This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity Zink, Gabriella Suzana Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity Author: Gabriella Suzana Zink The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 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Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Gabriela Suzana Zink King’s College London 2013 Acknowledgements There are many people to whom I owe the completion of this project; there are also many rooms, as many silent witnesses to its slow coming into being. There are cities and countries, too – my interest in Virginia Woolf dates back to my (first-time) student days in Romania, and since this is a thesis on space, it is fitting that I should pay tribute to my spatial and intellectual origins. My heartfelt thanks go to Professor Anna Snaith – I cannot hope to list here the many ways in which she has contributed to the writing of this thesis. I am grateful for the generous encouragement, the inspiration, as well as the insight with which she engaged with my (sometimes only tentative) ideas. I am also indebted to Professors Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Patrick Vincent at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, who were the first to believe in this project and accompanied me in its initial stages. I would also like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, whose six-month grant allowed me to study at King’s College from January to June 2008. For chapter 2, on Mary Geraldine Ostle, I am grateful to the National Froebel Foundation Archive at the University of Roehampton, London, for granting me permission to quote archive material, and to the friendly and helpful staff, particularly Vicki Briggs, Archives and Special Collections Adviser. In the last few years, I have enjoyed the warm working environment at the Institut de langue et civilisation françaises (ILCF) at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. I feel fortunate to be part of such a great team, and to have received such friendly support. To my friends Carla, Mariona, Patrick, Lise-Marie, Sara, Mariacristina, Valerie, Anne-Christine, Katrin, Fiona, Rahel, Sheila, Alastair, Barbara, thanks for putting up with me when the end seemed nowhere near. To Jo and Rosa, thanks for making your lovely home an inspirational place of study in the heart of London. I also wish to thank Roland, who has been an important part of this, my brother Cătălin for reminding me that there is life after the thesis, and my grandmother Eugenia for her support from afar. Finally, I owe a special debt to my parents, Monica and Ioan Denciu, who provided me with unfailing moral, intellectual and financial support throughout the writing of this thesis, and made it all seem worthwhile. They first encouraged my love of books and interest in languages – I dedicate this to them as a tribute to their love and the values that have guided me over the years. Abstract The present study aims to expand recent scholarship on modernism’s engagement with space by uncovering the centrality of “the room” in Woolf’s writings. Although the iconic “room of one’s own” has long been considered the cornerstone of Woolf’s feminist politics, criticism has been slow to recognise the significance of the multitude of rooms in her œuvre, from rooms evocative of domestic, national and colonial space in the works of fiction to rooms as loci of memory in “A Sketch of the Past.” This thesis argues that Woolf’s writings not only foreground such spatial representations but also model ways of reading and understanding space which anticipate current theoretical observations. The spatial formation of rooms sits at the heart of Woolf’s interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, yielding an understanding of space itself as dynamic, layered and relational. Previously unexplored “common readers’” responses to A Room of One’s Own preface the discussion. This allows new reader stories to emerge and offers a fresh perspective on the impact of the 1929 polemical essay on its historical readers. The focus then shifts to Woolf’s debut novel, where the room trope configures a symbolic space of ideological constraints bound up with patriarchal ideas of women, empire and the nation. Night and Day overlaps the material and the textual to critique memorialization practices and negotiate Victorian legacies, a negotiation also thematised in The Years , where rooms chart a family’s progress through modernity. The chapter on Jacob’s Room tells the story of an absence, reading the novel’s university rooms in conjunction with women’s struggle for education at Cambridge. Finally, rooms are shown to map out a geo-history of the self in “A Sketch of the Past,” weaving personal history and wartime trauma. Table of Contents Abbreviations of Texts by Virginia Woolf 7 Introduction 8 1. Re-Reading the Modern 18 The “Spatial Turn” 18 Spatial Perspectives on Woolf’s Work 27 Writing / Reading “Rooms” 32 A Biographical Detour 44 2. The Woman’s Room: A Room of One’s Own and Its Contemporary Readers 54 The AROO Letters 56 Not So “Common” a Reader: Mary Geraldine Ostle 67 The Note Books of a Woman Alone 75 3. Out of Rooms: Imperial Routes and the Impasse of Becoming in The Voyage Out 82 Early Travels 85 “Free of Roads”: Voyaging Out 96 “Other Spaces” 107 4. Night and Day : Great Men’s Rooms and Women’s Lives 115 Cheyne Walk and “the Ceremony of Ancestor-Worship” 118 Writing Great Men’s Lives 130 Repositionings 136 5. Trespassing: Spaces of Learning in Jacob’s Room 142 “Trouble Coming to Cambridge” 145 Male Spaces of Learning: The “Romance of Cambridge” 155 Outsiders: Writing Absence 164 6. Writing Spatial History: The Years 171 Victorian Rooms 174 Mobilities: A “Creature of Sunshine” 187 Networks: “Pipes, Wires, Drains” 196 7. Rooms of Memory: “A Sketch of the Past” 206 “The Little Platform of Present Time”: Writing Autobiographically 208 The Spatiality of Memory 213 Unlocking Rooms 221 War: A Spatial Poetics of Loss 229 Conclusion 236 Work Cited 240 Abbreviations of Texts by Virginia Woolf AROO A Room of One’s Own BA Between the Acts CE Collected Essays (4 vols.) D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.) E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (6 vols.) F Flush JR Jacob’s Room L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols.) LS The London Scene MB Moments of Being MD Mrs Dalloway ND Night and Day O Orlando P The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years PA A Passionate Apprentice TG Three Guineas TL To the Lighthouse VO The Voyage Out TW The Waves TY The Years 7 Introduction In a letter from Bronxville, New York, dated 6 February 1935, Isabel Forbes Milton – one of Woolf’s many contemporary readers who took the time to express their admiration in writing – offers what may be seen as an early critical response to rooms in Woolf’s work. Milton not only notes the recurrence of the room trope in Woolf’s writing, but also uses it as a readerly strategy to engage with the author and her fiction.