‘eternal return’ formulated in Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and
None. These intended links are illustrated by Morgan’s own novel title,
which is directly borrowed from Nietzsche. The parallels she draws between
characters have multiple levels: it concerns the past authors, Nietzsche and
Woolf, and the present-day scholars who follow their respective traces,
Raymond and Beatrice. Both Woolf and Nietzsche are said to have had
‘a mind that was extraordinary’ (3). Nietzsche ‘gather[s] the whole of the
nineteenth century into one voice’ (3), and so does Woolf for the twen-
tieth century. A Book for All and None thus brings together two autho-
rial fgures that marked their own centuries, two ‘brilliant mind[s]’ (21).
Morgan’s Nietzsche and Virginia are both powerful creators, with a rich
 Virginia’s Daughters 119
‘life of the mind’ (312). They are also portrayed as characters who often
have mental breakdowns and are plagued by dark moods, anguishes and
gloomy thoughts. They both battle with their ‘madness’ (3) and have strong
suicidal impulses. The two authors’ particular mental conditions are seen as
destructive, but at the same time constitute their major creative force. For
Nietzsche, the fever that takes hold of him is ‘the good fever’, out of which
‘Zarathustra came’ (309). Any disruptive external event is threatening for
the consuming creative process and may at any time upset the precarious
internal balance that is propitious for creation. This fear of upsetting inter-
ruptions is most certainly the reason why Nietzsche puts the unopened letter
in which Lou announces she is pregnant with their child in his pocket and
forgets about it for the next six years.
Morgan’s portrayal of Nietzsche fts the philosopher’s belief that suffering
and sacrifce are necessary ingredients which spark and feed creativity. This
is stated by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘To the good Dionysus […]
once I brought in all secrecy and reverence my frst born – being, it seems to
me, the last to have brought him a sacrifce (Book 318). This passage read
by Beatrice seems to imply that Nietzsche must have sacrifced his frst born
for the sake of a life fully devoted to creation. These considerations of sac-
rifce or giving up their children bring together Nietzsche and Virginia, but
also Beatrice, who is considering at some point getting an abortion in order
to ‘move forward with her work on Woolf’ and ‘regain equilibrium’ (320).
It is suggested that this deeply personal event – which stems from their love
lives, from their passionate ‘carnal’ (312) experiences – produces an imbal-
ance in the authors’ intellectual lives and prevents their creative genius.
While creating echoes and similarities between Nietzsche’s and Woolf’s
personal and creative itineraries, Morgan draws another parallel between
Beatrice’s and Raymond’s academic paths and fascinations with the lives
and works of their subjects. Both Woolf and Nietzsche are ‘monumental’
fgures who left a big ‘infuence’ (3) on them. Merlin Greatorex, Raymond’s
father, states in the ‘Prologue’ that it is Nietzsche’s ‘long shadow that gives
resonance to our sun’ (3). Retrospectively, his statement can also be read
as ‘it is his long shadow that gives resonance to our son’, as Merlin’s son
Raymond is not only a scholar who specialises in Nietzsche, but he is also
Nietzsche’s ‘hidden’ grandson: in both these capacities, Raymond is haunted
by the shadow of the great man. Both Raymond and Beatrice are obsessed
with their ‘ghosts’ and feel the need to physically and intellectually follow
in their subjects’ steps.
The relevance of studying these powerful authorial fgures is expressed
by Raymond who speaks of the ‘need to research Nietzsche’ because he is
‘our heritage’ and ‘our future’ (84). Their popularity today is largely main-
tained by scholars: ‘Why has Nietzsche’s popularity surged recently, why
has interest in him accelerated, conferences proliferated, the number of
articles on him in scholarly journals suddenly increased?’ (85). Hence, the
scholars must always be on the lookout for new evidence, arousing readers’
120 Virginia’s Daughters
curiosity and other scholars’ interest. Keeping the author in the academic
limelight is essential for his or her survival in the present and future. For
instance, the discovery of a ‘missing section of Lou von Salomé’s diary’
‘would cast a signifcant light on this vital relationship [with Nietzsche]’
(85). Raymond is handed von Salomé’s unpublished manuscript diary by
a Professor Volkheim who hopes that the discoveries Raymond will make
‘will add signifcantly to Nietzsche scholarship’ (155).
Beatrice’s scholarly interest in Woolf turns into an investigation into
Raymond’s own genealogical tree. Thanks to her detective work, Beatrice
reveals Raymond’s true origins and thus gives meaning to his life. As
Virginia’s heir, Raymond is the last branch in her genealogical tree, and
he inherits characteristics from his grandmother passed on through his
mother. The fnal revelation makes sense diegetically – albeit not histori-
cally, biographically or biologically – as it is sustained by the numerous
links that Morgan weaves between Virginia, Zeena and Raymond through-
out the narration. With her dark moods, her fears and suicidal attempts,
Zeena seems to be re-enacting her mother’s illness and fate and perpetuating
her genetic burden. By creating Zeena in the image of her mother, Morgan
makes Virginia’s disease appear as a curse which repeats itself, which also
illustrates the Nietzschean philosophy of the eternal recurrence of the same
experience. Like her biological mother, Zeena has a medical history of
depression. In pictures, she ‘seems to be breathing under water’ (112): her
aquatic-like environment is a direct hint to her mother’s tragic fate. But
Zeena is also the child of her father, Stephan von Salomé, who, like his
father before, experiences prophetic visions. ‘[Stephan] has woken up some-
times in the middle of the night with the sea on fre around him, dreaming of
fayed fesh’ (358). These visionary mental images announce his tragic death
by drowning and links his fate to Virginia’s. Zeena’s joint genetic inherit-
ance, from Virginia and Stephan, makes her, and later her son, Raymond,
who and what they are.
Like her mother, Zeena clearly suffers from bipolar disorder, a condition
which can be temporarily stabilised with a ‘modern method’, which is sup-
posed to be ‘very effective’ (199). But this brutal treatment, the electric shock
therapy, blows her mind ‘into little pieces’ (199). The description of Zeena’s
physical treatment brings together her ancestors’ intellectual heritage in a
subtle way. It appears that both Woolf and Nietzsche knew how to take
advantage of their mental condition and they conceptualised its function-
ing. The electric current that blows apart and sifts ‘the atoms of [Zeena’s]
thought’ (199) is a nod to Woolf’s artistic philosophy in ‘Modern Fiction’.
On the other hand, this modern, scientifc treatment Zeena is subject to
(‘The electricity whipped along the corridors of her mind and her brain siz-
zled. Her legs and arms jerked and her soul was dispensed with. Her blad-
der evacuated. There was no God’ [200]) echoes Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’
motto and philosophy put in the mouth of a ‘madman’ (‘The Madman’, The
Gay Science, sect.125).
 Virginia’s Daughters 121
Virginia’s genetic legacy also resurfaces in her grandson. Raymond often
explores the ‘corridors of his mind’ (343) and sometimes experiences moments
of being: these ‘shining, golden moments’ have their ‘own aura of unique-
ness’ (35) and are detached from the ordinary, factual ‘cotton wool of life’.
Like his mother who welcomes the voices in her head, Raymond embraces
these ‘blessed interlude[s]’ (35) and ‘marvel[s]’ at them. He is acutely aware
of these ‘disembodied fragments of beauty’ (82) that invade him and that he
‘preserve[s]’ ‘in [his] memory’ (82), whenever the ‘human hand’ is able to
‘remove from what is ephemeral and ethereal the spirit of sublimity that is at
its heart’ (82). Raymond thinks of these special moments that are ‘never to
be repeated’, ‘never to be recaptured’ (99): these moments ‘of discovery’ ‘ebb
out’ of people ‘into the dispensation of the new world’ (99).
Zeena preserves all the secret details of her birth in a box, and after her
death, Raymond inherits his mother’s ‘cache of letters’ (176), which con-
tains important documents he never had access to. He fnally opens this
‘Pandora’s box’ (177) and releases all its secrets. In this box, he fnds letters
from a mysterious ‘SVS’ – the explanation for the initials, ‘Stephan von
Salomé’, is only disclosed in the last page of the novel – and newspaper
cuttings from WWI concerning the sinking of a German battleship, which
corresponds to Stephan’s death. The box also contains Zeena’s adoptive
mother, Evie’s diary, which puts ‘all the pieces in place’ (345) and confrms
that Zeena is ‘truly’ Virginia’s daughter. A ‘ceremonial handing over’ (351),
with the lighthouse (symbol of Zeena’s parents’ love) in the background is
enacted on 20 May 1909. The child, from Evie’s perspective, was simply
an ‘error’ (351) of Virginia’s youth and life inexperience. At the end of her
quest, Beatrice miraculously fnds an unexpected photograph in an uncata-
logued archive which constitutes the solid proof that Lou met Virginia at the
Pembridge Window opening, an event which thus brings the three genera-
tions of women (grandmother, mother and daughter) together at the same
time and place, on 8 May 1930: ‘Louise von Salomé was approaching sev-
enty, Woolf not yet ffty. It was May 8th. […] Zeena’s twenty-frst birthday,
and the Pembridge Window was about to be unveiled’ (285).
Morgan’s portrait of Virginia is depicted through several characters’
perspectives: Evie’s diary, Zeena’s memories and Beatrice’s speculative
reconstruction. Virginia’s portrait is also drawn indirectly, through numer-
ous psychological similarities with her descendants, Zeena and Raymond.
Virginia ‘lives’ in her offspring and ‘inhabits’ them. This representation
made of disparate fragments speaks volumes about the way the process
of reconstructing a past authorial fgure works: it is based on established
record, memories and testimonies of the time, as well as our contemporary
imagination. The further we get from the authorial fgure in time, the more
we resort to imagination and leave behind or ignore the historical record.
The past becomes available to us as mere conjecture.
The academic paper that Beatrice initially sets out to write turns into
a different kind of narrative that grows out of the ‘real’ details that she
122 Virginia’s Daughters
discovers. From a subject of study, Virginia becomes a character in a story.
Beatrice can see ‘in her mind’s eye’ (80) what Virginia sees, feels, senses,
experiences, imagines and thinks. This imaginative process allows Beatrice
to completely identify with Virginia, walk in her steps and slip inside her
mind. She can even imagine Virginia’s perfectly balanced moment of being,
just before her mysterious encounter with her lover. When the young man’s
door opens in the story and Virginia ‘steps inside’ (80), Beatrice also opens
the door to speculation, to a parallel world, a ‘what if’ world in which
Virginia, at twenty-six, has a love affair with a young sailor in Manorbier.
Unlike an academic paper, Beatrice’s story has novelistic features, as it pro-
vides suspense, cliff-hangers and secret, mysterious encounters that propel
her narrative.
Beatrice’s methods of exploration of her subject may not be scholarly
valid, but ft the intrinsic principles of biofction writing, as she explores her
character’s consciousnesses and leaves behind the physical evidence that has
initially allowed her imagination to take off. In a novel which is built on
parallels, intersecting fates, interlocking effects and the re-enactment of the
eternal return, through a mise en abyme narrative stunt, Morgan’s Beatrice,
the Woolf scholar, who has a vast knowledge of her subject, prefers to
resort to imagination (like Morgan herself) to better approach her character.
Beatrice’s ‘speculative piece’ about her Virginia mirrors Morgan’s biograph-
ical novel about her Virginia which contains it and provides metacritical
comments on it: indeed, Beatrice often questions and formulates concerns
related to the relationship between fact and fction, truth and imagination.
While other novels or plays studied in this book offer distorted or partial
representations of Woolf, focusing only on specifc aspects of the author’s
life or personality such as her illness, dark thoughts, death or, on the con-
trary, her independent, adventurous spirit and her lively and fun nature,
Morgan’s ffth-degree biofction is a different case study altogether. The
author’s misrepresentation of Virginia as a young woman who gets preg-
nant with her lover’s child and who gives up her daughter goes beyond the
established bounds of biography: it is indeed, in Lodge’s terms, a complete
‘travesty’ of truth. However, Morgan’s aim is clearly not to present a truth-
ful portrait of the young Virginia Stephen or Friedrich Nietzsche, and her
portrayal method does not consist of adhering as closely as possible to their
biographical record; like the majority of biofctional novels in which Woolf
appears as a character, Morgan uses the two iconic authorial fgures to raise
questions about the different types of legacies Woolf and Nietzsche have
left and to point at issues of misrepresentation and misappropriation which
can easily threaten their reputations and iconic statuses. On the one hand,
Merlin bequeaths his son, Raymond, the volumes of Nietzsche’s work. This
constitutes a family heirloom in more than one sense, as Nietzsche’s work is
carried on by future generations of scholars embodied by his own grandson.
Raymond’s main job in the twenty-frst century consists of rehabilitating
Nietzsche’s memory, as his philosophy was distorted and appropriated by
 Virginia’s Daughters 123
the Nazis. Raymond’s vital mission is therefore to restore Nietzsche’s repu-
tation for today’s readers. On the other hand, Woolf’s iconic position is
stronger than ever today, and this is seen in Morgan’s novel in the way that
several characters keep capitalising on her image, making a tourist attrac-
tion out of her memory.
In Pembrokeshire, Beatrice discovers several cottages called or conveni-
ently re-baptised ‘Sea View’, whose owners claim to have hosted Virginia
and who are eager to give guided tours of her ‘room’. Everybody claims to
own her: ‘it makes a good tale, having a famous writer in your pedigree’ (78).
There are as many ‘truths’ or ‘lies’ about Virginia as people who appropriate
her. One lady who owns the house where Virginia allegedly stayed in Wales
created a ‘little shrine in the corner with pictures of Woolf in it’ (76), and
feels she has ‘a huge privilege to be custodian of this small piece of Woolf’s
heritage’ (76). In an ambient smell of essential oils, she treats Virginia’s
ghostly presence in a shamanistic way: ‘She turned to the shrine in the cor-
ner, made a little obeisance, and said, “Peace”’ (76). However, the events
she claimed happened in her house do not correspond to Beatrice’s intuition
and familiarity with Virginia. Beatrice’s vision of Virginia is informed by
her own knowledge and understanding of the author’s life and work. This
confrontation of fantasies about such an iconic author evinces the idea that
we all – be it in our popular or academic imagination – reconstruct Woolf
according to our knowledge, certitudes, intuitions and agendas: we all cre-
ate a Virginia who resembles us and fulfls our needs and expectations.
Lastly, Morgan’s characters in A Book for All and None, just like Gee’s
characters in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Barron’s characters in The
White Garden, raise questions about the renewal of scholarly interpre-
tations of an author’s work and their enduring infuence on the literary
scene. Every new archive discovery – even a few words scrawled on a piece
of paper, as is the case with Beatrice’s discovery – is made to appear as
a spectacular breakthrough which can revolutionise interpretation. Such
resurfacing information, decades after an author’s death, is precious and
coveted, and being the frst one to ‘possess’ the new material and boost
one’s career thanks to it is essential in the academic world. Eight decades
after Woolf’s death, scholars are still digging for and hoping to fnd unpub-
lished nuggets.
Like Gee’s Virginia and Morgan’s Raymond, we may wonder why some
authors are still relevant and why they still infuence us today, while oth-
ers have faded into obscurity. Raymond states that Nietzsche had a direct
impact on Yeats, but possibly only an indirect infuence on Woolf, through
the medium of Walter Pater who absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas and prolif-
erated them at the turn of the twentieth century in his ‘Renaissance’. In
the same way, Woolf’s infuence on us today may very well be less and
less direct, as the common twenty-frst-century reader has less contact with
Woolf’s primary sources and more with mediated images of her, especially
through biographical novels in which she appears as a character in fction.
124 Virginia’s Daughters
Ghosts and hauntings, both literal and metaphoric, are at the heart of the
two novels examined in this chapter. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and A
Book for All and None are ultimately about literary tradition, heritage, fli-
ation, lineage and the diffculty of present-day individual talents to emerge
from the long shadow of their formidable literary ancestor. Through differ-
ent stories, both novels raise the same question about Woolf’s heritage: is
it a blessing or a curse? ‘What was [Virginia] giving me, a gift or a curse?’
(Manhattan 361); ‘Who could say whether such an ability [to hear ances-
tors’ voices] was a blessing or a curse?’ (Book 202). How easy is it for
writers today to write in the wake of Woolf, when her iconic aura is omni-
present and the DNA of her monumental oeuvre is inevitably present in
many authors’ literary productions? Even when authors do not directly and
consciously draw on Woolf’s image and legacy, she is still ‘in their mind[s]
somewhere, even just as a model’, haunting their writing.16 The two fanci-
ful, implausible stories have the absolute merit of raising important critical
questions about the death of the author in general and of Woolf in particu-
lar, about her rebirth on the current literary scene and about her literary
daughters’17 duty to preserve her heritage in the twenty-frst century and
pass the literary baton to the next generation of writers; their foremother’s
hovering ‘shadow’, intimidating as it may be, can also constitute a stimulat-
ing creative impetus and a challenge to assert their individual talents, that
both British authors, Maggie Gee and Clare Morgan, clearly took up.

Notes
1 In a discussion about her novel, Gee has also stated: ‘I feel great admiration and
love for [Woolf] but there’s also something anti-authoritarian in me. I needed to
cheek her’ (qtd. in McGlone).
2 Layne suggests that Gee’s conceit is inspired by Woolf’s own statement in A
Room of One’s Own: ‘Inspired, perhaps, by Woolf’s suggestion that “great
poets do not die; they are continuing presences,” Gee resurrects Woolf in the
twenty-frst century, giving her “the opportunity to walk among us in the fesh”’
(‘Reinstating’ 41).
3 The implied author is inferred as ‘an ideal, literary, created version of the real
man; he is the sum of his own choices’ (Booth 75).
4 On other references to Woolf’s oeuvre, see Wright, ‘Resurrection’ 241–242.
5 On real Woolf’s sartorial inadequacy, see Dunn: ‘Virginia liked to be unaware of
her own appearance. She was intensely uncomfortable with the whole subject of
clothes and hated to be peered at, pointed at, or ridiculed for what she wore or
how she looked’ (213).
6 Wright argues that the humorous streak of Gee’s novel is also indebted to Woolf:
‘Gee takes Woolf and turns her into a comic Orlando-esque fgure, able to tran-
scend the passage of linear time by springing back to life in present day New
York’ (‘Resurrection’ 243).
7 Greek term for young poets used by Bloom in Anxiety in which he examines the
struggle between present writers and their old masters. His critical discussion is
‘performed’ by Gee’s characters Angela and Gerda (in the role of the ephebi) and
Virginia (in the role of the great precursor or foremother).
 Virginia’s Daughters 125
8 In ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot stated that modern writers must
be ‘set […] for contrast and comparison, among the dead’ (4). Gee does this liter-
ally, as her Virginia is resurrected to interact with Angela, who often measures
her own value as a twenty-frst-century writer against Virginia’s success.
9 In this sense, Gee has stated: ‘My fctional Virginia’s last words to her audience
of young writers play on her real-life masterpiece, A Room of One’s Own: “The
light is on you. It is in this room. You are in the sunshine which, while it’s here,
feels as though it will last forever. Write while you’re here. Write while you can”’
(‘Depression’).
10 Angela is clearly Gee’s spokescharacter, as Gee herself also formulated the same
criticism. See ‘Foreword’ xv–xvi. On Gee’s long-standing critical interest in the
concept of the death of the author, initiated in her PhD thesis, see also Wright,
‘Resurrection’. Wright states that Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan ‘moves the
critical arguments of [Gee’s] 1981 PhD thesis into her fctional practice by quite
literally bringing the fgure of Virginia Woolf back to life’ (230).
11 In this respect, Gee has stated: ‘I did three degrees in English literature, so I have
read widely and I know what games I am playing, with the tradition, and up to
a point how I would place myself in it’ (interview with Özyurt).
12 Concerning labelling Gee’s novel ‘biofction’, Wright argues that because ‘Woolf
is taken out of her own historical time […] and given life on two different conti-
nents, the terms biofction, biografction and fctional biography do not sit well
as categorization to describe this novel and this version of Woolf’. She states
that biographie romancée is the best term to describe Gee’s novel, as ‘[Woolf’s]
past is represented in a biographically accurate manner, but her present and her
future are quite obviously not’ (‘Resurrection’ 231). Fokkema’s capacious term,
‘author fction’ is also ‘particularly apt to describe Gee’s novel, in which all three
protagonists are authors’ (Wright, ‘Resurrection’ 232).
13 Gee has stated the following: ‘I don’t want to recreate Woolf in her own time
and her own space, because this would be too near to stealing her soul. I did not
describe the real Woolf, I transplanted a Woolf fgure into twenty-frst-century
New York, where she never went, so that everybody knows she is not the real
Virginia Woolf, she is my Virginia Woolf’ (interview with Özyurt).
14 Woolf often refers to her novels as her ‘children’ and to the process of creation
as gestation, labour and childbirth.
15 I have transcribed in italics the passages selected by Morgan from Woolf’s cor-
respondence to create her pastiche postcard.
16 Zadie Smith said the following about her novel NW (2012): ‘I really did not give
Woolf a second thought when I was writing the book, but when I fnished it and
read it over, it became obvious that she must’ve been in my mind somewhere,
even just as a model’ (qtd. in Zipp). In the same way, Gee has stated that Woolf’s
infuence, her ‘cadences’, ‘tricks’ and ‘tropes’ must have been present in all her
writing since her close study of Woolf’s prose in her PhD. See interview with
McKay 217–218.
17 French writer Emmanuelle Favier is also Woolf’s avowed literary daughter,
who continues her foremother’s feminine lineage, previously initiated by other
illustrious women writers. In Virginia (2019), her eponymous character visits
Haworth, the village where the Bronte sisters – women writers that she deeply
admires – lived and wrote, and follows in their footsteps. She pays homage to
them in her frst professional article that she submits to the Guardian; similarly,
Favier clearly states that she does the same thing in her pilgrimage to geographi-
cal places such as London or St Ives, which emotionally and artistically defned
Woolf, and pays homage to her in her biofction: ‘Virginia at Haworth did the
same thing as I do’ (295, translation mine).
4 Vanessa and Virginia

This chapter examines several joint biographical novels, the main characters
of which are Vanessa and Virginia. Different facets of their personalities and
specifc periods in their lives are singled out and reimagined by fve authors:
the Canadian duo Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault in Virginia Wolf
(2012) and British authors Priya Parmar in Vanessa and Her Sister (2014),
Susan Sellers in Vanessa and Virginia (2009) and E.H. Wright in Vanessa
and Virginia: A One-Act Play (2013). From the cornucopia of extant bio-
graphical documentation on Bell and Woolf, these contemporary novelists
have selected different factual foundations to support their visions of the sis-
ters’ special relationship, adopting or rejecting the dualism that most biog-
raphers establish in order to delimitate and oppose the sisters’ personalities,
lifestyles and artistic realms and pit them against each other. While Maclear
and Arsenault play on the sisters’ Manichean differences in a genre which
relies on antagonisms, Parmar portrays a more ambiguous Virginia along-
side a martyr Vanessa, and Sellers challenges these dichotomies, as her joint
portraits of Vanessa and Virginia are superposed to the extent of becoming
symbiotic.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Maclear and Arsenault, writer and illustrator, pay homage to Woolf and
Bell in Virginia Wolf: Maclear’s story is a tribute to Virginia Woolf as much
as Arsenault’s art is a tribute to the talent of painter Vanessa Bell. Maclear
has stated that she was especially interested in the ‘intimacy and affection
and humour’ between the two sisters and their ‘really close relationship’,
and decided ‘to tell the story of a girl who’s kind of down in the dumps,
and a sister who helps her out of that’.1 Virginia Wolf is an illustrated book
targeted at children, and Vanessa and Virginia are little girls in a fairy tale
about an imaginary, magic land called Bloomsberry which makes Virginia
happy. Both the writer and the illustrator play on the metaphor of the big,
bad wolf, which is a common trope in traditional children’s tales as well as a
pun on Woolf’s name. They anthropomorphise little Virginia, who appears
as a wolf, both in her physical form and in the description of her ferocious
 Vanessa and Virginia 127
behaviour. The tale explores the sisters’ privileged relationship, particularly
Vanessa’s sisterly love, support and devotion. She is not afraid of Virginia’s
wolfsh mood and wants to help her recover her little girl’s attributes and
attitude.
The characters of Vanessa and Virginia are two small, creative girls: one
makes up imaginary worlds and stories with colours and pictures, the other
with words. The two sisters are represented as diametrically opposed, not
only in their arts but also in their outlooks on life, which are refected in
the colours of their dresses and moods: blue for Virginia and yellow for
Vanessa. The whole book is structured according to the changing dynamic
of these two colours. The two girls have opposite personalities: Virginia has
a grouchy, unsociable and critical temperament, while Vanessa is a kind,
caring and cheerful little girl. This Manichean double portrait constitutes a
common motif in many fairy tales and an attractive narrative paradigm for
children.
As in Parmar’s and Sellers’s novels, Maclear and Arsenault’s tale is told
from Vanessa’s perspective. It is a painter’s point of view of an ‘episode’ in
her sister’s life. Virginia appears as a child prone to tantrums and depres-
sion, and Vanessa as a painter-magician who has the power of creating an
imaginary world for her sister in which she fnds happiness, an emotional
balance and ultimately her normal physical appearance. The tale starts with
little Virginia who wakes up one morning feeling ‘wolfsh’, that is to say,
depressed and irritated. She is in a ferocious mood and complains end-
lessly: she growls at her sister when she is trying to paint her portrait, she is
annoyed by her cheery yellow dress, by the noise of the toothbrush bristles
against her teeth and even by the chirping of the birds outdoors. Her dark
mood ends up invading the whole house and turns the entire family’s world
topsy-turvy: ‘The whole house sank. / Up became down. / Bright became
dim. / Glad became gloom’.2
Virginia’s depression is visually depicted by Maclear and Arsenault with
typographic and painterly means. Firstly, Virginia’s volatile mood is sig-
nalled by blocks of oversized capital letters which indicate the tone and
intensity of her rising voice. Secondly, her mental torments are suggested
by the choice of symbolic colours: black drawings on a blue background.
The pale blue colours on the frst pages of the book give way to darker
drawings as Virginia’s depression intensifes. These dark colours, which
denote Virginia’s perspective of the world surrounding her, contrast with
the predominant colours when Virginia is happy again: the blues and greys
turn into brilliant colours as the imaginary world of Bloomsberry comes to
life. A cheerful, luminous yellow colour, associated with Vanessa, replaces
the blue background in the book when Virginia recovers from her mood:
‘The whole house lifted. / Down became up. / Dim became bright. / Gloom
became glad’.
Little Vanessa has healing powers and can uplift her sister’s mood.
She is endowed with sympathy and empathy. During her sister’s bout of
128 Vanessa and Virginia
depression, far from being scared of her wolfsh behaviour, Vanessa lays
beside her on the bed. The two sisters fght Virginia’s disease together,
which is indicated in the use of the personal pronoun ‘we’: ‘We were two
quiet lumps under the blanket’. Vanessa patiently accompanies and nurses
Virginia during this breakdown. She thus appears as a loving, devoted,
compassionate sister with a motherly attitude towards her younger sibling.
Their physical closeness encourages Virginia to speak and confess that she
would like to fy to a ‘perfect place’ called ‘Bloomsberry’: it is an idyllic
place for a child, with ‘frosted cakes and beautiful fowers and excellent
trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums’. It is not a physical world to be
found on an atlas, but a fantastical world, a magical garden, a wondrous
refuge that Vanessa creates for her sister, not unlike the real-life Bloomsbury
which conferred Woolf a space to thrive intellectually and personally. The
‘Bloomsberry’ that Vanessa paints for her sister is a communal space in
which they both grow, fourish, fnd happiness and can express their respec-
tive arts, painting and storytelling. With her ‘art box’ and ‘stack of paper’,
Vanessa creates a three-dimensional realm, like a pop-up world. Thus, they
can both enter this fantasy world and explore it together. It is a jointly cre-
ated realm that they can share, in which they can play and give free rein to
their imaginations.
Vanessa’s act of love consists in putting into practice her sister’s vision
and making this perfect place come true. In this wonderland, fowers are
blooming, and colours appear again in the book. Vanessa creates a place
that looks and sounds like ‘Bloomsberry’:3 ‘I made a garden. / I painted
trees and strange candy blossoms and green / shoots and frosted cakes […]
and slowly I created a place called Bloomsberry. I made it look just the way
it sounded’. The signifer and the signifed thus coincide in this imaginary
painted world. Through her art, Vanessa tames the wolf in her sister and
makes her interested in the outside world: ‘I painted a swing and a ladder
that reached up to the window, so that what was down could climb up. My
sister started to pay attention’. Through her art, Vanessa manages to wake
Virginia up from her slumber and make her active: she is now willing to
participate in the joint effort to create the magic world: together, they spin
stories and continue to expand this world full of colour. Vanessa’s painting
is stimulating and encourages Virginia to release her imagination, a sign that
her emotional and mental balance is restored.
Vanessa illustrates her sister’s dreamed-up world and, conversely,
Virginia complements her sister’s colourful painting with her imaginative
stories. Vanessa’s method of painting is not mimetic – her ‘fowers are
foppy’, the ‘trees look like lollipops’ and ‘that shrub looks like an elephant’
– but is ‘perfect’: it perfectly fts her sister’s wild imagination and storytell-
ing technique. Maclear thus hints at the post-impressionistic and modernist
aesthetics adopted by Bell and Woolf to represent reality in an abstract,
direct, economical way in both painting and prose. These subtle references
add scholarly layers of meaning to the juvenile illustrated tale.
 Vanessa and Virginia 129
The message of the tale is that through sisterly love and painterly imagi-
nation, Vanessa can lift the gloom which suddenly overwhelms her sister.
She has a soothing capacity and the power to restore her sister’s balance,
fx her broken world and dispel her ‘doldrums’. At the end of the story,
Virginia feels ‘much better’, takes Vanessa’s hand and is ready to play with
her. Little Virginia is fnally metamorphosed: she is back to ‘girlish’ rather
than ‘wolfsh’ and this is illustrated by the fact that her initial wolfsh sil-
houette turns into a little girl’s, with the wolf ears becoming a pretty blue
bow atop her head. Although the targeted public will most certainly not
identify all the hints to Woolf’s and Bell’s work and their lifelong ‘very close
conspiracy’ (Dunn), they will relate to the simple message conveyed by the
tale. Art and imagination are therapeutic: they can offer an uplifting escape
and transport children to magic, bright places.

Vanessa and Her Sister: ‘Twinned Always’

Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister also favours Vanessa’s point of view and
captures her relationship with Virginia, who is painted in a somewhat
unfavourable light. As in Maclear and Arsenault’s tale, it is Vanessa who
appears as the most forceful and likeable fgure of the two sisters, while
Virginia is the villain who is prey to ‘wolfsh’ moods and ruthless, unfair
behaviour. The duality of the title, ‘Vanessa and her sister’ suggests that it
is Vanessa who has the leading role and is in the limelight, while Virginia’s
name is absent from the title: she is relegated to the secondary position of
the nameless ‘sister’.
Parmar’s novel opens with a letter from Virginia to Vanessa asking, ‘Am
I still loveable? Or have I undone that now? […] Someday you will love me
and forgive me. Someday we will begin again’ (Sister 1). Vanessa’s diary,
which follows this letter, gradually reveals why Virginia pleads for for-
giveness. The novel ends with Vanessa’s answer to this letter arguing that
forgiveness is impossible and ‘there can be no beginning again’ (341). The
fracture that happened between the two sisters, intimated by the frst letter,
is therefore at the core of the novel. The narrative spans nearly eight years,
from 1905 to 1912, and focuses on the beginning of the sisters’ social and
artistic lives under the impulse of the Bloomsbury group, before Virginia
starts a new life with Leonard and becomes less dependent on her sister.
After 1912, Vanessa and Virginia follow different, unique personal paths;
although they remain ‘twinned always’ (341), Vanessa and Virginia have
lives, careers and families of their own.
When Vanessa’s diary begins, the Stephen siblings have just moved from
their childhood home in Kensington to bohemian Bloomsbury after their
father’s recent death. It is Vanessa who takes parental responsibility for the
fates of her younger brothers, Thoby and Adrian, and her sister, Virginia,
and wants to bring light to the family. The four Stephen children begin
their new lives away from dark and gloomy Victorian Hyde Park Gate.
130 Vanessa and Virginia
They boldly move to the ‘shabby Georgian squares of Bloomsbury’ (6),
which is considered ‘not a suitable address’ (6), as it is far from the ‘Round
Pond in Kensington’ or the ‘pretty side street[s] in Chelsea’ (6). In this new
geographical environment, a fertile social and artistic life begins with the
unconventional mixed Thursday nights during which Thoby’s friends from
Cambridge spend time together and discuss various subjects such as writing,
philosophy, painting, economics, religion, love and sex.
When Vanessa decides to marry Thoby’s friend Clive Bell, Virginia
feels left behind, ‘like a lamb due to be separated from its mother’ (146).
In her jealousy, she charms and firts with her sister’s new husband, thus
insinuating herself in their marriage. The destructive affective confguration
understandably creates ‘encroaching tension’ (99) between the two sisters,
and permanently damages their close relationship: Vanessa can still show
‘sincere sisterly affection’ for her sister, but ‘no trust’ (235) and forgive-
ness, as we can read in Vanessa’s fnal letter.4 In order to imagine the per-
manent fracture in the sisters’ relationship caused by Clive and Virginia’s
affair, Parmar took a cue from two quotes included and acknowledged in
her ‘Author’s Note’, which sustain the dramatic tension in her story. The
frst one is taken from Angelica Garnett’s memoir entitled Deceived with
Kindness, in which she stated that Virginia and Clive’s affair

was an episode that left behind a permanent scar. Years later, seeing
[Vanessa and Virginia] together, in spite of their habitual ironic affec-
tion and without any idea of the cause, [she] could see in their behaviour
a wariness on the part of Vanessa, and on Virginia’s side a desperate
plea for forgiveness.
(28)

The second quote that Parmar drew on to build an emotional ‘unhappy tri-
angle’ (Sister 221) that deteriorates the sisterly bonds is taken from a 1925
letter from Woolf to Gwen Raverat in which she confessed her deep regrets:
‘My affair with Clive and Nessa turned more of a knife in me than anything
else has ever done’ (Letters 3: 172). This painful triangular involvement and
Bell’s resentment, anger and wariness that she never expressed or recorded in
writing anywhere, provide the dynamic interplay between Parmar’s sisters.
The main body of the novel is taken up by a diary that Bell never actu-
ally kept,5 but which sounds authentic, as it mimics a voice that is captured
and reproduced from her published and unpublished letters,6 in which she
expressed her thoughts, anxieties and opinions. Bell’s ‘frank style’, ‘affec-
tionate banter’ and ‘bawdy language’ (Marler, Letters 49) that characterise
her epistolary voice thus pervades Vanessa’s diary. Besides, Parmar main-
tains a ‘foothold in truth’7 and draws on autobiographical documentation.
If read in parallel with Bell’s letters, the fabricated diary entries correspond
to events mentioned by Bell in letters to her friends or family. For example,
in Parmar’s novel, Vanessa’s diary entry of 1 July 1906 describes the honest
 Vanessa and Virginia 131
letter she wrote to Clive in order to justify her refusal to his marriage pro-
posal, the fact that ‘[she] like[s] him better than any man not in [her] own
family’, that ‘he ought to go away for a year to make [her] miss him’ and
that ‘telling the whole bald, messy, unfattering truth suits [her]’, even if she
sounds ‘enigmatic’ (Sister 96). Vanessa’s words, arguments and ideas are
taken almost verbatim from Bell’s letters:

‘I like you better than I like anyone else (another man, I suppose I ought
to say!) outside our family’. (Letters 41)
‘I don’t want to be enigmatic as usual’. (41)
‘it seems to me that in every way it would be best if you were to go away
– I thought for a year’. (43)

Vanessa’s expressing her views about her sister’s ambiguous, almost erotic
love for her is yet another example based on authentic letters. In her diary
entry of 6 February 1907, on the eve of her marriage to Clive, Vanessa
records her sister’s desperate love for her: ‘She calls herself “my humble
beasts”. She speaks in multiples. She wishes I had married them. And if I
will not, perhaps I will take them as my lovers?’ (Sister 147).8 This corre-
sponds to Woolf’s letter at the time in which she wrote:

We have been your humble Beasts since we frst left our isles, and dur-
ing that time we have wooed you and sung many songs of winter and
summer and autumn in the hope that thus enchanted you could conde-
scend one day to marry us. But as we no longer expect this honour we
entreat that you keep us still for your lovers, should you have need of
such.
(Letters 6: 493)

After Vanessa’s marriage, Virginia continues her amorous courtship and

twisted erotic game with her sister, this time through Clive, who is asked
to give caresses to his wife on her behalf. This is recorded by Vanessa in
her 17 April 1908 diary entry: ‘She [Virginia] suggests I [Clive] kiss your
[Vanessa’s] eyeball […] Not only your eyeball: your earlobes, elbow, tem-
ple, and collarbone’ (Sister 171). This diary entry is based specifcally on
one of Woolf’s letters: ‘Kiss her most passionately, in all my private places
– neck –, and arm, and eyeball, and tell her – what new thing is there to
tell her?’ (Letters 1: 325). Numerous such examples show the perfect cor-
respondences between Bell’s and Woolf’s real letters and Vanessa’s diary.
Parmar sticks to documented chronology, incorporates facts and events
from Bell’s life into the fabric of her novel, and adopts Bell’s exact words
and idiosyncratic style in order to create a diary that rings true.
Vanessa’s diary reveals the portraits of the ‘twinned’ sisters: the diarist’s
(through her innermost thoughts) and her main subject’s (through her out-
ward actions). Vanessa’s thoughts are verbalised and ‘spool’ ‘like thread’
132 Vanessa and Virginia
(158) with great ease, although her role seems to have been relegated to the
visual sphere. This irrevocable, unquestioned ‘decree’ and direction given to
her career appears to have been Virginia’s idea: ‘[l]ong ago Virginia decreed,
in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer’
(3).9 Vanessa accepted her sister’s decision and took refuge in art, considered
as a lower form of creation in their ‘family of literati’: ‘Work is not work
where words are not involved. […] The distribution of colours is a curi-
ous sort of hobby to them’ (66). Vanessa’s work is therefore not taken seri-
ously by Virginia, for whom ‘writing is the real expression’ (66): she jealously
defends her sacred literary sphere and form of creation, although Vanessa’s
private diary proves that Virginia is not the only one who is master of the
verbal realm: Vanessa displays her love of words and ability to capture life,
render its complexities and express emotions in a powerful way. Just like her
literary sister, Vanessa is a skilful wordsmith who writes intense lyrical prose.
For a reader acquainted with Woolf’s diary and prose, Vanessa’s portrait
as a diarist is meant to mirror her sister’s. They have similar artistic sensibil-
ities: their eyes are attracted to the same colours and their ears are attuned
to the same sounds. Like Virginia, Vanessa captures the myriad sensations
around her. She takes in the beauty of the natural world and translates it
verbally on the pages of her diary. She chronicles silences and conversations
– both lyrically described in aquatic terms – and records movement in a
typically Woolfan rising and falling pattern. However, Vanessa’s diary also
reveals a different thought process than her articulate, sharp, witty sister, in
a different domain which requires the use of different tools and approaches.
The diary mostly showcases Vanessa’s painterly sensibility. She is atten-
tive to the quality and intensity of light and colours and often sums up
the whole day in terms of colour and light. While Virginia is the master of
words, Vanessa thinks ‘not in words’, but in ‘mass’, ‘colour’, ‘shape’, ‘light’,
‘volume’ and ‘texture’ (33), which refect her artistic preoccupations. While
Virginia formulates ideas and abstract concepts such as ‘What is the mean-
ing of good?’ (33), Vanessa’s mind asks different questions: ‘What is the
colour of good? What size? What light?’ (33).
The Stephen sisters have different personalities, senses of duty and expec-
tations. Virginia can freely pursue her writerly activities because Vanessa
is there to handle the servants and all the fnancial duties and domestic
obligations of their household. There is more pressure on Vanessa than on
any of her siblings, who, thanks to her dedication, sacrifces and sense of
responsibilities can lead a carefree existence and devote their time to their
work and passions. Vanessa is the perfect hostess for their Thursday eve-
nings, a mission which she unquestionably assumes, and which highlights
her attributes as an excellent organiser: ‘Neither Thoby, nor Adrian, nor
Virginia would ever think of anything so banal as sandwiches or napkins or
teaspoons. Mother or Stella was always there to do that for them. Now I do
it’ (3). Vanessa is thus walking in the footsteps of the previous ‘angels in the
house’ and inherits their role.
 Vanessa and Virginia 133
After their parents’ deaths, Vanessa is the one who keeps the four siblings
together. She has a pivotal role in the Stephen household and is essential in
her brothers and sister’s lives. The family equation relies on a perfect balance
and symmetry: ‘Just us four. There is lovely symmetry in four’ (6). Vanessa
is the mortar that provides unity to the remaining family after successive
deaths: ‘Mother, Father, Stella, and each time the terrible business of piecing
together what was left over. Rebuilding the broken piecrust and hoping the
dough will stretch’ (200). This culinary metaphor that Vanessa uses in her
diary shows she is endowed with exceptional domestic and motherly skills
to make a perfect home for her orphaned siblings. However, the symmetry
and balance are upset by Thoby’s shocking, unexpected death. Thoby, the
ground which keeps them rooted, disappears from the familial confgura-
tion and breaks their unity. In the aftermath of Thoby’s death, Clive gives
Vanessa ‘safety’, ‘warmth’ and ‘comfort’ (70). This relationship initiates a
new balanced emotional confguration for Vanessa but destroys Virginia’s
intimacy and privileged conspiracy with her sister. Virginia feels excluded
from the Bell couple, and this is perfectly symbolised by the card game the
new couple is playing, bezique, ‘a game for two’, which ‘drives [Virginia]
mad’ (135). She resents being rejected from their new ‘we’ (135) dynamic
and acts as a destructive intruder in the Bells’ couple until she fnally fnds
Leonard, who appears to be the perfect partner for her. Having been ‘in ter-
rible motion’ (338) since her parents died, Leonard is the one who ‘moors
her’ (338). In 1912, Virginia has a husband who is ‘[hers] to the bone’ (338)
and a house of her own: the emotional symmetry is thus re-established: ‘The
Bells and the Woolves. There is a lovely symmetry in four’ (338).
Before Vanessa is relieved of the responsibility of Virginia’s everyday
welfare, and the burden of her sister’s state of mind is passed on to Leonard
in 1912, she feels responsible for and takes care of her fragile sister. She
is worn out by the attention and affection Virginia constantly needs, even
more so when the state of her health deteriorates. Virginia’s recurrent break-
downs constitute a weight for Vanessa, who feels it is her parental duty to
nurse her sick sister. This is the reason why Vanessa is extremely cautious
not to infame her sister’s volatile moods, walks on eggshells so as spare
her feelings and responds suitably to her demands, expectations and stifing
affection. Virginia thus emerges as dependent on Vanessa – as in Maclear’s
tale – with the notable difference here that her condition takes a huge toll
on adult Vanessa’s personal and artistic life.
Although Virginia’s repeated illness and ominous breakdowns take up
much of Vanessa’s thought and scriptural space in her diary, these negative
traits are not the only things which defne her. Virginia is a ‘model’ and a
continuous source of inspiration for Vanessa who sees her sister through her
medium and her painter’s eyes. She is a great subject for Vanessa’s paint-
ings, her beauty and multifaceted personality emerging in fattering ways in
Vanessa’s pictorial representations. Even when ‘seated in [a] shabby green
wing chair’ (37), Virginia is beautiful and luminous. The painter is deeply
134 Vanessa and Virginia
fascinated with her subject and studies her from all angles: ‘Her fne hair,
a paler brown than mine, was swept back from her elliptical face into a
loose knot and lay in the shallow curve of her long neck’ (38). Vanessa
perceives Virginia with the loving eyes of a sister, and she simply idolises
her: ‘Virginia is always beautiful’ (10), her ‘beauty haunts’ and ‘[e]veryone
turns to look at [her]’ (68). Vanessa admires not only her sister’s ethereal
beauty but is also in awe of her sparkling intellect. She is an enthralled spec-
tator of her sister’s brilliant intellectual performances. For instance, during
the Thursday evenings, she looks at her sister through the men’s eyes and
sees her as their equal: ‘I watched them watch her. She stands with them as
an equal’ (15). In her diary, Vanessa writes complimentary remarks about
her sister’s extraordinary, exceptionally ‘subtle mind’ (33) which shines and
thrives in the company of ‘literate men’ (32). Virginia ‘captivates’, ‘has a
vibrancy about her’ (180), and Vanessa adores her sister when she is ‘at
her best’: ‘loving, rational, engaged, sincere’ (29). Charismatic and bright
Virginia also elicits her sister’s deep admiration when she acts as a unifer
during the evenings in Bloomsbury. Unlike Vanessa who is not at ease with
social and verbal interactions, Virginia is an excellent conversationalist, the
queen of the chessboard, a skilful player who knows how to strategically
move a conversation on: ‘How she rivets, my sister. Virginia’s conversation
has taken on a hard, diamond brilliance. […] She plays to keep now: carv-
ing up the chessboard, fuent and calm. And each time the pieces move to
defend their queen’ (203). Virginia’s body and mind are always in motion,
and this energy is propitious to imagination and creativity.
Vanessa can be sporadically blinded by her sister’s brilliance and intimi-
dated by her genius, but she can also see very clearly through her schemes
and treacherous behaviour. Virginia is thus described as both ‘extraordi-
nary’ and ‘exasperating’. The ‘Virginia logic’ (10; 206) often infuriates
Vanessa, as her sister’s acrobatic mind can manipulate and spin arguments
to work in her favour, thus leaving her most rational interlocutors baffed.
Thus, most of the time, Virginia emerges from Vanessa’s chronicles in a
very unfattering light. Her beautiful, brilliant, imaginative mind is often
capable of malice. Virginia at her worst is jealous, selfsh, manipulative and
narcissistic. When distance separates them, Virginia gives birth to a ‘mon-
soon of correspondence’ (144): ‘frantic’ letters that ‘amuse’, but ultimately
overwhelm and ‘infuriate’ (209) her sister. This contributes to Virginia’s
representation as a suffocating, dependent sister who is stifing Vanessa.
Virginia can often be spiteful and spill her ‘venom’ (122) when her sis-
ter gives affection to someone else. She not only invades Vanessa’s private
space, personal relationships and social sphere, but also wants to take pos-
session of her body: this degree of possessiveness verges on amorous, inces-
tuous affection:10

Virginia keeps talking about the two of us being on ‘our wedding

tour’ and I try to encourage the description into ‘holiday’. It is not the
 Vanessa and Virginia 135
affection but the belligerence that frightens me. She is driven by the
need to footprint, to own, to possess. A wedding tour is by nature a
pairing, an exclusion.
(100)

This extreme emotional relationship is the reason why any man who
approaches Vanessa is jealously perceived as an intruder or a predator by
Virginia who would like to keep her sister for herself. She envisages their
exclusive relationship as a permanent, perfect communion, and this is the
reason why she is extremely critical of Clive at frst: he is not only ‘not good
enough’ (122) for Vanessa, but he is perceived as an outright ‘enemy’ who
infltrates their family circle with the precise agenda of gaining Vanessa’s love
and destroying the sisters’ indivisible unity. Virginia’s loneliness and intense
love for her sister make her concoct a plan. She thus emerges as a malicious,
scheming sister who premeditates the breaking of her sister’s marriage, her
‘togetherness’ with Clive, by directing her love to her husband: ‘I will do my
best to love him. […] I think it will take some doing to divide them’ (148).
Virginia cannot accept that ‘marriages are restricted to two people’ (172), so
she invades and forces her way into her sister’s marriage by creating a destruc-
tive triangular relationship. This affair shows Vanessa that her husband is
effectively ‘not good enough’ – just like Virginia warned her – but also that
Virginia will alienate anybody who comes between her sister and herself.
In her diary, Vanessa often dwells on her rivalry with Virginia. By
comparing herself with her sister, she draws two portraits with the same
brushstrokes. Despite their differences, the portraits are often similar, com-
plementary and mirroring. Virginia may be overly jealous, but Vanessa is
often envious of her sister, too. According to Vanessa, Virginia is ‘better
read’, ‘better at conversation’ and ‘more beautiful’ (197) than her. During
the Thursday evenings, Vanessa feels like a ‘sprouted potato’ (3) while her
sister charms everybody with her conversation and displays her wit and
literary knowledge. Compared with Virginia’s talent with words, Vanessa
feels her amateurish writing falls short, and this is why she writes her diary
in secret. Writing, on the other hand, is ‘Virginia’s engine’ (27): it is not only
the outcome of her brilliant and creative mind but has also therapeutic ben-
efts, as it plays an essential role for her mental balance, focus and purpose.
Writing is a barometer of her mental health, her anchor into sanity, which
‘settles her’ (101) and gives her day a rhythm. Once a piece of writing is fn-
ished, Vanessa can see the ominous signs which threaten her sister’s sanity
and stability: Virginia therefore thrives only when she is writing.
The threat of Virginia’s repeated mental breakdowns cast a long shadow
over Vanessa’s life and explains her protectiveness and martyr-like willing-
ness to accommodate mercurial Virginia, whose ‘precarious’ mood (274)
ranges from ‘melancholy’ to ‘manic’ (259). She can sense her sister’s loom-
ing bouts of madness from the very infections of her voice. She can also
read the subtle ‘tensions in [Virginia’s] body’ (30) that ‘herald madness’
136 Vanessa and Virginia
(286) and has developed strategies to appease her sister and prevent these
signs from amplifying. When Virginia ‘howls’ and ‘shrieks in her room’
(282) – just like Maclear’s young, wolfsh Virginia – and resists any form
of care or treatment, Vanessa patiently waits ‘for the moment when the
boat capsizes in the dark’ (279). The image of shipwrecking and drowning
is aptly associated with the emotional turbulence created by such desta-
bilising mental experiences. Before Virginia gets married in 1912, dealing
with Virginia’s serious condition seems to be mainly Vanessa’s obligation,
responsibility and burden.
Parmar imagines Virginia’s emotional and intellectual itinerary during
her formative years, after her parents’ deaths and before it is implied that
she acquires another affective anchor in the form of her future husband,
who replaces Vanessa in her emotional demands. Virginia is both the sub-
ject of her sister’s paintings and the subject of her sister’s diary, and, as
such, we are confronted with different facets depicted in the two media.
As a subject of pictorial representation and experimentation in painting,
Virginia’s illuminating beauty allows the post-impressionistic painter to
convey her feelings by means of shapes and colours on her canvas. However,
most of the time, Virginia is portrayed in a less-than-complimentary light
in Vanessa’s diary, which reveals a particularly unfattering portrait of a
jealous, bitter, treacherous, narcissistic and troubled sister. In this particu-
larly biased, deprecating representation, Parmar vilifes Virginia11 in order
to sanctify Vanessa, who emerges aggrandised as a saint. She builds a special
Manichean dynamic between the two sisters, very much like Maclear and
Arsenault’s depiction of the relationship between the two sisters: one strong
and caring, the other one fragile and dependent.
In opposition to Virginia’s unfattering portrait, Vanessa’s self-portrait
as a sister, wife and artist that emerges from her candid diary is that of a
warm, caring, altruistic, talented, hard-working woman. She is the gener-
ous, self-effaced sister who allows her siblings to live a carefree intellectual
life. She is a mother fgure, an angel in the house and a liberated, free artist,
all at once. She looks after husband, children, siblings, lovers and the whole
Bloomsbury crew, and soothes Virginia when she is prey to her devastating
breakdowns. She also paints, exhibits her paintings and enjoys being an
artist. The reader is naturally made to feel sympathy for Vanessa’s situation
and side with her subjective point of view. The other characters also offer
contrasting points of view that tip in favour of Vanessa. When Lytton, for
example, compares the two sisters, despite Virginia’s sparkling genius that
he admires, it is clearly Vanessa whom he prefers: ‘[Virginia] is a distracting
creature: vain, brilliant, elusive, and bright. But she is not [Vanessa]’ (176).
However, as Parmar has stressed in her numerous interviews, ‘this is very
much a novel’, ‘a hat tossed into the ring at the interior landscape of these
historical fgures’.12 Her novel presents a particular vision and version of
the sisters’ relationship. Although based on fact and auto/biographical doc-
umentation, Parmar’s spin on the sisters’ relationship is more confictual,
 Vanessa and Virginia 137
romanticised and in keeping with novelistic expectations. Vanessa’s ambiv-
alent feelings for her sister as well as Virginia’s jealousy and betrayal have
rich dramatic potential.13 The confrontations, rivalry and rift between the
two sisters caused by Virginia’s affair with Clive are amplifed by Parmar,
which largely contributes to the process of vilifcation of the character of
Virginia, perceived as a spiteful, manipulative, possessive fgure whose
devouring, obsessional love destroys her sister’s marriage.
Virginia’s portrait as intellectually brilliant and charismatic, but also
fragile, possessive and emotionally unstable is necessarily less appealing
and nuanced in this twinned portrait which focuses primarily on the sisters’
rivalry and Virginia’s dependence on Vanessa. Parmar’s unbalanced, biased
portrait of the sisters largely contrasts with Sellers’s. As opposed to the title
of Parmar’s novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, which weighs towards a stronger
interest in Vanessa, Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia is ‘more even-handed’
(Layne, ‘Supreme’ 83) and redresses the balance by distributing the interest
towards both sisters. The sisters’ frst names coordinated by ‘and’ implies
they can only function together as a pair. Sellers restores the symmetry of
the sisterly relationship not only in the title of her biofction, but also in a
mirroring portrait of two equally brilliant and fawed sisters who emotion-
ally depend on each other.

Vanessa and Virginia: ‘Psychically Siamese’14

As in Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister, Vanessa is the narrator and main
character in Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia: it is again the painter, not the
writer, who tells the sisters’ conjoint story. Sellers also chooses to illuminate
Vanessa’s often-overshadowed perspective and sketch her portrait as a sis-
ter, mother, lover and, above all, artist. Parmar and Sellers draw from the
same pool of extant auto/biographical documentation and operate a similar
selection of biographemes but paint different portraits. Parmar bends or
distorts Virginia’s personality in order to build a conficting, antagonistic
sisterly relationship, while Sellers’s depiction of this relationship, although
also based on contrast, is a more balanced, mirroring portrait in which
the sisters are both alike and unlike, both loving and jealous, both strong
and weak. An idealised portrait of Virginia emerges from her sister’s lov-
ing tribute and heartfelt eulogy, composed after her unexpected, shocking
death, which leaves Vanessa bereaved. While in Parmar’s novel Vanessa’s
confessions are mostly tinged with resentment and acrimony, in Sellers’s
novel, Vanessa’s account is imbued with tenderness and melancholy, and
highlights their alliance, complicity, communion, fusion and symmetry.
Vanessa is as talented, sensitive, depressed, vulnerable and prone to suicide
as Virginia. She is also very ‘Woolfan’ in her writing, personality, feelings
and art. Sellers thus offers symbiotic, converging portraits of the two sisters,
symbolised by Vanessa’s last self-portrait in which she unconsciously adopts
her sister’s posture and paints herself as a painter holding a pen.
138 Vanessa and Virginia
Using Vanessa’s perspective has enabled Sellers to better explore and illu-
minate ‘multifaceted’ Virginia. In an interview, the author has enumerated
the advantages of this particular narrative voice:

Once I knew I would tell the story in Vanessa’s voice I began to see all
sorts of advantages. For instance, it made it possible to give what I hope
is a multifaceted portrait of Virginia: brilliant, risk-taking, intense, but
also at times uncertain and needy. I think this would have been more
diffcult to do if I had been writing through Virginia.15

Vanessa’s wide pictorial and verbal palette enables her to reveal the sub-
tle nuances of Virginia’s complex, powerful personality and compose the
mosaic of her many selves. In order to refect the mirroring portraits of the
two sisters as announced in the title of her novel, Sellers’s narrative voice
bears the imprint of both sisters’ arts: it has a painterly quality as well as
writerly poetic hues. Vanessa’s letter, in which she records thoughts and
memories, brings together both Bell’s method of rendering life on a can-
vas and Woolf’s idiosyncratic writing style. The result is a lyrical written
account, an elegiac, post-impressionist love letter from Vanessa to Virginia.
In this respect, Sellers has stated the following:

I wanted to evoke Virginia’s interior, poetic, lyrical writing style; but I did
not want to produce a pastiche – and because I wanted to tell the story
from Vanessa’s viewpoint I knew I had to write with a painter’s voice.16

Vanessa and Virginia is narrated by old Vanessa who ‘turn[s] the kalei-
doscope of memory’ (44) and tells her story of absent Virginia after her
sister has committed suicide. Sellers gives us access to her character’s inner-
most feelings and momentous memories in her frst-person present-tense
account, a one-way letter to her sister, designated by the silent ‘you’. The
letter has a confessional tone and creates an impression of immediacy,
proximity and sincerity, as Vanessa is directly addressing her sister and is
pouring her heart out. Sellers follows the sisters’ joint and parallel itinerar-
ies by conferring a chronological, teleological backbone to her narration:
Vanessa and Virginia’s lives unfold from early childhood, when Vanessa
is four, to the fatal outcome of her sister’s death, with proleptic intrusions
and fashbacks.17 There are no clear chronological landmarks, no exact
dates, but events in the sisters’ lives (deaths in the family, marriages, births,
wars) anchor the narration broadly in time and give the reader the sense of
the passage of time: the narration leaps in time from moment to moment,
event to event, memory to memory, forming ‘a mosaic of vignettes’ (Sellers,
‘Postmodernism’ 221) or narrative snapshots that focus on meaningful epi-
sodes which shape the sisters’ lives. The dual, intertwined portraits of the
two sisters appear out of all the close-ups on specifc memories in every
vignette. Vanessa’s fragmentary, impressionistic scenes accumulate into a
 Vanessa and Virginia 139
love letter from the surviving sister, who for a long time had considered
committing suicide, to the one who acted on this impulse.
Vanessa’s metafctional remark, ‘if this were a work of fction instead
of an attempt to discern the truth’ (Vanessa 31), makes Sellers’s fctional
account appear ‘true’, and not what it really is, a ‘work of fction’. Sellers’s
novel is thus disguised as a ‘real’ letter from one sister to the other. In this
postmodernist simulacrum of a real memoir, the fctional narrative voice
claims to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In order to build
this illusion of ‘truth’, Sellers uses a profusion of biographical details as
well as fragments of Bell’s paintings and allusions to scenes from Woolf’s
novels. As a Woolf scholar who has extensive knowledge of Woolf’s life
and oeuvre, Sellers’s portraits of the two sisters are quite accurate, as she
makes few departures from biographical records. In this sense, the author
has stated:

Though I have given myself a good deal of poetic licence in the novel,
everything I have written is underpinned by serious research on materi-
als that are held in the public domain: novels, paintings, but also pub-
lished diaries and correspondence.18

Sellers operated a ‘necessary selection’ (‘Postmodernism’ 213) of facts and

well-known exchanges, anecdotes, events and family incidents that Woolf
and Bell themselves recorded in their memoirs, published posthumously as
Moments of Being and Sketches in Pen and Ink.
For instance, the young sisters’ famous exchange about their favourite
parent, recounted by Bell in ‘Notes on Virginia’s Childhood’, is amplifed by
Sellers in one of her vignettes:

I remember one evening as we were jumping about naked, she and I, in

the bathroom. She suddenly asked me which I liked best, my father or
mother. […] ‘Mother,’ I said, and she went on to explain why she, on
the whole, preferred father. I don’t think, however, her preference was
quite as sure and simple as mine. She had considered both critically and
had more or less analysed her feelings for them, which I, at any rate
consciously, had never attempted.
(Bell, ‘Notes on Virginia’s Childhood’ 60)

‘Who do you like best, Mother or Father?’ Your question comes like a
bolt out of the blue. […]
‘Mother.’ […] You consider my answer, squeezing the damp from your
hair.
‘I prefer Father.’
‘Father?’ I sit up quickly. ‘How can you possibly like Father best? He’s
always so diffcult to please.’ […]
140 Vanessa and Virginia
‘Mother doesn’t know as much as Father, she doesn’t read as much. At
least when Father settles on something you know he isn’t going to be
called away.’
I want to rally, hit back, protest how self-centred Father is. I want to
declare Mother’s goodness, proclaim her unstinting sense of duty, her
ability to restore order when all is in disarray. Instead I stare in silence
at the water. From the corner of my eye I can see that you are smiling.
(Vanessa 4–5)

The sisters’ exchange gives the reader an idea not only about their rivalry
and loyalties, but also about their verbal duels for which young Virginia is
better equipped. From an early age, she seems to win all the disputes: she
knows how to whet her arguments and to put forth her opinions, while
Vanessa often remains silent and defeated. Each such debate constitutes
a victory for Virginia, while Vanessa is intimidated and afraid of her sis-
ter’s precocious cleverness: ‘I fnd myself fearing where your cleverness will
lead’ (5).
Many other signifcant memories and defning events in the sisters’ lives
are selected and novelised by Sellers, especially the highly traumatic ones
that haunted the sisters throughout their lives. The most harrowing of
them is certainly their mother’s death at the age of forty-nine, when the
Stephen girls were respectively ffteen and thirteen years old, an experience
recounted later by Woolf: ‘And there is my last sight of her; she was dying;
I came to kiss her and as I crept out of the room she said: “Hold yourself
straight, my little Goat” (‘Sketch’ 84). In the same way, Sellers’s Virginia
keeps remembering her mother’s last words to her: ‘Stand up straight, little
goat’ (Vanessa 21).
Sellers amasses not only such momentous events from the sisters’ lives to
buttress her narrative arc, but also small details with metaphorical poten-
tial. Indeed, the many documented incidental anecdotes, besides imparting
verisimilitude to the novel, sometime acquire a particular signifcance. In
an interview, Sellers gives an example of such an anecdote and explains
how the same facts are used by biographers and by novelists. Trivial details
or incidents from a biography may acquire a high symbolical meaning in
a novel:

[I]n the biographies, Virginia’s adolescent request for a lectern so that

she can emulate Vanessa at her easel and write standing up is included
only as a detail – whereas to me it is highly signifcant. By staging the
scene, I was able to give this detail greater prominence.19

Vanessa and Virginia is solidly anchored in thoroughly researched facts, and

yet it is certainly not intended to be read as a biography with informational
value. Through Vanessa’s voice, Sellers reminds the reader that ‘art is not
life’ (90). The defning events and anecdotes in the sisters’ lives, as well as
 Vanessa and Virginia 141
small, symbolical elements, are woven into a compelling, suspenseful story
in which Sellers uses the tools of a creative writer: she selects facts, recom-
poses the chronology and creates a strong, captivating narrative voice to
carry the intriguing story.
Vanessa’s string of memories starts with the frst vignette when she is
four years old. The perfect communion and physical closeness between her
brother Thoby and herself are suddenly broken by their jealous younger sis-
ter, Virginia, whose physical presence is perceived by Vanessa as an intru-
sion in their privileged fraternal space. Little Virginia’s formidable, unfailing
weapon that she uses to split her siblings apart is the words she can already
manipulate extremely well. Predatory Virginia often baits Thoby with prom-
ising intellectual stimulation and subsequently ‘monopolise[s]’ him (25).
Although she is younger than Vanessa, Virginia knows how to snatch Thoby
away from her. This ferce competition for their favourite brother’s love and
attention is depicted like a power game that cunning, eloquent, imaginative
Virginia is more skilful at. This primal, original siblings’ love triangle consti-
tutes Vanessa’s recurrent memory as well as a repetitive pattern in the sisters’
subsequent relationships. Virginia’s ‘shadow’ (1; 178) lies, time and again, not
only between Vanessa and Thoby, but also between Vanessa and other people
that she loves. Her sister’s love relationships are mere games for Virginia who
plays at winning by ‘stealing’ from her sister. Thoby is just the frst battlefeld
for the young sisters: eventually, envious Virginia usurps her mother’s affec-
tion for Vanessa and then that of Vanessa’s husband, Clive.
The triangular motif resonates throughout the rest of the novel, just
like in Parmar’s novel. Sellers novelises the painful, triangular relationship
formed by Vanessa, Clive and Virginia that alters the sisters’ close relation-
ship. Virginia insinuates herself in her sister’s marriage as a way to some-
how preserve her relationship with her, and as a result, ruins this marital
union. However, in Sellers’s novel, this triangular relationship does not have
a lifelong impact on the sisters’ relationship and does not destroy the sisters’
persistent love for each other. It especially authorises Vanessa to explore
other love relationships. Sellers also suggests that this event in Vanessa’s life
has a positive outcome, as it shapes her art. When painting and refecting on
her three poppies on the canvas [in ‘Iceland Poppies’ (1908–1909)], Vanessa
is actually representing this emotional episode:

In front of the objects I fashion poppies, another group of three. […]

The two that are furthest from the viewer I make white, their petals
closed, merging into the shadow. The third I paint red, the colour spill-
ing from the petals like blood. I do not see any meaning in my fowers.
I refuse to say which of them is me or Clive or you.
(65)

Although for Vanessa art is not supposed to be mimetic and personal, it is

implied that the three poppies do stand for Clive, Vanessa and Virginia and
142 Vanessa and Virginia
that this painting, inevitably, springs from real-life events and emotions.
Painting is therapeutic, as the colours and design allow her to vent feelings.
Such metapictorial passages evince not only Vanessa’s method of painting,
the balance and unity she wants to achieve on canvas, but also her deeply
hidden feelings that she does not otherwise express, as she silently and stoi-
cally faces life alone.
The ekphrastic descriptions which pepper Vanessa’s long letter to her
sister evince her evolving technique and the way she puts into practice her
intuitions and visions. Vanessa gradually moves away from mimetic repre-
sentation: ‘I decide to ignore verisimilitude altogether’ (47). Her paintings
display simplifed shapes, empty faces, contrasts and bold, vivid colouring.
They focus on form rather than subject matter and are perfect examples of
what art critic Clive Bell called ‘signifcant form’.20 This innovative pictorial
method is adopted by Virginia and successfully transposed to prose, as she
also focuses on rendering her characters’ impressions and emotions: these
are not inferred from the plot, dialogues or her characters’ physical fea-
tures, but by ‘getting inside’ (121) and exploring the character’s inner life.
Vanessa’s pictorial discoveries that Virginia borrows are frst put into prac-
tice in her ‘new novel about Thoby’ (i.e. Jacob’s Room). Both sisters, in their
respective arts, deliberately leave aside exterior, extraneous material details
in order to focus on the raw, essential emotions in their subjects-characters’
lives, be it on canvas or in prose.
Sellers’s Vanessa thinks about her art and paints very much like Woolf’s
Lily Briscoe. She does not adopt any existing method but follows her own
intuitive vision and develops her own technique: she chooses colours that
instinctively call for other colours and creates spaces that she needs on her
canvas: ‘There is still something missing. I have black left on my brush from
the stamens and I draw a line between the poppies, lacing them together.
[…] Yes, the thread ties the whole. My picture is complete’ (47). Vanessa’s
description of her spontaneous method has overtones of Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse: on her canvas, Vanessa creates unity out of fragments, and the
last line that she draws between her two poppies fnally and satisfactorily
fulfls her vision. Her method is based on her painter’s natural instinct and
the requirements of the painting are dictated by her design: ‘The blue needed
it, the pattern needed it. It gives the eye something to rest on’ (106). The
particular emotions she wants to express on her canvas call for different
colours. Her brush ‘itches’ (47) or ‘craves’ (64) for specifc colours. She
instinctively needs ‘light, shadow, space’ (65): her painting is organic, grows
progressively and intuitively to respond to the painter’s different artistic
requirements and personal emotions.
Although Vanessa reaches her pictorial maturity and manages to put into
practice an innovative vision, she does not become as famous and successful
as her sister. Despite what appears to be a richer, fuller and more fulflled
family, love and sexual life than Virginia’s, by resorting to Vanessa’s perspec-
tive, Sellers conveys all the pathos of Vanessa’s personal life: her insecurities,
 Vanessa and Virginia 143
doubts, sense of failure, secret petty jealousies, breakdowns, depression and
her suicide attempt. Vanessa oftentimes expresses her feelings of failure and
ineptitude, especially as she perceives her artistic career in terms of ‘bits and
pieces, like scraps of sewing at the bottom of [her] Mother’s work basket.
Nothing fnished, nothing made good’ (143). Like Lily Briscoe, she regularly
has doubts about her paintings. When compared with her sister’s novels
which sell well, Vanessa has the feeling that her work is becoming ‘increas-
ingly marginalised in comparison with [Virginia’s]’ (137). She envies her
sister’s literary and fnancial success: while Virginia makes money from her
latest novel, Orlando, Vanessa ‘make[s] almost nothing from [her] paint-
ings’ and she ‘can scarcely afford to pay [her] models’ (136). Her family life
is also chaotic and does not seem to compensate in any way for her fnancial
disappointments. During such moments of acute despair, it is Virginia who
always points to her the bigger perspective of her life and the vital role she
plays in everybody’s lives. Vanessa is the light towards which ‘all the lonely
moths’ (143) like Virginia converge. Vanessa thus needs Virginia’s reassur-
ance and her outsider’s comprehensive outlook to realise her value both as
an artist and as a woman.
Sellers’s representation of the sisters’ relationship therefore differs from
the commonly known dynamic between them, as exemplifed by Maclear’s
tale and Parmar’s novel in which it is only needy Virginia who is depend-
ent on her sister, and Vanessa, the stronger character, gives comfort to her
fragile, depressed sister and brings colour back to her life whenever dark
thoughts invade her. On the contrary, Sellers’s Virginia has the psychologi-
cal strength and ability to provide support to her sister who is often prey
to discouragement. In Maclear’s tale, Vanessa sits on Virginia’s bed and
helps her to emerge from depression with her colours and shapes. In Sellers’s
novel, it is Virginia who sits by Vanessa’s bed to comfort her and dispel her
dark thoughts. Virginia’s healing words are buoys that Vanessa clings to
that prevent her from drowning.
Parmar’s Virginia is portrayed as possessive and jealous of her sister’s
affections, marriage and motherhood; so at times is Sellers’s Virginia, but it is
not a straightforward, one-way jealousy: indeed, as Sellers’s sisters are similar
in their personalities and feelings, they are both jealous of each other, posses-
sive of each other, affectionate with each other. For instance, Virginia envies
her sister’s married life, artistic and fnancial success: ‘You have everything –
Clive, money, people wanting your pictures – whereas I have … nothing’ (55).
Conversely, Vanessa is jealous of her sister’s successful career as a writer: ‘I
have a sudden, painful image of you as a successful writer, sought after and
fêted while my own pictures go unnoticed. I feel excluded and second-rate’
(59). She is also jealous of Virginia’s marriage, which she perceives as a special
communion and partnership with her husband that she cannot achieve in any
of her love relationships. Despite her full domestic and artistic life, she often
feels lonely, and her oneiric descriptions translate her anxieties, insecurities,
losses and the emptiness in her life. In reality, neither Vanessa nor Virginia
144 Vanessa and Virginia
are completely satisfed with their male partners, although their relationships
seem enviable from the other sister’s perspective. Virginia envies Vanessa’s
chaste relationship and artistic partnership with Duncan, while Vanessa
envies Virginia’s closeness and intimacy with Leonard, despite their sexless
marriage. However, the perfect companionship Virginia sees from the outside
is different from what Vanessa really experiences, which she confesses in her
letter: her agony each time Duncan has a new affair and her fear of losing
him. Similarly, the enviable situation Vanessa sees from the outside is differ-
ent from what Virginia must really feel – hence her attempt, after her sister’s
death, to penetrate Virginia’s mind and picture what must have happened
deep inside to push her to take the fnal plunge.
Through such echoes and similar experiences, Sellers gradually builds a
subtle network of striking similarities between the sisters and reveals their
absolute complementarity, described by Vanessa, the painter, in terms of
colours (‘The darker vermilion in your scarlet threw you off-balance, and
enabled my own paler tints to gleam’ [44]) and by Virginia, the writer, in
terms of point of view (‘I sometimes feel as if we see the world through the
same pair of eyes – only we’re wearing different glasses’ [178]).21 Virginia is
portrayed as Vanessa’s ‘other’, her mirror double: ‘we became each other’s
mirrors’ (14). The sisters have similar looks and personalities, which leads
Vanessa to constantly compare herself with her sister and fnd differences:
‘Our faces are inexact replicas of each other, as if the painter were trying
to capture the same person from different angles. Your face is prettier than
mine, your features fner, your eyes a whirligig of quick lights’ (4).
Their minds also function in a similar way, mainly because Sellers imparts
Vanessa with Woolf’s own memories and experiences. In her hallucinations,
Vanessa sees dead fgures surfacing around her, while she is submerged in an
aquatic atmosphere. Well-known imagery that belongs to Woolf’s cosmog-
ony haunts Vanessa, too. For example, the Woolfan images of the shark’s
fn and the bird’s dipping its wing in the ‘unending blue of the water’ (64)
are attributed to Vanessa. Woolf’s fascination – both attraction and fear –
with water is thus transferred to Vanessa:

Water. […] I think constantly of water. I feel as if I am on a precipice

and that at any moment I might fall into an abyss from which I shall not
return. Only drowning will thwart the monsters I might still create.
(70)

Hence, her pressing desire to plunge and drown in order to escape her mon-
sters. Sellers’s Vanessa has defnite, recognisable Woolfan features and is
composed of fgments of Woolf’s life and oeuvre. Just like Woolf, Vanessa
needs ‘a house of her own’: ‘a house independently of our husbands’ (82), a
space to allow her to experiment in life and art. She fnally fnds the perfect
place, Charleston, where she accommodates all her children, husband, lover
and all his lovers, and friends. Her symbolic position in the centre of the
 Vanessa and Virginia 145
household allows everybody to gravitate around her. This house also becomes
her canvas that she freely decorates. Vanessa thus manages to merge art and
domesticity: she is a unique combination of Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.
As in Parmar’s novel, Virginia is often the subject of her sister’s sketches.
The portrait of Virginia emerging from Vanessa’s pencil or brush tells us
as much about the subject as about the feelings of the artist who paints it:

I mark the almonds of your brows, the fne chiselling of your nose. I fnd
pastels and shade the pearly-rose of your skin, the green glints in your
eyes. I add colour to your lips, accentuate the bow I should so much
like to kiss.
(58)

This is a portrait of a beautiful sitter/sister made by the other, loving artist/

sister. Unlike Parmar’s Vanessa, Sellers’s Vanessa is similar to Virginia in her
love: she pours as much love over Virginia as she receives from her. Vanessa
reciprocates her sister’s adoration and secretly expresses her ‘desire to have
[Virginia] to [herself]’ (58). Both sisters are affectionate, have pet names for
each other and use them lavishly. Vanessa sums up all her sister’s facets in a
painting which she would like to paint but which always eludes her:

Sometimes you are an ally in the picture, sometimes a child that requires
protection; sometimes your proximity is a threat. Whenever your oppo-
sition becomes too powerful I have no choice but to deploy all the
weapons at my disposal to force your retreat. Yet I cannot risk losing
you altogether.
(133)

This ‘nightmare haunting’ (133) unveils the many roles Virginia plays in her
sister’s life. Just like in this imaginary painting that Vanessa sees ‘in [her]
mind’s eye’ (132), Virginia is vital to Vanessa’s equilibrium, and vice versa.
Sellers has stated that she aimed at debunking stereotypes in the way
Woolf has been consensually represented in contemporary productions
by depicting in her novel the diverse facets of Woolf’s life and personal-
ity.22 And yet, while the character of Virginia is undeniably multifaceted
and contradictory in Vanessa and Virginia, as Sellers intended her character
to appear, everything converges towards her suicide – the defning event
in Woolf’s life that most authors and artists focus on. Indeed, Vanessa’s
account slowly leads to this notorious, fatal event, although the way Sellers
designs it makes it completely surprising and, at the same time, predictably
Woolfan, as she confers a Dalloway-esque spin to it.
Throughout the unfolding memories which lead to her sister’s suicide,
Vanessa is haunted by her sister’s defnitive decision: although it is fore-
seen by many premonitory signs, it happens completely out of the blue.
Vanessa thinks about Virginia’s breakdowns and suicide attempts after
146 Vanessa and Virginia
each familial tragedy. After their mother’s death, for instance, distressed
Virginia resolves to jump out of the window. Vanessa manages to per-
suade her depressed sister to abort her suicide attempt and soothes her,
in the same way as, later, when Vanessa herself considers putting an end
to her life, Virginia dissuades her and dispels her sister’s dark thoughts.
They both play similar roles in each other’s lives: they rely on each other
and need each other’s support, comfort and validation. Thus, they are
both strong and weak at the same time, ‘sane and insane’, in love with
both ‘life and death’. All these Dalloway-esque thematic hints predict, in
a subtle way, the unpredictable ending.
Virginia’s ‘madness’ keeps her sister sane, in the same way as Virginia’s
suicide, at the end, prevents her from committing suicide and saves her
again: ‘I think your madness spared me. It was as if your visions stood in
for my own feelings, enabling me to go on with my life’ (38). Virginia’s hal-
lucinations anchor Vanessa in her everyday life: while Virginia loses foot-
ing in reality, Vanessa is more rooted into it. It is a matter of maintaining
balance together. Similarly, after Thoby’s death, Virginia’s grief and fragil-
ity makes Vanessa stronger and allows her ‘to pass safely over the vortex’
(50). Vanessa becomes the strong fgure because she must compensate for
her sister’s sensitivity. And in turn, Vanessa’s strength authorises Virginia
to express her feelings and mourn their brother for both of them. All of
Virginia’s negative feelings, states of mind and impulses – grief, madness
and suicide – are enacted for both of them. Virginia’s performed suicide thus
supplants Vanessa’s own simmering, hidden, dark suicide urges and ena-
bles her to go on with her painting and her life, just like Woolf’s character
Septimus Smith ‘saves’ Clarissa Dalloway by committing suicide.
The twinned doubles, as well as the theme of life and death, underlie the
design of Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia, just like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
Vanessa initially attempts to commit suicide, but it is fnally Virginia who
takes the plunge. This Woolfan design, which appears as a twist in Sellers’s
novel, corresponds to Woolf’s evolving ideas during the creative process of
Mrs Dalloway, which was eventually explained by Woolf in the preface of
the frst American edition of the novel:

[…] in the frst version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double,
had no existence; and […] Mrs Dalloway was originally to kill herself,
or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party.
(‘Introduction’ 549)

Sellers’s Vanessa walks to the river and steps into the brown water. The
river’s current and cold water numb her pain. She has a strong desire to
surrender to the embracing river, but fear holds her back. The force of the
current pushes her back to the riverbank and she fnally goes home. After
Vanessa’s failed suicide attempt, the sisters make a pact, and Vanessa prom-
ises Virginia never to give up – a promise that she keeps, but is often tempted
 Vanessa and Virginia 147
to break, as she seems to have all the emotional reasons to want to end her
life. As readers who have direct access to Vanessa’s darkest thoughts and
death impulses, we witness her feelings of failure, abandonment, loneliness,
her unsatisfactory love life, her homosexual lover’s continuous rejection,
her son’s death and the ensuing depression, as opposed to the portrait she
draws of Virginia as a happy and fulflled wife and writer. As the German
invasion seems ominous during WWII, Virginia paradoxically appears calm,
optimistic and resourceful. She comforts Vanessa, who is overwhelmed by
images of destruction, rubble, debris and bombing around her. And yet,
it is Virginia – surprisingly and inexplicably for Vanessa as well as the
reader who follows Vanessa’s subjective perspective – who commits suicide.
Virginia’s death ‘makes no sense’ (177): she always gave the perfect illusion
of being happy, composed and fulflled, while it was depressed Vanessa who
was constantly considering putting an end to her unhappy life. But in the
end, it is Virginia who enacts Vanessa’s compulsions.
Vanessa ultimately puts herself in Virginia’s shoes and imagines the sui-
cide scene as Virginia must have experienced it. In her mind, she accompanies
her sister to the river, sees and feels everything Virginia must have felt: ‘the
paralysing cold’, ‘the weight of her wet clothes’ (177) as she ‘force[s] [herself]
forward’ (177). Vanessa identifes with Virginia’s body and soul: she even
feels the water flling her own mouth and lungs. It is a mirroring, double
suicide, as indicated by the frst-person plural pronoun, which grammatically
marks the fusion between Vanessa and Virginia: ‘the river drags us under’
(177). Both of them die with Virginia and both of them survive in Vanessa or,
more exactly, a part of Vanessa dies with Virginia, and a part of Virginia lives
on in Vanessa. They remain paired forever, united in life and death.
After their friend Lytton’s death, Virginia declares that Carrington,
Lytton’s lover, who tried to commit suicide out of grief and despair, must
not be allowed to end her life; according to Virginia, it is the survivor’s
utmost duty to continue to live and thus allow a part of the dead one, ‘per-
haps the best part of him’ (151), to continue. This is exactly what Vanessa
does: by continuing to live after her sister’s death, she allows Virginia’s life
to continue through her, thus maintaining a very Woolfan balance between
life and death: ‘I glimpse the hand with its contraption. I sense that as one
of us surrenders, the other must fght’ (171). It is therefore Vanessa’s duty to
fght, go on living and creating for both of them. The merging of the two sis-
ters in Vanessa’s self-portrait at the end of the novel is symbolical of the sis-
ters’ symbiosis in life, death and art. While she is drawing her self-portrait,
Vanessa unconsciously paints her sister, too: ‘Her posture [the artist’s] has
an energy and resolution that remind me of you. I examine her fgure more
closely. This time, I realise that what she holds in her hand is not a brush,
but a pen’ (179). Vanessa’s self-portrait confates the two sisters in one sub-
ject and one art, namely the act of writing (metonymically symbolised by the
pen), as Vanessa has just fnished writing her memoir, a passionate homage
to her writer sister.
148 Vanessa and Virginia
Vanessa and Virginia, which is ultimately a novel about borrowings,
imitations and mirror effects, refects the sisters’ arts: it captures the point
of view of a painter and expresses this vision with the words of a writer.
Sellers’s biofction constitutes the scriptural space in which the two arts con-
verge. The author draws the portraits of the eponymous sisters in the spirit
of their very arts, that is to say, by borrowing their styles and artistic tools.
For instance, Virginia’s life and art are depicted with Woolf’s own palette.
Similarities with Woolf’s own prose style – the rhythm of her lyrical prose,
the use of arresting, overworked images, the intensity of syntactically com-
plex sentences, the attention conferred to details, magnifying close-ups on
minute objects and trivial events that have a signifcant impact on the sub-
ject’s consciousness, motifs and refrains that resonate at precise moments
throughout the narration, and so forth – are immediately detectable in this
biofction. Sellers masters the complex art of the light pastiche, a looser
form of literary imitation than the detailed and meticulous close imitation
practised by Cunningham or Lippincott, for example.23 Her prose is proof
of an intimate knowledge of Woolf’s and Bell’s corpora, and the result
evinces her creative virtuosity of merging Woolf’s style and Bell’s point of
view in a novel that fuses the portraits of the two artists.

Vanessa and Virginia: A Biofctional Spin-off

E.H. Wright’s bioplay, Vanessa and Virginia: A One-Act Play is an inter-
esting bioplay which grew out of Sellers’s biographical novel. Unlike the
other creative writers examined in this study, Wright does not draw on
primary sources directly (Bell’s and Woolf’s auto/biographical hypotexts)
but on Sellers’s own novelisation of these primary sources. The adaptive
text is directly or explicitly indebted and has an ‘overt and defning relation-
ship’ with Sellers’s prior text: Wright ‘openly announces this relationship’
(Hutcheon, Adaptation 3) in ‘A Note on the Text’ at the beginning of her
play, clearly claiming kinship and stating that her Vanessa and Virginia is
‘based on the acclaimed novel by Susan Sellers’. Wright adapts24 Sellers’s
biographical novel and dramatises its novelised material. This adaptation
involves a shift of genre (from novel to play) and of medium (from printed
page to stage). Her process of dramatisation moves from ‘the telling’ (genre
of the novel) to ‘the showing’ mode (performative genre which engages the
audience), which is usually involved in the ‘print to performance’ adapta-
tion (Hutcheon, Adaptation 38). The rivalry, confrontation, jealousy, verbal
exchanges and physical interactions between Sellers’s characters Vanessa
and Virginia lend themselves to the dramatic form of the two-character one-
act play imagined by Wright. I would like to briefy discuss how Wright’s
dramatic imagination functions in this adaptation process, how she trans-
poses and adjusts the prior text, and how Sellers’s hypertext becomes her
hypotext in order to fnally conclude on how her representation of the two
sisters in a different genre varies from Sellers’s original novelistic endeavour.
 Vanessa and Virginia 149
Portions of Sellers’s novelistic text are either ‘rapidly translated into
action and gesture’ or ‘dispensed with altogether’ (Hutcheon, Adaptation
39). Wright operates a selection of segments from Sellers’s text and welds
them together: she creates joints, articulations and adds coordination. She
sometimes re-arranges Sellers’s vignettes which include Vanessa’s specifc
memories and offers a slightly different chronological presentation. Her
creative job mainly consists of cutting fragments, with their specifc chro-
nologies, then pasting them in one exchange. The playwright skips many
episodes presented in Sellers’s successive, chronological vignettes, which
is of course in keeping with the economy of a theatrical representation.
She therefore picks even fewer defning events, well-known anecdotes and
moments from the sisters’ lives than Sellers, who had already operated her
own, particular selection from documented auto/biographies in order to
build her narrative arc. The one-act play is inevitably a chronological con-
tinuum with many biographical gaps and holes. However, the acceleration
and condensation of selected events create a dynamic momentum, which
rapidly leads towards the key tragedy in Vanessa’s life, her sister’s suicide.
As in any adaptation from print to stage, ‘description, narration, and rep-
resented thoughts’ are ‘transcoded into speech, actions, sounds, and visual
images’ (Hutcheon, Adaptation 40). Wright performs a series of transgeneric
operations in order to translate Sellers’s epistolary-diaristic novel with its inher-
ent confessional mood and interiority into dynamic verbal exchanges between
the two characters on the stage. She either takes the sisters’ dialogue from
Sellers’s novel and unhusks it from the narrative, descriptive envelope (making
it tighter, denser and reduced to the essential exchange) or she truncates por-
tions of Vanessa’s monologue in order to make it dialogic. Wright thus pares
down the complex narrative text in order to transform it into dramatic units or
exchanges between Vanessa and Virginia, while preserving what she considers
the essence of Sellers’s text. Out of a solitary, private situation in which Sellers’s
Vanessa is in the process of remembering and writing a love letter to her sister,
Wright fabricates a dialogic mise en scène, a verbal, physical and kinaesthetic
interaction between her Vanessa and Virginia who face each other on the stage.
Vanessa, ‘a woman of about 70’ (Vanessa and Virginia 7) at the begin-
ning of the play, is the main character, and is in charge of telling the story
to the audience: ‘Unlike Vanessa who tells, as well as plays out, the story of
their relationship, Virginia never directly addresses the audience’ (7). The
absent, silent ‘you’ that Vanessa addresses in Sellers’s novel becomes both
Virginia and the audience in Wright’s play. Indeed, Vanessa addresses the
audience (when she looks back on past events and comments on them, as a
seventy-year-old woman) and talks to Virginia (as a character who evolves
chronologically, from four to seventy years old).

Vanessa: [to Virginia] Bloomsbury has become so infamous! It’s a house

we can afford and not in the neighbourhood of our ants. Space, light,
white walls, without clutter. This is our turning point.
150 Vanessa and Virginia
[to audience] Time has wrapped layers of myth and envy round what
started very simply. A handful of young men, Thoby, Saxon, Lytton,
Leonard and Clive and two nervous, ill-at-ease women seated round a
freplace.
(25)

It is mainly Vanessa who ‘create[s] the psychological/emotional engagement

with the audience’ (Hutcheon, Adaptation 42), but Wright gives a voice to
Virginia, too. Both sisters speak in their own voice, and Virginia’s experience
is not mediated by her sister anymore, as in Sellers’s novel, but expressed
directly when she addresses Vanessa. The mirror theme at the heart of Sellers’s
novel is aptly expressed by the face-to-face dialogue conceived by Wright.
Instead of an indirect approach of depicting absent Virginia, Wright’s play
stages a direct verbal confrontation between the two sisters. Virginia is pre-
sent on stage, although only intermittently engaged in action. Sellers’s static,
solitary action of Vanessa mourning the absent Virginia by writing a letter is
given a more dynamic, interactive and dramatic impulse on stage.
The sisters’ dialogue in Wright’s bioplay is obviously in keeping with
the dramatic form she designed out of Sellers’s pre-existing narrative fab-
ric. From the introspective letter and memories, Wright operates a shift
to externalisation. It is the characters’ movement on the stage which
refects their emotional and psychological turmoil. For instance, ‘Virginia
climb[ing] onto a box or chair with arms out-stretched’ (Vanessa and
Virginia 15) marks her ‘depart from sanity’ (15). The characters’ states
of mind are thus made visible and audible for the audience. Images and
music, designed to accompany the characters’ actions, also give a visual
and aural dimension to the slow-paced narrative in the original text. We
move from what Vanessa visualises in her mind to what we directly per-
ceive on the stage.
In an interview, Sellers discussed the reduced role her novel’s words
occupied in Wright’s play, her characters’ verbosity being complemented or
compensated by other theatrical effects:

[Words] are important, but only as one ingredient in a gamut of pos-

sibilities and effects, including the actors’ bodies and voices, the set,
costumes, props, sound, and lighting. So while the line spoken by the
actor might indicate an emotion, all the extra information about that
emotion is conveyed through modulations in voice, a gesture, perhaps a
phrase of music, a subtle change in lighting.
(‘Postmodernism’ 213)

In the stage directions, Wright gives information about the way she imag-
ined the movement of her characters on the stage as they address each other
or the audience, as well as their use of material props (a screen and two
boxes or two chairs). The audience perceives the passage of time in the
 Vanessa and Virginia 151
ages of the characters, with each scene transition, which is signalled by the
changing image on the screen and by music.
Because of the format and duration of the play, Wright naturally brings in
less biographical information than Sellers to sketch Vanessa and Virginia’s
portraits. Despite the characters’ physical movement on the stage as well as
the materiality of the music, images and props, which are meant to act as
catalysts for the sisters’ interaction and compensate, in a way, for the loss of
narrative depth, Sellers’s characters are stripped down of their internal com-
plexity. The sisters’ portraits drawn by Wright are more economical and less
subtle, made with rougher and quicker brush strokes. Virginia especially
becomes more stereotypical, reduced to the essential tragic clichés – her
mental breakdowns, madness and suicide – that defne her life.
Maclear and Arsenault’s tale, Parmar’s and Sellers’s novels and Wright’s
play prove that Bell and Woolf’s sisterly relationship has been particularly
appealing for fctional and dramatic exploration. In an interview, Sellers
summed up their ‘exceptionally close bond as siblings’: ‘their loyalty and
support for each other, as well as their rivalries and occasional desire to free
themselves from the other’s orbit’ (‘Postmodernism’ 208). Indeed, the sisters
were both allies in their youthful struggles against Victorian customs, con-
ventions and patriarchal expectations and rivals in their arts and affections.
The rivalry between two exceptional women has a natural underlying narra-
tive fascination which is conducive for creative writers. Their characters of
Vanessa and Virginia are ferce competitors who fght for everything: their
brother Thoby’s company, their mother’s attention and affection, Clive’s
love, as well as the supremacy of their arts. Besides, the audacity of their
unorthodox lifestyles and their search for personal and artistic freedom con-
stitute extremely attractive material for a creative writer. Bell and Woolf had
adventurous, tragic lives, peppered with a series of unexpected blows that
naturally lend themselves to romanticised stories.
The authors whose works have been analysed in this chapter novelise
and dramatise different facets of the sisters’ ‘very close conspiracy’. Firstly,
Maclear and Arsenault offer an imaginary slice of life from the sisters’
childhoods. Frail and unstable Virginia depends emotionally on her older
sister’s support. Vanessa has the motherly instinct and artistic ability to
bring Virginia emotional comfort and restore her mental balance. Secondly,
Parmar offers a confrontational portrait of the two sisters and accentuates
their rivalry during a particular period in their youth which coincides with
Vanessa’s frst love and Virginia’s unforgivable betrayal. The emotional
wound inficted by the treacherous sister permanently alters their privileged
relationship. Finally, Sellers also focuses on the sisters’ rivalry, but her por-
trait of the two sisters is mostly symbiotic and complementary. The sis-
ters have similar personalities and function as a balancing, mirroring pair.
They emerge as almost identical twins, similar and yet not the same. Many
of Woolf’s physical and personality features, the recurrent imagery in her
prose and her stream-of-consciousness lyrical writing are transferred to the
152 Vanessa and Virginia
character of Vanessa. Vanessa and Virginia thus look, think and create in
similar fashions. In this way, Sellers manages to create a diptych portrait
with the same palette and brush strokes.
In both Parmar’s and Sellers’s novels, Vanessa is as a poetic writer who,
in her diary or letters, reveals the rich fabric and texture of her thoughts,
her artistic preoccupations and convictions. She constantly thinks about the
art of painting and theorises her intuitions. She can also beautifully capture
moments of being. She thus emerges as an extremely eloquent and capable
writer, despite her insecurities and perpetual comparisons with her genius sis-
ter who has always been so adept with words. Virginia, on the other hand, as a
young writer, is seen by Vanessa as an inexperienced author who ‘plunders’ or
‘pilfers’ (75) material from her family members’ lives. Both Thoby and herself
appear very thinly disguised in Virginia’s frst novel, which makes Vanessa
think: ‘This is not literature, it is mere journalism’ (75). Despite Virginia’s
‘characters [who] are perfectly turned’ and her ‘sentences [which are] full of
lyricism and sparkle’ (75), it does not bear ‘the hallmark of great art’ (75).
The question whether novels based on real people, whose authors ‘pilfer’
details from their lives, can attain the status of ‘great art’ is also interesting
insofar as the study of biographical novels is concerned. Sellers’s Vanessa
seems to think so, as long as there is an ‘intricate balance’ between ‘compo-
sition and vision’ (75), which is the case of her sister’s To the Lighthouse,
that she unconditionally deems a ‘masterpiece’. In the same way, one could
argue that biographical novels can never be ‘masterpieces’ if their repre-
sentation of the characters remain factual or ‘mere journalism’ and do not
aspire to fulfl a higher artistic vision. In order to become masterpieces, they
need to ‘bridge the gap between biography and art’ (76). Vanessa’s thoughts
on life and art in general acquire high metacritical signifcance: her consid-
erations on how some novels which borrow from ‘life’ reach the status of
‘art’, while others remain ordinary, valueless literary endeavours, lead us to
wonder how some authors can bridge the gap between biography and fc-
tion and fruitfully negotiate the two realms, while others are less successful.
In several interviews, Sellers has provided insights into her specifc bio-
fctional method, which is to be found at the intersection of two traditions
and narrative paradigms: the modernist strategy of exploring her characters’
consciousness and the postmodernist attitude of flling in the gaps of the
offcial biographical hypotext from new perspectives or with voices that
have never been heard before:

We know an extraordinary amount about Virginia Woolf and her sister

Vanessa Bell. And yet, there are gaps in what we know. Fiction enabled
me to explore these gaps. It also allowed me to go inside the minds of
both sisters, and to imagine what they were thinking and feeling.25

In the same interview, Sellers states that the idea of flling in the chinks of
the grand narrative amounts for her to a ‘feminist enterprise’. Besides the
 Vanessa and Virginia 153
combined modernist and postmodernist poetics of exploring consciousness
while flling in the gaps and re-telling the story from an unusual, fresh per-
spective and with an underlying political bias, Sellers confesses she had a
further autobiographical impulse and used her experience of her own sis-
terly relationship in her novel. The author thus blended her personal expe-
rience with elements from Woolf’s and Bell’s own auto/biographies and
accommodated them all into her auto/biografction.26
Although there is a profusion of extant documented autobiographical
and biographical material about Bell and Woolf, questions about them still
remain, and fction can precisely offer what biography cannot: a way to
explore possible, imaginative answers to titillating questions that haunt writ-
ers and intrigue readers. Biofction thus gives authors the freedom to ‘invent
stories that never happened in order to answer [these] perplexing questions’
(Lackey, Truthful Fictions 8). All the novels analysed in this chapter evince
the utmost fexibility of the biographical novel to include the personal mes-
sages, agendas, experiences and questions that fred up these authors to write
their stories. Their creative minds have infnite resources to bring Woolf to
life in the pages of their novels, imagine ever fresher, unexpected situations
and confgurations and explore ‘the motivations, proclivities, hopes, gener-
osities, fears, passions, antipathies, and cruelties’ (Sellers, ‘Postmodernism’
213) of their character. Finally, it is noteworthy that Vanessa is not a charac-
ter on her own in an eponymous novel: she is always portrayed in conjunc-
tion with Virginia, the more famous and familiar sister. Vanessa thus benefts
from her sister’s fame: despite her own personal achievements, it is she who
remains ‘the sister’ of one of greatest writers of the twentieth century and acts
as a catalyst to reveal Virginia’s mysterious facets and hidden motivations.

Notes
1 See Medley’s article ‘Kyo Maclear isn’t afraid of Virginia Woolf’, National Post,
17 March 2012, available at: https://nationalpost.com/afterword/shes-not-afraid
-kyo-maclear-anthropomorphizes-virginia-woolf-into-a-childrens-tale-heroine
(accessed September 2020).
2 The pages of this book are unnumbered.
3 The foral resonance of the name ‘Bloomsbury’ was discussed by Bell in her
memoirs: ‘It is lucky perhaps that Bloomsbury has a pleasant reverberating
sound, suggesting old-fashioned gardens, and out-of-the-way walks and squares’
(‘Notes on Bloomsbury’ 95).
4 Marler has stated that the scar left by the affair between Clive Bell and Virginia
Stephen is perceptible in the changing tone of Bell’s letters to her sister: ‘After a
few pained letters, in which she adopts the suppliant tone which was tradition-
ally Virginia’s, Vanessa cools to an affectionate, concerned, but implacable elder
sister’ (Letters 50).
5 In an interview, Parmar declared the following: ‘Vanessa Bell did not leave a jour-
nal, and that is a wonderful missing voice in the center of the group. I wanted
to build a novel to ft that negative space’. See interview for Bookreporter at:
https://www.bookreporter.com/ authors/priya-parmar/news/interview-012215
(accessed September 2020).
154 Vanessa and Virginia
6 Parmar has confessed that she read both Bell’s published and unpublished cor-
respondence: ‘I spent huge amounts of time with the primary documents. After I
had made my way through all of the published letters and diaries and biographies
of group, I started in on the unpublished correspondence. I moved to Bloomsbury
and spent long hours in the archives’. See interview with Rennicks at: https://ww
w.abaa.org/blog/post/researching-vanessa-bell-bloomsbury (accessed September
2020).
7 ‘I like stories where there is a foothold in truth or in history or in some real life
event; I always really enjoy that’. See interview with Parmar at: http://mirandas
notebook.com/a-chat-with-priya-parmar/ (accessed September 2020).
8 Vanessa’s indignation recorded in her diary is meant to depict Virginia’s desper-
ate, unreasonable love for her sister, which appears as extreme and one-sided,
whereas in reality both sisters expressed their love in the same terms: ‘[Virginia’s]
love for Vanessa had a distinct erotic element which both acknowledged, with
both offering and asking for pettings – kissings and stroking of hair, of the inner
arms, of earlobes and neck’ (Dunn 189).
9 In reality, this division of artistic realms, depicted by Parmar as being imposed
by jealous, strong-willed Virginia who keeps the supreme form of art for herself
and wants to continue the strong masculine literary tradition in the Stephen fam-
ily, was a decision that both sisters made, according to Bell: ‘I cannot remember
a time when Virginia did not mean to be a writer and I a painter’ (‘Notes on
Virginia’s Childhood’ 63).
10 Nigel Nicolson, editor of Woolf’s letters, states in his ‘Introduction’ to the frst
volume of letters that Virginia sometimes loved Vanessa ‘almost to the point of
thought-incest’ (xviii), an idea which transpires in Parmar’s novel.
11 In an interview, Parmar has confessed her bias towards her Virginia: ‘As I was
writing, I found myself furious with Virginia. Hopelessly partisan, I sympathized
with Vanessa unreservedly’. Although she stated that she restored the balance
at the end, Virginia’s character does not emerge as a likeable character: ‘It was
only after I fnished the novel that the balance restored itself and the genius of
Woolf as a writer stepped back to the foreground’. See interview with Blake at:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm /author _num-
ber/2580/priya-parmar (accessed September 2020).
12 See interview with Parmar: http://writingren.blogspot.com/2015/01/interview-w
ith-priya-parmar-author-of (accessed September 2020).
13 Parmar has discussed the historical fgures’ conficting relationship: ‘Vanessa Bell
must have experienced a web of contradictory and shifting feelings. She must
have felt trapped, exhilarated, exhausted, frustrated, proud, and protective when
she dealt with her brilliant but selfsh sister. And while Virginia adored Vanessa,
she deliberately set out to destroy her sister’s marriage. As a novelist, I found
this nexus of conficting emotion irresistible. There is so much juicy humanity in
the contradictions’. See interview with Blake at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/
author_interviews/full/index.cfm /author _number/2580/priya-parmar (accessed
September 2020).
14 Vincent, Adeline 84.
15 See interview with Leavitt at: http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/2009/06/r
ead-this-book-vanessa-virginia (accessed September 2020).
16 See interview with Sellers at: https://susansellers.co.uk/interviews-and-articles/
(accessed September 2020).
17 ‘The fashback structure offered great economy because Vanessa could select
certain incidents rather than attempt to be all-inclusive and could also alter
the chronology. This was important because some of the things that happened
would have been hard to include sequentially in a novel, where as a writer you
 Vanessa and Virginia 155
are thinking about pace, balance, contrast and so on. From this vantage point
the most diffcult part of the story was during the 1890s when the sisters lost
frst their mother then their half-sister Stella. This double tragedy would have
been very diffcult to handle if I had been telling the story in strict chronologi-
cal order’. See interview with Leavitt at: http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com
/2009/06/read-this-book-vanessa-virginia (accessed September 2020).
18 See Sellers’s interview with Vulpes Libris at: https://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/
2017/02/17/interview-with-novelist-and-virginia-woolf-expert-susan-sellers-
giveaway/ (accessed September 2020). In another interview with Layne, Sellers
confessed that ‘[she] is always careful to ensure that whatever [she] add[s] is
at least plausible in terms of the consensus of what is known’ and ‘in keeping
with the world and lives of the people who inspired [the biographical fction]’
(‘Postmodernism’ 215; 221).
19 See Sellers’s essay on her website: https://susansellers.co.uk/interviews-and-art
icles/ (accessed September 2020).
20 Term coined by Bell in 1914 in Art to describe the idea that the form of an art-
work or forms within an artwork can be expressive, even if largely or completely
divorced from a recognisable reality. The aesthetic emotion is what matters in
painting, at the expense of mimetic representation.
21 In a letter to her sister written in 1937, Woolf wondered: ‘Do you think we have
the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles?’ (Letters 6: 158).
22 ‘I was certainly frustrated with the stereotype of her as a madwoman out of
touch with reality – Nicole Kidman’s monotone depiction of her depression in
the flm of “The Hours” is a case in point’. See interview at: https://susansellers.
wordpress.com/questions-for-reading-groups/us-interview/ (accessed September
2020).
23 Sellers has discussed how she aspired to emulate Woolf’s stylistic signature: ‘I
was terrifed of producing a kind of sub Virginia Woolf speak. But certainly the
wonderful fuidity of Woolf’s prose as it moves across points in time and between
characters, her consummate understanding of shape and rhythm down to sen-
tence level, and the opulence of her vocabulary, were all ingredients I aspired to
emulate’ (‘Postmodernism’ 220).
24 Hutcheon considers the phenomenon of adaptation from three perspectives: as
a ‘formal entity or product’, that is to say ‘an adaptation is an announced and
extensive transposition of a particular work or works’; ‘a process of creation’,
that is to say this type of adaptation ‘always involves (re-)interpretation and
then (re)creation’ and lastly, ‘a process of reception’, that is to say ‘adaptation is
a form of intertextuality’ (Hutcheon, Adaptation 7–8). In Wright’s case, the frst
perspective of adaptation presented and theorised by Hutcheon is relevant.
25 See interview with Leavitt at: http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/2009/06/r
ead-this-book-vanessa-virginia (accessed September 2020).
26 Based on Stephen Reynolds’ term ‘autobiografction’ (1906), Saunders devel-
oped a theory of ‘autobiografction’ in Self Impression in which he analyses the
connections between modernism and autobiography. My defnition of autobio-
grafction in the context of Sellers’s novel is a work of fction which combines
elements of both the author’s and her characters’ auto/biographies.
5 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms

Virginia Woolf’s fnal thoughts and dramatic suicide have a rich narrative
and sensational potential, and many authors examined in this book have
been drawn to them. In this chapter, in both Norah Vincent’s Adeline: A
Novel of Virginia Woolf (2015) and Alienora Taylor’s Riding at the Gates
of Sixty: A Fictional Account of Virginia Woolf’s Death and Life (2015)
Woolf is portrayed as a troubled genius who struggles with repeated break-
downs and strives to maintain a precarious mental balance until she is
fnally unable to cope with her debilitating illness and decides to give up
fghting. Both the American and British authors cover almost the same time
period in their characters’ lives, starting with 1925/1927, when Virginia
is in full creative swing, and culminating with her tragic demise in 1941.
The question usually asked in the aftermath of any suicide is ‘why’, and
every author provides their own imaginative answer to this question.1
Moreover, Vincent’s prose offers Woolfan-like glimpses into the mind of
an anguished Virginia, who very much resembles Woolf’s Septimus Smith.
Similarly, in Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), American author
Sigrid Nunez ventriloquises Woolf’s style by borrowing and reproducing
her novelistic techniques in order to create a biofction in the spirit of Flush:
A Biography (1933). Taylor, Vincent and Nunez imagine the functioning
of their Virginia’s creative mind in her interactions with her bipolar self,
exchanges with her husband and sister, discussions with her literary peers,
and more unconventionally, in her rivalry with her marmoset.

Riding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘Sixty’s Gate’2

The starting point of Taylor’s novel is a re-enactment of Virginia’s death, as
in Cunningham’s The Hours and Barron’s The White Garden. The ‘fctional
account of [Woolf’s] life’ (‘Author’s note’, n.p.) paradoxically and a-chron-
ologically starts with the fctional account of her death. Thus, from the start,
Virginia is defned by her suicide, which orients the reading of the whole
novel. In order to limn this particularly dark portrait, Taylor used facts
gleaned from Jane Dunn’s joint biography, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa
Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy, as well as from Woolf’s diary and letters.
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 157
These sources inspired her and gave her ‘the facts and personalities to work
from’ (Riding 194). The biofctional ‘tapestry’ she has woven is made with
‘known facts and fights of [her] imagination’ (194), although her imagina-
tion is said to have been kept in check by the authentic documentation.
Taylor’s novel combines the points of view of three main characters
– Virginia, Leonard and Vanessa – and offers a circular structure. After
recounting Virginia’s death in March 1941, the story goes back in time
to focus on what must have been considered by Taylor as a key period in
Woolf’s life, the year 1927–1928, and circles back to the end of March
1941, on the day of Virginia’s suicide. Death thus constitutes the beginning
and the end of Taylor’s novel, as if Virginia were entrapped in a fateful
mechanism that slowly drags her towards the inevitable end. Virginia is
mainly portrayed as a ‘troubled genius’ who is often prey to ‘bouts of mad-
ness’ (n.p.). This specifc representation emerges from both Leonard’s and
Vanessa’s external points of view, but also from Virginia’s own perspective,
as at times we are directly plunged in her consciousness and follow her frst-
hand account of her illness, depression, frustrations and self-doubts.
A few hours after Virginia leaves the house on 28 March 1941, Leonard
is flled with growing anxiety, the signs of which are visible in his body:

My tremor is pronounced; the fngers undulate separately. […] It is late,

six in the evening, and my wife has not returned from walking. Her
familiar stick no longer rests against mine, I sense her absence in the
entirety of the house.
(7)

Virginia’s absence and Leonard’s loneliness are metonymically rendered

through Virginia’s walking stick, which does not rest against her husband’s
any longer. When Leonard traces his wife’s footsteps through the meadows to
the river, he notices the obvious signs of her death: ‘Her stick lay in the mud.
The water fowed by’ (8). The metonymic stick is ‘cold’ and ‘damp’ (8), which
gives him the certitude that his wife is actually dead. Virginia’s physical absence
is also translated by the lack of movement and action in the house. The sign of
the writer’s death is that her writing tools are still and quiet: ‘the typewriter is
stilled’, ‘quill pens stick up’ from the pot and ‘her diary is closed’ (7).
Virginia’s absence is seen at the beginning as part of a repeated pattern
of several other disappearances in the Woolfs’ twenty-eight years of mar-
riage; Leonard therefore experiences a familiar fear which has resurfaced
intermittently in his life. As he is looking in the mirror, he perceives himself
as a fragile man who is the crumbling foundation for an ageing couple. His
physical shrinking is a direct consequence of his taxing marriage, a burden
which eventually wears him out. Virginia is highly aware of the strain she
puts on him, and her gratitude harks back to Woolf’s farewell letter to her
husband: ‘He has been good to me. All these years he has loved, protected
and warmed me; he has listened to my cries and tried to push me out of dark
158 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
corners with his kindness’ (Riding 51). Her motivations for her fnal, tragic
decision are therefore presented as an act of love, liberation and compassion
for her husband.
Taylor draws an idealised portrait of Leonard as a stoic martyr who
is fully devoted to his wife. He is a faithful husband who ‘could have
taken another’ (19) woman, but stood by his wife, despite her ‘madness’
and ‘withdrawal from [him]’ (19). During their marriage, he has learnt ‘to
anticipate [Virginia’s] states of being’ (31). He is a ‘calming and inspiring’
(34) presence in her life and forms ‘half of [her] wholeness’ (34). Through
Leonard’s memories of his wife in Part One, Taylor portrays the couple’s
marital arrangement, their life together and their necessary balance between
‘separate paths’ (20) and ‘meeting places’ (20). This special marital union
fts Virginia’s personality and needs perfectly. Leonard gives her the space
she desires as an independent writer and woman3 and relishes their privi-
leged meeting times and places ‘between tea and supper’ (20). Because of
Virginia’s emotional fragility, Leonard’s sexual impulsions and physical
attraction to his wife are thwarted and contained: ‘At times I would like to
make love to V, but schooled myself not to: it seems to frighten her greatly,
and my transient pleasure is not worth that’ (139). Virginia thus emerges
as a frigid woman, nursed by her husband who refuses himself all carnal
pleasures so as not to derail her fragile mental health. As a competent and
experienced nurse, Leonard knows how to preserve her body and ‘mend’
her mind (140).
Virginia’s body remains her private mausoleum in which ‘she hides her
wounds’ (11), but in her own way, her ‘cool’ body can create a warm, safe
intimacy with her husband. Despite the separation of bodies and spaces –
as she often takes refuge in her room – the Woolfs have created together a
private, special intimacy and communion. Most of the time, Virginia and
Leonard are happy living and working together. However, although usually
tender, affectionate, caring and protective, Leonard can also be unreason-
able, jealous and ill-tempered. His own moods can tip the fragile balance of
his wife’s sanity, and the 1927–1928 section reveals tensions in the couple’s
otherwise harmonious union. Leonard is jealous of the special bond between
Vanessa and Virginia during the 1927 Christmas episode when the sisters
are engaged in creating a snow statue together at Charleston. Virginia’s
breakdown, which is triggered by the insignifcant row with Leonard after
this event, presages her last, fatal breakdown in 1941, caused by a conjunc-
tion of different circumstances.
In Part Two, the focalisation changes from bereft Leonard to distressed
Virginia, two months before she commits suicide. She is on the eve of her
ffty-ninth birthday, on 24 January 1941, as she is ‘riding at the gate of
sixty’ (26), ‘drift[ing] slowly into [her] sixtieth year’ (28). Virginia thinks
about her drying creativity, the professional pressures, her repeated head-
aches and the guilt she feels for being a burden on Leonard. On her last
birthday, she is absorbed into the past and haunted by harrowing thoughts.
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 159
She nostalgically thinks of her father and his library when she was twelve
and was given permission to come to choose any book she liked. Through
this memory, Taylor gives a sense of Virginia’s relationship with her ‘for-
mal’, ‘unsmiling’ ‘remote’ (30) father who enriched her mind and ‘fed [her]
word-hunger’ (31), and the mixture of ‘affection and respect’ (30) she had
for him. Her father shaped her emotionally and intellectually, and now
Virginia considers herself as not only her father’s literary heir, but also the
inheritor of his emotional remoteness. Virginia also relives the traumatic
experience of her half-brother’s incestuous exploration of her body and
remembers her powerlessness as a little girl in front of such an unexpected,
brutal invasion of her body. Taylor thus draws on well-known childhood
episodes in Woolf’s life and presents them as a string of distressing memo-
ries about traumatic past events that resurface on Virginia’s last birthday.
These incidents appear to have had a tremendous, lasting impact on her and
have shaped her intellectually and sexually, for better or for worse. From
memory to memory, Taylor takes the reader closer to the fatal moment.
Virginia’s tactile, auditive and visual senses are magnifed and exacerbated:
the colours she sees are violent, her fngers ‘cringe away at the slightest
touch; ears strain wide at a pin drop’ (43). These colours, lights and noises
become increasingly oppressive and plague her as her ‘madness’ ‘threatens’
(44) to take over. She feels persecuted by eyes that look at her ‘laughing,
judging, hating’ (49) and hears sneering trees and cackling voices from the
past ‘imprisoned in tree trunks’ (50). The imaginary ‘monstrous beings’ who
‘live behind [her] closed lids’ (51) gradually become more ‘real’ and replace
her true reality.
On 28 March 1941, Taylor gives the reader access to Virginia’s last
thoughts as she ‘fear[s she is] going mad again’ (53) and is hurriedly writing
her farewell letters. An avalanche of harrowing visions invade her mind:
‘eyes hid[e] in trees’ (53), the ‘silver fsh mov[e] up the tree trunks’ (54) and
‘wriggle in and out of the human shape’ (54). Virginia appears to exist in a
secondary state, utterly confused and wishing to hide from the ‘human eyes’
that are staring at her. She thus looks for peace and comfort on the riverbed.
‘I am cold’ (54), she thinks just before she dies: this is her last bodily sensa-
tion before she is mentally and physically liberated and meets her embracing
death. She fnally lies down to eternally rest in peace on the river’s pebbly
‘mattress’ (54). Just like Vincent in Adeline, Cunningham in The Hours and
Duffy in A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square, Taylor imagines Virginia’s
mental turmoil during the last hours of her life and creates the atmosphere
which leads her character to make her irrevocable decision. Virginia hence
appears as the helpless prey to her powerful hallucinations that fnally take
over and control her actions.
Riding at the Gates of Sixty’s last parts are narrated by Vanessa and
unveil the sisters’ relationship from her subjective perspective, just like in
Parmar’s and Sellers’s novels. Taylor takes ‘the lid off [Vanessa]’s brain’ and
reveals her ‘real thoughts’ (177). Vanessa navigates the ‘vast space’ (177)
160 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
that Virginia occupies in her heart and thoughts. It is the portrait of a painter
who, unlike a writer, does not notice moods or words, but movements and
tensions in her subject’s face and body. Just like Leonard, Vanessa remi-
nisces a series of isolated scenes, shards of memories that pierce through and
amount to a post-impressionistic narrative method. Because Virginia is dif-
ferent, she completes and opens the confnes of her world. Vanessa suddenly
thinks of her world without her sister, a premonitory thought, as she senses
that Virginia, although younger than her, will die before her.
The portrait of Virginia as a child emerges from her sister’s memories
and comparisons with her own daughter. Vanessa particularly remembers
Christmas Day 1927 that she spent with her sister, which coincided with
her daughter’s ninth birthday. While contemplating her daughter, Angelica,
Vanessa considers the womanly bonds that defne her life and the impor-
tance of both her sister and her daughter in her life. Together, they make a
perfect, feminine, triangular confguration: ‘One should have, at most, two
women in one’s life. […] I have a sister and a daughter, and that is quite
enough to my way of thinking’ (155). Virginia and Angelica are seen by
Vanessa as alike, as they have similar creative imaginations, so Angelica
appears as Virginia’s imaginative offspring, her daughter-in-imagination.
Her wave-like moods are similar to Virginia’s, too, but without the ‘sad,
morbid strain’ (117): she is emotionally more ‘robust’ (156) than her aunt.
While closely observing her daughter, Vanessa can discern her sister in
Angelica’s gestures, which ‘plunge[s] [Vanessa] back into [her] childhood’
(160). Taylor draws a triptych mirroring portrait, with Angelica in the mid-
dle, encompassing and refecting both sisters’ personalities and arts.
In the last pages of the novel, back in March 1941, Vanessa postpones
reading her sister’s farewell letter to her until she fnally feels ready to open
the envelope. After reading the suicide note, Vanessa considers everything
her sister represented for her: ‘[her] baby, [her] irritant, [her] beloved
one, part of [her] soul’ (188) and cannot imagine life without her sister,
‘the one constant in [her] life’ (188). She then starts sketching her sister’s
last moments as she imagines them on the back of the envelope – the last
material bond she has with Virginia. Vanessa paints her sister’s demons
in the shape of swirling water, and this ultimately constitutes a portrait
of Virginia’s mental scape. Vanessa’s pictorial gesture is the equivalent of
Taylor’s narrative description of Virginia’s last moments in her novel and
the representation of the inner turmoil that leads to her suicide.
Riding at the Gates of Sixty brings together different fragments and
defning moments in Virginia’s life, which resurface through Virginia’s,
Leonard’s and Vanessa’s memories. In this clichéd representation, Virginia
is depicted mostly as a fragile, mad, suicidal woman who is crippled by
morbid thoughts and hallucinations. She ‘think[s] a great deal about death
and dying’ (184), and fnally decides to ride ‘the Dark Mare’ over the abyss
(188). By starting with Virginia’s death, Taylor suggests that it hovers over
and determines Virginia’s whole life. Similarly, Vincent focuses on a string
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 161
of meaningful events that inexorably lead to Virginia’s death. Spanning
1925 to 1941, Adeline is structured in fve ‘acts’ and scenes like a play,
which gives Virginia’s life an episodic, theatrical progression: it starts on the
morning of 13 June 1925, when she has a revelation about her future novel
To the Lighthouse and ends with her suicide on the morning of 28 March
1941. Vincent also imparts a teleological, dramatic arc to her episodic nar-
rative: as Bethany Layne argued, Virginia’s ‘diverse experiences chart a dis-
cernible trajectory towards a certain death’ (‘Reinstating’ 41).

Adeline and Virginia

The titles for Adeline’s fve acts are borrowed from the titles of Woolf’s nov-
els and refect the content of Vincent’s respective sections. Act I, ‘Night and
Day’ (Saturday 13 June 1925), signals the theme of polarity which is intro-
duced in the novel and which constitutes its main contraption, but also the
power struggle between Adeline and Virginia and the time frame of this epi-
sode which, just like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), takes place during one
specifc day in June. The third-person narrator alternately follows Virginia’s
thoughts and conversation with Adeline (which lead to a luminous epiphany
and the birth of To the Lighthouse), as well as Leonard’s thoughts about his
wife and their discussions (which unveil his contribution to her creative pro-
cess). In Act II, ‘The Waves’ (1920–1930), the reader follows Virginia, now
the celebrated author of To the Lighthouse and Orlando, as she takes a fur-
ther creative step into abstraction and conceives her novel The Waves. Her
debate with Lytton about the biographical self and the role of imagination
in reconstructing a subject’s consciousness, her incredulity about Freud’s
‘Viennese twaddle’ (102), her aversion of psychoanalysis as a method of
exploring one’s consciousness and fnally Yeats’s philosophy about the split
self, all feed her own artistic intuitions. Virginia draws from both the fail-
ures and discoveries of a historian, a psychoanalyst and a poet-philosopher;
their ideas and theories about the splintered self and the attempt to appre-
hend, know and make it whole, converge and progressively sediment in
Virginia’s literary masterpiece.
Act III, ‘Between the Acts’ (1932), is composed of two ‘acts’ which
offer two signifcant parallels: the frst between Virginia and suicidal Dora
Carrington who mourns the death of her partner, Lytton Strachey, and the
second between Virginia and irrational, delusional Vivien Eliot who also suf-
fers from a ‘nervous disease’. In the frst scene, Adeline, Virginia’s destruc-
tive ‘doppelgänger’ (144) – her malevolent young self – incites grief-stricken
Carrington to put an end to her life. In the second one, Tom and Vivien’s
disastrous visit to Rodmell offers the Woolfs the abominable spectacle of a
highly dysfunctional marriage. Virginia’s profound dislike for Tom’s wife
and her complete lack of empathy with this ‘harpy’ radically change when
she later identifes with Vivien, a vulnerable, burdening wife with mental
issues who ends up being interned by her husband.
162 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
Act IV, ‘The Years’ (1934–1938), is composed of close-ups of three sig-
nifcant events in Virginia’s life: her encounter with William Butler Yeats
(October 1934), which progressively leads to the revelation that her own,
personal poetic vision of the waves is part of a larger ‘correspondence’
pertaining to both the occult and the scientifc world; her anguished wait-
ing for Leonard’s verdict of her latest novel, The Years (November 1936)
and the upsetting news of Vivien Eliot’s commitment to an asylum (July
1938), which calls into question her scathing indictment of patriarchy in
her recently published pamphlet Three Guineas: Vivien’s situation makes
Virginia contemplate women’s responsibility and tacit complicity in mascu-
line dominance.
Finally, Act V, ‘The Voyage Out’ (Saturday, 22 March – Friday, 28
March 1941) corresponds to Virginia’s last week before she dies. Vincent
reconstructs three specifc days within this week. On Saturday, Leonard
detects the signs of Virginia’s mental deterioration; on Thursday, in a discus-
sion with her friend and physician Octavia Wilberforce, Virginia pleads her
cause and justifes her suicide, and lastly, the next day, on Friday, accompa-
nied by Adeline, Virginia fnally gives in to her younger self’s long-lasting
suicidal impulses and together they take the liberating plunge into the river.
These fragmentary scenes from Virginia’s life, the close-ups on signifcant
events, the conversations with other luminaries, which fertilise her creative
process, and the interaction with her younger self, which brings childhood
memories to the surface, compose a distinctive portrait of Virginia.
Vincent gives life to a Virginia made with bits of her own mental and
emotional experience, thoroughly researched biographical material, literary
criticism of Woolf’s texts and an imaginative story about Woolf’s psyche
which is unique in the vast spectrum of biographical novels about Woolf
studied in this book. In several interviews, the author has discussed the auto-
biographical skein that she braided into Adeline. Woolf’s own struggle with
mental illness struck a chord with Vincent, who talked about her own per-
sonal experience of depression and suicide. She confessed she used her own
arguments for suicide and put them in Virginia’s mouth in the last conversa-
tion she has with her physician, a day before she commits suicide. Haunted
by the ‘specter of Virginia Woolf’,4 Vincent confessed that writing Adeline
had a therapeutic, benefcial outcome for her ‘mental health’: Adeline was
‘a purgative, and in that sense, it was a good thing, a way of leaching out
the poison of depression’.5 Vincent’s perceptive analysis of her own suicide
attempt6 made her realise that it was her suicidal self, a completely differ-
ent entity separated from her sane, rational self, who acted in her stead.
The duplication of selves, with one part strong and harmful and the other
one powerlessly witnessing the horrid scene, constitutes the very polarity
to be found at the heart of her novel. This dual self, intrinsically composed
of ‘the sane & the insane side by side’ (Woolf, Diary 2: 207), is also a very
recognisable Woolfan motif. As in Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia, the theme
of mirroring selves is prevalent, although in Adeline the duality concerns
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 163
Virginia’s own split self and the duel that takes place within herself between
the adult Virginia (ageing from forty-three to ffty-nine years old in the
story) and eternally thirteen-year-old Adeline, Virginia’s younger self, the
‘little goat’ (18) that she was when her mother died. Vincent imagines that
Virginia’s adolescent self continues to exist as a separate entity, haunts old
Virginia, and accompanies her in her major decisions. During psychologi-
cally intense episodes, old Virginia converses with young Adeline, who plays
the role of both confdant and antagonist. Virginia is shaped by her periodi-
cal encounters with Adeline, or as Layne puts it, in the light of Freudian
theory, ‘Vincent’s Adeline […] becomes a device to show how the child is
“the mother of the woman”’ (‘Reinstating’ 40).7
Adeline emerges whenever Virginia’s sanity is precarious and progres-
sively threatens to take over. In the beginning, the relationship with her
younger self is benefcial for both of the selves and has a therapeutic and
cathartic value: on the one hand, Adeline’s spectral presence helps Virginia
remember past events and revives signifcant moments of being; on the
other hand, mature Virginia helps young Adeline articulate her experience,
soothes her and keeps her in check. However, towards the end of her life,
Virginia gradually loses her power and control over Adeline, who boldly
takes over,8 resurfaces or materialises unexpectedly and maliciously usurps
Virginia’s voice in critical situations. The spectral apparitions and eerie
duplications of the self hark back to the doppelgänger motif, with Adeline
sometimes acquiring evil Hyde-esque overtones.
Vincent’s design of Virginia’s twofold self follows a recognisable ‘life
and death’, ‘sanity and insanity’ Dalloway-esque pattern. Virginia emerges
as a mentally fragile character, always on the precipice of breakdown, on
the verge of madness, on the razor’s edge between light and darkness. She
constantly walks on a dangerous line that ‘has abysses either side’ (10).
Over time, she has developed a mechanism of self-defence which enables her
to cope with her fitting mind. She has learnt how to escape her harrowing
thoughts by shifting her mind from the dangerously absorbing interiority to
the outside world. This method functions like a safety valve which prevents
ominous eruptions; it is similar to what Woolf’s Septimus is encouraged
to do by doctors: noticing things outside would prevent him from being
absorbed in the maelstrom of his disturbed mind and being consumed by his
traumatising war experience.9
While writing her novel The Years, Virginia spends a whole summer ‘in
bed with’ Adeline (192), which becomes a metaphor for Virginia’s polar-
ity, overcoming depression and inability to keep Adeline at bay. Virginia’s
deteriorating mental condition and physical weakness necessarily signal
Adeline’s growing strength and omnipresence as she gradually overpowers
Virginia. Their interaction and mode of functioning are based on a power
balance: sanity indicates that Virginia manages to maintain control and
Adeline remains subdued, whereas Adeline’s appearance and lingering is
the sign that insanity or Virginia’s dark, villainous, death-oriented self takes
164 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
over. Towards the end of Virginia’s life, Adeline often has ‘the upper hand’
(193) and becomes the dominant self. She gradually creates a physical and
mental prison for Virginia, who is powerlessly witnessing what a ‘creep-
ing lamia Adeline had become’ (195), ‘feast[ing] on [her] weakness’ (195).
Her despotic control over the declining Virginia culminates in her ultimate
control of their joint death. ‘That is not how we are going to die’ (193),
Adeline categorically decrees, now making all the life and death decisions
for Virginia.
Virginia’s death is prompted by a series of converging emotional circum-
stances. The momentary silence and respite from war noises in the morning
of her last day are flled with the voices of a chorus that her consciousness
summons to accompany her last moments. The canonical fgures that mate-
rialise in her hallucinations replace the sounds of the cannons: Tom, ‘her
haunting competitor, here to the end, to beguile and torment her’ (261);
Lytton, who ‘came alive again in this chorus this morning’ (261); Yeats, ‘the
old magus himself’ (262). These canonical writers signal to her the ‘canoni-
cal hour’ (262), ‘noon at the latest’ (268), by which she would join them.
Vincent imagines Virginia’s thoughts while she is writing her two notes, one
to Leonard, one to Vanessa, in a secondary state, ‘without knowing it’, ‘like
something written in sleep’, while she is ‘confabulating with friends’ (271).
She then puts them in two blue envelops, ‘writes the names Leonard and
Vanessa respectively on the two envelopes’ and ‘places the envelopes side by
side on the table’ (275).
The fnal moments of Vincent’s Virginia very much resemble the fnal
moments of Cunningham’s Virginia. The third-person narrator renders eve-
rything Virginia thinks, does, hears, sees and feels just before her drowning:
‘she puts on her fur coat, takes up her walking stick and heads out again,
this time down the garden path, out the back gate by the church and onto
the path that leads to the Ouse’ (276). Virginia chooses the right spot on the
riverbank, the right mudstone with ‘dark red and purple bands of clay run-
ning through it’ (276) and performs a surprising ritual based on the poem
Yeats wrote for her, ‘Spilt Milk’:10 she takes the milk that her friend and
physician Octavia gave her the day before and spills it over the mudstone
before putting it in the pocket of her fur coat. Young Adeline’s plan for them
to die together is fnally implemented by old Virginia, as she takes Adeline’s
hand and together they embrace death. Virginia feels the chilling wind and
the weight of the stone in her pocket, but ‘unvanquished and unyielding’,
like Bernard in Woolf’s The Waves, at ‘a quarter to twelve’, the canonical
hour, ‘steps into the river’ (277). On the bed of the river, ‘woman and girl’
lie together ‘side by side’ (18) in a long-lasting defnitive communion.
Vincent’s novel is similar to Cunningham’s insofar as she imagines not
only Virginia’s death, but also the birth of her canonical novels. In Act I, To
the Lighthouse originates in the very dialogue between Adeline and Virginia,
during which meaningful childhood memories at St Ives resurface. A sig-
nifcant moment of being is initiated by one of Adeline’s memories which
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 165
kindles Virginia’s imagination and vision of a new design for a new novel.
Adeline summons the past in the present, and this retrieved past constitutes
an invaluable reservoir from which Virginia draws on. To the Lighthouse
thus appears as a joint creative endeavour with therapeutic benefts for both
of them. The novel’s title, design, characters and themes gradually coalesce
from both of their contributions. In Virginia’s words, creativity is tribu-
tary to their ‘wholeness’ and equilibrium: together they work perfectly well
‘when [they] are not mad’ (34).
Vincent’s Virginia is aware of the ‘Freudian vogue’ (60) at the time but
resents Freud’s ‘jargon’, which has become ‘the lingua franca of [their] age’
(59), and, just like Duffy’s Virginia, expresses her mistrust of this ‘scatologi-
cal charlatan’ (66). Her mind has fabricated its own introspective method
of exploration of the self, and her personal encounter with her hidden self,
Adeline, is the equivalent of the Freudian method of psychoanalysis: ‘I am,
I confess, very interested in me, and my past in particular – it being mine’
(60). Virginia is her own psychotherapist; her open discussion with her alter
ego is an investigative mechanism that allows her to learn more about her
past and understand it as an adult. Her main discovery, from her interaction
with Adeline, is that the self is ‘multiple, multi-layered’, ‘endlessly myriad
and diverse’ (63). This vision is put into practice in To the Lighthouse, in
which Lily Briscoe thinks that to see someone fully, one would need more
than ffty pairs of eyes, and James Ramsay realises that nothing is simply
one thing. In Virginia’s new novel, ‘the multifoliate self’ embarks on a jour-
ney ‘through the dream of time, in language that shimmers and billows and
fows with the narrative of experience’ (64).
In this age of continuous scientifc discoveries, Virginia is convinced that
new prose forms need to capture the complexities of the human mind, the
‘mysteries of consciousness’, the ‘shifting texture of the world as it really
is’ (67), and must be expressed in a new language, different from the ‘cor-
seted novels, poems, plays [they] have known’ (67). Virginia is critical of her
male peers and wishes to offer a different, feminine vision of the psychologi-
cal novel. Leonard compares Virginia’s unique design and technique with
Einstein’s scientifc discoveries of ‘the journey of the self through time’ (72).
Virginia’s vision of the self, according to Leonard’s analysis, ‘has no mass
at all’, being ‘made entirely of thought, and so is itself a kind of light’ (72).
This de-materialised self is defned only by its spiritual consciousness. Just
like Einstein, with her new novel Virginia lays the foundation of ‘a new sci-
ence of the art of fction’ (73). After her spontaneous, emotional interaction
with Adeline, her discussion with Leonard helps Virginia theorise her intui-
tive, dream-like visions and give them scientifc signifcance.
All of Virginia’s novels appear to be rooted in vivid ‘moments of being’ in
which a certain vision of their design surfaces, as well as in eye- and mind-
opening discussions with her peers, during which this vision is solidifed and
confrmed. For instance, The Waves progresses from Virginia’s encounter
and interactions with Yeats. Yeats’s inspiring theories about the nature of
166 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
the split self, the ‘anti-self’, the ‘shattered self’, the ‘sharded self’ and ‘the
self that does not walk in this world’ (111) constitute the ‘very substance
of her new work’ (111). Vincent’s Virginia’s dream-like process of crea-
tion of The Waves is similar to Cunningham’s Virginia’s conception of Mrs
Dalloway. Inspiration comes to her in a state of grace when she is a differ-
ent, parallel self. In each of her novels, she delineates new selves, and this
is also the creative principle of The Waves: ‘I and Adeline, the selves that
I am and those that I have been, my family as it was then and my family
as it is now’ (114). ‘Biography is fction’ (114), Virginia thinks during her
encounter with Yeats, and in The Waves she puts this revelation into prac-
tice. Her novel contains her biography as well as ‘her group biography of
Bloomsbury’ (114). She brings together different split selves who are ‘in
Yeats’s sense, all her, all the pieces of her split self shattered in the look-
ing glass’ (115). Virginia is progressively envisioning the design of her new
novel as well as the six pivotal characters, ‘two pairs of three’ (116). She
borrows Lytton’s personality for Neville, Tom’s for Louis, her male self for
Bernard, Thoby’s for Percival, Nessa’s for Susan, her female self for Jinny
and Adeline’s for Rhoda, and imagines that all these disembodied charac-
ters will be mere ‘outlines’, with ‘no substance’ and ‘no solid form’ (120).
A thin biographical substrate will sustain each character conceived as part
of a geometrical, symmetrical form: the characters are imagined as three-
dimensional pyramids, the apex of which meet in one centrepiece, Thoby/
Percival. Virginia’s characters’ ‘mystic union’ as well as the ‘dispersal of the
self’ (118) thus seem to have originated in the stimulating discussion she had
with Yeats in which they debated his philosophy.
Virginia’s last meeting with Yeats, one day in October 1934, illustrates
the theme of underlying, invisible connections and correspondences – the
multiple forms of propagation of experience as echoes, links or waves – at
the heart of all artistic works within a period of time, which are inevita-
bly the product of the artists’ Zeitgeist. Yeats points out images both Tom
and Virginia used in Ash Wednesday and The Waves respectively, a proof
for him that they are all ‘drinking from the same spring’ (178). He frmly
believes that the common pool of images, similar thoughts and identical
words, that all great, innovative poets use in their work, is explained by the
occult, the ‘Spiritus Mundi’ (178). According to his philosophy, there is a
common reservoir or universal memory that provides inspiration to the poet
or writer. All the seemingly coincidental images resonate with each other
and are called, according to Baudelaire whom Yeats cites, a ‘correspond-
ence’ (186). Yeats suggests that Virginia’s poetical waves are in keeping
with the scientifc discoveries of the time: the voices she hears in her head,
Yeats believes, have the same principle as the propagation of radio waves.
The human body works like a wireless, and science is a mere reproduction
of what already exists in the body, which is made of conductive metals and
minerals. Yeats thus appears as a visionary attuned to the discoveries of
his time who is alluding to the future of wireless communication between
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 167
human beings: ‘one day people will be communicating across seas and con-
tinents, their messages travelling through nothing but air, and they will be
doing so through yet another of these so-called marvelous inventions’ (182).
However, for Virginia, hearing voices is not a blessed state of communica-
tion, but the attribute of the mad, ‘caged’ people (183). Yeats’s answer is
that on the contrary, Virginia is part of a very fortunate, select few who
are equipped to receive this experience, and towards the end of her life,
she is more and more aware of the strange, unsettling, multiplying corre-
spondences that coincide with her own visions. Vincent pulls together all the
threads and inter-connections between people, science, psychology, mysti-
cism and art to make illuminating patterns which acquire meaning for her
Virginia.
Adeline is ultimately a novel about invisible links between great minds
and their masterpieces which form the literary canon. Vincent suggests that
the creation of a literary work is to be found at the confuence of private
motivations and public debates, inner refections and external infuences.
The exterior circumstances surrounding one’s work confront or confrm
one’s deep intuitions. Any work of art is born from personal artistic beliefs,
but at the same time benefts from a larger epistemological context. The
representation of Virginia’s relationships with her most remarkable peers
shows how she absorbs their theories and adjusts them to ft her own,
unique artistic vision. Her novels are put in the perspective of a larger crea-
tive web or intellectual network that underlie not only modernist aesthet-
ics, but also the psychological and scientifc discoveries of the time. All the
luminaires of the time leave their own distinctive mark on the Zeitgeist of
the early twentieth century, and Virginia is one of the many threads that
contribute to this collective intellectual tapestry. Virginia and her peers all
draw from a common pool of knowledge that all novelists, poets, artists,
philosophers and scientists dip in. She gleans ideas from her fellow writers,
which resonate with her own vision, and she expresses them in an original
way in her novels.
Virginia is convinced that an author who spends their whole life captur-
ing an artistic vision can only deliver it ‘absolutely right’ ‘once or twice’ ‘if
he is fortunate’ (233). Vincent suggests that for Woolf, To the Lighthouse
and The Waves constitute those two notable instances in which Woolf
reached supreme perfection. She thus takes the reader inside the writer’s
consciousness and unveils the ‘truth’ behind the creative processes of the
two masterpieces. She plants the invisible seeds which germinate, grow in
Virginia’s mind and produce her new novels. Vincent thus focuses on the
movement and fertility of Virginia’s mind, depicts her astonishing mind-
scape, and explores the ‘intoxicating frisson of her imagination’ (79). She
imagines the mystical revelations that happen beyond the surface, at the
crossroads of a multitude of emotional events and intellectual stimuli.
Finally, she purports that Virginia’s hallucinatory states and confronta-
tions with Adeline are at the origin of her artistic experience: creativity and
168 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
bipolarity are thus intertwined in this particular representation of Woolf as
an imaginative writer.
Furthermore, considerations about the ethics or benefts of biofctional
representations are indirectly raised by Vincent through her characters’
refections and discussions: while observing Leonard gardening, Virginia
considers how posteriority will see them as a couple. Their profound inti-
macies, like their sexual life together, will be total speculation and will give
rise to many interpretations in the future: ‘the conjectures of sex’ will be
interpreted by people who ‘know nothing’ (52) about them. This remark
is particularly pertinent concerning biographical fction: biofction authors
examine their historical fgures’ lives and interpret them by speculating
about private details and thoughts that only they experienced. These people
wore many public, social masks to hide their true selves, and it is implied
that the creative aim of biofction authors is to lift those masks and give us
access to the historical fgures’ real selves, which are naturally accessible
only through conjecture. According to Virginia, people’s eyes ‘refect only
the distorted image of what or whom is being observed’ (55); similarly, we
may also wonder if biographical novels only display a distorted image of
Woolf, and if reinventing a life is unavoidably an act of ‘misinterpretation’
(106). However, in the new critical space opened by Harold Bloom, misin-
terpretation does not carry a negative connotation, but becomes a necessary
act of creation without which Woolf would not survive and fourish on our
current literary scene.
Virginia’s debate with Lytton about the conjunction of biography and
fction is largely based on Woolf’s diary entry in which she briefy sketches
the shortcomings of Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex as a biography, which
unsuccessfully tries to fusion fact and imagination, as well as on Woolf’s
essay ‘The Art of Biography’, in which she discusses the problems inherent
in the genre of biography that Strachey, as a biographer, could not pos-
sibly solve. Virginia argues that the limitations of biography are due to
the ‘breakage in the self’ (Adeline 105) and the fact that ‘we cannot know
ourselves’, therefore ‘how can we write a life when the self is beyond our
grasp?’ (105). The advantage of fction is that it can surpass the limitations
of biography and can capture a character’s many selves, which is exactly
what Vincent does, by materialising Virginia’s younger self, Adeline, and
making her interact with her older self, Virginia. Lytton and Virginia’s pre-
occupations with telling the ‘truth’ are those of postmodernist writers, too:
‘How does one tell the truth in biography or in autobiography when the
truth is not to be had?’ (106). Virginia points at intrinsic faws of such life-
writing genres which aim for an impossible, unattainable result. This is the
reason why, unlike Lytton, the biographer, Virginia chooses to ‘take refuge
in fction’ (106) when ‘telling the stories of real people’s lives’ (106). Fiction
is thus seen as the most appropriate genre for her to tell the true stories of
real people. Lytton and Virginia also discuss the impossibility for a biogra-
pher to recreate the past, as he does not have access to his subject’s mind
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 169
and hidden motives and cannot consequently interpret his actions. But crea-
tive writers like Woolf and Vincent can imaginatively plunge into ‘the liquid
landscape of [the characters’] dreams’ (106) and reveal their thoughts and
ideas in their novels of consciousness.
Virginia’s thoughts about the composition of her novels and her debates
with Leonard, Lytton and Yeats, which spark or consolidate her creative
vision, read like real literary criticism. Vincent thus popularises literary
scholarship and makes academic arguments readable by imagining conver-
sations between Virginia and other modernist writers, in which they con-
front their original visions and philosophies. When voiced directly by these
erudite characters, literary criticism acquires a three-dimensional, practical
and immediate quality. In an interview, Vincent discussed the new genre
that she envisaged, which opens new literary possibilities: ‘Through writing
Adeline I discovered a new genre for myself, which I’m calling bio-fc or bio-
lit. It blends biography, literary criticism and fction and attempts to present
a portrait of the lives and work of writers I admire’.11 These portmanteaux,
‘bio-fc’ or ‘bio-lit’, which clearly point to the intrinsic generic hybridity of
biofction, can also apply to Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury in which
Sigrid Nunez presents an original portrait of Woolf’s life and work.

Mandril and the Marmoset

Nunez imagines Virginia and Leonard’s domestic partnership, social life
and literary ventures from the moment the marmoset Mitz enters their lives,
on 19 July 1934, to the moment she dies, on Christmas Day 1938. This slice
of life in the Woolfs’ lives is composed of a series of entertaining vignettes
and anecdotes. The subtitle of the novella draws on the appealing cachet of
Bloomsbury, but more than interacting with their Bloomsbury friends, the
Woolfs enjoy their ‘blessed quiet evenings alone’ (38), in the company of
their pets, Pinka and Mitz. The animals share the quiet, domestic lives of
their owners, an ageing couple who not only ‘had not grown apart, as cou-
ples do’, but are ‘closer than they had ever been’ (86), so close that in their
old age, they begin ‘to look more and more alike’: ‘the same gaunt serious
faces; brother and sister some people mistook them for at frst’ (91).
Nunez depicts a group portrait of Mitz and her owners, with their specifc
work and leisure habits, based on real facts, events and anecdotes recorded
in sources listed in the ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end of the novella. Scraps
from these published sources are interwoven in the narration and delimited
by quotation marks: in this way, ‘the suture-wounds where fact meets fc-
tion’ (Layne, ‘Biofction’ 20) remain visible for the reader. The lives of the
animal and human subjects, Mitz and the Woolfs, are invented to different
degrees: on the one hand, Nunez flls in the huge gaps in Mitz’s slim recorded
existence and fabricates many fctional details around the scarce kernels of
evidence;12 on the other hand, she adheres closely to the Woolfs’ profusion
of auto/biographical material and draws on a multitude of biographemes.
170 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
As such, Mitz ‘serves under two masters’ (Woolf, ‘New Biography’ 478), as
it is faithful to biographical and historical record concerning the Woolfs’
lives, but it relies on imagination for the eponymous marmoset; it combines
the substance of truth, conferred by the published Woolfan sources, with
the freedom of fction in the imagined situations fltered through Mitz’s eyes
and the invented dialogues between characters.
With Mitz, Nunez offers the reader a pastiche of Woolf’s Flush: A
Biography, which, in turn, was conceived as a parody of a Strachey biog-
raphy. Indeed, the author borrows and adapts13 Woolf’s original idea and
narrative method adopted in Flush, a mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, inspired by Strachey’s biographies of emi-
nent historical fgures. Woolf explained the inception of this unusual biog-
raphy to Ottoline Morrell in a letter:

I was so tired after The Waves, that I lay in the garden and read the
Browning love letters, and the fgure of their dog made me laugh so I
couldn’t resist making him a life. I wanted to play a joke on Lytton – it
was to parody him.
(Letters 5: 162)

From this letter, it clearly appears that this biography was intended as a leg-
pull of Strachey and his ground-breaking biographies, especially Eminent
Victorians, in which he debunks Victorian heroes, and Queen Victoria, in
which he constructs the interior world of the monarch. However, Flush was
not only envisaged as a parody of Strachey’s biographical method but also
an example of her vision of the ‘new biography’,14 which takes a different
direction from the Victorians’ serious, codifed biographical enterprise, with
its lack of humour and excessive reverence for the biographical subject, who
is put on a high pedestal. Woolf’s idea of demystifying the historical sub-
ject and debunking the stale, fossilised Victorian biography in the wake of
Strachey’s developments was put into practice in the burlesque biography
of Flush, a new cross-genre which combines the ‘granite-like solidity’ of
documented truth about the human characters and the ‘rainbow-like intan-
gibility’ of the dog’s perspective (‘New Biography’ 473).
The fabric of Nunez’s imaginative biography is similar to Woolf’s
text.15 For instance, Nunez imitates Flush’s oscillating, unstable narrative
voice, largely dominated by a strong, ‘Victorian biographer’-like presence,
and predisposition of barging in on the story and drawing attention on
himself. This omniscient, didactic and informative narrator adopts a dry
and factual voice whenever he distils biographical information about the
Woolfs throughout the story, informing the reader about their house, life-
style, writing habits, publishing work, deaths of their friends, parties they
attend, visitors they entertain and so on. The narrator navigates in time and
gives proleptic hints about Virginia’s future canonical position, the Woolfs’
fate at the outbreak of WWII and also fashbacks through the characters’
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 171
signifcant memories. In the same way, just before Mitz’s death, the nar-
rator goes back in time and gives a moving account of Mitz’s distressing
life before her happy encounter with the Woolfs, starting with her South
American birthplace in the jungle, then a succession of adventures such as
her theft and fate in the hands of poachers, her ‘voyage of fear’ (105) to
England, her illness and delirious hallucinations, her mission, dressed in
Victorian doll’s clothes, to attract customers into a junk shop, until she
is purchased by Victor Rothschild as a present for his wife, Barbara. The
Woolfs frst see Mitz, the Rothschilds’ pet, during their visit to their friends’
place in Cambridge, and they fnally become Mitz’s permanent guardians
after the Rothschilds decide to go abroad for an indefnite time.
The omniscient narrator, who traces Mitz’s biographical trajectory until
her life intersects the Woolfs’ and provides the details of their lives together
for the next four years, at times leaves room for the ‘new biographer’, who
takes over the narration and gives us occasional access to the animal’s inte-
riority. In Flush, Woolf projected human qualities onto the dog and anthro-
pomorphised his ‘human passions’: ‘he knew all grades of jealousy, anger
and despair’ (Flush 127). Similarly, Nunez presents events in Virginia’s life
through Mitz’s subjective, limited animal perspective and awareness, and
fabricates the marmoset’s inner thoughts, dreams, hopes, frustrations, love
and jealousies. Just like Flush, Mitz is ‘biographer and biographee, seen and
seer’; as ‘the mute witness of his mistress’s emotions and actions, he can
actually feel [her] thoughts better than the biographer himself’ (Reviron-
Piégay 58). This fuctuating Woolfan narrative voice, sometimes incorpo-
rating biographical information in the narration and other times adhering
to the animal’s perspective, composes a unique portrait of Virginia in her
daily interactions with Leonard and Mitz. The Woolfs are portrayed as a
happy couple who enjoy each other’s company. Virginia deeply admires
‘[h]er Mongoose’’s (Mitz 36) devotion to animals, passion for his gar-
den, diplomacy and political skills; she believes she is ‘the luckiest wife in
England, and that no two people could have been happier’ (37). But the
arrival of Mitz in 1934 changes the dynamics of this childless couple: with
Virginia or ‘Mandril’, the marmoset forms a curious pair and with both
‘Mandril’ and ‘Mongoose’, an unusual love triangle.
Just like in Woolf’s Flush, in which Barrett and Flush share physical simi-
larities, Nunez creates a series of parallels between Virginia and Mitz, and
points at the ‘likeness between them’ (Flush 23). Both Virginia and Mitz
have humble origins: when compared with Vita’s aristocratic roots, Virginia
is ‘positively ashamed’ (Mitz 39) of her middle-class origins; similarly, Mitz
herself ‘belong[s] with the common marmosets’ (39) in the Callitrichidae
monkey family. Besides, they both have a traumatising past and as a result,
fragile health. Mitz was frightened to death during her voyage from her
native jungle to Europe, got rickets because of the terrible travelling condi-
tions and it is implied from the very beginning that she will not survive very
long. Virginia jokes about how much she and Mitz have in common: ‘Two
172 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
nervous, delicate, wary females, one as relentlessly curious as the other.
Both in love with Leonard – for both, he was their rock, their “inviolable
centre.” They both were mischievous. They both had claws’ (45).16 Just like
Virginia, parties excite but tire Mitz:

in this too she was like Virginia: she could take only so much. Too
many soirées frayed her nerves and gave her a headache, and no mat-
ter how much fun she’d had she was always glad to be home, for really
there was nothing dearer to her than those simple book-flled rooms,
her cozy bird-cage, her own fre.
(71)

In her behaviour, Mitz appears in many ways as Virginia’s mirror image

or alter ego. The biographer-narrator also points out Virginia’s onomas-
tic resemblance to the marmoset, as many of her pet names are monkey
derived: her childhood nickname was Apes; Vanessa calls her Singe (French
for monkey) and Leonard’s name for her is Mandril (‘a large, ferocious
baboon’) (26). Nunez thus establishes numerous direct and explicit connec-
tions between the delicate marmoset and the frail Mandril.
In a conversation, Vanessa mockingly remarks on the similarities between
the two ‘monkeys’, Virginia and Mitz, both having benefted from Leonard’s
care and attention: ‘He’s had such a lot of experience with – monkeys!’ (26).
Virginia acknowledges this resemblance and bursts out laughing: ‘With nerv-
ous – s-sickly – s-s-sensitive monkeys – don’t you mean!’ (26). Indeed, Leonard
treats the tiny monkey with the same solicitude he lavishes upon his wife,
whom he perceives as ‘a fragile mind in a fragile body’ (27). He is a devoted
nurse for both of his ‘monkeys’, both depicted as vulnerable beings, whose
‘nerves [are] not strong’ (20). He patiently nurses Mitz, cures her eczema and
feeds her. He applies the zookeeper’s advice to the letter, just as he would
apply doctors’ recommendations for Virginia. Under Leonard’s care, the
marmoset is metamorphosed, both physically and psychologically. Leonard
analyses Mitz’s moods and illnesses in light of his knowledge of Virginia’s
states of mind and ailments. His wife has the same sickly predisposition as
Mitz, having been ‘plagued by illness’ (26) all her life and having been nursed
by him through ‘countless bouts of migraine and fu’ ‘as well as through more
serious troubles’ (26). This particular condition resurfaces repeatedly, such as
in the summer of 1936, which is witnessed by Mitz, who observes Virginia’s
refusal to eat, insomnia, doctors’ visits and her ‘reading cure’ (75).
Both Virginia and Mitz ‘tend to be restless’ (98) when Leonard is not
around, as his presence soothes them both: he is the necessary balance for
their psychological well-being. Both ‘ladies’ share his care and affection, so
they quickly become rivals who compete for his love and attention. This
very Bloomsbury-esque comic triangular confguration is established as
soon as Mitz enters the Woolfs’ lives: she falls in love at frst sight with
Leonard and becomes physically attached to him. Virginia observes the
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 173
disconcerting picture of her ‘husband with a monkey’s head growing out
of his bosom’ (15), and the new ‘couple’ at Tavistock Square immediately
becomes ‘inseparable’ (16). Virginia likes teasing ‘her rival’ (31) and mak-
ing her jealous by ‘snuggling up to Leonard now and then precisely to pro-
voke an outburst’ (31). Their silly games make Leonard lose patience and
burst out: ‘Oh, ladies, please!’ (31, italics in the original text). When at
the Woolfs’ country house in Sussex Mitz escapes into the trees, Leonard’s
simple stratagem of openly displaying affection towards Virginia is enough
to bring the marmoset back to her perch on his shoulder. Mitz is a ‘jealous
creature’ (24) who cannot stand Leonard displaying affection towards his
wife: whenever he does so in Mitz’s presence, Mitz ‘would jump onto his
shoulders and protest in her high-pitched staccato way’.17 This exclusive
love is visually represented on the dust jacket of the Harper Flamingo edi-
tion of Mitz, designed by John A. Parks. The picture is a montage of Gisele
Freund’s famous 1939 photo of Leonard and Virginia Woolf with their dog
Sally, in which the dog is replaced by the marmoset. Not only does this pic-
ture announce the hybrid generic content of the novella and evince the phe-
nomena of fabrication, manipulation and distortion of reality at the heart of
it, it also illustrates the quirky triangular relationship. Mitz is symbolically
holding tight to Leonard’s fnger and turning its back to her rival, Virginia.
Mitz is clearly an unusual rival, but also proves to be a useful ally or a
saviour when she helps Virginia get rid of invasive friends. In a comic scene,
Ethel Smyth, scared of Mitz screaming in her ear trumpet, loses balance and
dignity and fnally leaves after having outstayed her welcome. As a result,
Mitz wins Virginia’s gratitude. In another episode, by attracting attention
to herself, Mitz protects the Woolfs from the Nazis. When in Germany in
1936, Mitz lightens the highly tense, oppressing, threatening atmosphere in
which Jewish people like Leonard are openly declared the ‘enemy’ (53). In
Bonn, the Woolfs get caught in the middle of a Nazi demonstration. Mitz
can read the signs of Leonard’s anxiety in the tightness in his neck, the vio-
lent shaking of his hands, his quickening pulse and his repeated swallowing
while he is trying to remain composed. The fearsome Nazi who stops them,
however, is charmed by tiny Mitz and shows surprising tenderness towards
her. He shouts to the crowd to ‘make way for Mitzi’ (54) and hails her with
the Nazi salute.18 While the Woolfs are allowed to drive on, Mitz surveys
the troops and lets out ‘one of her high-pitched trilling screams’, reminiscent
of Hitler’s high-pitched voice,19 which provokes the crowd’s laughter and
delight.
Mitz is not just the mock biography of Mitz and a fctional portrait of the
Woolfs as an old, affectionate couple, but also an oblique representation of
Woolf as the author of Flush, through Nunez’s close imitation of her narra-
tive technique. Nunez’s Virginia is portrayed with Woolf’s own biographical
palette that she used in Flush. While Barrett’s and Browning’s portraits are
based on their historical counterparts’ letters, Woolf confessed she ‘had to
invent a good deal’ as ‘little [was] known about [their dog]’ (Letters 5: 167).
174 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
Another noteworthy inspiration at the time came from the biographies writ-
ten by Strachey, including Queen Victoria, which was specifcally dedicated
to Woolf. In turn, Woolf wrote Flush in the spirit of her friend’s biography,
both to honour and parody his style. Although Laura Marcus contends that
Woolf ‘positions Flush on the side of biography rather than fction’ (142),20
we can draw a parallel between Woolf’s ‘new biographical’ form of Flush
and Nunez’s contemporary biofctional practice. Her idea of writing a life of
Mitz originated in reading the Woolfs’ auto/biographical material, but she
also had to ‘invent a great deal’, as ‘little was known about’ their marmoset.
In the continuous chain of literary infuence and inspiration, Nunez has
prolonged Woolf’s original homage to Strachey through Mitz, a mock bio-
graphical novel in which she pays tribute to Woolf’s original subject matter,
generic hybridity and style.
Like many postmodernist biographical novels, Mitz also displays a meta-
biografctional dimension: the production and reception of the hypotext,
Woolf’s Flush, is incorporated in the narration of the hypertext, Nunez’s
Mitz. Indeed, Nunez narrates the inception of Flush, which ‘was begun as
a relaxation – something to cool a brain that had seethed and bubbled over
during the feverish labor of completing The Waves’ (Mitz 29). But the excit-
ing and playful ‘jeu d’esprit’ becomes mere ‘work, work, work’ (28) and
Flush turns into a ‘dull and slow’ job characterised by ‘tedious’ research
and an ‘endless’ (29) writing and rewriting process, followed by Virginia’s
doubts about its reception: ‘Now strangers would paw it. Critics would
claw at it. There would be reviews’ (29). Finally, Virginia has to face the
bad reviews, such as the vitriolic one written by Rebecca West, who, in the
Daily Telegraph suggested that ‘it was a joke that should never have left
the room where it was born’ (29). Mitz thus constitutes Nunez’s nod to the
original Woolfan model and a response to West’s criticism by implying that
fortunately it ‘left the room where it was born’ to inspire future readers and
writers like her.21
Mitz’s narrative stance as an observer and witness of the Woolfs’ lives
raises questions about the limitations of biographical representations in gen-
eral. Mitz’s inability to understand Virginia’s behaviour, actions and moti-
vations, despite their very close physical proximity and the very privileged
place she holds in the Woolfs’ couple, translates the biographer’s failure to
render the reality of somebody’s life by relying just on observations of exte-
riority. Mitz’s attitude of conjecture, hypotheses, doubt, puzzlement and
questions is the ‘hallmark of the New Biography’ (Reviron-Piégay 59), and
Woolf herself hailed the necessity of departure from outdated biographi-
cal conventions by resorting to fction in imagining the subject’s conscious-
ness and conjuring up their feelings and sensations. The theoretical path
she cleared in 1927 with her essay ‘The New Biography’ was opened wider
in 1933 by Flush, in which she put into practice her concept of ‘new biog-
raphy’ previously outlined: a combination of truth and imagination in a
condensed, ‘slim volume’, ‘the size of a novel’ (‘New Biography’ 475) that
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 175
contains the pith and essence of Elizabeth Barrett, unburdened by a plethora
of external facts and events. The very path that Woolf traced with Flush
has been followed ever since by many biographical novelists, among whom
Nunez, who have brought their own contribution to the genre and built on
Woolf’s theory and practice. Nunez’s Virginia muses and speculates about
Mitz’s inner life, a habit of ‘making up which comes to her as naturally as
breathing’ (Mitz 46); similarly, Nunez and many other contemporary bio-
graphical novelists muse and speculate about Woolf’s own inner life, her
thoughts, fears and dreams.
Mitz’s omniscient narrator, speaking from the perspective and with
the knowledge of ‘our own day’, evaluates the events ‘back then’ (34). He
alludes to Woolf’s legacy and central canonical position in Western litera-
ture established by Bloom in his Western Canon and makes assumptions
about how Virginia would have reacted to her current position in between
D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce: ‘Canonization would not have surprised
her; she knew her work would endure’ (34). The narrator is further wonder-
ing what Virginia would have made of her growing fame, of the marketing
of her work, of her authorial image being paraded ‘on the side of a bus
driving down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue’ (34), of her and her friends ‘being
impersonated on stage and screen’ (34), of being inspirations for fashion col-
lections and of our contemporaries sometimes getting it all wrong. Nunez’s
narrator has a clear-sighted historical and critical vision, and embraces
the evolution of Virginia’s literary reputation, from ‘hostility’ in her day
(through Rebecca West’s, Wyndham Lewis’s and Cyril Connolly’s attacks),
which reinforced her fears that her reputation is not ‘as high as Morgan’s,
not as high as Tom’s’ (101), to ‘homage’ (35), adulation and canonisation
today. This reversal of her critical fate and her glorious afterlife in which
she surpassed both Morgan Forster’s and Tom Eliot’s literary reputations,
is embodied by Nunez’s Mitz, in which Woolf appears as a character, an
absolute proof of her utmost fame.
The novelisation of Woolf’s life and work in Mitz not only offers read-
ers a comic story about a marmoset who shares the Woolfs’ lives, but, just
like Vincent’s Adeline, is also a means to popularise literary criticism and
make it accessible to the common reader, who, along with the story, is given
informed but informal outlines of the backstage of the creative process of
some of Woolf’s novels, illustrated with quotes from her diary and letters.
Finding the appropriate primary and secondary sources to support an argu-
ment is a research methodology used by academics as well as by biograph-
ical writers. Nunez selects quotes in which Woolf describes her mystical
inspiration, her exciting incipient ideas, the innovative designs, fndings,
methods, obstacles and ordeals, passages in which she charters her pro-
gress, the completion of drafts, the strenuous revision process, the ordeal of
publication and the reception of her work by her contemporaries, as well
as the ensuing critical and fnancial success. In informative passages, Nunez
also gives the gist of Woolf’s work:
176 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
In [Three Guineas] she planned to discuss education and professions for
women. But now, with the threat of fascism and war always present,
she began thinking of it also as her ‘war pamphlet’: a meditation upon
the reasons for war and what might be done to prevent it. Virginia
believed that fascism, the pursuit of war, and the oppression of women
were all connected. (79)

These kinds of digested patches of literary criticism give the reader an idea
about the genesis, content and aim of Woolf’s literary and political work
within a light, entertaining ‘mo(n)ckiography’.

Notes
1 Vincent has stated the following: ‘a close friend, who read the manuscript I’d
been working on before I tried to kill myself said: “Whenever someone com-
mits suicide, we always ask: Why? In Adeline, you’ve given us an answer”’. See:
https://lithub.com/on-the-subject-of-my-suicide/ (accessed September 2020).
2 Taylor’s Vanessa is refecting on her sister’s death in these equestrian terms: ‘My
little sister has gone. She rode her hardest at sixty’s gate, but did not clear it in
the end. Was it too high? Did her trusty horse fail her at the last moment? Or
did she, perhaps, sense an abyss, unseen by all but her, and ride the Dark Mare
instead, as she always said she would?’ (188).
3 This contrasts with other feminist representations of Leonard Woolf as a vil-
lainous fgure and an oppressive, inquisitive, controlling husband in Hawkes
and Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth, Barron’s The White Garden or O’Brien’s
Virginia.
4 ‘I found that the specter of Virginia Woolf was just too much for me’. See inter-
view with Vincent at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/
index.cfm/author_number/1250/norah-vincent (accessed September 2020).
5 See Q&A with Vincent at: http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2015/09/q
-with-norah-vincent (accessed September 2020).
6 See Vincent’s testimony of her failed suicide attempt, ‘On the Subject of My
Suicide’ at: https://lithub.com/on-the-subject-of-my-suicide/ (accessed September
2020).
7 In Virginia (2019), French writer Emmanuelle Favier also focuses on Virginia’s
early life and teleologically reconstructs and reinterprets her character’s life by
suggesting that her childhood and adolescence constitute the origin of every-
thing to come and providing ample hints of Woolf’s future literary achievements.
Young Virginia’s itinerary into adulthood is paved with themes, images and
ideas that are taken from the mature Woolf’s literary work. During her forma-
tive years, Virginia unconsciously gathers fertile material which constitutes the
lifeblood of her future oeuvre.
8 In Favier’s Virginia, the evolution of Virginia’s identity is also refected in the
different names the author gives her character: Ginia, Miss Jan and Virginia. At
the death of the mother, Ginia ‘becomes Virginia’ (135). Just like in Vincent’s
Adeline, this sudden, tragic event marks the end of Virginia’s childhood and pre-
maturely propels her into adulthood, although her childhood self, Ginia, peri-
odically resurfaces and temporarily takes over.
9 Virginia confesses to Octavia that she is part Septimus, but also other Dalloway-
esque characters, Clarissa, Sally, Peter, all at once: ‘All pieces of me’ (Adeline
241).
 Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms 177
10 Yeats, inspired by his 1930 meeting with Woolf, wrote the following day a quat-
rain which became the poem ‘Spilt Milk’, published in 1933. See Lee, Virginia
Woolf 568.
11 Interview available at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/
index.cfm/author_number/1250/ norah-vincent (accessed September 2020).
12 One such kernel of truth is the novella’s epigraph: ‘At that time I had a marmoset
called Mitz which accompanied me almost everywhere, sitting on my shoulder
or inside my waistcoat’ (Leonard Woolf, Downhill).
13 On the adaptive qualities of Mitz and Nunez’s ‘sustained engagement’ with
Woolf’s Flush, see Layne, ‘They Leave Out’ 31. Layne adopts Sanders’s defnition
of adaptation as a close intertextual affliation which enables ‘a more sustained
engagement with a single text or source than the more glancing act of allusion or
quotation, even citation, allows’ (31).
14 On the specifcities of Flush as ‘New Biography’, see Reviron-Piégay.
15 On the biographical fabric of Flush, see Reynier.
16 See Shannon’s discussion of ‘Q.D. Leavis-infuenced impression […] of Woolf as
the delicate madwoman of Bloomsbury’ (154).
17 On Mitz’s jealousy and the Woolfs’ tricks to lure her down the tree, see Leonard
Woolf, Downhill 187–188.
18 This episode is recounted in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Downhill 191.
19 Quentin Bell also pointed out the marmoset’s resemblance to Goebbels in
Bloomsbury Recalled 42.
20 After completing The Waves, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘It is a good idea I think
to write biographies; to make them use my powers of representation reality accu-
racy; & to use my novels simply to express the general, the poetic. Flush is serv-
ing this purpose’ (Diary 4: 40).
21 Nunez has acknowledged Woolf’s infuence on her: ‘I do think Woolf’s life, as
revealed in her own life-writing and in various biographies, has had as much
infuence on me as her fction. And of course that has everything to do with the
fact that she was a woman, and that she concerned herself a great deal with
what it meant to be a writer of fction and a woman’. See interview with Chee at:
http://www.memorious.org/?id=264 (accessed September 2020).
6 Biofctive Mirrors
Clarissa Woolf/Virginia Dalloway

This chapter examines how two contemporary American authors, Robin

Lippincott, in Mr Dalloway (1999), and Michael Cunningham, in The
Hours (1998), portray their Virginia with Woolf’s Dalloway-esque tools.
Their characters carry on the ‘diagnostic properties’1 of Woolf’s Clarissa
Dalloway in new, postmodernist fctional universes.2 Both authors establish
and maintain close hypertextual links with the source text by replicating
and extending its recognisable Dallowayisms.3 The result of the meeting
and fusion of two entities and identities, on two ontological levels, Clarissa
Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, is a particularly interesting hybrid character
that I would call Clarissa Woolf or Virginia Dalloway, drawing from both
a fctional character and a historical fgure and combining their features. In
Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway, Virginia makes a cameo appearance in an aes-
thetic and diegetic space which mimics and prolongs Woolf’s 1925 novel.
In Cunningham’s The Hours, Virginia is an author who looks and acts
like Clarissa Dalloway while she is working on her novel in progress, Mrs
Dalloway. Immersed in a Dallowaysian style, Lippincott’s and Cunningham’s
Virginia emerge as two different versions, avatars (Richardson 530) or rein-
carnations of Woolf’s own prototype, Clarissa Dalloway, who, in turn, was
originally covered ‘very remarkably with [Virginia Woolf herself]’.4

A Cameo Appearance
Mr Dalloway is not a biographical novella in the sense that the main char-
acter is not Virginia Woolf but the eponymous Richard Dalloway. As a
transfocalised5 sequel6 to Mrs Dalloway that takes place in 1927, it con-
tinues Clarissa Dalloway’s life while focusing mainly on her husband.
Consequently, from a supporting character in Mrs Dalloway, Richard
Dalloway is brought to the fore and placed on centre stage. At the very
end of the novella, Virginia observes the sun’s eclipse at Bardon Fell, in
North Yorkshire, surrounded by Lippincott’s characters – some borrowed
from Woolf, like the Dalloways, and some freshly imagined by him. The
discussion of Lippincott’s remarkably ‘accomplished’ ‘act of ventriloquy’
(Schiff 372) and the Dalloway-esque narrative and stylistic context in which
 Biofctive Mirrors 179
Virginia is immersed in Mr Dalloway will lead to considerations about her
symbolic role at the outdoor party given by Richard Dalloway: Virginia’s
triangular, bisexual relationship displayed in the public eye marks the begin-
ning of a similar love confguration for closeted Richard Dalloway.
Lippincott’s sequel was conceived in the wake of the great Woolfan
model, which fascinated and inspired him, and to which he clearly intended
to pay homage. In the ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of his novella, Lippincott
affrms that his book is Mrs Dalloway’s direct heir and a ‘creative response’
to it, following his ‘passionate immersion in the life and work of Virginia
Woolf’ (220). It is the result of an ‘invitation’ extended by the original text,
which incited him to re-explore it, and which constituted an open reser-
voir of resources that the author reprocessed. Woolf’s literary heritage is
perceptible in Lippincott’s text through his skilful command and minute
reproduction of Dallowayisms: he borrows typical Woolfan characters and
expressions, copies the original time frame, embraces the same themes and
motifs and emulates Woolf’s tone and narrative voice. From the very frst
line, the reader is immediately plunged into a distinctive Woolfan universe:

Mr Dalloway said he would buy the fowers himself. For he wanted to

surround Clarissa with them; to choose those fowers, those colours,
which would set her off to the best possible advantage; which would
complement her.
(Mr Dalloway 3)

It is 28 June 1927, four years after the events in Mrs Dalloway, and
Lippincott’s novella traces this particular day, which is Richard and
Clarissa’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. This day also has a singular cosmic
signifcance, being the date of the total eclipse of the sun. The characters are
largely those already seen in Mrs Dalloway, only now at four years’ dis-
tance from the original setting, with the action again guiding us towards the
culmination of a party. Besides these Woolfan characters who are familiar
to the reader, Lippincott invents new characters, and they all rub shoulders
with a third type of character, those with historical referents: Virginia and
Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
During the day, Richard Dalloway, now retired from Parliament, has
arranged a surprise party for his and Clarissa’s anniversary and oversees the
party arrangements. In the morning, he goes to town to buy fowers, while
his thoughts turn to forty-fve-year-old Robert Davies (Robbie), an editor
at Faber’s with whom he has had an affair, and Duncan, his brother who
committed suicide forty years ago. Robbie has exposed his affair in a letter
to Clarissa, who told her husband that she ‘understood’. Clarissa retains
her Woolfan ‘diagnostic properties’ and imparts some to Richard, too. Like
Woolf’s Clarissa, ffty-fve-year-old Richard contemplates ageing and the
ominousness of death throughout the day, especially in the middle of the
party, and while retracing his wife’s itinerary through London on his mission
180 Biofctive Mirrors
to buy fowers, he muses on his past and present life. Richard also has obvi-
ous and explicit kinships with Woolf’s Septimus Smith, whose mind is prey
to hallucinations and morbid visions. Robbie, too, is in certain respects a
counterpart of Septimus, as Lippincott imparts him ‘[Septimus’s] own forms
of madness’ (Alley 404) brought about by jealousy, isolation, mental insta-
bility and an inclination to commit suicide. He is an ‘erratic, compulsive,
impetuous, and self-absorbed man’ (Hutchings 367) who once tried to kill
himself by jumping out of a third-foor window. In an act of desperate obses-
sion, he becomes an uninvited guest at Richard and Clarissa’s party.
In a typically playful postmodernist manner, Lippincott welds different
ontological levels, bringing together, on the one hand, historical facts and
real people (for example, several 1927 events: the total eclipse of the sun,
the Woolfs’ trip to see the eclipse at Bardon Fell7 and Woolf’s publication
of To the Lighthouse) and, on the other hand, fction with Dalloway-esque
shimmers. Hence, historical and biographical details sustain Lippincott’s
fctional world, which is so closely modelled upon Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,
a real novel that both Lippincottian characters, Clarissa and Richard
Dalloway, discuss together. Richard frst sees Woolf’s latest novel, To
the Lighthouse, in the window of Hatchards’ bookshop, and decides to
buy it for Clarissa. Mrs Dalloway, referred to as Woolf’s ‘previous novel’,
remains unnamed but generates an accomplished effect of dramatic irony
as, strangely enough, the two characters seem both acutely aware and
oblivious of the fact that they are both characters in that novel. Being both
inside the book (as a character portrayed in it) and outside it (as a reader
and critic of it), Richard personally knows that Woolf, ‘despite her keenly
perceptive mind’ and ‘considerable descriptive powers’, ‘had not captured
it all, not all of it, in her novel of two years past: for she did not know;
could not have known – only Clarissa knew)’ (Mr Dalloway 16–17, italics
in the original text). He here implies that the author could not have captured
his hidden homosexuality and love affair with Robbie, about which only
his wife knows. Richard Dalloway’s portrait and personality thus remain
incomplete in Mrs Dalloway, according to the character-cum-critic him-
self: Woolf, the novelist, failed to penetrate his essence as a sexual being.
In a characteristically ironic postmodernist situation, the character, who
migrates outside the diegesis of the Woolfan novel, is discussing the failures
of his own representation within it.
Clarissa Dalloway also considers Woolf’s eponymous novel in a feeting,
vague thought, but because of a distinctively abrupt Woolfan interruption,
the reader will never have access to what she genuinely thinks about a novel
in which she evolved as a character: ‘Clarissa thanked him; she had seen
it announced, she said, and had, of course, wanted it [To the Lighthouse];
for after Mrs Woolf’s previous book … (but hearing Elizabeth’s voice
interrupted that thought)’ (86). Clarissa, a huge Woolf fan, seems eager
to read the author’s latest novel, To the Lighthouse – which she received
as a gift from her husband on their thirtieth wedding anniversary – as the
 Biofctive Mirrors 181
previous book (that is to say Mrs Dalloway) has created certain expecta-
tions. This intricate postmodernist mise en abyme of character postures and
metafctional comments – a character in a novel discussing another novel in
which she is a character – creates a sort of ‘Chinese-box world’ (McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction 112).
At the end of Lippincott’s novella, Clarissa notices the famous author,
Mrs Woolf, from a distance, in the company of a ‘shorter, rather masculine-
looking woman’ (Mr Dalloway 204), Vita, at Bardon Fell, where they all
converge to observe the sun’s total eclipse. Both Robbie and Lady Vallance
know Virginia (‘He had been introduced to her once at a party in London for
one of Faber’s authors’; ‘Oh my, yes; I’ve known her since she was a child;
my parents knew her parents, you see, when we lived in Hyde Park – what?
some forty years ago now’ [205]), but Clarissa has never met Mrs Woolf,
and would very much like Lady Vallance to introduce them. The Virginia
portrayed by Lippincott is a Dalloway-esque character herself, seen through
the eyes of various characters: she is a ‘tall, thin woman’ (204) noticed by
Robbie, a ‘tall, elegant fgure’ (204) recognised by Lady Vallance, and a
‘beautiful’ (205) woman, ironically complimented by Lippincott’s Clarissa
Dalloway. Thus, in Lippincott’s diegetic space, the character of Clarissa
Dalloway contemplates the character of Virginia Woolf, an author who,
on another ontological level, gave birth to her in a parallel world. Woolf’s
eponymous character and Virginia Woolf herself both become Lippincottian
characters in a short secondary scene within Lippincott’s novella, which
offers an extension of Woolf’s own novel. Virginia is absorbed into a com-
plex network of new and old characters in a story which plays with the
multiplication of fctitious and realistic stances; it is a vertiginous narrative
game which combines not only biography and fction, but in an even more
convoluted way, biography and different levels of fction.
Lippincott’s postmodernist characters, who evolve both in a familiar set-
ting and in a new diegetic environment, speak with a distinct Dalloway-esque
voice and are wrapped in a narrative husk that reproduces and perpetuates
numerous Dallowayisms. Lippincott appropriates Woolf’s ‘technical art-
istry’ (Evans 71), which confers his prose an unmistakable Dalloway-esque
aura and a distinguishable favour. His style is

remarkably congruent with Woolf’s own, with the same interiority and
the characteristic parenthetical insertions and complex stream-of-con-
sciousness style, the narrative shifts from one character’s point of view
to another, with each voice remaining idiosyncratic and recognisably
idiomatic, detailing individual preoccupations that will be readily rec-
ognized by readers of the earlier work.
(Hutchings 367)8

Lippincott’s sequel continues in the same direction as the source material

but also opens new paths, reconfgurations and ramifcations, especially by
182 Biofctive Mirrors
imagining Richard’s self-avowed homosexual tendencies and his desire to
live his life with both Clarissa and Robbie in the open. At the end of the
novella, the sun’s eclipse refects Richard’s double nature, which contains
light and shadow: his social life that he lives openly, in the public eye, and
the sexual life that he lives in secret, in the dark, behind closed doors. He
grasps Clarissa’s hand and also, at the same time, for the frst time ‘in the
sunlight’, ‘briefy’ holds Robbie’s: ‘Only for a moment, but it was enough.
It was a beginning’ (Mr Dalloway 215). Lippincott’s novella therefore ends
with a new beginning, beyond the ‘straitjacketed, homophobic England’9
depicted by Lippincott through the numerous allusions to Oscar Wilde and
his ‘emblematic status of gay martyr’ (Schultz 222). The furtive handhold-
ing is a sign that the social context would condemn such intimacy, but it still
constitutes a small triumph.
In this ‘postcloset’ reworking (Chatman 281) of Mrs Dalloway, Richard’s
sexual orientation and its ambiguity, unlike Clarissa’s in Mrs Dalloway, is
not a secret anymore, at least not for his wife. The author ‘queer[s]’ (Schiff
372) Richard Dalloway and brings ‘male sexuality into the narrative’ (374).
His novella gives voice to a repressed minor character who is now no longer
constrained to being ideologically silenced, although Wilde’s scandal10 is still
very much present in his mind. He is aware that in public he and Clarissa
form ‘a “we” – sanctioned by marriage, by society’ (Mr Dalloway 76) and is
constantly anxious that the others around him might fnd out the truth. The
fact that Lippincott’s party takes place outdoors, out of the confnes of the
Dalloways’ house, unlike the party in Mrs Dalloway, constitutes a sign that
Richard’s frst, timid steps, of holding both Clarissa’s and Robbie’s hands,
is the beginning of his coming out.
Lippincott draws an obvious parallel between his characters Virginia
Woolf and Richard Dalloway. The representation of Virginia’s triangular
love confguration is used to shed light on Richard’s reconfguration of his
core identity and his promising future as a fulflled, complete man, with
both Clarissa and Robbie. Virginia and Vita form a ‘couple’ who are out
together in the public eye, making it possible for Richard to do so, too.
Virginia’s bisexuality and marital arrangements are hinted at when Vita
and Virginia are joined by Leonard and Harold. Virginia, Leonard, Vita and
Harold symbolically ‘disappear into the expectant crowd’ ‘as a foursome’
(205), whereas Richard briefy initiates a threesome love confguration in
the last paragraph of the novella in which he holds hands, albeit ‘only for a
moment’ (215), with both Clarissa and Robbie, thus indicating ‘a reconcili-
ation of both his camaraderie with Clarissa and his love for Robert’ (Schultz
222). Richard thus experiences a brief moment of true liberation. James
Schiff has pertinently stated that ‘in bestowing on his character a freedom
and self-acceptance that they are denied in Woolf’s text, [Lippincott] pro-
vides a kind of corrective’ (375) to Mrs Dalloway.
Unlike Wilde’s notorious example which ‘continues to remind gay men of
the perils of public disclosure’ (Schiff 374), Virginia’s lifestyle gives Robbie
 Biofctive Mirrors 183
and Richard the courage to begin their relationship openly, especially as the
social scene appears to be more tolerant compared with Wilde’s unforgiving
epoch: ‘Some people [Robbie] knew, like Bob Willoughby, a fellow travel-
ler, had told him that things were getting better in that regard, more toler-
ant, but he had seen no signs of it himself’ (Mr Dalloway 69). Such a ‘sign’
is nevertheless given at the end of Lippincott’s novella through Virginia
and her relationship with Vita. Their affair seems to be common knowl-
edge: ‘“Virginia Woolf,” Lady Vallance said. “And that’s that Sackville-
West woman with her.” And then Lady Vallance whispered something
inaudible into Clarissa Dalloway’s ear’ (204). Although the nature of this
private affair is inevitably surrounded by public gossip, as exemplifed by
Lady Vallance’s whispering in Clarissa’s ear ‘something inaudible’ about
Virginia and Vita’s secret love life, and her clearly having judgemental atti-
tudes towards such relationships, considering the way she refers to ‘that
Sackville-West woman with [Virginia]’ (204), this relationship gives Robbie
and Richard courage and hope.11 Virginia’s example makes them more dar-
ing: Robbie symbolically displays a Wilde-ian green carnation on his lapel
and Richards briefy holds his hand in public, in the middle of his party. In
1927, three decades after Wilde’s trial, Lippincott suggests there is a more
tolerant attitude towards homosexuality, a promising ‘beginning’ (215) for
generations to come. There is hope that during the next eclipse mentioned
both in Woolf’s diary12 and in Lippincott’s novella,13 in 1999 (the year of
Mr Dalloway’s publication), at the outset of a new millennium, a differ-
ent social and political context – unimaginable for Richard Dalloway or
Virginia Woolf – will allow people to live their loves freely and fully accord-
ing to their sexual preferences, build confdence and gain legitimacy. The
darkness of the ‘retreat’ (68) in which gay men were sent in the wake of
Wilde’s humiliation is followed by the timorous beginning of Virginia’s and
Richard’s love relationships, linked to the emergence of light, revelation or
enlightenment after the 1927 eclipse, which foreshadows the year 1999,
when social evolution and acceptance of different lifestyle options will com-
pletely live up to the momentous historical and cosmic event.
The covert homosexual hints and impulses in Mrs Dalloway (‘Septimus’s
suppressed homoeroticism and Clarissa’s deep lesbian inclination’ [Alley
416]) are transformed into openly gay certitudes in Mr Dalloway: ‘by focus-
ing on Richard and bringing his story into play, Lippincott signifcantly
alters our understanding of the Dalloways’ marriage, and thus contributes
to the evolution of the Mrs Dalloway story’ (Schiff 373). By organising
this party outdoors, he ‘indicates his desire to reveal publicly, and thus to
legitimize, his secret inner life, which echoes Lippincott’s central objective of
bringing to light the secret male homosexuality inherent in the story’ (373).
While liberation is denied in Woolf’s text, in Lippincott’s ‘corrective’ (375),
Richard’s moment of ‘public disclosure’ and ‘true liberation, as he joins
hands, however briefy, with Robbie and Clarissa’ (375) suggests a new sort
of sexual and human harmony: Richard’s life is ‘irrevocably intertwined’
184 Biofctive Mirrors
(Mr Dalloway 173) with Clarissa’s and ‘incomplete without [Robbie]’
(207). Moreover, although set in 1927, Lippincott’s novella is not so much
rooted in ‘the social and political culture of its moment’ (Whitworth 226)
but focuses on modern concerns. Lippincott’s rewriting of Mrs Dalloway
allows new meanings to be grafted onto a familiar text, which thus remains
deeply relevant to our culture.

Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown:

Death, Birth and Survival
Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is the narrative, thematic and stylistic foun-
dation of Lippincott’s novella and ‘supplies both the structure and motifs’
(Leavenworth 507) for Cunningham’s novel. In The Hours, it constitutes the
central backbone which supports and connects three alternating storylines –
Virginia Woolf’s, Clarissa Vaughan’s and Laura Brown’s – anchored in three
different epochs and taking place over the course of a single day. The three
female protagonists embody specifc aspects of the production/reception
continuum: Virginia Woolf is the writer of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughn
is the present-day incarnation of Virginia’s character, Mrs Dalloway, and
Laura Brown is the reader of Mrs Dalloway. The three characters are par-
alleled, ‘creating a sense of interconnection and simultaneity, which puts
emphasis on a complex interrelation of textual and sexual identity’ (Schultz
227). The Hours starts with Mrs Woolf’s death and ends with Mrs Brown,
who is ‘alive’ (Hours 222) and has survived the deaths of two authors –
Virginia and her son, Richard.
Cunningham conceives intricate Dalloway-esque motifs, linking devices
and unifying strategies to build bridges between the three strands, and
depicts the women’s experiences, in their particular contexts, in a typically
Dallowaysian style. The external linkage or analogies that he creates between
Woolf’s hypotext and his hypertext (scenes repeated from Mrs Dalloway)
are complemented by numerous internal echoes that connect his three sto-
ries (scenes repeated within The Hours): Cunningham’s ‘sections “talk
to each other” and together communicate with Mrs Dalloway’ (Aimone
159).14 The Hours maintains a ‘symbiotic relationship’ (Tory Young 35)
with its predecessor, as the pivotal themes at the heart of Mrs Dalloway
(sanity and insanity, life and death) permeate The Hours where they ‘ripple
out in wider and wider circles’ (Hughes 353), and many of Cunningham’s
characters experience Dalloway-esque moments, emotions and sensations at
some point during the day.
Cunningham invented a fctional universe which also maintains strong
links with Woolf’s auto/biographical documentation. In ‘A Note on Sources’
at the end of his novel, he enumerates the primary sources he consulted,
which informed his writing. They include various Woolf biographies,
Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, critical studies and different introductions
to Mrs Dalloway, as well as frst-hand information drawn directly from
 Biofctive Mirrors 185
Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries. Several real people appear as characters
in his novel: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Nelly Boxall and
others. The author’s intention was to ‘render as accurately as possible the
outward particulars of their lives as they would have been on a day [he has]
invented for them in 1923’ (Hours 229).
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s character creation is very much infuenced
by her life experiences: Clarissa Dalloway behaves very much like Virginia
Woolf and leads a life like that of her creator. Strachey once said that
Woolf ‘covered, very remarkably’ her character with herself (qtd. in Woolf,
Diary 3: 32). Conversely, in The Hours, it is Virginia Woolf as a charac-
ter who resembles Clarissa Dalloway: Cunningham’s Virginia is ‘covered,
very remarkably’, with Woolf’s Clarissa. In this circularity of infuences,
fction and reality remain tightly imbricate and dependent on each other.
Cunningham implants seeds of reality into fction, fctionalises real events
and interweaves them with layers of pure fction, and the staging of Woolf’s
death is a perfect illustration of his unique biofctional method.
In the ‘Prologue’, Cunningham depicts an insightful picture of Virginia’s
struggle with depression from her point of view and follows her as she pre-
pares, embraces and fnally succumbs to death. Woolf’s real suicide note
is to be found at the core of the death scene and constitutes the kernel of
truth which imparts verisimilitude to the whole scene. In this note, Woolf
mentions her artistic crisis, the fear of another attack of insanity and depres-
sion, the anxiety provoked by hearing tormenting voices and her inability to
overcome the terrible ordeal again, as well as her refusal to be a burden on
her husband. The real suicide note15 is inserted within a fctional framework
which, in turn, intricately combines fction and real facts, creating a com-
plex text which both mirrors and distorts reality. Cunningham’s detailed
description of Woolf’s suicide is based on authentic auto/biographical docu-
mentation, but is also an imaginary universe in which, through a clever
mise en abyme device, Virginia Woolf becomes a character who thinks and
behaves like her own characters, especially Clarissa Dalloway, the key fgure
upon which Cunningham’s three parallel stories hinge.
When comparing the account of Woolf’s death in several biographies
which Cunningham used as sources for his novel with his own fctional-
ised version in the ‘Prologue’ of The Hours, the imaginative recreation of
Woolf’s death is more immediate, more spectacular, more sensational, more
cinematic and vividly rendered, as it seems to unfold before the spectator’s
very eyes. The narratives of Woolf’s death in the biographies mentioned
by Cunningham – what I would call ‘zero-degree biofctions’ – are second-
hand, secondary accounts and ‘exterior’ explanations or descriptions of
what allegedly happened. On the contrary, Cunningham’s account is a
fctitious frst-hand account of what ‘really’ happened. He thus allows the
reader to be with Virginia, accompany her until the very last moments and
witness her private thoughts and minutest gestures, as opposed to biogra-
phies which only give a peripheral version of her death. The novel fabricates
186 Biofctive Mirrors
that immediate, central, direct experience of the suicide as lived by the char-
acter, which is naturally missing in real biographies.
In order to give a dramatic spin to one of the most notorious suicides in
the literary sphere and present it through the privileged point of view of the
victim, Cunningham fctionalises and juxtaposes the points of view of two
real witnesses who remember the alarm caused by Woolf’s disappearance.
The frst external point of view is that of Louie Everest, the Woolfs’ house-
keeper, present at the Monk’s House on 28 March 1941. On the morning
of that day, Everest remembers seeing Mrs Woolf

come downstairs from the sitting-room and go out to her room in the
garden. In a few minutes she returned to the house, put on her coat,
took her walking stick and went quickly up the garden to the top gate.
She must have … rushed off like that so that we would not see her.
When I rang the bell at 1 o’clock to tell Mr Woolf that lunch was
ready, he said he was going upstairs to hear the news on the radio and
would only be a few minutes. The next moment he came running down
the stairs to the kitchen calling me. ‘Louie!’ he said, ‘I think something
has happened to Mrs Woolf! I think she might have tried to kill herself!
Which way did she go – did you see her leave the house?’ ‘She went
through the top gate a little while ago,’ I said. It was suddenly a terrible
nightmare.16
(qtd. in Russell Noble 195)

The second point of view used by Cunningham is that of Leonard Woolf,

who provides a more detailed account of the infamous day:

The next day, Friday, March 28, I was in the garden and I thought she
was in the house. But when at one o’clock I went in to lunch, she was
not there. I found the following letter on the sitting-room mantelpiece:

Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through
another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin
to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the
best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two
people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t
fght it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without
me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write
this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is that I owe all the hap-
piness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and
incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody
could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone
from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your
 Biofctive Mirrors 187
life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than
we have been. V
When I could not fnd her anywhere in the house or garden, I felt
sure that she had gone down to the river. I ran across the felds down
to the river and almost immediately found her walking-stick lying upon
the bank.
(Leonard Woolf, Journey: 93–94)

In the middle section of his ‘Prologue’, Cunningham compiles and arranges

the two points of view by shifting from one to the other. The real auto-
biographical material is transfocalised and linguistically refashioned: frstly,
drawing from the autobiographical ‘I’ in the recorded frst-hand testimonies,
Cunningham devises a third-person focus; secondly, the story is extracted
from the past tense of the autobiographical memoirs and given a sense of
immediacy through the use of present tense.

More than an hour later, her husband returns from the garden. ‘Madame
went out,’ the maid says, plumping a shabby pillow that releases a min-
iature storm of down. ‘She said she’d be back soon.’
Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to the news. He
fnds a blue envelope, addressed to him, on the table. Inside is a letter.

Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going
mad again: I feel we can’t go
through another of those terrible times.
And I shan’t recover this time. I begin
to hear voices, and can’t concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have
given me
the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don’t think two
people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I can’t
fght it any longer, I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you
could work. And you will I know.
You see I can’t even write this properly. I
can’t read. What I want to say is that
I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me &
incredibly good. I want to say that—
everybody knows it. If anybody could
188 Biofctive Mirrors
have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the
certainty of your goodness. I
can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two
people
could have been happier than we have been.
V.

Leonard races from the room, runs downstairs. He says to the maid, ‘I
think something has happened to Mrs Woolf. I think she might have
tried to kill herself. Which way did she go? Did you see her leave the
house?’
The maid, panicked, begins to cry. Leonard rushes out and goes to
the river, past the church and the sheep, past the osier bed.
(Hours 5–7, italics in the original text)

The realism of the scene is frstly conferred by Louie Everest’s and Leonard
Woolf’s memories and testimonies which are brought together and rear-
ranged in Cunningham’s novel. The second element which grants realism
to Cunningham’s prose is Woolf’s authentic suicide letter borrowed by
Cunningham verbatim and displayed in the novel with its very ingenious
mimicry of handwriting; indeed, besides the use of italics, which signals
intertextual excerpts throughout the novel, the layout of the letter and the
cutting of the sentences into irregular lines imitate Woolf’s manuscript let-
ter. Verging on plagiarism, Cunningham absorbs and appropriates this let-
ter by collaging it without using quotation marks, in a text which mimics
Woolf’s recognisable style. The surrounding frame absorbs the real letter
which ‘contaminates’ the rest of the text with authenticity, thus conferring
the illusion of ‘reality’ to the whole scene.
The narrator focuses on two parallel scenes: one following Virginia’s
actions and thoughts, and the other one combining the two exterior points
of view, in the middle of which Woolf’s real letter is inserted. The frst
scene is devised as a frame encompassing the second one which displays
the ‘reality kernel’. Also, in a very complex and intricate interweaving of
fact and fction, the frst framing scene bears close kinship with Woolf’s
real style and narrative technique and evokes, for the reader familiar with
Woolf’s life, her own torments and preoccupations which pushed her to
commit suicide. The use of pastiche in the framing text calls into atten-
tion Cunningham’s postmodernist practice of mimicry17 of an inimitable
modernist style or cannibalisation of a past idiosyncratic style. Several
recognisable Dalloway-isms, defning features which constitute the essence
of Woolf’s prominent novel, are employed by Cunningham: the free indi-
rect speech, the change of focalisation, the pictorial and poetic quality of
descriptions, the particular use of punctuation and the incantatory-like
effect of repetition and motifs.
 Biofctive Mirrors 189
The third-person narrator describes Virginia’s gestures, the fow of her
thoughts, her hesitations, distress and headaches, as well as the exterior
events unfolding around her, which have an impact on her consciousness.
While thinking of death, her eyes embrace the life going on around her.
Cunningham records the ‘myriad impressions’ received by Virginia on her
way to the river and after, in the aquatic environment which embraces her
body. By means of free indirect speech, the narrator unveils the charac-
ter’s inner thoughts and private interrogations. Her mind ‘receives a myriad
impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness
of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable
atoms’ (Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ 160). Cunningham records his character’s
movement of consciousness in the same way as Woolf herself did in her
novel when following Clarissa Dalloway’s and Septimus Smith’s fuctuat-
ing moods, change of feelings and the ebbs and fows of their mental pro-
cesses. As we follow Virginia’s progress to the river and we are plunged
in her consciousness, the narrator focuses on specifc details that call to
mind Woolf’s own prose, with its depiction of light, colours and the almost
obsessive omnipresence of an aquatic atmosphere. Cunningham’s inventive
genius was not only to imagine a scene as if he were there, thus allowing the
reader to witness it ‘live’, as it happens, but also to depict Virginia’s death
using Woolf’s narrative method and Dallowaysian palette.
Staging the ‘death of the author’ in the ‘Prologue’ not only illustrates the
Barthesian thesis that it is the reader, epitomised by Laura Brown in The
Hours, who survives, it also introduces the dominant theme of resurrection
and survival of the author through her literary legacy in the following sections
in which Virginia begins to write her novel and gives birth to her iconic char-
acter, embodied decades later by Clarissa Vaughn. The ‘Prologue’ and the
three ensuing ‘loosely related narrative strands’ (Schiff 366) are all enveloped
in a unifying Dallowaysian style, which is suggested sprang from Virginia’s
fertile imagination one day in June 1923. During this ordinary day, Virginia
conceives and begins writing her day-in-the-life novel, Mrs Dalloway,
the early working title of which was ‘The Hours’. Cunningham ‘takes us into
the writer’s den and into her head during the composition process’ (Schiff
369). He condenses Woolf’s long and complex creative process (the 1922–
1925 years during which she wrote and rewrote her novel18) and weaves
in biographemes as well as made-up details to give the reader a sense of
Virginia’s creative genius. The solidly researched historical truth and factual
elements provide the basis for Cunningham’s imagined, romanticised, idyl-
lic version of how his writer-character is fnding her ‘vein of gold’, how she
is ‘forg[ing] ahead, stoop[ing] and grop[ing]’ to bring to daylight ‘buckets’
of ore (Woolf, Diary 2: 292). Cunningham’s simulacrum of Woolf’s crea-
tive itinerary suggests that the modernist author’s inspiration sprang from
the dreams, encounters, events, incidents, illuminating, epiphanic moments
and myriad sensations of one day in Richmond at Hogarth House. All these
circumstances gradually shape her novel. In this sense, this imaginative birth
190 Biofctive Mirrors
of the novel is very much similar to Norah Vincent’s fctional geneses of
Virginia’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves as well as Christine Orban’s
Virginia’s genesis of Orlando.
In 1923, Virginia appears in full possession of her artistic gifts. The
moment before she takes her pen and starts writing the frst sentence of
Mrs Dalloway is described in minute detail, as we are plunged in her
thoughts, in her humming mind, and we witness ‘the most singular experi-
ence’ (Hours 34) of her genius. She is extremely careful not to destroy this
delicate moment, ‘that fragile impulse, that egg balanced on a spoon’ (85),
pregnant with promising imaginative material, which is why she tries to
avoid all external obstacles – domestic or social obligations – which could
hinder or brutally put an end to her creativity. Virginia is having ‘a good
day’ which offers ‘infnite possibilities’ (34), with whole fertile hours ahead
of her. Her experience of writing is depicted as if she were in a trance, as
if she were schizophrenically inhabited by a ‘second’, ‘parallel’, ‘purer self’
(34) who takes over the ordinary self of a ‘woman in a housecoat holding
a pen’ (35). Cunningham poetically portrays Woolf’s ‘inner faculty’ (35)
that is conducive to the production of great prose, and particularly focuses
on the poised moment that brings together all the favourable intellectual
and emotional circumstances and ultimately leads to the writing down of
her novel’s frst, recognisable and memorable sentence, ‘Mrs Dalloway said
she would buy the fowers herself’ (35).19 During such intense moments, the
author-character gains ‘access’ (35) to satisfying spurs of profound inspira-
tion which propel the advancement of her novel.
During this ordinary June day, Cunningham’s Virginia imagines the
whole itinerary and structural design of her circadian novel. First, Virginia
is considering its temporal scope and subject matter: ‘a single day in the
life of an ordinary woman’ (69). Then, the core of the novel rests on a
choice between life and death. Virginia’s initial idea revolves around her
female character’s death – an obsessive idea that haunts her until it feshes
out and becomes a conviction: ‘Clarissa Dalloway will die, of that she feels
certain, though this early it’s impossible to say how or even precisely why.
She will, Virginia believes, take her own life’ (69). In light of Cunningham’s
‘Prologue’, which hovers over the rest of the novel and orients its inter-
pretation, Clarissa initially has a tragic and very Woolfan fate. However,
as hours go by, Virginia’s original idea is reconsidered and adjusted, and
culminates with the fnal decision that another character will die instead, ‘a
greater mind than Clarissa’s’, ‘someone with sorrow and genius enough to
turn away from the seductions of the world, its cups and its coats’ (154).20
The ‘sane and insane’ Dalloway-esque theme is thus progressively found
and confrmed by the end of this June day. After having experienced an
epiphanic illumination and is thrilled at the prospect of going back to live
in London, Virginia, who lives vicariously through her character Clarissa
Dalloway, now has a clear sense of the design, structure, plot and themes
of her novel: ‘Clarissa, sane Clarissa – exultant, ordinary Clarissa – will go
 Biofctive Mirrors 191
on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a
deranged poet, a visionary will be the one to die’ (211). Clarissa’s alter ego,
the character of Septimus – although he is not yet named – is thus born out
of Virginia’s own love for life that she attributes to Clarissa.
Throughout this June day, we follow Virginia’s hopes, intuitions and
dreams as they gradually take shape and materialise in the written pages of
her book. Cunningham fctionalises Virginia’s certitudes, as it seems to her
that her incipient book ‘seems good enough’ (69), but also her doubts about
the prose she is writing: ‘she knows that tomorrow she may look back at
what she’s written and fnd it airy, overblown. One always has a better book
in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper’ (69). Cunningham
thus gives us the opportunity to see both the ‘better’ version in Virginia’s
mind before she puts it down on paper as well as the fnal result, the version
that Laura Brown is reading in the ‘Mrs Brown’ sections.
As a writer, Virginia is endowed with a powerful, strong imagination,
but her constant battle with her ‘devil’ (167) reveals her as a weak, fragile
woman, with a predictable tragic fate. Her relationship with Leonard as
depicted by Cunningham gives the reader indications of her portrait not
only as a writer but also as a wife who is constantly supervised by her
responsible, loving but authoritative husband. Leonard is a severe critic of
‘all written work, including, and especially, her own’ (32), but mostly a
devoted husband ‘who has nursed her through her worst periods’ (32). He
is aware of her fragility and tries to remove all stressful agitation and excite-
ment from his wife’s life. As an expert nurse, he knows how to read ‘signs’
of her behaviour and he can prevent her bouts of madness, by applying the
doctor’s recommendations to the letter: he ‘urges on her, sometimes suc-
cessfully, a glass of milk every morning at eleven’ (32). He keeps track of
her patterns of sleep, rest and food: ‘Virginia refusing to eat is not a good
sign’ (33). Not eating is, for Virginia, who is revolted by the smells of food,
‘a vice, a drug of sorts – with her stomach empty she feels quick and clean,
clearheaded, ready for a fght’ (34); it is a means for her to maintain control
over her own body and mind. Although in awe of her genius (‘She may be
the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read
for centuries’ [33]), Leonard knows that her repeated mental illness has
lately taxed her physical beauty; when he objectively looks at her, he can
see that she has ‘aged dramatically’ (33): ‘[s]he’s grown craggy and worn’;
‘[s]he’s begun to look as if she’s carved from very porous, gray-white marble’;
‘[s]he’s still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable
lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful’ (33). Her beauty is
on the wane and her physical decay indicates how weak and vulnerable she
actually is.
Besides the external portrait from Leonard’s point of view, the narrator
infltrates Virginia’s mind and shows us a writer racked by headaches, tor-
menting voices and moments of depression: this is the aggrandisement of the
inner landscape often described by Woolf herself in her diary. Cunningham
192 Biofctive Mirrors
turns factual autobiography into poetic narration and manages to give us
a pictorial mise en abyme, as if when drawing the portrait of his character,
Mrs Woolf, he uses her own self-portrait. Virginia has perpetual fears about
an imminent relapse into madness. She is plagued by recurrent headaches
which ‘infltrate her’, ‘inhabit her’ ‘the way viruses inhabit their hosts’ (70).
The idea of ‘an entity with a life of its own’ (70), a disease which takes
over one’s mind and body, is a hint to the contemporary affiction, AIDS,
which invades, infects and ‘colonises’ Richard, the ‘deranged’ ‘visionary’
poet (211) – Virginia’s genius writer-counterpart in the late twentieth cen-
tury – and leaves him defenceless, with no other choice than to take his
own life. Virginia’s headaches sometimes take ‘possession for an evening or
a day or two, then withdraw’ (70), other times they ‘remain and increase
until she herself subsides’ (70). Headaches are often accompanied by ‘angry,
accusatory, disillusioned’ (71) voices. These oxymoronic states of mind are
terrifying, but they also have great creative potential: they are full of ‘pain’
and ‘light’ (71). Although they are physically disabling, ‘they are necessary’
(71) for her artistic vision. Quite often, she manages to hide the presence of
headaches from Leonard by ‘act[ing] more frmly healthy than she […] feels’
(71). She thus impersonates a sane woman who has a grip on reality, while
actually she is completely absorbed by her inner life and consumed by her
creation: ‘She has learned over the years that sanity involves a certain meas-
ure of impersonation’ (83). ‘Sane’ Virginia is a mere character, a mask that
she puts on for the beneft of her husband and servants: ‘She [Virginia] feels
fully in command of the character who is Virginia Woolf, and as that char-
acter she removes her cloak, hangs it up, and goes downstairs to the kitchen
to speak to Nelly about lunch’ (84). In public, she pretends, performs and
makes sure at all time she ‘stay[s] in character’ (85), just like Laura Brown,
who works hard at playing her role as a devoted mother and loving wife.
Cunningham’s version of Virginia ‘rings true’21 insofar as she resembles
both Woolf as described by biographers or self-portrayed in her own auto-
biographical works and her own characters. He imagines a day in her life
by borrowing facts, details and events from the author’s real life – espe-
cially concerning the medical history, visions and hallucinations described
in her diary – but also from the fctional universe of Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s
afterlife is thus depicted with the diegetic material and the stylistic and nar-
rative tools of Woolf herself. Cunningham puts into practice the artistic
credo and the theory of modernist fction expressed by Woolf in her critical
essays in a postmodernist novel which seems to suggest that there is no one
single truth or comprehensive portrait of Woolf and offers his own version
of her by drawing from her Dalloway-esque heritage and portraying her
as a mirror image of her character, Clarissa Dalloway. At the same time,
in the ‘Mrs Dalloway’ sections of the novel, Cunningham uses facets of
Woolf’s iconic character to fabricate his late-twentieth-century variations
on Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, New Yorkers Clarissa Vaughn
and Richard Brown.
 Biofctive Mirrors 193
As an authorial fgure, Richard Brown resembles both the real Woolf and
Cunningham’s Virginia,22 the tormented writer in the ‘Mrs Woolf’ sections. Both
Virginia and Richard, during their lifetimes, are ‘almost legendary authors’ (16),
with similar poetic signatures. Clarissa Vaughan, Richard’s friend, becomes a
character in Richard’s own Woolfan-like novel which ‘meditates exhaustively
on a woman (a ffty-plus-page chapter on shopping for nail polish, which she
decides against!)’ (126). In a conversation with Louis, Clarissa Vaughan com-
ments on her representation as a character in Richard’s novel:

‘He hardly even bothered to change your name’.

‘That isn’t me,’ she says. ‘It’s Richard’s fantasy about some woman who
vaguely resembles me’.
(129)

This metafctional remark could be applied to Cunningham’s biofction,

too: indeed, his character Virginia Woolf is not the real Virginia Woolf, but
his ‘fantasy about some woman who vaguely resembles Virginia Woolf’!
As an author, Richard – just like Cunningham – carries on Woolf’s liter-
ary legacy: in his poetic Dalloway-esque fction, everything is ‘observed so
minutely and exhaustively’ as he ‘splits[s] the atom with words’ (Hours 65)
and records it ‘as [it] falls’ (Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ 161). Just as in the
‘Mrs Woolf’ chapters Cunningham’s character Leonard Woolf considers his
wife’s position in the literary canon of their time (‘She may be the most intel-
ligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries’
[Hours 33]), so Clarissa Vaughan is thinking about Richard’s contribution
to literature (‘Richard may (although one hesitates to think in quite these
terms) be entering the canon’ [64]) in the ‘Mrs Dalloway’ strands. However,
despite their accomplished literary works, both Richard and Virginia expe-
rience a sense of failure, and are ‘inhabited’, ‘infltrated’, ‘colonised’ (70) by
their respective ‘viruses’ (63) (headaches, AIDS, voices and hallucinations)
which ‘eat’ (55) their minds and fnally defeat them.
Richard Brown and Clarissa Vaughan’s relationship resembles that
of Virginia and Leonard depicted by Cunningham in the ‘Mrs Woolf’
sections of the novel. Like Leonard, Clarissa is worried about Richard’s
medication, sleep patterns and the amount of food he needs to survive.
Richard’s life is a string of ‘good days among the bad’ (56), until he can-
not bear the burden of time: ‘and then the hour after that, and the hour
after that’ (197). Before committing suicide, Richard’s fnal words echo
Woolf’s in her suicide note: ‘You’ve been so good to me, Mrs Dalloway’;
‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been’ (200).
Within this densely wrought Dalloway-esque tapestry, Cunningham’s
duo, Clarissa and Richard, are infused with Dalloway-esque words, fea-
tures and gestures, and borrow characteristics from Woolf’s Clarissa
Dalloway and Septimus Smith as well as from their supreme creator,
Woolf herself.
194 Biofctive Mirrors
In his ‘partial biographical novel’ (‘Biographical Novel’ 92), Cunningham
has imagined his own version of Virginia Woolf. His originality consists of
having transposed biographical elements and shaped a poetic trajectory of
Woolf’s life by using her own literary structures and theories. Thus, in his
representation of Woolf, the subject has become a Dalloway-esque character
in a Dalloway-esque fctional universe created with a Dalloway-esque pal-
ette. Like his own character Richard Brown who, as an author, renders life
‘so minutely and exhaustively’ (Hours 65), Cunningham’s ‘wonderfully tex-
tured writing’ is ‘alive with intense observation’ (Lee, ‘Mrs Brown’s Secret’
13). The author emulates Woolfan narrative templates – especially for the
representation of his characters’ fuxes of consciousness and their private
experiences – and reproduces a ‘plenitude of Dallowayisms’ (Chatman 274),
that is to say, thematic, stylistic, linguistic, syntactic features and idiosyn-
crasies that Cunningham identifed as the essence of the original model and
chose to weave into the fabric of his own text.
In this Dalloway-esque-like fctional universe, Virginia emerges as a trou-
bled genius with a tragic fate.23 Her romanticised death is what survives
today in the popular imagination, even more vividly than her remarkable
oeuvre, and this is perfectly well exemplifed in The Hours, as Virginia’s
death appears as a prelude to her creative life. Cunningham’s literary struc-
turing device constitutes the cultural sign that Woolf’s death precedes her
life and literary legacy. This is the reason why readers, here embodied by
Laura Brown, systematically think of Woolf’s suicide when reading her
novels. However, staging Woolf’s death at the beginning of his novel has
a deeper implication for Cunningham than just depicting one of the most
notorious suicides in literary history. The Hours is ultimately a novel about
mortality and survival: Woolf survives and endures in time through the art
she produced, through the imprint she left during her lifetime and through
the impact she still has on contemporary readers and writers.
Cunningham’s Clarissa Vaughn refects on Meryl Streep’s celebrity and
the fact that while just ‘a few silver fllings’ will remain ‘lost underground’
after the majority of mortals, only a handful of people ‘will still be known’:
‘[Meryl Streep] will exist in archives, in books; her recorded voice will be
stored away among other precious and venerated objects’ (51). Cunningham
implies that celebrities like Meryl Streep – or Virginia Woolf to whom he
pays homage in his novel – transcend their human condition and become
immortal, venerated icons, long after their death. Their ‘earthly career’ will
bring them ‘recognition that will travel far into the future’ (64). In the same
way, Richard Brown, Virginia’s contemporary authorial counterpart, ‘who
tried to split the atom with words’, ‘will survive after other, more fashion-
able names have failed’ (65). Although all the creators in The Hours are
striving for perfection, only a handful of books are ‘good’ enough, ‘and of
that handful, only a few survive’ (225): only the most remarkable, outstand-
ing books, like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, as Cunningham implies, stand the
test of time.
 Biofctive Mirrors 195
Besides the aesthetic implications of literary immortality and canon for-
mation, Cunningham’s political agenda transpires from his three Woolf-
inspired representations of womanhood. Mrs Woolf, Mrs Brown and Mrs
Dalloway stand for twentieth-century landmarks in the evolution of wom-
en’s love, from Virginia Woolf’s lifetime until the end of the century. For
example, through the reproduction of the trope of the Woolfan kiss24 in the
three storylines of The Hours and the multiplication of kisses – all varia-
tions on the original, defning, poignant Woolfan kiss between Sally Seton
and Clarissa Dalloway – Cunningham depicts the evolution of the percep-
tion of sexuality, sexual identity and same-sex love. The kiss is ‘replicated
in multiple confgurations and circumstances’ (Schiff 370): frst, Vanessa
and Virginia’s kiss in 1923, an epiphanic manifestation piercing the ordi-
nariness of Virginia’s day, is an illicit, small victory behind conventions;
second, Laura Brown and Kitty’s awkward kiss in 1949 still violates social
order; fnally, in the late nineties, Clarissa Vaughn ‘is free to live as a les-
bian’ (Cunningham, ‘Biographical Novel’ 91) with her life partner: Clarissa
and Sally, ‘always generous with kisses’ (Hours 89), do not attempt to ‘dis-
guise their love for anyone’s sake’ (20). Thus, Clarissa Dalloway’s original,
transgressive, furtive, ambiguous kiss, which threatens the heteronormative
matrix of society, contrasts with the bounty of Clarissa Vaughan’s kisses
and their public display, and evinces the evolution of female love, from the
beginning to the end of the twentieth century.
The sexualised representation of both Clarissa Vaughn and Richard
Brown in The Hours springs from Woolf’s idea of sexual freedom, her phi-
losophy of androgyny and the multiplicity of the self: Cunningham openly
brings to light the secret male and female homosexuality to be found in
a latent way in Woolf’s novel and disambiguates it. In this way, he con-
tributes to the evolution of Woolf’s prior story. By creating new versions
or avatars of Woolf’s characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith,
and being more explicit in his characters’ portrayal of sexuality, bisexual-
ity, attraction to the same sex and homoerotic relationships, Cunningham
updates Woolf’s characters to our times and mores. He engages with
questions of sexual fuidity and ambiguity25 – ‘a subject that has even a
greater currency within a contemporary world actively and openly explor-
ing gender construction’ (Schiff 364) – and represents new confgurations
of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual relationships.26 By rewriting
Woolf’s masterpiece, Cunningham also depicts new socio-cultural climates
and represents our current concerns. Thus, the devastating effect of AIDS
experienced by his characters is the equivalent of the post-war shell shock
felt by Woolf’s Septimus Smith. Also, through the character of Mary Krull,
who replaces the religious fanatic Doris Kilman, Cunningham obliquely
portrays the predominance of other theories and socio-cultural trends
which preoccupy our contemporaries: queer theories instead of religion
and a culture of spectatorship in which movie stars have replaced the mys-
tic aura of royalty.
196 Biofctive Mirrors
Cunningham updates, ‘Americanises and popularizes’ (Schiff 369) his
modernist predecessor’s novel and offers readers a new version of Woolf and
Mrs Dalloway. His creative response invites questions about the inscription
of the past in the present, about recontextualising and appropriating previ-
ous works. More than any other novel or play examined in this study, The
Hours, the best known and most unanimously critically acclaimed novel
about Virginia Woolf, has crossed borders, popularised Woolf’s work and
made her authorial fgure more visible to the twenty-frst-century readers all
over the world.27 Cunningham gave a tremendous impulse to biographical
novels about Woolf and incited Woolf scholars to renew their critical inter-
pretations when confronted with this fourishing genre.
Both The Hours and Mr Dalloway depend on the reader’s familiarity
with the prefgurative Woolfan text. In Lippincott’s and Cunningham’s
updated versions of the source text, Virginia as a character is portrayed with
Woolf as an author’s own words. Precise details and meticulously built cor-
respondences and resonances between Woolf’s hypotext and the two con-
temporary hypertexts can only be fully appreciated by readers or scholars
well versed in Woolf’s life and work; they are aware of the Dalloway-esque
features of Lippincott’s and Cunningham’s characters and can detect the full
resemblances with Woolf’s. The most satisfying reading of these types of
creative exercises is one that grasps the intricacy of Woolf’s portraiture and
actively engages with untangling various intertextual references, sources and
biographical facts. Lippincott’s and Cunningham’s ventriloquisms, their
masterful orchestration of the Woolfan voices, their clever metafctional
twists, their expert interweaving of the different echoes and hints taken both
from Mrs Dalloway and Woolf’s life and transplanted into the fabric of
their postmodernist texts can only be fully gauged by such an informed
reader. But the interest of the two rewritings resides not only in the authors’
representational strategies and the reader’s aesthetic deciphering: we must
also acknowledge the explicit political dimension which is deliberately
braided into the interpretative texture of the two novels. Lippincott and
Cunningham revisit, update and continue not only Woolf’s Dalloway-esque
signature but also the socio-historical context outlined in Mrs Dalloway:
their ‘Virginias’ are brought back to life to address our immediate private
and public, social and political preoccupations.

Notes
1 ‘Diagnostic properties’ are dominant characteristics, aggregates of ‘semes’ or
properties (physical or external, actantial, social and mental or internal), ‘essen-
tial attributes’ or ‘cluster of traits’ (Richardson 536). They defne the character’s
‘identity’ or ‘personality’ (527). See also Eco, Confessions 105.
2 For an in-depth analysis of Cunningham’s The Hours and Lippincott’s Mr
Dalloway, see Latham, Poetics 62–98.
3 See Chatman 274. I have extended Chatman’s defnition beyond the verbal,
punctuation and syntactic characteristics to include other stylistic, thematic and
 Biofctive Mirrors 197
narrative qualities, ingredients, features or templates that intrinsically defne
Woolf’s text, such as the fuidity and fexibility of the narrative voice, the mul-
tiplicity and intersection of subjective points of view, the shifts in perspective,
the piercing through different time strata and the alternation of interior/exterior
events, the themes accentuated by Woolf during the process of creation of her
novel (doubles, sanity/insanity, life/death), the creation of powerful moments of
being and so on.
4 Woolf wrote in her diary that her friend Strachey recognised her in Clarissa
Dalloway: ‘he thinks [I] cover her, very remarkably, with myself’ (Diary 3: 32).
5 Transfocalisation is the rewriting of a text from the perspective of a marginal
character. See Genette 292.
6 A sequel takes the work ‘beyond what was initially considered to be its ending’.
See Genette 206. The allographic sequel is written by a different author who
proceeds by imitation, as opposed to autographic sequels written by the same
author. Whitworth argues that the trend of ‘prequelling and sequelling’ (224) is
part of a late-twentieth-century trend.
7 Woolf describes this event in her Diary 3: 142–144.
8 For an analysis of Lippincott’s stylistic, thematic and structural Dallowayisms,
see Latham, Poetics 76–92.
9 See the review of Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway, Publisher’s Weekly, July 1999,
available at: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-889330-29-7 (accessed
September 2020).
10 Alley discusses Wilde’s ‘crucifed shadow’ (405) that hovers over Mr Dalloway
to suggest the hostile, aggressive homophobia of the period.
11 In this sense, Schultz has argued that ‘[t]he inclusion of Woolf in the narrative
and her assignment as a viewer of the eclipse rather than as the artist can be
regarded as a strategy to signify her as an ally to Richard’; ‘The fact that Woolf
is in company of Sackville-West and not Leonard Woolf indicates the “queer”
aspect of her relationship’ (218).
12 ‘it was over till 1999’ (Diary 3: 144).
13 ‘Someone in the crowd announced that after this it would be over until 1999
(and Richard Dalloway thought to himself that 1999 was a year so far away, so
remote-seeming, that he couldn’t even imagine it)’ (Mr Dalloway 212).
14 Schiff asserts that ‘almost every technique, trope, motif, and theme derives from
Woolf’ (370). On the multiple parallels between Mrs Dalloway and The Hours,
see also Pillière.
15 On a detailed analysis of the interplay between the biographical and fction in
Cunningham’s ‘Prologue’, see Girard (Latham), ‘Suicide Notes’.
16 The specifc elements selected by Cunningham and reworked in his ‘Prologue’
are here rendered in italics.
17 See Jameson’s defnition of pastiche in the postmodernist context: ‘Pastiche is,
like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wear-
ing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of
such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric
impulse, devoid of laughter’ (17).
18 In Cunningham’s romanticised rendering of the creative process, the frst sen-
tence ‘leaping to Virginia’s mind’ is ‘shortly followed by a whole book’ (Lee,
Nose 55). For an analysis of the real creative process of Mrs Dalloway, see
Latham, Poetics 16–61.
19 The passages from Mrs Dalloway quoted by Cunningham are rendered in italics:
they not only signal the collage of intertextual material, but they also constitute
a simulacrum of handwriting. By inserting intertextual snippets from Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway transcribed in italics, Cunningham visually shows how Virginia’s
198 Biofctive Mirrors
thoughts, ideas and impressions immediately become part of her (hand)written
novel.
20 This corresponds to Woolf’s real creative process, as she explained in the preface
of the frst American edition of Mrs Dalloway: ‘in the frst version Septimus,
who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; […] Mrs Dalloway
was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party’
(‘Introduction’ 549).
21 ‘what does ring astonishingly true is Cunningham’s vision of Woolf’s struggle
between life and death, her swings between pleasure, relish, excitement and
vacuity, self-annihilation, despair’ (Lee, ‘Mrs Brown’s Secret’ 19).
22 The circularity of infuences is noteworthy: Woolf’s own emotions and expe-
riences are used for her characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith in
Mrs Dalloway. In turn, Cunningham confates their features and creates char-
acters resembling Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith and Virginia Woolf: ‘the
biographical strand of Cunningham’s novel works by a circular process: it takes
elements from the writer’s published works, and inserts them in fctitious scenes
from the writer’s life; it then encourages the reader to see the works as echoes of
the life’ (Whitworth 220).
23 Critics have pointed out the way Cunningham portrays his Virginia in a some-
what stereotyped way, drawing on ‘exhausted stories concerning her madness
and suicide’: ‘Cunningham resurrects the familiar cliché in which madness and
genius are inextricably linked and mutually enhancing’ (Newman 9). Her life and
creation fall into the shadow of death and madness: ‘by beginning the novel with
Woolf’s death, Cunningham makes her a suicide frst, and a writer second’; ‘the
structure that Cunningham creates is potentially very reductive: it encourages
the reader to see every detail of Woolf’s life as prefguring her death’ (Whitworth
219).
24 On the way Cunningham ‘mass-produces’ the Woolfan kiss, replicating it ‘in
multiple confgurations and circumstances’ ‘in nearly every major scene’, see
Schiff 370. On interpretations of Clarissa and Sally’s kiss in Mrs Dalloway and
Cunningham’s three variations on it in The Hours, see Haffey.
25 This is ‘a subject that has even a greater currency within a contemporary world
actively and openly exploring gender construction’ (Schiff 364).
26 Lee has stated that Cunningham ‘treats bisexuality as the normal condition of
life’ (Nose 54).
27 However, some scholars have expressed concerns that this particular widely
spread representation is also partial and therefore damaging to her image: ‘The
Hours has reached a mass audience, and there is some fear that this Woolf will
be the Woolf for thousands of readers and moviegoers’ (Shannon 157).
7 Bloomsberries Reimagined

Bloomsbury, the urban location that has entered critical discourse, is a word
which is ‘so rife with competing connotations’ (Marler, Pie 204) and an
‘almost impalpable, almost indefnable’ (Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury 103)
entity that is very diffcult to defne and ‘must for convenience’s sake be
personifed and called Bloomsbury’ (21). Bell tried to sum up Bloomsbury’s
amorphous character, essence and values by pointing to the ‘combination of
pacifc method and revolutionary purpose’ (37) as its chief characteristics.
Today, Bloomsbury has become ‘a signifer for a group of people living,
thinking and creating together’ and ‘provides a rich example of how con-
viviality works to shape and reshape culture’ (Detloff and Helt 2).
Bloomsbury has attracted vivid criticism, animosity and hostility, and
its detractors pointed at the group as elitist, snobbish, arrogant, eccentric,
provocative, irreverent, libertarian and unpatriotic. It has long been a term
of abuse ‘suggesting everything from giggling effeminacy to political indif-
ference’ (Marler, Pie 11).1 On the contrary, others have expressed their
profound admiration for the members’ courage to defy conventions and
taboos and demonstrated that their aesthetic, artistic, intellectual and politi-
cal achievements have had a lasting impact on our world today. Bloomsbury
friends refused the heteronormative logic of the time and upset the rigid
social and familial organisational rules. They adopted a new kind of domes-
tic life, ‘[f]louting convention with their bohemian lifestyles, espousing
homosexuality and heterosexual sex outside marriage long before such
practices were publicly countenanced or even legal’; thus ‘the Bloomsbury
Group is often understood to have incarnated a certain version of the mod-
ern spirit’ (Rosner 3). What was important for them then – free speech,
emotional honesty, a liberal view of homosexuality decades before it was
legal, preserving their personal identities, artistic visions, ethical commit-
ments and creating networks in which they thrived both as individuals and
as a community – is also largely relevant for us today. Bloomsbury ethics
thus resonate with every generation’s preoccupations and struggles, and this
is the reason why their revolutionary attitude still fnds a receptive audience.
An enduring myth has grown around the Bloomsbury group and
glamour has been attached to ‘the ideas of artistic friendship, intellectual
200 Bloomsberries Reimagined
ferment, relaxed sexual mores’ (Maler, ‘Afterlife’ 216). The sensationalism
of their sexual unorthodoxy – the ‘freakishness’ of their love and domestic
arrangements (Marler, Pie 282) – partly explains Bloomsbury’s novelistic
and dramatic appeal. Bloomsbury has become a savoury word that appears
in titles (The Nightingale of Bloomsbury Square, Mitz: The Marmoset
of Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury: A Play in Two Acts, But Nobody Lives in
Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl) as an oppor-
tune hook to attract readers. This convenient label certainly stirs readers’
curiosity and fuels their voyeuristic instinct about Bloomsbury members’
personal lives, their unconventional cohabitation arrangements, compan-
ionate marriages and erotic entanglements. Contemporary writers and play-
wrights like to explore the Bloomsberries’2 ‘garden of vices’: ‘the spice of
sex and Modernity, of rule breaking in art and life, ménages à trois and
marriages blanc’ (Maler, ‘Afterlife’ 215). This depiction of Bloomsbury as
triangles and squares3 that contain the historical fgures’ sexual energies
and intellectual ethos has become a fascinating geometry retraced by many
authors in their novels and plays. The shifting yet enduring relationships
between friends, and their unconventional domestic and love confgura-
tions, which have contributed to their posthumous reputation, are at the
heart of Peter Luke’s Bloomsbury: A Play in Two Acts (1976) and Gillian
Freeman’s But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006). Written thirty years
apart, they are the proof that authors continue to tap into the dynamics of
Bloomsbury’s private lives, as the friends’ ‘amours, their domestic arrange-
ments, their feeting antagonisms and lasting friendships’ (Maler, ‘Afterlife’
215) provide excellent dramatic and novelistic material.

Lytton and Virginia

In Bloomsbury, British writer, editor and producer Peter Luke focuses on
the period between 1914 and 1932, which coincides with two landmarks,
the outbreak of WWI and Lytton Strachey’s death. Despite its broad title
which seems to suggest a glimpse into the lives of many Bloomsbury mem-
bers, Luke’s play mostly follows Lytton’s life, the evolution of his relation-
ship with Carrington, their triangular love confguration with Mark Gertler
and ménage à trois with Ralph Partridge. Bloomsbury seems to have been
used as a magic word for a voyeuristic audience lured into the dark nature
of its members’ ‘abhorrent practices’ (Bloomsbury 69) and unconventional
conduct. In this context, Lytton’s life must have been perceived as repre-
sentative of Bloomsbury attitude to love, friendship and art. Lytton is a
comical, witty character at the heart of farcical scenes, the most memorable
of which is his appearance in court where he defends his pacifsm and asserts
his position as a conscientious objector. In his plea and arguments for the
exemption from National Service, he is the epitome of Bloomsbury ethics.
Virginia follows her friend and rival’s rise and fall, success and death. She
does not interact with Lytton or any other character, but appears on stage
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 201
alone, talking dreamily to the audience about her writing and her use of her
Bloomsbury friends, who are transformed into characters. She is ‘isolated
from the main action of the play’ (7), as if she were a remote aesthete living
only for her art: ‘life’ unfolding under her eyes constitutes a rich reservoir
for her prose. Indeed, while the action unfolds, Virginia is writing at her
‘specially constructed’ (40) desk. This high desk is ‘built so that she could
write standing up’ (7) and oversee the movement and activity on the stage.
This God-like creative posture implies that she is a mere distant observer, a
conductor with a pen in her hand who orchestrates people’s lives in her nov-
els: ‘I have conducted their gyrations, their rise and fall. I have orchestrated
their movements like the waves’ (83). She admits that her ‘craft’ consists
of appropriating her friends’ lives and making ‘an art form out of them
all’ (82). This transformative process is justifed as a way to ‘give meaning
to the meaningless of their lives’ (7), ‘to catch them as they rise and fall’
and ‘to give rhythm to their movements’ (7). The movement of their lives
is compared to the ‘ebb and fow of waves in the sea’ (7), the waves thus
becoming an ‘apt simile’ (7) and the central design of all her prose. In a typi-
cally Woolfan fashion, the symbol of the waves encompasses connotations
of natural rhythms: the incessant, invigorating movement of life as well as
the crushing of life. Death is always lurking beneath the surface, and this is
intimated from the very beginning when Virginia has a brief vision of ‘a fn,
a black fn rising out of the wide blank sea’ (8). The image of the fn and the
omnipresent wave imagery suggest that the ‘book’ she is writing throughout
the play is The Waves, the ‘lovely book’ (92) that Lytton disappointingly
leaves ‘untouched, unopened, unread’ (92) by his deathbed at the end of the
play.
When Virginia frst appears in Act One, Scene 1, the stage is bathed in a
green-blue light ‘giving a subaqueous effect’ (7). The speakers produce ‘the
sound of waves regularly pounding on a rocky shore’ and Virginia writes ‘in
silence’ ‘as if she were at the bottom of the sea’ (7). These indications, given
in the stage directions, impart a specifc interpretation of her life and art in
light of her death. Virginia’s phantasy of death, always associated with the
bottom of the sea in her imagination, is enacted in the last scene. During the
play, she keeps writing in her notebook and voices her inner torments and
private preoccupations. She openly speaks about her ‘madness’ and how
people perceive her as ‘raving mad’ (55). Her struggle with mental instabil-
ity is set against the background of war and violence, as the omnipresent
external noise of air-raids amplifes her inner agonies. Virginia’s ‘madness’
is ‘a nightmare that continues not for seconds, or even hours, but for days,
months, years – perhaps a lifetime’ (56). It is a permanent condition which
fnally prompts her to put an end to her life.
Virginia is portrayed as a tireless genius who is entirely dedicated to
her art. Her mind, ‘galloping ahead of [her]’ (83), is always busy with
‘the excitement, the frenzy of creating’ (83). However, this proves to be
extremely strenuous and taxing on her mental health, and as the play draws
202 Bloomsberries Reimagined
to its end, she becomes more and more incoherent and ‘races more towards
aberration’ (83). She strives to put order in a material which is inevitably
moving and shifting while she is still ‘in command, before the machinery
of the brain accelerates beyond [her] control’ (83). She tries to arrange the
‘vast multitude of facts’ into a ‘signifcant whole’ (86) and to fnd a ‘new
form’ (83) to encompass them. Luke’s particular portrait of Woolf is that
of an ethereal writer in her ivory tower, cut from the surrounding, external
events, who is living exclusively in her mind, constantly preoccupied with
the design of her novels. This extreme creative attitude is ultimately damag-
ing for her fragile mental equilibrium.
Thus, in the melodramatic ending of Act Two, in the wake of Lytton’s
death, Virginia becomes ‘hysterical’ (92), as indicated in the stage direc-
tions. Her growing madness is suggested on stage through the wave noises
or ‘a storm at sea’ (92). The last moments of the play are those of Virginia’s
overwhelming visions of a black sea, black weeds and drowned ships, with
the sea rising dangerously. She ‘begins to cry hysterically’ (93) and ‘lets out
a terrifed scream as of someone about to fall from a great height’ (93).
Finally, the distressed, terrifed Virginia, in the throes of madness, plunges
into the imaginary waves as the curtain falls and the play ends. The rising
madness ultimately leads to her physical plunging. Luke’s Virginia therefore
emerges essentially as the author of The Waves, whose central metaphor
governs her whole life. The symbol of the waves brings together representa-
tions of Virginia’s life, art and death.
Luke’s particular snapshot of Bloomsbury is taken through the double
perspective of two illustrious members, Lytton and Virginia. On the one
hand, Lytton’s lifestyle, defance of war and governmental pressures which
crush the freedom of individual opinion stand for Bloomsbury’s outspoken
political and social statements. On the other hand, the literary and aesthetic
dimension of Bloomsbury’s credo is represented through Virginia’s tireless,
consuming attitude towards creation. Together, these Bloomsbury facets are
deemed representative for the playwright: the unconventional, subversive
homosexual free thinker who defes norms and authority, and the tortured,
remote aesthete who lives exclusively for her art, which gradually brings her
nearer death.
Lytton states that his tutor ‘once advised [him] never to write about peo-
ple [he] admire[s] because the characters inevitably become mawkish’ (30).
This metabiofctional comment about writers who turn people they look up
to into characters is highly resonant for the present study and symptomatic
for this very special creative practice which must be handled with care, as
it could be a risky endeavour. Lytton’s assertion must be read as a serious
warning: if authors admire Woolf, they should not write about her because
as a character, she will inevitably end up being ‘mawkish’. This is clearly
the case for Luke, whose Virginia is in keeping in with her pervading image
built by masculine biographies in the seventies, that of the delicate mad-
woman of Bloomsbury, prone to hysteria and obsessed with death.
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 203
Variable Geometries: Squares, Circles and Triangles
Gillian Freeman’s But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury focuses on the most
infuential ‘ingredients of Bloomsbury’ (Vanessa Bell, ‘Notes on Bloomsbury’
102) and their profound impact on British politics, art and literature at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The author novelises a series of anec-
dotes collected from the copious sources left by the Bloomsbury members:
memoirs, letters, diaries, reminiscences and biographies. The reader gets a
sense of the wide spectrum of intellectual interests the Bloomsbury group
covered and the signifcant impulse they gave to politics (through the char-
acters of Maynard and Leonard), to the artistic scene (through the charac-
ters of Vanessa, Duncan, Roger and Clive) and to literature (through the
characters of Virginia and Lytton) at the time.
The lives and works of Bloomsbury members provide great novelistic
material which makes for a compelling read: indeed, Freeman’s characters
all live fascinating lives, have passionate affairs and adventures, are daring,
unconventional and forward-thinking, but also suffer from numerous tragic
rejections, separations, jealousies, betrayals and double-crossings. Their
entangled love relationships, homosexual and heterosexual infatuations
and ensuing emotional turmoil have enormous dramatic potential. Many
male characters are portrayed as tortured, anguished and agonising over
unrequited loves, while women are often hopelessly in love with their homo-
sexual friends: they all seem to be in love with the wrong person at various
stages of their lives. However, their strong friendships stand the test of these
devastating love dynamics and consuming affairs.4 The way they cohabit
and function together as family, honest friends and unfaithful lovers, while
they make, unmake and remake new love constellations contributes to the
numerous intersecting narrative threads and concurrent subplots of the
novel. This soap-operatic dimension of the couples’ lives in their various
domestic situations, their odd mésalliances, their constant negotiations to
maintain stable domestic relationships, make readers eager to follow further
developments. The free yet committed relationships between husbands and
wives, their lovers and artistic companions were new, unusual and experi-
mental not only for those times, but for ours, too, hence the continuous
attraction and growing fascination with their bold, unconventional familial
and social constructs.
Freeman’s novel traces the origins of ‘old Bloomsbury’ with Thoby’s
friends at Cambridge in 1903 and ends with Virginia’s death in 1941. The
title of Freeman’s novel, which originally indicates Vanessa and Virginia’s
aunts’ horrifed comment on the young women’s new home location,
suggests all the familial and social disapproval of the Bloomsbury alter-
native lifestyle and ideology in general. Freeman gives the reader a tour
through some of the most memorable episodes involving the Bloomsbury
group: Leslie Stephen’s death, the Stephen siblings’ decision to move from
Kensington to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, the legendary Dreadnought
204 Bloomsberries Reimagined
Hoax, the ground-breaking post-impressionistic exhibition, the marriages
of Vanessa and Clive, Virginia and Leonard, Lytton’s unconventional rela-
tionship with Dora Carrington, and fnally Virginia’s notorious suicide.
The series of anecdotes selected by Freeman are small brushstrokes that
accumulate and give thickness and depth not only to the extraordinary per-
sonalities of the Bloomsbury characters but also to the political, social and
artistic scene during four decades at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Although complex life relationships are inevitably reduced to simple scenes,
the different angles presented simultaneously compose a cubist tableau in
which the novelist presents her characters’ parallel and intersecting lives and
achievements.
Each of the novel’s six chapters focuses mostly on a particular character
or couple, with the others gravitating around them within the Bloomsbury
orbit. Thus, in Chapter 1, ‘But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury’, we follow
Vanessa and Virginia’s progress from the respectable Hyde Park Gate to
disreputable Bloomsbury, until Vanessa agrees to marry Clive Bell, which
closes the frst Bloomsbury chapter in the sisters’ lives. At the outset of the
novel, Vanessa and Virginia live at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in Kensington, with
their ageing, widowed father, their brothers Thoby and Adrian, and half-
brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Freeman recreates the claustro-
phobic atmosphere which reigns in the crowed, dark house, ‘cluttered with
framed photographs, ornaments and papers’ (2). In this context of stifing
Victorian atmosphere in which Virginia and Vanessa ‘wither at home’ (4), a
minor event in the sisters’ lives, their visit to Thoby at Cambridge, proves to
have a major impact on their future lives. On contact with the Cambridge
intellectual elite, Vanessa and Virginia awaken to revolutionary ideas,
which trigger a stimulating intellectual development. Freeman thus presents
the Bloomsbury origins in Cambridge through the Stephen sisters’ mind-
opening encounter with a few outstanding young men. Virginia, who envies
her brothers’ formal education, is excited to meet ‘the most brilliant men’
(6) in Cambridge: the ‘alarmingly cultured’ Lytton Strachey, the ‘astonish-
ing’ Clive Bell, ‘a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country
squire’ (9), and another ‘astonishing fellow’, the passionate Leonard Woolf,
who ‘trembles perpetually’ (9).5 During this visit, the Stephen sisters also
catch a glimpse of these young men’s venerated prophet, the philosopher
George Moore, who will infuence their whole Bloomsbury ethics.
Beauty, knowledge, truth and love – the life values advocated by Moore
– are put into practice by the Cambridge set who ‘enjoy pleasant com-
pany, good conversation and beautiful surroundings’ (12). At the centre
of Moore’s philosophy lies an ideal utilitarianism: being ‘good’, adopt-
ing the ‘right’ behaviour and performing actions which will lead to ‘good
results’ (15). What the friends consider ‘good’ is ‘affection for another per-
son’, ‘appreciation of what is beautiful in Art and Nature’ and ‘love of
knowledge’ (15) – principles to which Vanessa and Virginia are extremely
receptive. This particular ethos of freedom, friendship and civilised human
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 205
relationships becomes the foundation of Bloomsbury ideals, guides them all
throughout their lives and imprints a certain trajectory on all their actions
and decisions.
The Cambridge friends are aware of their stance on the brink of a new
era which must leave behind the previous century and its ‘murky heritage’
(13). Lytton sums up this revolutionary momentum perfectly well: ‘We
are three years into the twentieth century. It is up to us to blow away the
fog of hypocrisy and superstition that poison our lives’ (13). They all feel
invested with a vital mission for their country, which consists of shaking
off the oppressive Victorian conventions, norms and traditions. Vanessa
and Virginia thus beneft from an informal education on contact with these
‘interesting minds’ (14). Their discussions form a favourable intellectual
ground for the young women’s later development as artists.
The sisters’ artistic activities in progress at Hyde Park Gate are meto-
nymically referred to through their tools: ‘There was an easel with an
unfnished water-colour and, pushed up in a corner, a lectern-writing-desk
with ink, paper and pen’ (5). These unfnished works have different causes:
fragile Virginia has not yet recovered from the breakdown provoked by
her mother’s sudden death and is plagued by unsettling memories of her
half-brother’s misplaced affection and his ‘warm brotherly embraces’ (5);
Vanessa’s duties that she takes over after her mother’s death and her posi-
tion as the new angel in the house are hindering her work. In this context,
young Virginia’s heartfelt outbursts constitute the origins of her feminism, as
she deeply resents men’s unquestioned and undisputed privileges: ‘Is writing
always to be considered the male prerogative? Novels and “ladies” novels?’
(6). Freeman thus suggests that the strong convictions of the future author
of A Room of One’s Own spring from her early environment, frustrations
and anger at her parents’ discriminatory attitude towards their sons’ and
daughters’ educations.
Their father’s death in 1904 signals for the young women the death of
all Victorian constraints and marks the end of their patriarchal supervision
or tutelage, disapproving chaperones and the rigid conventions of respect-
ability imposed on them by the family. The young women embark on a new
life, in a new place, Bloomsbury, which prompts their Aunt Adeline’s horri-
fed comment: ‘But nobody lives in Bloomsbury!’ (20, italics in the original
text). This inappropriate geographical location proves to be an extremely
‘blooming’, fertile social and artistic environment for the two sisters. They
symbolically rip down the ‘dark velvet curtains’ (20) and let the light come
in. Determined to discard the Victorian pomp and lifestyle, Vanessa and
Virginia start by breaking the previous domestic conventions in order to
establish their own rules.
Thoby’s Thursday evening gatherings6 quickly become ‘landmarks in
London’s social club’ (27). Freeman captures the atmosphere of these eve-
nings and budding love relationships by inventing conversations based on
real facts and anecdotes recorded by the historical fgures in their memoirs,
206 Bloomsberries Reimagined
or real letters they exchanged at the time. For instance, conversations
between Virginia and Leonard are based on the Woolfs’ real letters:

I’m cold and reserved to other people. I don’t even feel affection easily.
But with you, for you … apart from love, apart from desire, I’m fond
of you in a way that I’ve never been fond of anyone or anything in the
world.
(Nobody 70 / Leonard Woolf, Letters 173)

When you kissed me … I felt like … a rock. Desire will come between
us, Leonard.
(Nobody 70 / Virginia Woolf, Letters 1: 496)

Using portions of letters to create dialogues between characters is an eff-

cient technique employed by many novelists and playwrights. Likewise,
Woolf’s diaristic stream of consciousness constitutes prime material to fab-
ricate Virginia’s private thoughts. For instance, her thoughts about Vita,
who ‘shines in the grocer’s shop with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs
like beech trees, pink, glowing, grape-clustered, pearl-hung’ (Nobody 136),
come straight from Woolf’s diary (3: 52).
The novel follows the love lives of several characters within the inti-
mate Bloomsbury circle, which encompasses their numerous interlocking
triangular confgurations. Their solid friendships and family ties are con-
stantly challenged by brief, intense, passionate love relationships, extramar-
ital affairs, ménages à trois, inevitable jealousies and exacerbated feelings.
Freeman traces the contours of all her characters’ sexual ‘variations’,7 and
the different dramatic ‘scenes’ or tableaux, framed by elliptic blank spaces
in the text, offer close-ups on signifcant moments in their lives. These
vignettes contain the constant forming and breaking-up of couples. All the
Bloomsbury friends, wives, husbands and lovers living together ‘in squares’,
under the same roof – frst at 46 Gordon Square, then at 29 Fitzroy Square,
at 38 Brunswick Square and 52 Tavistock Square – make the square the
geometrical symbol of their various confgurations of friendship, marriage,
community and communion. These squares contain their life experiments
and artistic partnerships, their love triangles and collaborative, professional
circles. They all live as ‘inmates’ (76) in a prolifc ‘warren of creativity’ (75).
The novel’s second chapter, entitled ‘Private Passions’, frst plunges the
reader into Clive and Vanessa’s initial idyllic marital bliss, before Clive and
Virginia’s firtation gradually develops as Vanessa becomes absorbed in her
new maternity. This draws Virginia and Clive physically and intellectually
closer, thus breaking the very intimate conspiracy that existed between the
sisters. The affective rivalry between sisters lasts until Vanessa decides to
‘opt out’ (46) and fnds emotional stability elsewhere. In parallel with the
Vanessa/Clive/Virginia love triangle, other betrayals, jealousies and sexual
infdelities unfold among Bloomsbury friends. Lytton suffers not only from
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 207
numerous diseases, but also from crippling jealousy, as he constantly ago-
nises over his unfaithful lovers. He is enamoured of his cousin Duncan with
whom he has a sexual relationship, and Duncan in turn has a love affair
with Maynard, which unleashes Lytton’s consuming ‘agony’ (49). These
emotional tangles become more complicated when Lytton impulsively pro-
poses to Virginia, who accepts, then immediately refuses, his marriage pro-
posal. Instead of a marriage of convenience, Lytton and Virginia remain tied
by a special, long-lasting friendship, based on common pursuits, literary
ambitions, mutual admiration, encouragement and praise for their respec-
tive writing, but also competition, jealousies and criticism.
Chapter 3, ‘When You Kissed Me I Felt Like a Rock’ – a quote from
Virginia Stephen’s letter to Leonard Woolf – focuses on the new Bloomsbury
couple, Virginia and Leonard. The Woolfs’ marriage opens a new chapter
in Virginia’s love life and writing career. During Leonard’s courtship, the
couple envisage ways of preserving their individual freedoms despite mar-
riage. They set the ground rules of a special union which will not hinder
their personal freedom and ambition to work and write: ‘I want to be left
free. I want to be honest’ (71). Leonard brings stability to Virginia, who has
experienced ‘bouts of insanity’ and ‘she’s been in the nursing home a few
times’ (71). He provides a calm environment for her to thrive as a writer.
For this, Leonard foregoes his initial sexual impulses, and his passion turns
into a ‘brotherly’ (78) affection as early in their couple’s life as their hon-
eymoon. Their lasting affection for each other is based on mutual support
and intellectual companionship, and Virginia expresses her commitment in
these terms: ‘I am going to support you. I am going to be with you to do
important things’ (78).
Freeman gives the reader an idea of Leonard’s work through his political
commitment to the Socialist Party, his vocation to help the underprivileged
and tackle the poverty problems in Britain at the root, by reforming the
system. Through the character of Leonard, the Bloomsbury members are
depicted as prophets who guide other individuals and open their minds.
Each in their own way is at the forefront of the political, cultural, artis-
tic and literary scene. Bloomsbury artists also attempt to educate the pub-
lic and are instrumental in introducing them to new aesthetic codes. They
organise the most signifcant art exhibitions before WWI, the two Post-
Impressionistic Exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery. Freeman captures the
public’s extreme reaction and the press’ vivid outrage at the contact with
avant-garde continental artists, who deliberately defect expected aesthetic
conventions. Through this important artistic landmark, Freeman introduces
another pillar of the Bloomsbury group, Roger Fry, initiator and organ-
iser of the exhibitions and Vanessa’s future lover. The latest love triangle,
Vanessa/Roger/Clive, triggers new passions within the Bloomsbury circle.
Out of the friends and lovers’ artistic passion emerges The Omega work-
shops, along with their desire to popularise art and make it accessible to
more than the educated elite.
208 Bloomsberries Reimagined
Freeman’s Chapter 4, ‘I Think I Trust Lloyd George’, focuses mainly on
the character of Maynard and his key role in British politics during WWI,
but offers a wide perspective on all the Bloomsbury members’ different
responses, reactions and positions to war. One episode, symbolic of their
political and moral stance during the war and deep commitment to pacifsm,
which is also dramatised in Luke’s play, is Lytton’s 1916 tribunal hear-
ing. Freeman imparts the same theatrical and comic dimension to Lytton’s
‘performance’. A frail, pile-ridden, ‘semi-invalid’ (97) Lytton arrives at the
tribunal with his tartan rug and an air cushion to relieve his piles. While the
tribunal looks at him ‘with a mixture of derision and disgust’ (97), Lytton’s
witty remarks and frm attitude against war based on his moral principles
refect the whole group’s pacifst ethos. In the course of this theatrical exam-
ination, the real anecdotal exchange between the tribunal and Strachey is
included in the episode:8 ‘What would you do if you saw a German soldier
raping your sisters?’ Lytton is provocatively asked. Strachey’s famous witty
answer, ‘I would try to place my body between them’ (99), triggers ‘a burst
of laughter from the Strachey sisters and the Bloomsbury spectators’ (99)
and the fuming anger of the self-righteous court.
The Bloomsbury members’ professional lives go on despite the war,
and this is illustrated by a new landmark in Virginia and Leonard’s lives,
their purchasing of a printing press ‘for nineteen pounds, fve shillings and
fve pence’ (104) and the beginning of a fourishing business venture, the
Hogarth Press. Their literary activities thus continue and so do other artistic
partnerships and love lives. The initial, small Bloomsbury circle at Gordon
Square gradually widens in time and geography to include the friends’ grow-
ing affnities, changing lovers and new friendships. The Bloomsbury circle
thus opens to accept ‘dark, handsome, full-bosomed’ Vita, who awakens
Virginia’s ‘sapphist tendencies’ (133), and her husband, Harold Nicolson.
With Vita, a new episode in Virginia’s love life begins, which energises her
inspiration for a fresh novel, Orlando.
The new Bloomsbury era initiates the formation of another series of love
triangles: Clive, his mistress Mrs Raven-Hill and Vanessa, who is now in
love with Duncan Grant, in turn in love with Bunny Garnett. At this time,
most of the Bloomsbury friends move to Sussex and work the land, a con-
dition for their exemption from military service. At Charleston, Vanessa
makes practical cohabitation arrangements to accommodate all these love
relationships and include new forming triangles in the family circle. These
triangular confgurations, a stable and convenient way to preserve love,
friendship, intellectual companionship or creative partnerships, refect the
chaotic harmony of their lives and constitute a rich source of continuous
collaboration. Other vignettes reveal another love, intellectual and artis-
tic companionship between three people: Ralph Partridge, who is pining
over Dora Carrington, who is in turn impossibly in love with Lytton. In
Chapter 5, ‘The Girl’s Gone Up the Spout’, the majority of scenes are ded-
icated to aspects of this singular love triangle and the way they manage
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 209
its inherent tensions. Like Vanessa, Duncan and Bunny, they play house
together and make their ménage à trois function.
Freeman’s episodic and melodramatic representation of all these com-
plicated love triangles contained within the Bloomsbury circle shows the
characters’ fuid sexual identities, the many shades of their heterosexual,
bisexual and homosexual love, their affections and love bonds at different
stages in their lives, and their romantic rivalries, but also the fruitful artistic
partnerships and impulses they give to one another. The Bloomsbury tri-
angle9 offers a fexible geometry that allows loves to ‘bend but not break’
(Marler, ‘Love Triangle’ 148); it combines celibate and sexual love, domes-
tic and artistic relationships, and constitutes the perfect illustration of how
the characters reject the previous strict Victorian sexual mores and adapt
Moore’s philosophy to ft their living arrangements.

Bloomsbury Legacies
Lytton’s death, marked by his historical counterpart’s famous last words, ‘If
this is dying, I don’t think much of it’ (Nobody 140), symbolically coincides
with Virginia’s speech at Broadcasting House about her contemporary peers
and the survival of their work for posterity. She suggests that a writer’s
work is immortal and survives when ‘purifed’ of their bodily existence:
‘Only after a writer is dead […] do his words to some extent become disin-
fected, purifed of the accidents of the living body’ (140). This quote, taken
by Freeman from Woolf’s essay ‘Craftsmanship’, originally a talk broadcast
on the BBC radio on 29 April 1937, exposes Virginia’s vision of the links
between a writer’s life and work, a connection that is only broken with the
author’s death. Creation is then severed from the physical umbilical cord
which connects it with its creator; it lives on, beyond the short earthly exist-
ence of its author.
The last chapter of Freeman’s novel, entitled ‘Before Lunch…Or After’,
which stages Virginia’s notorious suicide, is an allusion to the young
Virginia and Lytton’s conversation at Cambridge, during Virginia’s visit in
Chapter 1. It refers to the Cambridge undergraduates’ idealistic and enthu-
siastic beginnings and desire to reform the whole epoch. Their aim then,
‘three years into the twentieth century’ (13), was to blow away the Victorian
‘hypocrisy and superstition that poison[ed their] lives’ (13). Virginia teas-
ingly asks if this is planned to be accomplished ‘before lunch – or after?’
(13). The last chapter is therefore meant to be an assessment of their lives,
and Freeman raises the question of what is left of their idealistic, noble
intention, what has been accomplished since the beginning of the century
and what legacy they are leaving behind to the next generation of artists
and writers.
Four decades after their optimistic beginning, at the outset of WWII, in the
darkening political climate and the menace of Nazi invasion, the Woolfs and
their friends discuss their suicide pacts so as not to be left at the mercy of the
210 Bloomsberries Reimagined
Germans. The shadow of planes crossing the Sussex sky and air-raid sirens
form a gloomy, menacing background against which distressed Virginia starts
hearing birds speaking Greek. She becomes manic and frantic as the birds’
voices become louder and louder. Virginia feels ‘terrifed and exhausted’
(166). Like Cunningham, Barron and Vincent, Freeman imagines Virginia’s
state of mind from the moment she writes her farewell letters to her plunge
into the river. The narrator accompanies Virginia to the river, following her
progress step by step. Freeman splits the narrative focus between two per-
spectives, Virginia’s and Leonard’s, just like Cunningham in the ‘Prologue’
of The Hours. We frst follow Virginia, who writes her letters and starts
walking to the river, then Leonard, who comes home and discovers ‘two
folded letters by the radio’ (166), one for him, the other one for Vanessa.
With shaky hands, he tears open the envelope addressed to him and reads his
wife’s farewell words, made with Woolf’s real suicide letter: ‘Dearest, You
have been in every way all that anyone could be. All I want to say is I owe
all the happiness in my life to you. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been’ (166).
The point of view then switches again to Virginia, who puts the last stone in
her pocket and is ‘looking for a way into the river’ (166); she fnally ‘fnd[s]
a suitable spot’ and ‘step[s] into the water up to her waist’ (166). Lastly, we
follow Leonard who eventually fnds Virginia’s garden room empty and con-
templates the material remains that signal her physical absence, the ‘evidence
of her previous presence – a ball of string used for tying up the manuscript
parcel, pens, paper, open books’ (167). With growing panic, he dashes to the
river where he only sees ‘Virginia’s hat foating slowly downstream’ (167).
Virginia’s hat, like Virginia’s walking stick in Cunningham’s and Taylor’s
novels, is the last object that metonymically hints at her absent body and her
tragic demise. Freeman’s fnal scene, which stages Virginia’s death, implies
that Bloomsbury also ends here. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, ‘with the death of
Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken’ (qtd. in Heilbrun 32).
The legacy that the Bloomsbury friends leave behind is composed of
all their books that Virginia is carefully dusting and contemplating at the
end of the novel, just before her death, as a sort of an assessment of their
achievements. Virginia’s own literary achievements emerge through allu-
sions to her novels in progress in the different chapters of But Nobody Lives
in Bloomsbury. As a writer, just like in Luke’s play, she is portrayed as
constantly imagining, writing and revising her novels, either standing at her
lectern or sitting with a board on her knees. Different well-known facets of
Woolf’s authorial fgure are illuminated in Freeman’s short tableaux: Woolf
as a tormented writer, through a brief glimpse into the imagined geneses of
her frst and last novels, The Voyage Out and Between the Acts; Woolf as a
prolifc, inspired writer with Orlando; and Woolf as an outspoken feminist
writer with A Room of One’s Own. Freeman’s Virginia is either feverishly
writing and drawing material from events that are happening in her life, or
is weighed down by the labours of revision.
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 211
Like many other novelists in this study, Freeman imagines the geneses of
Virginia’s novels and her mental health during or after the strenuous gesta-
tion effort. For instance, the painstaking writing process of her frst novel, The
Voyage Out, lasts seven years. Virginia talks about the length of this unusual
‘pregnancy’ (75) and the painful delivery of her frst ‘child’. Finishing her frst
novel coincides with a ‘postpartum’ mental breakdown which almost ‘fnishes’
her: this creative effort causes a deep depression, which is followed by a sui-
cide attempt. Like Luke in Bloomsbury, Freeman resorts to the wave imagery
to represent Virginia’s depression: ‘Virginia was aware only of the pounding
waves growing louder and louder in her head’ (84). Her symptoms are enu-
merated through the conversation between Leonard and Dr Savage: she expe-
riences ‘violent bouts of euphoria’, ‘headaches’ and ‘delusions’ (84), and the
cure she is prescribed is rest, ‘wholesome food’ and ‘plenty of milk’ (85).
In her delirium, she talks to her dead mother and hears voices and birds
singing in Greek. She hears groans and sees predatory birds with ‘beaks of
brass’ which ‘tear fesh’ and ‘pierce brains’ (86). Virginia’s aural halluci-
nations are drawn from both Woolf’s medical history and her characters’
experiences. Indeed, this precise detail, one of Woolf’s best-known hallu-
cinations that recurrently fuels popular imagination, originates in Woolf’s
1904 breakdown, after her father’s death, when she believed she heard birds
singing in Greek and King Edward VII uttering profanities among the azal-
eas.10 But the birds singing in Greek is also a hallucination extended to the
character of Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, and Mr Ramsay’s ‘beak of
brass’ is an image which suggests his tyranny as a father and husband in To
the Lighthouse. This impressionistic insight into Virginia’s disturbed, con-
fused mind is made with an amalgamation of autobiographical and fctional
touches, and the refrain of singing birds is chosen by Freeman to signal
Virginia’s frst and fnal breakdowns, after the completion of her frst and
last novels.
Freeman gives an idea of her character’s process of transformation of life
into art by imagining the process of composition of Orlando. Vita and her
ancestral home, Knole, an ‘enchanted place’ (144) for Virginia, spark the idea
of a new novel. We are given the portrait of an inspired writer, in full creative
swing, ‘writing feverishly’ (146) or ‘writing furiously’ (148) ‘[a]bout Orlando!
About Vita!’ (146); it is an absorbing, fowing writing process, as Virginia
is relentlessly ‘ending one page and beginning the next without looking up’
(147). Virginia’s luminous ideas which form in her fertile mind and which
she is writing down on paper are made with snippets from Woolf’s Orlando:

Truth! Truth! Truth! We have no choice but confess he was a woman.

(Nobody 147 / Orlando 83)

For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of petti-

coats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
(Nobody 147 / Orlando 128)
212 Bloomsberries Reimagined
The fctional genesis of Orlando shows Virginia’s creative fow from the
frst inspiration and revelation about her character’s change of sex, from
man to woman, to its completion with three dots. With Orlando, Freeman
draws the portrait of an inspired writer who, in a romanticised way, is car-
ried away by her passion and effortlessly writes this novel dedicated to the
lover who inspired it.
Finally, the well-known image of Woolf as a feminist writer is rendered
through the genesis of A Room of One’s Own. Freeman shows how Virginia’s
ideas originate in her contact with underprivileged women at the Women’s
Co-operative Guild, whose aim was ‘to educate women members, advance
co-operative principles and obtain proper recognition for women’s interests’
(82). Her infuential pamphlet starts as a lecture to women at St Hughes on
‘Freedom for Women’. Freeman selects and paraphrases two well-known
episodes from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The frst one is about women
being forbidden to walk on the grass at an imaginary Oxford College:

It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across
a grass plot. Instantly a man’s fgure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at
frst understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a
cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed
horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help,
he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path.
Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place
for me.
(Room 5)

I … and the ‘I’ is not exactly me … was crossing a patch of grass in

Oxford when a man rose up to intercept me. This was a beadle and I
was not a scholar or a fellow of Oxford and – horror of horrors, lowest
of the low – I was a woman and the grass was preserved for the hal-
lowed feet of selected males.
(Nobody 155)

The second passage illustrating Virginia’s outcry against injustice and femi-
nine discrimination is also a rewriting of Woolf’s anecdote about women
being admitted to the library only if accompanied by a male fellow of the
College:

I must have opened it [the door of the library], for instantly there issued,
like a guardian angel barring the way with a futter of black gown
instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who
regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admit-
ted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished
with a letter of introduction.
(Room 6)
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 213
Worse was to follow at the famous Oxford library. My way was barred
by a kind of guardian angel – but with a black gown futtering instead
of white wings – who regretted that ladies are only admitted if accom-
panied by a fellow of the College who are all men!
(Nobody 155)

These representative aspects of Virginia’s oeuvre are placed by Freeman in

the context of other remarkable Bloomsbury achievements, as well as in the
context of their rich, passionate lives and rebellious attitudes and events
they witness in the frst four decades of the twentieth century, marked by
two world wars, deep social changes and artistic innovations.
Freeman’s portrait of the Bloomsbury legend is made of signifcant frag-
ments of the characters’ friendships, love lives, and political, artistic and
literary accomplishments that have left an imprint on the whole twentieth
century. The ‘eminent’ Bloomsberries are distinguished and remarkable his-
torical fgures that are ‘revealed as people’ (Nobody 119), in the same way
as Lytton portrays his ‘Eminent Victorians’. He does not present them as
‘saints’ or ‘icons’ but as humans with inherent faws: ‘The time has come
to cut these idols down to human size’, says Lytton, and this metafctional
remark constitutes an apt comment for Freeman’s novel, too. Lytton revolu-
tionises the art of biography by ‘destroy[ing] the halo’ of ‘England’s heroes’
(123), which paradoxically reinforces their mythical image. This decon-
structive and reconstructive narrative process refects the whole contempo-
rary biofctional enterprise.
Strachey’s provocative manifesto in the introduction to his biogra-
phy, read by Lytton in Freeman’s novel, constitutes an interesting tool
in approaching and discussing today’s biofctional practice. The char-
acter of Lytton, speaking with Strachey’s words, seems to give Freeman
advice about how to navigate ‘the great ocean of material’ and ‘bring up
to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths,
to be examined with careful curiosity’ (120). With these tools, the bio-
graphical novelist ‘will attack his subject in unexpected places’ (120) and
‘will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses hitherto
undivined’ (120). These valuable methods of exploration will reveal the
truthful nature of the subject. The truth is hence not necessarily told by
the historian who focuses on the subject’s public achievements, but by
the novelist, whose aim is not to present the ‘antediluvian Victorian’
but to understand his subject’s psychology and motivations and offer
the reader ‘some Victorian visions to the modern eye’ (120). Lytton’s
pioneering approach thus justifes the very existence and essence of bio-
fction today. His biographical considerations can perfectly well apply to
Freeman’s biographical novel in which she presents not the ‘antediluvian
Bloomsbury-an’, but her own ‘visions’ of Bloomsbury for our ‘modern
eye’, which combines the narrative and research methods of both novel-
ists and biographers.
214 Bloomsberries Reimagined
Among the impressive heritage left by Bloomsbury members, what is par-
ticularly signifcant for the present study is their literary legacy, as illustrated
by Lytton and Virginia, and more especially the way Strachey and Woolf
together paved the way for biographical novels in which they themselves are
depicted today. Thus, literary history seems to have come full circle: the two
authors are pioneers or progenitors who set the foundations of a fourishing
genre in which they now appear as characters. Both Strachey and Woolf
tried to reconcile the binaries of truth and fction and produced ‘biofction
in ovo’ (Avery, ‘Biographical Roots’ 16). Strachey revolutionised the art of
biography by challenging the iconic image of the subject and revealing their
human nature. He took biography ‘toward a form of life-writing in which
the text projected the personality of the writer more than, or at least as
much as, it strove to represent the facts of the subject’s life’, towards ‘subjec-
tive expression and self-analysis’ (Avery, ‘Art’ 5) – in a word, towards what
today we call biofction. At the same time, Woolf revolutionised the art
of fctional biography and found ingenious novelistic ways to successfully
yoke ‘the freedom of fction’ and ‘the substance of fact’, to make the ‘truth
of fact’ and the ‘truth of fction’ compatible (‘New Biography’ 478). When
Virginia addresses women undergraduates on the ‘Freedom for Women’
with Woolf’s words from A Room of One’s Own, she declares the follow-
ing: ‘Sometimes I think fction contains more truth than fact, so the story
I am about to tell uses the licence and liberties of the novelist’ (Nobody
155). Freeman’s story of the Bloomsbury set also uses ‘the licence and liber-
ties of the novelist’; her fction also contains truth, and this truth possibly
reaches the audience more effciently when wrapped and delivered in fction.
Woolf’s statement could be read as a manifesto of biofction: ‘Lies will fow
from my lips, but there may be some truth mixed up with them’ (Room 4).
Freeman thus borrows Woolf’s idea that truth emerges from the mesh of lies
and creatively puts it into practice in a novel in which she reimagines the
Bloomsberries’ real lives.

Notes
1 On Bloomsbury’s reputation as individuals and as a group through ages, see
Marler, Pie and ‘Afterlife’.
2 Molly MacCarthy coined the term in a letter in 1910. See Marler, Pie 7.
3 The famous quip that the Bloomsbury group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles
and loved in triangles’ is now widely attributed to Dorothy Parker, but Marler
argued that it was probably the work of Kingsley Martin. See ‘Love Triangle’
148.
4 Marler contends that the different Bloomsbury same-sex or asexual amorous
relationships and ‘endogamous triangles’ ‘cemented alliances that might other-
wise have been feeting’ (‘Love Triangle’ 144).
5 These sketchy portraits of these ‘astonishing fellows’ are recorded by Woolf in
‘Old Bloomsbury’ 187–188.
6 ‘These Thursday evening parties were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from
which sprang all that has since come to be called – in newspapers, in novels, in
 Bloomsberries Reimagined 215
Germany, in France – even, I daresay in Turkey and Timbuktu – by the name of
Bloomsbury’ (Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ 186).
7 The ‘many variations […] on the theme of sex’ (Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ 197).
8 On this well-known anecdote, see Holroyd 116.
9 On the homo- and hetero-erotic triangle as ‘a default relationship mode’ (135)
for many of the Bloomsbury members and their close friends, and how ‘they
benefted from these risky but oddly resilient unions’ (136), see Marler, ‘Love
Triangle’.
10 On this precise episode, see Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ 184.
Posthumous Lives
‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’

Since her tragic death, Virginia Woolf has been ‘variously and passionately
idealised, vilifed, fctionalised, and mythologised’ (Lee, Nose 39). She has
been ‘made and remade continually’ in numerous novels and plays – a lit-
erary endeavour which has contributed to the building of a prosperous,
vigorous afterlife.1 Contemporary authors have given her the opportunity
to ‘walk among us’ and be a ‘continuing presence’ on our literary, cultural
and political scene.2 ‘There are some stories which have to be retold by
each generation’ (‘Not One of Us’ 465), Woolf said about Shelley, and her
life, too, is one of those inspiring stories that has been ‘rewritten by each
generation, and appropriated by different and competing readings’ (Lee,
‘Biomythographers’ 107).
The profusion of biographical novels and plays examined here, eighty
years after Woolf’s death, ensures not only her mere survival in the Western
public consciousness, but also contributes to her growing prominence and
stands as a testament to the long-established canonical status of her oeuvre.
Many creative writers have resuscitated Woolf, a pioneering fgure of a
great literary tradition and a forerunner of major ongoing struggles, and
have revitalised her image in a permanent process of iconisation and myth-
ifcation. They have reinterpreted her life and commemorated her work,
thus cultivating and shaping her posthumous reputation. The study of ‘all
the lives [she] ever lived’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 160) in contemporary
fction and drama has evinced how authors, for many decades, have cele-
brated her life and kept her literary legacy alive, which constitutes a way for
Woolf to reach immortality beyond death. These literary productions are a
powerful testimony of how relevant Woolf remains for current generations
of writers, who reinvent her and rewrite her life and oeuvre into their works.
In this way, they facilitate Woolf’s mobility and evolution through time.
The beginning of resurrections of Woolf in fction and drama ironically
follows Barthes’s and Foucault’s solemn proclamation of the death of the
author and their dissolution in the text itself in the late sixties. These ques-
tions of author/ity marked new trends in literary interpretation, which
consisted of liberating the reader from the author’s domination and infu-
ence. The production of biofctions curiously parallels the New Criticism
 Posthumous Lives 217
vogue in scholarly debates, especially the belief that literary works should
be studied in themselves, separately from biographical interferences. The
fourishing genre of biofction signals the resurrection of the author who
comes alive from these texts. This constitutes the living proof that an
author like Woolf can never actually ‘die’ but remains immortal: in one
way or another, the author will always shape readers’ interpretations, be
it during her lifetime, or beyond the grave, in her numerous afterlives.
The abundant production of biofctions could suggest that literary studies
cannot arbitrarily be separated from the authors’ historical-biographical
contexts and they will always gain from them, as critical interpretations
of literary works are constantly informed and enriched by biography – an
idea which is very much in keeping with Woolf’s own approach to literary
criticism.
In 1928, Woolf wrote that fame was ‘becoming vulgar & a nuisance’; she
believed that ‘[i]t mean[t] nothing; and yet [took] one’s time’ (Diary 3: 183).
This statement expresses Woolf’s horror about the publicity surrounding the
ceremony of the ‘Femina-Vie Heureuse’ Prize for To the Lighthouse. Today,
although Woolf would probably have hated the idea of being famous for
anything other than her writing3 and may be turning in her grave each time
one of these biofctions appears on the literary market, she is inevitably
famous far beyond her work, as proven by the numerous reinventions of
her as a fctionalised fgure. Over the decades, she has inspired novels, plays
and flms – the most recent one being Vita and Virginia, released in 2019
and directed by Chanya Button – and has achieved notoriety as a symbol of
high art and feminism. In several novels, metabiofctional passages allow the
character of Virginia to discuss her growing reputation and the endurance
of her oeuvre after her death, her lack of control over her authorial image
and her becoming a commodifed product: in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan,
she is pleasantly surprised to see her fame today and the monetary value
attached to her coveted manuscripts; in Mitz, she, ‘who had declined to sit
for her portrait for the National Portrait Gallery’ is slightly shocked to see
‘her picture on the side of a bus driving down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue’
and to be ‘impersonated on stage and screen’ (34).
However, beyond fanciful speculations about how Woolf may have
responded to her presence in contemporary biofction4 and the authors’
(mis)treatment of her image, more important literary and cultural ques-
tions should be raised, such as what this wide array and proliferation of
literary productions tell us about Woolf and her infuence today, but also
about the contemporary writers and playwrights and their visions of our
world conveyed through the character of Virginia. The twenty-fve novels
and plays analysed in this book, from 1972 to 2019, display a variety of
biofctional forms and ramifcations. Biofction is not simply one thing: it is
the result of a variable concoction of truth and untruth mixed more or less
homogenously, of surprising intersections between biography and fction,
each with their own generic imperatives and modes of representation, and
218 Posthumous Lives
has multiple roots in prior biographical, historical, intertextual and popular
representations of Woolf.
All these biofctions illustrate what Silver refers to as ‘the proliferation of
Virginia Woolfs, each of which carries its own claim to “truth”, and authen-
ticity’ (Icon 5). These sometimes ‘contradictory versions of the same face’
(Woolf, ‘Art of Biography’ 186) refect the authors’ true vision of Woolf:
not an accurate or defnitive portrayal – if such a thing ever existed – nor the
‘established facts of [Woolf’s] actual life’, but ‘the integrity of [their] autho-
rial vision’ (Lackey, ‘Usages’ 13). Author biofction does not aim at a faithful
representation of a past authorial fgure but is an act of reinterpretation of
the author’s life and work and of exposing both past and present authors’
visions of the world. Gee’s acknowledgement in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan
can be applied to all biofctional works examined here: each Virginia is ‘a
phantasm […] always and only [the author’s] own’ (475). However, such
‘truthful fctions’ (Lackey) can only spring from informed research about the
true, historical Woolf. Vanessa Bell aptly commented about Bloomsbury in
these terms: ‘we should see the whole from different angles’; ‘with luck, each
might paint one true facet of the whole’ (‘Notes on Bloomsbury’ 96). In the
same way, contemporary authors have seen Woolf from different angles,
each of them attempting to paint one true facet of the whole.
Woolf’s fctional portraits are to be found at the crossroads of several
factors. Firstly, as passionate love letters to Woolf, biofctions are acts of
homage and communicate the contemporary authors’ own visions of Woolf
as well as their current preoccupations conveyed through their Virginia’s
eyes, voice and inner thoughts. When Woolf becomes a character in fc-
tion, she inevitably brings her aesthetic and ideological values with her, but
she is also made to address issues as a spokesperson for the contemporary
authors. In Duffy’s Virginia’s words, she is made to ft ‘the Procrustean
bed of [the authors’] imagination’ (Nightingale 18). Violently distorted,
stretched out, cut, forced into a specifc mould, she is a made-to-measure
character who voices her makers’ concerns. Their novelised or dramatised
versions of Woolf highlight her features that are most relevant to them and
resonate with their lives and writing experiences. Conjuring up a Virginia
in their image can provide answers to their own existential questions and
allow them to live vicariously through her fctionalised life. This consti-
tutes an exercise in ventriloquism which enables their messages to be heard,
interwoven with Virginia’s. Thus, contemporary authors become twinned
with their Virginia and insinuate themselves into the biofctional equation.
Such bio-depictions draw from a double ‘bio’ and reveal two superimposed
portraits at once: the portrait of the artist as well as the portrait of the
subject. Duffy imagines her Virginia saying, ‘I hid myself in wolf’s clothing’
(Nightingale 28). In the same way, authors here ‘hid themselves in Woolf’s
clothing’: they borrowed the fabric of her life and work and hid behind their
representations of Woolf, like puppeteers or ventriloquists who make their
character tell their own truths.
 Posthumous Lives 219
Secondly, these literary representations refect the climate of popular
opinion surrounding the fgure of this iconic author and the changing per-
ceptions of her over decades in popular culture, but they are also attempting
to debunk the legend, remediate stereotypical images born out of reductive
labels attached to Woolf and build the myth anew, reveal different truths
about her and depict her in a (w)hol(l)y different light. Indeed, by imagining
their own versions of Woolf, some authors obviously continue and augment
clichéd representations, while others try to subvert commonplace expecta-
tions about Woolf: they endeavour to break with a mode of characterisa-
tion prevalent in popular representations and present an extremely original,
complex and nuanced character.
Thirdly, biofctions about Woolf refect the critical trends of a period and
tend to crystallise the scholarly discourses of particular landmarks in Woolf
scholarship. Embedded in the narration, some biographical novelists also
propose their own, popularised version of literary criticism. And last but
not least, these biofctions mirror the shifts in interest and attitudes towards
the biographical subject and the evolution of Woolf representations in vari-
ous biographies through time, which have taken into account new archival
discoveries and previously unpublished primary sources.

Biographical Woolfs and Fictional Virginias

As ‘one of the most prolifc, energetic, versatile and professional writers’
(Lee, ‘Biomythographers’ 107), Woolf ‘lends herself to infnitely various
interpretations’ (Lee, Virginia Woolf 3):

She takes on the shape of diffcult modernist preoccupied with questions

of form, or comedian of manners, or neurotic highbrow aesthete, or
inventive fantasist, or pernicious snob, or Marxist feminist, or historian of
women’s lives, or victim of abuse, or lesbian heroine, or cultural analyst,
depending on who is reading her, and when, and in what context. (758)

Woolf has many facets, is many things, to many authors, and ‘ffty pairs of
eyes’ will see her in ffty different ways. Capturing Virginia’s essence in fc-
tion is a diffcult enterprise, especially when the historical Woolf herself is
such a multifaceted, elusive, contradictory person, and like any biographi-
cal subject, ‘she doesn’t have a life, she has lives’ (Lee, ‘Biomythographers’
107). The complexities inherent in Woolf have too often been reduced to
one-dimensional versions of her, an idea pertinently expressed by Woolf
herself in Orlando:

For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have
been able to fnd room for, since a biography is considered complete if it
merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have
as many thousand. (179)
220 Posthumous Lives
Woolf thus seems to extend an invitation to contemporary novelists and
playwrights to explore her ‘thousand selves’ that biographers cannot pos-
sibly account for.
Despite being different genres with specifc modes of representation, the
biographical and biofctional go hand in hand, as the latter is necessarily born
from and informed by the former. The portraits of fctional Woolf largely
depend on the raw auto/biographical sources researched and processed by the
creative writers, which are often listed in their acknowledgements. In many
contemporary biofctions studied in this book, Virginia is a direct refection
of an image fostered by problematic, monolithic biographical constructs of
Woolf as a historical fgure. A chronological examination of all these biofc-
tions shows that her fctional portraits are largely determined by how the
auto/biographical material about Woolf has been disseminated through time.
Besides, every biographer is inevitably a mytho-biographer: both a mythoma-
niac who fantasises about their subject, promoting and exaggerating certain
features, conveniently obscuring others, and a mythmaker who by writing
a life necessarily creates a certain myth around their subject. Thus, Woolf’s
public image in the thirties was that of a ‘frail, batty lady author, out of touch
with the brutal world of politics’ (Gordon 13). This gave birth to the ‘myth of
a precious aesthete withdrawn from the real world’, which was perpetuated
‘through the forties, ffties, and early sixties’ (13). This particular image was
largely reinforced by the circulation of A Writer’s Diary, an expurgated and
abridged version of her diary edited by Leonard Woolf in 1953, which, as
the title indicates, focuses on Woolf’s intellectual life, her writing and read-
ing methods and habits, and shows her grappling with her prose. This trun-
cated version of her diary gave readers the impression that Woolf was only
‘an intense, austere, dedicated aesthete’ (Lee, ‘Biomythographers’ 107), and
solidifed an unfair image of her as a cold, aloof and ethereal writer. When the
full diary was published – starting with 1977 for the frst volume until 1984
for the last volume – the public surprisingly discovered a different image of
Woolf as a happy, self-confdent woman and writer.
Another Woolf emerged from Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography – written
under the guidance of Leonard Woolf – which was subsequently attacked
by many feminist scholars, especially in the United States where women’s
studies were developed in universities. The fatal faw of this biography
was its focus on Woolf’s frigidity and mental breakdowns, which obvi-
ously conferred her personality a reductive dimension. Woolf scholars have
vehemently criticised Bell’s ‘bogey which frighten[ed] American readers’;
his biographical version of his aunt was that of ‘an Ophelia of the Ouse,
a woman who is a failure as a woman, a cautionary fgure’ (Jane Marcus,
‘Bogey’ 204). This persistent myth was reversed in the seventies following
the advent of the feminist movements, when a new generation of readers
politically recuperated Woolf, the author of A Room of One’s Own and
Three Guineas, for the promotion of women’s rights. They constructed a
Woolf ‘as a bold, revolutionary pioneer, a Marxist and lesbian heroine, a
 Posthumous Lives 221
subversive cultural analyst and a historian of women’s hidden lives’ (Lee,
‘Biomythographers’ 107). This is refected in biofctions of the time in two
contradictory ways. On the one hand, some creative writers embroidered
on and magnifed these ‘hot spots of the Woolf legend – madness, sexuality,
marriage, suicide’ (Marler, Pie 171) and sensationalised the narrative of her
life. Many plays about Woolf written and performed at the time attempt to
trace the origins of her madness, her suicide and her sexual ‘frigidity’. On
the other hand, other writers – most of them with a blatant, strong femi-
nist agenda – rewrote Woolf’s life in fction as a reaction to such ‘bogeys’
that did not correspond to their vision of Woolf. They made it their mis-
sion to rescue Woolf from being trapped in inadequate biographical repre-
sentations and fought a battle on two fronts to fx her damaged image, in
scholarly articles and in fction, by defending a certain image and creating a
political, sexual and intrepid Virginia.
In the eighties and nineties, new generations of biographers rewrote
Woolf’s life according to their own ideological agendas, lines of defence and
theses, rejecting other biographical narratives and imposing their own inter-
pretations of her life. Each of these biographies constructs a specifc version
of Woolf, focusing on particular features of her life and personality, and
offers interpretations of her work in light of these personal features. Some
of these enduring biographical representations have been extremely damag-
ing to Woolf’s image. Lee discusses how, in the wake of Bell’s biography,
Woolf ‘was rewritten, on Laingian lines, as the victim of repressive atti-
tudes to mental illness, and in the late 1980s and 90s her life-story was seen
to be determined by childhood sexual abuse’ (‘Biomythographers’ 108).
Biographers have reclaimed Woolf according to their understanding of her
life and reading of her work, and the same is very true of literary reconstruc-
tions, which kept pace with the available biographies. Auto/biographical
documentation that informed authors necessarily led to a certain portrait of
Woolf, kindling and fashioning their imaginations.
One can notice a signifcant shift in Woolf’s fctional representations trig-
gered by Lee’s 1996 biography, which revealed a ‘more comical, wicked,
socialised and robust Virginia Woolf’ (Lee, ‘Biomythographers’ 107) and
which has conferred more complexity and depth to subsequent biofc-
tions about Woolf. This invaluable landmark biography – supplemented
by access to previously unpublished documents, such as Woolf’s full diary,
letters, edited essays and memoirs, as well as a profusion of secondary, criti-
cal material – has better shaped authors’ visions of Woolf beginning with
the late nineties. This is refected in the millennial biofctions and the crea-
tive writers’ desire to move away from the image of the ‘doomed, fey, mad
victim’ (Lee, Nose 40) who took her own life. However, despite recent,
more nuanced biographies and accessible, copious auto/biographical mate-
rial, Woolf’s suicide constitutes too much of an irresistible attraction, and
the majority of biofction writers continue to feed the readers’ voyeurism
and curiosity about Woolf’s last moments. They have foregrounded Woolf’s
222 Posthumous Lives
self-inficted death over and above her life, creativity and literary achieve-
ments, and have turned their character into a potent symbol of our death
instinct. Some authors have romanticised her death, while others have for-
ayed into her consciousness to recreate her state of mind while she is on the
verge of suicide in order to explain this mysterious, unknown moment and
make sense of it. These preoccupations with Woolf’s madness and death
certainly make for attractive, dramatic, soap-operatic narratives based on
popular expectations and tenacious stereotypes that die hard.
But even if the fctional Virginia always remains ‘lightly attached’ (Woolf,
Room 41) to the historical Woolf, and Woolf’s biographical, bibliographi-
cal and critical heritage produced through decades has given impulse to and
supported contemporary authors’ creativity, their aim was not to recreate
a biographical replica of Woolf, but a literary symbol ‘that could expose
and critique [our] culture’ (Lackey, ‘Narrative Space’ 5). Their Virginia is
an (inter)textual construct charged with symbolic meaning and perform-
ing an emotional or political function; it is a carefully fabricated narrative
discourse made with bits and pieces of auto/biographical material, selected
quotes and images from Woolf’s works, critical responses to her oeuvre and
personal interpretations of her life and work. Each author’s fertile imagina-
tion churns these ingredients to produce a truthful fctional Virginia.
The common readers’ inevitable question when reading Woolf biofc-
tions, ‘I wonder how much of this is true’, that is to say, what proportion
of biographical truth and historical documentation authors have invested
in their fctional representation of Woolf, is, of course, legitimate, but what
primarily matters for a reader is that the portrait of each Virginia appears
truthful, her voice rings true, her complex thoughts are accessible and her
vision of the world strikes a chord with the readers’ preoccupations. Lackey
argues that there are ‘better questions readers can and should ask when
reading biofction’:

What did the author fnd in the life of the biographical subject that
is so important and inspiring? What changes did the author make to
the story and the biographical subject? And why did the author make
these alterations? […] How does the author use the historical fgure to
expose a psychological and/or cultural sickness that functions in both
the subject’s and the author’s time? And how does the author fctional-
ize the biographical subject to offer or propose an alternative and more
life-promoting way of thinking and being?
(Biofction, forthcoming)

A Summing-up of Woolf’s Afterlives

Biographers understand the futility of trying to sum up a life in the pages of
their biographies, and fction cannot be expected to do more. Instead of one,
impossible totalising account, writers and playwrights give complementary
 Posthumous Lives 223
and contradictory aspects of their characters’ or dramatis personae’s person-
ality. The aim of this book was to bring these creative fragments together
and present an overview of the various representations and incarnations of
Woolf in fction and drama. Contemporary authors reveal different facets of
Woolf, illuminate and magnify one or several of them at once, especially the
juicy, tryptic holy grail: Woolf’s sexuality, madness and suicide. These fc-
tional portraits are depicted with different palettes and brushes, sometimes
borrowing straight from Woolf’s own pictorial language and poetic prose.
Over a span of almost half a century, creative writers have imagined
a dark, dreamy, troubled, neurotic Virginia, or on the contrary, a strong,
heroic, outspoken, politically aware Virginia; in between these represen-
tational extremes, we can fnd more intricate, subtle, balanced, pastel-like
shades of the character, in her role as a friend, wife and sister and in her
activity as an industrious writer absorbed by and dedicated to her art. In
their novels and plays, Woolf becomes a character with varying degrees of
depth and complexity, as authors attempt to enter her mind while she is
writing, thinking, dreaming, suffering, considering committing suicide, or
just present her moods, actions, behaviour and ‘madness’ from an external
perspective. Each author uses Woolf as a mannequin that they dress up with
made-to-measure fctional clothes: the result is a character customised in a
variety of versions and personalities: Virginia the feminist, the political, the
a-sexual, the Sapphist, the suicidal, the manic-depressive, the eccentric, the
frugal, the vulnerable, the incest survivor, the happy, lively prankster, the
witty, the sympathetic, the malicious and the jealous. The ensemble of these
versionings, which reveal the writers’ biases, likes, dislikes and allegiances,
adds up to a vast mosaic portrait. This is, however, never static and defni-
tive, but it is a kaleidoscopic, perpetuum mobile portrait which incorporates
new biographical features and new critical interpretations of her work. ‘For
a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’, Woolf said in ‘The
Humane Art’ (227), and this shifting self is perfectly well captured in the
wide array of bioplays and biofctions studied in this book. Woolf certainly
did not ‘settle into a fgure’ (Diary 4: 85), an undesirable idea she already
expressed during her lifetime, as books about her were already being pub-
lished as early as 1932. Her various representations in contemporary litera-
ture suggest that her wish has fnally been fulflled: the Virginia characters
are all different, each author highlighting, expanding or distorting different
facets of Woolf’s life and personality.
But through the character of Virginia, Woolf has also become a con-
venient shorthand for many reductive labels. When authors play on clichés
that are deeply ingrained in the popular imagination, they inevitably end
up offending Woolf scholars, guardians of the author’s literary excellence,
who react to what they deem is tarnishing her reputation or watering down
her oeuvre. Virginia’s afterlives refect the authors’ familiarity, knowledge
and engagement with Woolf: some, like Hawkes and Sellers, come to Woolf
through the scholarly connection; others, like Cunningham and Atkins, are
224 Posthumous Lives
ardent admirers who continue her literary legacy; still others like Taylor
and Bougret are common readers and amateur writers fascinated by Woolf’s
life. Defensive Woolf scholars, capable of a ‘ferocious possessiveness’,5 may
deem some (or most, or all!) of these fctional versions of Woolf inauthentic,
inaccurate, sensational, romanticised, crude, unsubtle, polemical, irritant or
simplifed,6 and may fnd fault even in the most accomplished ones, claim-
ing that ‘there is a responsibility to accuracy’ (Lee, Nose 61). However, I
would argue that the point of these literary productions is by no means
accuracy and fdelity, just like an abstract, cubist painting is not intended
to be a mimetic representation of a subject. Although Woolf biographers
or scholars may claim they alone know the ‘real’ Woolf from their deep
and serious immersion in her life and work – thus raising essential ques-
tions about authority and ownership – creative writers’ personal versions of
Woolf are no less authentic. These authors present their unique, imaginative
visions of their character Virginia – not a factual, exact replica of Woolf, the
biographical subject or the historical fgure.
So what are we to make of all these fctional reconstructions of Woolf in
fction and drama after having examined them separately, compared them
and brought the fragments together in a great, shifting mosaic portrait?
What does this panoramic, encyclopaedic view of her multiple afterlives tell
us about Woolf and her cultural currency today? How do authors capital-
ise on her image, what features do they perpetuate in their literary works
and for what specifc purposes? Woolf’s fctional portraits have a double
epistemological anchor and value: they tell us as much about the creative
authors and their world as about Woolf and hers. Each epoch has created a
Virginia in its own image: she is very much the fruit of a period and refects
the authors’ literary, socio-political and historical contexts; she is a fexible
construct that adapts to and epitomises the seventies, but also the eighties,
the nineties and the beginning of the twenty-frst century. We can expect
future Virginias with fresh afterlives to speak to our current aesthetic, cul-
tural, social and political concerns in new biofctions as we approach the
centenary of Woolf’s earthly death.
Besides, these biofctions offer a close-up of Woolf scholarship at specifc
points in time. Each Woolf representation mirrors the concerns of the read-
ership at the time as well as trends in the interpretation of her oeuvre that
were necessarily born from these concerns: women’s equality and liberation
from patriarchal tyranny, gender issues, sexual fuidity, professional free-
dom for women, the relationship between art and politics, and (post)mod-
ernist approaches to elitist and popular literature. Woolf has evolved with
time, and this is illustrated in the proliferations of literary Virginias who
refect social anxieties, cultural interrogations, political struggles, scholarly
analyses and popular attitudes towards Woolf. Millennial biofctions about
Woolf tend to display an increasing sophistication in literary representation,
as authors add new textures and nuances to the portrait of their Virginia,
compared with the frst fctional versions of Woolf in the seventies, which
 Posthumous Lives 225
primarily revealed simplistic, caricatural misconceptions about a delicate,
suicidal madwoman. Today, more critically informed authors-scholars offer
their readers denser, richer, multidimensional and more authentic portraits
of Woolf.
Each of Woolf’s afterlives springs from a multitude of biographical,
critical and epistemological issues and popular imaginary representations
which feed and orient the authors’ imaginations. As these biofctions crys-
tallise Woolf’s image and popularity born out of specifc aesthetic, cultural
and political circumstances, their analyses enable us to dissect these histori-
cal moments. Each of Woolf’s fctional lives remains arrested in time and
fossilised in a biographical novel or play, which incites the Woolf critic to
undertake an archaeological exploration of these literary productions and
perform a post-mortem analysis of the subject’s vital characteristics. This
forensic inquiry allows us to examine in what circumstances authors gave
birth to Woolf, the way they chose to stage her death and how the read-
ing public perceived and identifed with her from the seventies through
the new millennium. This brings together a double critical perspective that
encompasses assessments about both the production and reception of these
literary works.

Biofction as Critical Interpretation

Biofctions about Woolf have the absolute merit of opening Woolf to gen-
eration after generation of readers who may not have otherwise been famil-
iar to a Woolf who was put on a pedestal by academic scholarship. Woolf
and her oeuvre are thus introduced to the general public via an absorbing,
entertaining novel or dramatic performance. Some of these literary pro-
ductions have an additional rich critical potential and offer an accessible,
personal, informal, popularised form of literary criticism aimed at non-
specialist readers through fne metafctional observations folded in the nar-
ration. These metafctional passages guide and provide interpretative aid to
the common reader who is not always equipped to decode the intertextual
games so subtly played by many contemporary authors. They may prompt
the readers who do not know much about the historical fgure and her
oeuvre to turn their attention to primary sources, and many readers on
blogs claim to do so.
Woolf biofctions rely on the readers’ ability to recognise some, if not
all, borrowed Woolfan biographemes, images and stylistic topoi. Lured to
Woolf’s brand name from the very title of the novel or play and incited
to read them, not all readers have the prior literary, biographical, cultural
and historical knowledge about Woolf’s life and work to fully appreciate
the texts’ intricacies, but it ultimately does not matter if they cannot iden-
tify and interpret everything. Enjoying reading these novels or watching
the plays certainly does not depend on charting all the Woolf references
and subtle allusions, although a more knowledgeable reader would draw
226 Posthumous Lives
much more intellectual pleasure from doing so. The ‘pleasure of the text’
(Barthes) increases with the degrees of familiarity with Woolf’s life and
oeuvre. Although this truism would imply that Woolf scholars are the best
equipped to enjoy them, this is hardly the case, as academics are highly
territorial in their passionate defence of Woolf’s reputation, and many of
them are extremely disdainful of these representations. The literary critical
community, described by Gee as a ‘piranha-shoal’ (Wright, ‘Resurrection’
246), are ready to pounce at these literary incarnations of Woolf in popular
fction and tear them to pieces.
However, as I have repeatedly argued in this study, these popular and
deeply personal representations, which contain the authors’ subjective selec-
tions of Woolf’s biographemes as well as their readings of Woolf’s oeuvre,
contribute in their way to the solid critical edifce on which Woolf has rested
for a century. Besides, this creative enterprise is based on a similar schol-
arly method: just like a critic who reads and selects fragments of Woolf’s
work to support their interpretation, a creative writer selects Woolf primary
materials and builds a whole character out of them. Biofction thus humbly
offers a unique kind of interpretative dimension to Woolf’s critical heritage,
which complements professional, scientifc and academic criticism. This
amounts to a popularised creative form of literary criticism and it is likely
to reach a wider, more diverse and receptive audience. Wrapping a digested,
light form of literary criticism in popular fction is an effcient way to reach
such a readership. Through biofction, authors provide a practical, three-
dimensional approach to literary criticism, in which the author-as-character
comes to life in order to voice and enact the contemporary authors’ literary,
aesthetic and critical preoccupations. Biofction therefore extends the rigid
and protected frontiers of scholarly interpretation, making them more mal-
leable and permeable to include such popular narratives, and constitutes
a different means to draw attention to the richness and depth of Woolf’s
work. This is one of the reasons why biofctions about Woolf are highly
signifcant and must be given their rightful place in the dynamic and diverse
landscape of Woolf studies. The critical potentiality and cultural legitimacy
of such productions are easily justifable: by presenting a certain portrait
of Woolf – albeit imbued with an unavoidable ideology and partisanship
– all authors illuminate specifc aspects of her life and critically assess her
oeuvre, thus bringing their unique contributions to the legend of Woolf,
participating to her growing cult and augmenting the impressive Virginia
Woolf industry.

Virginia Woolf Legend: Keeping the Myth Alive

A true ‘cult’ of Woolf emerged in the eighties the United States: ‘She has
become the Marilyn Monroe of American academia, genius transformed
into icon and industry through the special circumstances of her life and
work’ (Dudar 32). Unlike Monroe, Woolf is a literary icon; but like Monroe,
 Posthumous Lives 227
her iconicity consists of ‘a combination of glow and pain’ (Herwitz 30).
Herwitz’s concept of the icon expounded in his study The Star as Icon:
Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption perfectly describes the encoun-
ter ‘between aura and consumable’ (37). The aura of stardom evokes the
transcendence that elevates any icon, in spite of the ‘human’ traits that it
preserves; however, the iconic celebrity also relies on a base consumerist
dynamic: it is their pervasive embodiment as a ‘product’ that averts obliv-
ion. In Virginia Woolf Icon, Silver demonstrated how Woolf, in her iconic
capacity, has increasingly become a commodifed fgure in popular culture
all over the world.7 As her one-dimensional face has been merchandised on
aprons, boxer shorts or craft beer, biofction has the ability to bring Woolf
to life, ‘restore her to her human proportion’ (Shannon 157), give her a
multidimensional complexity and improve her literary aura.
A degree of ‘well-knownness’ is a prerequisite for almost any biographi-
cal project;8 it is therefore not surprising that Woolf’s high celebrity pro-
fle and her long-established iconicity have inspired so many biographical
novelists and playwrights to engage with her life and oeuvre; their works,
in turn, nourish and augment her celebrity status and mythical aura, in an
ongoing process of celebrifcation. Biofctions about Woolf have the critical
potential of a fruitful scholarly feld that should combine several discipli-
nary approaches: Woolf studies, life-writing studies, cultural and celebrity
studies, and draw from their methods and theories. It is high time that this
rich genre was given the scholarly attention it deserves.
Author biofction can be considered as a literary manifestation of an
author’s celebrity.9 Today, in our post-postmodern cultural landscape, this
genre fnds a favourable reception from a readership which has a particular
attitude to celebrity and specifc habits of social media consumption. We are
deeply fascinated by famous people’s lives and we do not hesitate to invade
their privacy: our peculiar appetite is largely facilitated by the internet and
technology. This phenomenon reveals not only our voyeurism, but also our
desire to emulate, live vicariously through these people and worship them,
which refects a quasi-religious ‘longing for latter-day saints and heroes in
an increasingly secularised society’ (Lee, Biography 18). In fact, the religious
undertones of the word ‘icon’ as a person who is worthy of veneration
appropriately apply to Woolf and the biographical contemporary authors’
creative endeavour of paying their respects to a Goddess who obsesses and
haunts them. Iconicity is akin to the process of myth making, as myth is
defned as a signifcant story – ‘either true or false’ (Segal 5), or, in the case
of biofction, both true and false – about ‘gods or near-gods’ (4), which has
a ‘powerful hold on its adherents’ (5) and stands for something bigger and
more universal.
An icon ‘is neither person nor image but both – both in an incomprehen-
sible collusion’ (Herwitz 37–38; italics in the original text); an icon is not
a still image frozen by awe, but a ‘structured polysemy’ (Silver, Icon 17)
that suffers variations and transformations. The biographical novelists and
228 Posthumous Lives
playwrights have converted their characters into literary symbols invested
with a plurality of meanings, according to their aesthetic or political agendas:
Woolf has thus become a convenient symbolic cartridge that is constantly
charged with new personal and collective values. Woolf, whose myth is con-
stantly remade with each biofction, is like a ‘mannequin in the shop win-
dow upon which all sorts of changing displays may be exhibited’ (Righter
33). This mannequin is made of biographical material upon which all sorts
of fctional attire is exhibited, so new versions of Woolf regularly catwalk
on the literary scene. Creative writers make her up and make her over, and
she emerges metamorphosed with each new outft. Each fashion designer
imposes their signature; in the same way, novelists make Virginia their own,
and there is a recognisable Cunningham’s Virginia, Sellers’s Virginia, Gee’s
Virginia, O’Brien’s Virginia, Atkins’s Virginia, Hawkes’s Virginia, Barron’s
Virginia and so on. The Woolf myth is malleable and capacious, embracing
all the contradictory and complementary personal attitudes and communal
ideologies about Woolf and her oeuvre throughout decades: it is precisely
these transformative and adaptable qualities that have made her an endur-
ing iconic fgure, with prolifc afterlives. Myth is changing and evolving,
and so is Woolf: her numerous portraits through time are based on authors
manipulating, (mis)representing and reshaping her life in fction so as to
meet their visions and needs. Their Virginia absorbs and displays all the
mythologies surrounding historical Woolf’s personae, her writing, her life
and her death.
Writing biofction goes beyond the simple fctionalisation of a biographi-
cal subject and has deeper cultural signifcance. It is the same kind of process
as building the iconic image of a saint, a genius, a hero or a famboyant star
who is part of our collective identity. The contemporary literary produc-
tions studied in this book point out how myth functions in our common
imagination. We all certainly have idealised or romanticised versions of our
heroes, whose legends always deviate from the truth, and are often based
on the perpetuation of stereotypes or repetition of well-known anecdotes.
Creating the Woolf legend in contemporary biofctions implies a double
process: frst, the author is demystifed and taken off her high pedestal, as
she is given a life and a body and is confronted with her fawed human
nature and contradictory emotions. This, in turn, paradoxically contributes
to the second phase, that of mythifcation, as contemporary authors give her
even more visibility, introduce her to a wider and more varied audience and
place her in an exclusive pantheon of immortal stars.
Woolf biofctions have the merit of (re)acquainting readers with an autho-
rial fgure who has left a permanent imprint on our literary and cultural
tradition. Just like Greco-Roman mythical heroes, Woolf embodies not only
specifc literary values, but she also stands for universal, trans-cultural and
a-temporal human ideals that are brought to the forefront and resonate with
our present-day preoccupations. Although during her lifetime Woolf was
a product of her familial, social, historical and geographical context, since
 Posthumous Lives 229
her death, she has acquired an a-historic dimension as a timeless, worldwide
cultural symbol and beacon of feminism, sexual freedom, gender politics,
transgression of and resistance to power, and risk-taking avant-garde exper-
imentation. These valuable ideals are still celebrated and emulated every-
where today in our current cultural and socio-political climate.
Absorbed by popular culture, Woolf’s fame goes beyond her academic
or literary reputation, as her household name is known even to those who
have never read her work: her iconic image thus precedes her achievements.
Woolfan mythology has always had a higher resonance in popular culture.
The usual ubiquitous images of Woolf emerge from popular culture, and
through biofction, they are again injected into popular culture. These con-
stant recyclings and transfers may be perpetuating Woolf’s images in a close
circuit, but thanks to biofctions, the machinery of Woolf’s posthumous
fame is kept in motion. Woolf biofctions are proof that the author has
had a relentless, ever-growing appeal for many generations of readers. Her
stature becomes ‘two inches & a half higher in the public view’ (Woolf,
Diary 3: 201) with each publication, which increases her iconic status and
confers her immortality. What Woolf said in her essay ‘Four Figures’ about
Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in the prime of her life, can be applied to
her immortal stance today: ‘she is alive and active, she argues and experi-
ments, we hear her voice and trace her infuence even now among the living’
(477). In all the literary representations discussed in this book, contempo-
rary authors enable us to ‘hear Woolf’s voice’ and ‘trace her infuence even
now’, eighty years after her death.
Biofctions about Woolf commemorate her life and work and thus
become part of the author’s impressive and enduring legacy. The etymology
of the verb ‘to commemorate’ enlightens this literary practice when consid-
ered in its double meaning: recalling and showing respect for someone’s life
and work, as well as paying homage to them by producing another piece of
work to keep their memory alive. With each novel and play about Woolf,
contemporary authors erect and consolidate a literary mausoleum to her
memory. These commemorative biofctions largely contribute to the mythi-
cal aura glowing around her. We cannot therefore diminish or dismiss the
tremendous role that biofctions play in Woolf’s longevity and canonical
stature and the renewed interest they generate in her. Biographical authors
and playwrights, who present Woolf’s life and oeuvre mediated through the
attractive envelope of fction, keep her work alive and prevent her from fall-
ing into an oblivion that threatens every writer or artist, dead or alive. By
continually re-enacting her life in fction and drama, biographical novelists
and playwrights defer her death and grant her eternal life.
Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, all the contemporary authors presented in this
study have captured Woolf’ essence and drawn their subjective, singular
versions of her according to their sensibilities, passions, obsessions, aes-
thetic and political agendas, their emotional projections on Woolf and their
understanding of her oeuvre. These creative writers are not photographers,
230 Posthumous Lives
‘who aim for a true likeness’ of Woolf, but painters, just like Lily, who
‘offer an individual view’ or vision of her.10 This study has presented a Mrs
Ramsay-like scholarly approach, which consists of gathering these personal
visions together, observing and refecting upon them, and proposing a unify-
ing assessment. Writing biographical novels and plays about Woolf is cer-
tainly not a short-lived, feeting, fashionable literary phenomenon, but a
long-standing, acknowledged trend that has been continuously growing in
strength and visibility for the last ffty years. Rather than signalling a lassi-
tude with the genre, they seem to whet readers’ gluttonous appetite for more
such literary productions. But whether all these biofctions featuring Woolf
as a character will stand the test of time, or else will be stored in attics or
fung under sofas – as Lily Briscoe fears for her portrait of Mrs Ramsay – it
ultimately does not matter: their authors have had their visions, have cap-
tured and revealed a Mrs Woolf of their own and of their own Zeitgeist, and
what they have attempted remains forever.

Notes
1 ‘I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from
me’ (Woolf, The Waves 78).
2 ‘Great poets do not die, they are continuing presences; they need the opportunity
to walk among us in the fesh’ (Woolf, Room 108).
3 In a letter, Woolf talked about the media attention around her: ‘I’m threatened
with 3 more books upon me […]. All this means to me a kind of fuss and falsity
and talking about my husband, mother, father, and dog which I loathe’ (Letters
5: 97).
4 See Schrimper, ‘What Would Woolf Think About her Presence in Biofction’.
5 Cunningham, qtd. in Lee, Nose 128.
6 Lee sums up critics’ objections and negative reviews of The Hours in Nose
127–128.
7 Sellers also commented on the proliferation of a ‘bizarre industry’ around Woolf
in an interview: ‘Did you know that you can buy Virginia Woolf boxer shorts –
or how about a Virginia Woolf barbecue apron?!’ https://vulpeslibris.wordpress.
com/2017/02/17/interview-with-novelist-and-virginia-woolf-expert-susan-sel
lers-giveaway/ (accessed September 2020).
8 See Nanette O’Brien, ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity’, https://www.
torch.ox.ac.uk/ after-image-life-writing-and-celebrity-2 (accessed September
2020).
9 On this topic, see Mayer and Novak, Life Writing and Celebrity.
10 See Sellers’s remarks about the difference between photography and painting:
‘where the photographer aims for a true likeness, the painter offers an individual
view – refocusing, highlighting, and sometimes adding lines or colours that are
not in the original but which the composition appears to call for’. http://www.
tworavenspress.com/TRP_Writing_Vanessa_&_Virginia (accessed September
2020).
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Index
Ackroyd, Peter 4, 5
adaptation (Hutcheon, Sanders) 3,
40, 49–50, 65, 66, 71n7, 72n16,
148–151, 155n24, 170, 177n13;
see also appropriation
Albee, Edward 2
anxiety (of infuence) (Bloom) 28, 30–
31, 107, 124n7; see also apophrades;
ephebi
apophrades (Bloom) 17
appropriation 3, 23, 29, 31, 45, 48,
72n16, 122–123, 188
Arsenault, Isabelle: Virginia Wolf 16,
28, 126–129, 136, 151; see also
Maclear, Kyo
Atkins, Eileen 38–43; genesis of
Orlando (fctional) 41–42; interview
with 38–39; Vita and Virginia 16,
26–27, 38–43, 59, 65, 66, 68, 117
Austen, Jane: as character in fction 84,
97n8
autobiografction 23, 155n26
autobiography 12, 14, 23, 26–27, 29,
31, 33, 39–41, 43–50, 52–56, 59–60,
65–66, 69, 78, 90, 92–95, 101, 116,
130, 136, 137, 139, 148, 149, 153,
162, 169–170, 174, 184–186, 192,
203, 205–206, 211, 220–222;
see also Woolf, Virginia, as author of
‘A Sketch of the Past’, Diary, Letters,
Moments of Being, ‘Old Bloomsbury’
Avery, Todd 2, 214
Barrett, Elizabeth: as character in
fction 170, 171, 173, 175
Barron, Stephanie: Jane Austen Mystery
series 84, 97n8; The White Garden:
A Novel of Virginia Woolf 16, 20,
28, 32, 74, 84–98, 115, 123, 156,
176n3, 210
Barthes, Roland 7, 20, 111, 189,
216, 225
Bell, Clive: as character in fction
130–131, 133, 135, 137, 141, 143,
150, 151, 203–204, 206, 208; as
historical fgure 39, 116, 130–131,
142, 153n4, 155n20
Bell, Quentin: as biographer 32, 47,
48, 64, 79–80, 97n4, 177n19, 199,
220–221
Bell, Vanessa: as character in fction
23, 46, 60–61, 114, 118, 126–155,
157, 158, 159–160, 164, 166, 172,
185, 195, 203–206, 208–209; as
historical fgure 56, 81, 116, 117,
126, 128–129, 130–131, 138, 139,
148, 151, 152–153, 153n3, 153n4,
154n6, 154n9, 154n13, 203, 218
biofction: ‘author as character’
genre (Franssen and Hoenselaars)
7; author fction (Fokkema, Savu)
7, 125n12; bastard 2, 8, 35n19;
belletristic biography (Lukács) 8;
bio-fc (Vincent) 169; ‘biographical-
novel-about-a-writer’ genre (Lodge)
2, 7; biographie romancée 125n12;
biographoid forms (Geffen) 7; bio-lit
(Vincent) 169; and celebrity culture
12; as commemoration 229; as
corrective justice 19, 23, 28, 32, 64,
69–70, 80–84, 112, 182–183, 219;
criticism of 8, 12–14, 35n19, 35n20,
95, 111–112; crossover genre 3, 6;
defence of 8–9, 12–15, 36n24, 112,
114; defnition of 3–7, 11, 34n9;
ethics of 11–14, 69, 95, 98, 112,
168; fction biography (Jacobs) 7;
fctional biography (Schabert) 7,
37n39, 37n40; ffth-degree biofction
27–28, 96, 122; frst-degree biofction
244 Index
26–27, 44, 56, 65; fourth-degree
biofction 27–28, 65, 74, 83, 84, 96;
fusion 6, 66; as graverobbing 13, 95;
as homage 13, 16, 19, 30–31, 43,
45, 68, 69–70, 72n16, 112, 125n17,
179, 194, 218, 227; hybrid 2, 6–7,
8–9, 10, 11, 14, 24, 25, 33, 36n24,
37n39, 169, 173, 174; imaginative
biography 37n39; as literary criticism
19, 29, 31–32, 72–73n24, 169,
175–176, 219, 225–226; manifesto
of 214; novel-as-biography (Kendall)
7, 35n19, 37n40; novel biography
(Mailer) 7; as plagiarism 13; as
political tool 16, 30, 32, 64, 69,
104, 195, 196, 222; popularity of
3, 7, 12, 23, 32–33, 35n15, 217; as
a postmodernist genre 21–22, 24,
36n35, 152–153, 174, 180–181, 192,
196; potentialities of 10–11, 14, 22,
29; roman vrai (Sartre) 7; as satire
32, 98, 102–103, 112; second-degree
biofction 26–27, 44, 56, 65, 71n12;
as therapy 31, 38, 69, 71n2, 162;
third-degree biofction 27, 56, 59,
65; and truth 5, 6, 7, 9–11, 14, 15,
19, 20–26, 32, 33, 35n16, 36n24,
44, 46, 61, 76–78, 83, 85, 87, 93,
112, 113, 115, 122, 123, 130, 139,
167, 168, 170, 174, 177n12, 185,
192, 213–214, 217–219, 222, 227;
truthful fction (Lackey) 6, 7, 20–25,
30, 70, 80, 83, 84, 122, 213, 218,
222; vampiric process 13, 36n24, 69,
70; zero-degree biofction 26, 185;
see also biographical novel; bioplay
Biofction studies 2–3, 227
biographemes (Barthes) 7, 35n18, 56,
83, 88, 137, 169, 189, 225, 226
biographer 4–6, 10, 20, 23, 26, 28,
32, 69, 77, 114, 140, 213, 220, 222,
224; see also biography
biographical novel 2–6, 11, 17, 18,
21–23, 25
biography: as compared to biofction
3–6, 15, 21, 22, 26, 219–220;
defnition of 3, 35n12; new
biography 5, 9–11, 36n21, 170–171,
174–175; Victorian biography 9–10,
170–171, 174; Woolf biographies 19,
21, 25–27, 32, 37n42, 46, 64, 69,
78–80, 82, 83, 87, 96n3, 139, 140,
156, 169–170, 177n21, 184, 185,
192, 202, 219–222
bioplay 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26–27,
38–64, 150
Bloom, Harold 168, 175
Bloomsbury 45, 46, 128–130, 134,
149, 153n3, 199, 202–205, 218;
criticism of 199; group 30, 39, 85,
87, 105, 106, 114, 129, 136, 166, 169,
199–200, 203–209, 210, 213–214,
214n1, 214n3; myth 199–200, 213;
praise of 199; squares 200, 203, 206,
214n3; triangles 30, 130, 135, 141,
171–173, 200, 203, 206–209, 214n3,
214n4, 215n9
Bougret, Anne-Marie: Intrigue chez
Virginia Woolf 16, 28, 32, 97n7
Boxall, Nelly: as character in fction
185, 192
bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, Derrida) 27, 44,
56, 71–72n13
Brown, Dan: The Da Vinci Code 85
Byatt, A.S.: Possession 85, 113
Cambridge Five 84–87
Carrington, Dora: as character in
fction 147, 161, 200, 204, 208
Case, Janet: as historical fgure 56, 58
Cavendish, Margaret: as character in
fction 55; as historical fgure 55
Charleston 144–145, 158, 208
Chaton, Anne-James: Elle regarde
passer les gens 16, 34n4, 71n12
Clarissa Dalloway 61, 67, 78, 89, 91,
146, 156, 163, 176n9, 178, 183,
185, 189, 191–193, 195, 197n4,
198n22; see also Woolf, Virginia, as
author of Mrs Dalloway
collage 3, 12, 21, 26, 39, 52, 66,
73n27, 117, 188, 197n19
Cubism 21, 35n11, 204, 224
Cunningham, Michael: genesis of Mrs
Dalloway (fctional) 29, 67, 166,
178, 189–191, 197n18; The Hours
16, 17, 29, 33, 67, 88, 99, 112, 148,
156, 159, 164, 178, 184–198, 210;
interview with 5, 13, 21
Dallowayisms (Chatman) 29, 78,
90, 145–146, 163, 178–181, 184,
188–189, 192–194, 196, 197n3
death of the author (Barthes) 21, 28,
98, 110–111, 124, 189, 216
Dee, Jonathan 11–12, 13
Dickinson, Violet: as historical fgure
56, 57, 81

Doležel, Lubomir 24, 36–37n37
dramatisation 27, 30, 33, 39–41, 44–50,
53, 55–56, 58, 69, 148–151, 218
dualities 28–30, 39, 52, 64, 126–127, 129,
135, 137–138, 144, 146, 151–152,
161–165, 167–168, 171–172
Duckworth, George: as character in
fction 62, 204, 205
Duckworth, Gerald: as character in
fction 204; as historical fgure 73n31
Duckworth, Stella: as character in
fction 57, 132–133
Duffy, Maureen: A Nightingale in
Bloomsbury Square 15, 27, 38,
59–65, 69–70, 159, 165, 200, 218
Duhon, Christine: Une année
amoureuse de Virginia Woolf 64;
see also Orban, Christine
Dunn, Jane 124n5, 129, 154n8, 156
Eco, Umberto 24, 36–37n37, 196n1
Einstein, Albert 2, 165
Eliot, T.S.: as character in fction (Tom)
161, 164, 166, 175; as critic and
historical fgure 31, 125n8, 210
Eliot, Vivien: as character in fction
161–162
ephebi (Bloom) 16, 31, 37n43,
107–108, 124n7
Everest, Louie: as character in fction
187, 188; as historical fgure 186, 188
Favier, Emmanuelle: Virginia 16,
125n17, 176n7, 176n8
fctionalisation 3, 14, 27, 29, 30, 33,
35n11, 35n19, 64–69, 89, 115, 122,
136–137, 140–141, 148, 151, 169,
175, 185–193, 198n22, 203, 217,
218, 221, 222, 228
Forster, E.M.: as character in fction
(Morgan) 175
Franssen, Paul 7, 19
Freeman, Gillian: But Nobody Lives
in Bloomsbury 16, 29–30, 200,
203–209; genesis of A Room of
One’s Own (fctional) 210, 212–213;
genesis of Orlando (fctional) 210,
211–212; genesis of The Voyage Out
(fctional) 210–211
Freud, Sigmund: as character in fction
59, 63–64, 73n29, 161, 165; as
historical fgure 163
Fry, Roger: as character in fction
203, 207
Index 245
Garnett, Angelica: as character in
fction 160; as historical fgure 130
Garnett, Bunny: as character in fction
208–209
Gee, Maggie: as critic 12, 31, 125n10;
interview with 19, 112, 124n1,
125n11, 125n13, 125n16; Virginia
Woolf in Manhattan 14, 16, 19, 20,
28, 32, 36n29, 96, 98–113, 123, 124,
217, 218
Genette, Gérard 3, 197n5, 197n6
genre fction 15, 17, 18, 33, 75, 78–79,
82, 84–85, 95–96; see also literary
fction
Gertler, Mark: as character in
fction 200
grand narrative (Lyotard) 22–23,
36n36
Grant, Duncan: as character in fction
114, 144, 203, 207–209
Hawkes, Ellen: as critic 31, 76, 79–84,
96n2, 97n6, 223; The Shadow of the
Moth: A Novel of Espionage with
Virginia Woolf 16, 20, 28, 32, 70,
74–84, 95–97, 112, 176n3; see also
Manso, Peter
historical novel: as compared with
biographical novel 2–3, 5, 8, 21
historiographic metafction (Hutcheon)
6–7
Hoenselaars, Ton 7, 19
Hogarth House 75, 189
Hogarth Press 45, 75, 91, 93, 208
Huber, Werner 6, 7, 20
Hutcheon, Linda 6, 148–150, 155n24
Hyde Park Gate 46, 129, 181, 204, 205
hyperreality (Baudrillard) 21, 54,
73n25
hypertext (Genette) 3, 81, 148, 174,
178, 184, 196
hypotext (Genette) 3, 7, 32, 46, 50,
72n17, 82, 148, 152, 174, 184, 196
implied author (Booth) 100–101, 115,
124n3
intentional fallacy 111
intertextuality (Kristeva) 3, 7, 17, 21,
25, 38, 44, 78, 83, 88, 89, 91, 94,
101, 188, 196, 197n19, 218, 222, 225
Jacobs, Naomi 7, 13
James, Henry: as character in fction
36n32; as historical fgure 10
246 Index
Jewsbury, Geraldine: as character in
fction 55–57; as historical fgure 55
Joyce, James: as character in fction 63;
as historical fgure 175
Kendall, Paul Murray 7, 35n19, 37n40
Keynes, Maynard: as character in
fction 86–87, 94–95, 203, 207, 208;
as historical fgure 59
King, Martin Luther 2
Lackey, Michael 2, 3, 6, 8, 14, 21, 26,
27, 32, 35nn11, 15, 153, 218, 222
Lady Diana 2, 34n4
Layne, Bethany 31, 161, 163, 169
Lee, Hermione 4, 5, 18, 20, 26, 32,
33, 198nn21, 26, 216, 219–221,
224, 227; Virginia Woolf 5, 32, 68,
219, 221
Licence, Amy: Life in Squares 20
life writing 2, 9, 11, 214, 227
Lily Briscoe 17, 142, 143, 145, 165,
229–230; see also Woolf, Virginia, as
author of To the Lighthouse
Lippincott, Robin: Mr Dalloway 16,
29, 148, 178–184, 196
literary fction 15, 17, 18, 84–85
Lodge, David 2, 6, 7, 15, 25, 113;
interview with 6
Lukács, Georg 8, 11; The Historical
Novel 8
Luke, Peter: Bloomsbury: A Play in
Two Acts 15, 29–30, 200–202, 208,
210, 211; genesis of The Waves
(fctional) 201
Lyotard, Jean-François 22, 36n36
Maclear, Kyo: Virginia Wolf 16, 28,
126–129, 133, 136, 143, 151
magical realism 25, 28, 98, 99
Mansfeld, Katherine: as character in
fction 73n27; as historical fgure
73n27
Manso, Peter: The Shadow of the
Moth: A Novel of Espionage with
Virginia Woolf 16, 20, 28, 32, 70,
74–84, 95–97, 112, 176n3
Marler, Regina 130, 153n4, 199–200,
209, 214n4, 221
McHale, Brian 22, 24, 181
metabiofction 68, 114, 174, 202, 217
metabiography 7, 19
metacriticism 80, 107, 122, 152
metafction 19, 22, 23, 85, 94, 101,
139, 174, 181, 193, 196, 213, 225
metapictorial 19, 142
Middeke, Martin 6, 7, 14, 20, 27
misrepresentation 20–25, 26, 31–33,
35nn11, 15, 83–84, 100, 112, 118,
122, 137, 168, 217–221, 223–224,
228; see also representation
modernism 8–9, 11, 21, 25, 53–54, 69,
77, 152–153, 188, 192
Monk’s House 46, 60, 77, 84, 85, 87,
95, 186
Monroe, Marilyn 2, 34n4, 226
montage 3, 12, 21, 26, 45, 54, 59, 66,
116–117, 149
Moore, George: as a character in fction
204, 209
Morgan, Clare: A Book for All and
None 16, 28, 96, 98, 113–125
Morrell, Ottoline: as historical fgure 170
Nicolson, Harold: as biographer 9–10;
as character in fction 86–87, 92,
97n13, 179, 182, 208; as historical
fgure 42–43
Nietzsche, Friedrich: as character in
fction 113–116, 118–120, 122–
123; as historical fgure 113, 115,
118–120, 122
Nunez, Sigrid: genesis of Flush
(fctional) 174; Mitz: The Marmoset
of Bloomsbury 16, 29, 156, 169–
176, 200, 217
O’Brien, Edna: interview with 43–44,
45, 46; Virginia: A Play 15, 26–27,
38, 41, 43–54, 59–61, 65, 66, 176n3
Orban, Christine: genesis of Orlando
(fctional) 64–68, 190; Virginia et
Vita 16, 27, 38, 64–69
Ormerod, Eleanor: as character in
fction 55; as historical fgure 55
Parini, Jay 21, 26
Parmar, Priya: interview with 136,
153n5, 154nn6, 7, 11, 13; Vanessa
and Her Sister 16, 28–29, 126, 127,
129–137, 141, 143, 145, 151, 152,
159
parody 170, 174, 197n17
Parry, Lorae: Bloomsbury Women
& the Wild Colonial Girl 16,
73n27, 200

Partridge, Ralph: as character in fction
200, 208
pastiche 12, 29, 66, 85, 89, 90, 92–94,
125n15, 130, 138, 148, 155n23,
170, 173, 188, 197n17; see also
ventriloquism
petit récit (Lyotard) 22–23
plagiarism 13, 72n14, 94, 188
playgiarism (Federman) 39, 45, 72n14
postmodernism 9, 11–12, 20–26, 54,
73n25, 75, 109, 139, 152–153, 168,
178, 180–181, 188, 192, 196
Raverat, Gwen: as historical fgure 130
Raverat, Jacques: as historical fgure
56, 58
recycling 21, 27, 32, 45, 54, 229
representation 3, 14, 16, 19, 21–27,
30, 32–34, 35n11, 54, 64, 68, 70, 80,
100, 118, 121, 133, 136,
141–142, 148, 149, 157, 160,
168, 174, 177n20, 195, 217–218,
220–226, 229
Reviron-Piégay, Floriane 171, 174,
177n14
Sackville-West, Vita: as character in
fction 38–43, 46–47, 50, 52, 56, 59,
60, 62, 64–69, 73n29, 86–89, 92–94,
97n13, 179, 181, 182–183, 206,
208, 211; as historical fgure 39–41,
42–43, 56, 64–65, 66, 92–93; as
Orlando 65, 67–68, 94, 208, 211
Sanders, Julie 3, 177n13
Saunders, Max 23, 155n26
Schabert, Ina 7, 37n39
Schiff, James 13, 33, 178, 182, 183,
189, 195
Schneider, Michel 45, 72n15
Sellers, Susan: as critic 31, 139, 223;
interview with 3, 9, 12, 13, 15, 23,
24, 138, 140, 150, 151, 152–153,
154–155n17, 155n18; Vanessa and
Virginia 16, 23, 28–29, 126, 127,
137–153, 159, 162
Septimus Smith 49, 50, 52–54, 61, 78,
146, 156, 163, 176n9, 180, 183,
189, 191–193, 195, 198n20, 198n22,
211; see also Woolf, Virginia, as
author of Mrs Dalloway
Shakespeare, William 1, 34n2, 34n3,
36n32, 45
signifcant form (Bell) 155n20
Index 247
Silver, Brenda 1, 2, 16, 34n2, 218, 227
simulacra (Baudrillard) 7, 21, 29, 54,
139, 189, 197n19
Sissinghurst 84–88, 93
Sizemore, Christine 63–64, 70, 73n29,
73n30, 73n32
Steele, Elizabeth: Virginia Woolf and
Companions: A Feminist Document.
A Play 16, 27, 38, 55–59
Stephen, Adrian: as character in fction
118, 129, 132, 204
Stephen, Julia: as character in fction
45–48, 132–133, 140, 151, 205, 211;
as historical fgure 47–48, 139–140
Stephen, Leslie: as biographer 9; as
character in fction 45–47, 62, 133,
139–140, 159, 203–205; as historical
fgure 81, 139
Stephen, Thoby: as character in fction
118, 129–130, 132, 133, 141, 142,
146, 150–152, 166, 203–205
Stone, Irving 8, 15, 35n19
Strachey, Lytton: as biographer 9,
10, 11, 168, 170, 174, 213–214;
as character in fction 136, 147,
161, 164, 166, 168–169, 200–202,
203–205, 206–208, 209, 213–214;
as historical fgure 170, 185, 197n4,
208, 209
stream of consciousness 33, 50, 53, 59,
69, 78, 99, 109, 151, 206
Sydney-Turner, Saxon: as character in
fction 150
Taylor, Alienora Judith: Riding at the
Gates of Sixty: A Fictional Account
of Virginia Woolf’s Death and Life
16, 29, 156–161, 210
Terry, Ellen: as character in fction 55,
57, 59; as historical fgure 55
Thoveron, Gabriel: Qui fait peur à
Virginia Woolf: Élémentaire, mon
cher Lupin! 16, 97n13
travesty (Lodge) 3, 25–27, 37n39, 96,
113, 122
ventriloquism 14, 29, 48, 66, 93, 112,
156, 178, 196, 218
versioning (Silver) 2, 16, 17, 19–21,
24, 30, 34, 34n6, 54, 218–219, 221,
223–224, 228, 229
Vincent, Norah: Adeline: A Novel of
Virginia Woolf 16, 29, 31, 156, 159,
248 Index
161–169, 175, 210; genesis of The
Waves (fctional) 161, 165–166, 167,
190; genesis of To the Lighthouse
(fctional) 161, 164–165, 167, 190;
interview with 31, 169
Von Salomé, Louise: as character in
fction 113–115, 119–121
Wilberforce, Octavia: as character in
fction 162, 164, 176n9
Wilde, Oscar: as character in fction
182–183; as historical fgure 12, 183
Wilson, Harriette: as character in
fction 55; as historical fgure 55
Wollstonecraft, Mary: as character in
fction 55; as historical fgure 55, 229
Woolf, Leonard: as autobiographer 47,
64, 177nn12, 17, 18, 184, 186, 188,
206; as character in fction 18, 45–49,
50–51, 54, 57–59, 60–62, 68, 75, 78,
79, 86–90, 92–93, 95, 99, 114,
116, 129, 133, 144, 150, 157–158,
160–162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–173,
176n3, 179, 182, 185–188, 191, 193,
203, 204, 207, 208, 209–210, 211; as
historical fgure 48–49, 53, 56, 57–59,
79, 173, 207
Woolf, Virginia: as author of (A Room
of One’s Own 63, 82, 106, 110,
124n2, 125n9, 205, 212–213, 214,
220; ‘A Sketch of the Past’ 81, 101,
140; Between the Acts 43, 62, 104,
106; Diary 27, 39–40, 44, 48–49,
53, 57, 58, 64, 65–66, 90, 109, 117,
168, 175, 177n20, 185, 192, 197n4,
197n7, 206, 220, 221; Essays 55–56;
Flush: A Biography 24, 29, 156,
170, 173–175, 177n20; ‘Friendships
Gallery’ 81–82; ‘Lapin and Lapinova’
50–51, 89–90; Letters 27, 39–42, 44,
48–49, 53, 56, 57–58, 62, 65–66,
116, 117, 130, 131, 155n21, 170,
175, 206, 207, 221 (suicide letters
53, 97n9, 99, 157–158, 185, 186–
188, 193, 210); Moments of Being
47–49, 139; Mrs Dalloway 49–50,
52–53, 61, 78, 89, 100, 101, 146,
161, 178–180, 182, 183–185, 192,
194, 196, 197n19, 198n20, 211;
Night and Day 77; ‘Old Bloomsbury’
214n5, 214–215n6, 215n7; Orlando:
A Biography 24, 35n16, 42, 50,
62, 65–66, 68, 143, 211, 219;
‘Reminiscences’ 48; Three Guineas
63, 74–77, 82, 87, 95, 103, 175,
220; To the Lighthouse 38, 63, 68,
117, 142, 152, 161, 167, 180, 211,
217; The Voyage Out 52, 114, 117;
The Waves 51–53, 83, 101, 164,
167, 170, 177n20, 202); as character
in fction (Virginia) (aunt 160; birth
38, 101, 110, 124, 225; bisexual 17,
78, 82, 101, 179, 182; child(-like)
108–109, 145, 126–129, 140, 141,
159, 160, 163, 176n8; comic fgure
99–103, 112, 122, 124n6; daughter
56, 60, 61, 63, 103, 129, 139, 205;
depressive 18, 60, 68, 75, 88, 118,
120, 122, 127–128, 133, 136, 143,
146, 155n22, 157, 158, 163, 185,
211, 223; death 29, 42–43, 47, 53,
54, 60–63, 74, 78, 84–88, 92, 96, 99,
102, 122, 137, 144, 147, 156–157,
159–161, 162, 164, 175n2, 184,
185–189, 194, 198n23, 201, 203,
210, 225; detective 18, 23, 28, 74–84,
96; and doctors 61–62, 63–64, 75,
211; drowning 60, 88–89, 120,
164; feminist 17, 28, 32, 59, 63–64,
75–77, 79–83, 87, 95–96, 103–104,
108, 205, 223; (fore)mother 18, 28,
61–62, 65, 98, 105–110, 114, 116,
118–122, 124, 124n7, 124n14, 160;
friend 30, 39–41, 207, 223; genius
17, 18, 28, 39, 54, 67, 68, 118–119,
134, 136, 152, 156, 190, 191, 194,
198n23, 201–202; grandmother 107,
109–110, 114, 118, 120–121; incest
victim 17, 45, 62, 159, 205, 223;
jealous 41, 65, 67, 130, 134–136,
137, 143, 148, 154n9, 207, 223;
lesbian 17–18, 32, 64, 67, 77–78,
100, 183, 223; love relationships
39–43, 45, 52, 60, 64–69, 78,
80–81, 101, 118–119, 122, 135,
141, 143–144, 160, 171–173, 179,
182–183; madness 18, 28, 47, 52–53,
54, 60–61, 62, 68, 78, 82, 88, 92, 99,
100, 119, 120, 135–136, 146, 150,
151, 155n22, 157, 158, 159, 160,
162, 163, 167, 191–192, 198n23,
201–202, 207, 210, 211, 223, 225;
moments of being 58, 122, 164,
165, 190, 195; patient 32, 61–62,
63, 75, 78, 158, 172, 191, 207, 211;
resurrection 42–43, 54, 98, 99–100,
101, 104–105, 109–112, 124, 124n2,
189, 216–217; sister 18, 28–29, 60,

126–155, 156, 158, 159–160, 223;
stereotypical 57, 70, 83–84, 100,
151, 155n22, 160, 198n23, 225;
suicide 18, 28, 45, 53, 58–59, 60,
63–64, 70, 75, 78, 86–88, 92, 100,
118–119, 120, 138, 145–147, 149,
151, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162,
185–189, 198n23, 202, 204, 209
(suicide letter 53, 58–59, 60–61,
87–89, 90, 159, 160, 164, 186–188,
202, 210); thoughts 88–89, 99,
103, 117, 119, 122, 156, 158–159,
160, 161, 163, 164, 169, 175, 185,
188–191, 206, 210, 218, 223; tragic
fgure 18, 29, 45, 59, 99, 100, 118,
151, 156, 191, 194, 223; and war 28,
45, 58, 60, 63, 74–77, 79, 83, 85,
87, 88, 95, 103, 147, 201, 209–210;
and water 60, 63, 78, 86, 87, 88–89,
93, 99, 120, 147, 157, 189, 201–202,
210, 211; writer 17, 30, 61–62, 63,
67–68, 77, 83, 86, 88, 90–91, 94,
104–106, 109, 132, 135, 143, 147,
152, 157, 161, 165–167, 174, 175,
184, 189–191, 201–202, 205, 210–
212, 223; wife 18, 32, 39, 48–49,
50–51, 54, 56, 57–58, 60, 62, 68, 75,
78, 79, 89, 90, 129, 133, 136, 143,
156, 157–158, 161, 168, 169, 171–
173, 182, 191, 207, 223); as critic
(‘The Art of Biography’ 4, 10, 11, 15,
24–25, 168, 218; ‘Craftsmanship’
209; ‘How Should One Read a Book’
12; ‘Modern Fiction’ 9, 120, 189,
193; ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’
72n18; ‘Professions for Women’
76, 99; ‘The New Biography’ 2, 6,
9–11, 21, 24, 170, 174, 214); as
dramatis persona (Virginia) 38–64; as
historical fgure (Woolf) (and canon
1, 17, 175, 195, 216, 229; celebrity
1–2, 18, 194, 217, 227, 229, 230n3;
as commodifed product 1–2, 175,
Index 249
217, 227, 230n7; as cultural symbol
19, 23, 32, 228–229; death 28, 32,
33, 38, 45, 54, 77, 102, 112, 124,
194, 216–217, 221–222; feminist
19, 28, 74, 76–78, 82, 95, 103–104,
175, 217, 219, 220–221, 224, 229;
foremother 1, 19, 31, 82–83, 107,
125n17, 216; and freedom 14, 195,
224; and gender equality 14, 19–20,
104, 224, 229; icon 1–2, 14, 17, 30,
34n2, 34n4, 80, 122–124, 194, 216,
219, 226–229; image of 16, 17, 30,
32, 100, 123–124, 173, 175, 198n27,
216, 220–221, 225, 229; immortality
53, 69, 194–195, 216–217, 228–229;
legacy 1, 19, 28, 31, 33, 53–54, 59,
70, 78, 96, 98, 122–124, 175, 179,
193, 194, 214, 216, 223, 229; legend
219, 221, 226–230; mythical status
1, 32, 34, 216, 219, 220, 226–229;
and pacifsm 14, 19–20, 28; and
patriarchy 14, 19, 28; and popular
culture 1–2, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19,
31–32, 34n7, 36n30, 59, 79–80,
82, 99–100, 102, 112, 118, 123,
194, 218, 219–220, 223–226, 227,
229; and war 28, 95, 103; sexuality
18, 19–20, 32, 80, 219, 221, 223,
224; suicide 18, 32, 39, 45, 77,
194, 221–222, 223; stardom 1,
228; stereotypes 31–32, 34, 79–80,
99, 102, 112, 145, 219–220, 222,
223; tattoos 1, 34n5; and Zeitgeist
20, 230)
Woolf studies 1–3, 16, 79–80, 82,
97n4, 219, 220, 223, 224, 226–227
Wright, E.H.: Vanessa and Virginia 16,
28, 126, 148–151; see also Sellers,
Susan, Vanessa and Virginia
Yeats, William Butler: as character in
fction 161, 162, 164, 165–167, 169;
‘Spilt Milk’ 164, 177n10