NUMBER 79 SPRING 2011 To the Readers: not use, but censoring a narrative like this went Woolf and Auto/biography — TABLE of CONTENTS— against the grain. She became frustrated by the see page 6 In his Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton “appalling grind,” of concentrating and “sweating Strachey famously contends that the “explorer EVENTS, INFO and CFPs over minute facts. Its all too minute & tied down & – Louisville 2012 CFP – of the past” cannot proceed by a “direct method” documented” (D5 155). She decides that when she – MLA 2012 in Seattle – gets to the point of writing about meeting Roger, but needs to attack his subject strategically from Annual Conferences on Virginia Woolf an unexpected angle: “he will fall upon the flank, in 1909, she will “then attempt something more – 2012 & 2013 – fictitious. But I must plod on through all these or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing see page 3 searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto letters till then” (155). Her recognition, in “The undivined” (9). The image is mischievously IN MEMORIAM Art of Biography,” that “The novelist is free; the suggestive; Strachey leaves the sentence hanging, George Wilbon Bahlke biographer is tied” (181) may have spurred her to teasingly, on “undivined.” There is surely Sara (Sally) Ruddick create a new hybrid form: the fictional biography. intentional wordplay here to suggest the ungodly see page 39 Orlando (1928), and Flush (1933) indirectly and playfully address the same issues raised explicitly in as well as the undiscovered. Strachey implies that Virginia Woolf Miscellany her non-fiction discussions. biographers may be irreverent in their wish to shed Guest Editors & CFPs light into secret or hidden places. Autobiography Issue #80—Fall 2011 In “The New Biography,” Woolf states that and biography both explore what has past and both Amy Smith and Isabel Mª Andrés “the biographer’s imagination is always being are speculative genres. It is difficult to avoid using Virginia Woolf and stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, optical terms when we write about them. As the Spirituality suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private articles here show, we often make use of metaphors for information contact: life” (E4 478). In her last and incomplete piece, of vision to describe these genres: observation, <[email protected]> “Sketch of the Past,” Woolf explicitly shows that, examination, insight, perception, revelation, and in autobiography, just as in fiction and biography, reflection, point of view, angle of vision. <[email protected]> decisions have to be made about organising Issue #81—Spring 2012 material to fit the purpose of the writing. In this Virginia Woolf did much to develop the writing and Diana Swanson to conceptualise the study of auto/biography and piece Woolf reveals much about her private self Eco-Woolf while, concurrently, as the text emerges, showing she too uses these same metaphors. In reaction to for imformation contact: us the making of the public self. She knows that her father’s presumptuous task, the Dictionary of <[email protected]> versions of the past may be fragmentary or biased; National Biography, she wanted to create a more Issue #82—Fall 2012 that the genre is dependent on the unreliability of inclusive form of writing. Following Strachey, she Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt Virginia Woolf Miscellanymemory; that the selves and subjects being written too wished to reveal and record what had been Queer Woolf hidden; the lives of the forgotten, the eccentric We invite brief analyses and explorations are contingent on context, and on construction and the obscure. In “The Lives of the Obscure,” of how queer studies can help or has helped through words. She has an acute understanding of she writes about wanting to reclaim these stranded illuminate Woolf’s life and work, and vice the aesthetic effects she wishes to make, so that the ghosts who are often women. Using the image versa —and how Woolf’s work and life fictional may take precedence over the factual. of bringing light again, Woolf writes of feeling nuance or otherwise influence queer studies, broadly conceived. A pertinent example of this process occurs in “oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across Send submissions of not more than “Sketch of the Past.” Wishing to re-create, on the the waste of years to the rescue” (CR1 110). 2000 words to page, a scene from a childhood holiday in St. Ives, Madelyn Detloff In her 1927 essay “The New Biography” (E4), she consciously ignores the likely truth. Recalling <[email protected]> & the scene, she is unsure whether the family was which is discussed later in this issue by Janine Brenda Helt <[email protected]> by Utell, Woolf considered the change in size and in “a train or in an omnibus” (“Sketch” 78) but, February 1, 2012 in her memory, the light suggests it was evening. tone that came about in biographical writing with Issue #83--Spring 2013 the twentieth century. In 1939 Woolf produced This means that they were probably returning to Sara Sullam and Emily Kopley London. She tells the reader, quite openly, that it “is “The Art of Biography” in which she makes clear Virginia Woolf and Literary Genre that Strachey’s work “throws great light upon the We invite short essays (up to 2500 words) on more convenient artistically” for her to “suppose” nature of biography” (E6 183) but that there is an the relationship between Woolf and literary that they were going to St Ives. She reverses the expectation that biography “must be based upon genre, including the novel, short story, essay direction of their travel so that she can use it to lead fact. And by fact in biography we mean facts that as well as poetry, drama, biography, and the narrative, and her reader, to a new scene she can be verified by other people besides the artist” more specific genres such as lyric, epic, verse wishes to set in St Ives (78). Later in this memoir drama, elegy, satire, detective fiction.Topics (E6 184). Later in the essay she makes an appeal she writes, “I find scene-making is my natural way include Woolf’s definition of particular for the “creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact of marking the past. A scene always comes to the genres, adherence to/challenging generic top; arranged; representative” (145). She writes that suggest and engenders” (E6 187). Woolf’s conventions, blending genres, relationship to recognition that it was a condition of biography writers of a particular genre, and her work’s about the “rapture” she gets “when in writing I for it to be based on facts became a problem to reception in varied genres. seem to be discovering what belongs to what; her later when she was struggling to convey a Please send submissions to both making a scene come right; making a character “truthful” impression of Roger Fry in her one Sara Sullam <[email protected]> & come together” (85). She knows that, as she writes conventional attempt at biography. She had access Emily Kopley <[email protected]> about the people in her childhood, she is creating to some private facts about him that she could by June 1, 2012. characters, adding colour and detail for effect: fictional rainbow to the granite of fact. 1 What is so refreshing is her candour in revealing her own agency Nuala Hancock also considers Virginia and Vanessa and the visual. in making this text. She is prepared to expose the uncertainties and “Intimating Lives: Biography and the Literary/Artistic House Museum” possibilities implicit in the form she has selected. Of course, the draws together theoretical ideas about biography with close aesthetic paradoxical effect of Woolf writing so frankly of her doubts about examination of two houses and their gardens: Monk’s House (Woolf’s) subjective memory is that her account creates the impression of great and Charleston (Bell’s). Hancock writes about homes she has studied authenticity. She plainly acknowledges that “there is nothing to check thoroughly, showing us their less accessible parts, suggesting how these that memory by” (96). She knows that “no sooner has one said this spaces embody interior worlds. She writes: “From the moment that we was so, than it was past and altered” (91). She also knows that writing enter the internal spaces at Charleston and Monk’s House, we become about her past is therapeutic; autobiography encourages “recovery” in entangled with Woolf’s and Bell’s intimate things.” She analyses in rich two senses. This process allows her to explain events to herself. She and sensual detail what these places may reveal about the private lives of tells the reader, unequivocally, that the materialising text is provisional. their inhabitants. Woolf knows that the self is unstable. She also sees with clarity that autobiography means that the writing self is not the one that is being In her paper Claire Nicholson is also concerned with the material, written about; she understands that there is “I now, I then.” The “I,” external expressions of personality. Presentation of self is another and the eye, merely need to change their angle of vision to perceive a autobiographical act. In “Virginia Woolf and Her ‘Clothes Complex’” different picture. Nicholson shows that, in spite of, apparently, caring little for her appearance, Woolf was anxious about what she wore; her response to Alice Lowe ends her article here with Woolf’s own recognition that clothes was complicated and tended to reflect the present state of her the “truth” offered by an autobiographer is partial and subjective, mind. Leonard judged that she had an “almost morbid horror of being “What I write today I should not write in a year’s time” (“Sketch” 87).