As a feminist essayist, critic, and a central figure of the Bloomsbury group, Virginia Woolf has been one of the most talented Modernist novelists in English literature. Coming from a family with literary tradition, she was educated by her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother Julia Jackson Duckworth was a member of the Duckworth publishing family and she died quite young when Woolf was only thirteen in 1895 that caused Woolf her first emotional breakdown. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), a literary editor who set up a publishing company—Hogart Press—with Woolf. On March 28, 1941, when WWII was approaching, she loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near Rodmell. Among her famous works are The Voyage Out (1915),[1] Jacob’s Room (1921),[2] Mrs. Dalloway (1925),[3] The Common Reader (1925),[4] To the Lighthouse (1927),[5] Orlando (1928),[6] A Room of One’s Own (1929),[7] The Waves (1931),[8] The Years (1937),[9] and Three Guineas (1938).[10]

While writing these works, Woolf worked towards a new type of fiction, along the line of other Modernist novelists like James Joyce[11] and Marcel Proust.[12] Woolf’s novels have been recognized as a breakthrough from the practices of the prevailing realism with a stream-of-consciousness technique and interior monologue depicting the psychological aspect of character. Credited as a Modernist literary canon, Woolf not only attempts to redefine a new language in her novels but also offers her critical opinions in her prose-like essays. It is important to note that most existing analyses of her work discuss Woolf’s novels, short stories, and essays. More importantly, the reasons for Woolf’s rising fame in the 1970s and 1990s are to be summarized as follows: 1) the rise of feminist politics and its relation with Modernism and psychology, 2) the interest in the Bloomsbury Group, and 3) the widespread population achieved by the film and drama adaptations of Woolf’s novels within the setting of technology.

One of the most constructive Woolf criticisms is Harold Bloom’s Virginia Woolf[13] that offers a general review on Woolf’s novels and gathers a representative selection of eighteen essays from books and journals on Woolf’s works, ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s but mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. The essays in the later 1970s, including Hermione Lee’s on The Waves, T. E. Apter’s on Night and Day, and Paul West’s on Orlando, investigate the Modernist features in Woolf’s novels. Yet the essays in the 1980s, such as that of J. Hillis Miller’s on Mrs. Dalloway and John Burt’s on To the Lighthouse, give deconstructive and feminist insights into Woolf’s texts. Robert Kiely studies Jacob’s Room and its relationship to painting while Gerald Levin analyzes the musical elements of The Waves. Bloom’s book concludes with three different essays, namely July Little’s on Orlando, Virginia Blain’s on The Voyage Out and Elizabeth Abel’s on Mrs. Dalloway, that predict the 1990s trends of ongoing issues of the Modernist feminist politics, narrative perspective, and psychic development.

Bloom’s edition cannot help but have contributed to the historical emphasis in Woolf criticism over the last two decades from the 1970s to the 1980s: the redressing of Woolf’s own feminist notion, as well as her concern with the language of Modernist novels. The surge in the feminist movement since the 1970s has forced a paradigmatic shift of attention from civil rights to women’s rights. Therefore, an increasing interest in unearthing ignored women writers such as Woolf has become a visible academic phenomenon. Of all the biographies of Woolf, the most authoritative are Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf (1972)[14] and Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1997).[15] Bell’s biography of Woolf, from the Bloomsbury point of view, presents Woolf as excessively private, unconcerned with the public domain. Although the book’s wit is exquisite, Bell’s Woolf is shadowed as an upper-class woman whose emotional instability makes her depend upon her husband, Leonard Woolf. One of the biggest problems that annoys feminists is that Bell ignores Woolf’s talent in political writing, especially in her later works such as Three Guineas and The Years.

Thus, Lee’s 1997 study offers a long-awaited antidote to Bell’s refusal to present Woolf’s political sensibility. Lee notes, “. . . the conflict between private and public . . . will be one of the main subjects of her writing life.”[16] Likewise, Marder’s book The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years (2000),[17] written with a feminist and intellectual awareness, demonstrates an obsession of Woolf’s last decade in the thirties, the years during the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin. Woolf, in Marder’s biography, is no longer an upper-class aesthete but a political activist. Indeed, Marder’s focus is shifted from the experimental novels Woolf wrote in the 1920s such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando to the political texts of the 1930s, namely The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts.[18] Marder’s version of Woolf’s life emphasizes interweaving her multiple selves that defy the conventional biographer’s egotism. In reconstructing Woolf’s inner life, Marder respects Woolf’s otherness as if he wanted to unite his mind with hers. By so doing, his biography is a moving tribute, treating Woolf as a political writer whose ingenuity lights up the politics of writing.

A. Feminism, Modernism, and Psychoanalysis

        In the early twentieth century, Modernism and psychoanalysis were being established in Britain, and engaging with each other at the same time. The issue of sexual difference was central to Woolf’s period as it attempted to formulate a modern aesthetic based on new models of subjectivity and sexuality. Thus, the intense Woolf renewal of the early 1980s was based mostly on this awakening consciousness toward Woolf’s texts riding the wave of the feminist movement. Jane Marcus’s editing of New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf[19] is a book combining original essays in the Marxist approach to emphasize political readings of Woolf’s work. In Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject,[20] Makiko Minow-Pinkney considers that Woolf’s characters are not essentialists but “subjects in process” whose quest always involves a sense of floating essence.

While Woolf personality struggled in the feminist debate on the dilemma of essentialism in the 1980s, a search of the rhetoric or reality and politics of gender have been addressed in Woolf studies since the 1990s. The research concerns the debates about feminism, gender, sexuality, and androgyny in what has been called a postfeminist or a queer movement. Thus, we may perceive that Tuzyline Jita Allan identifies a complicated interplay between Woolf’s critique of British patriarchy and her sense of femininity.[21] Her reading of Woolf’s texts involves multiple levels in the politics of sexuality, race, and social class that reveal an ensemble of attitudes indicative of the liberal feminist attack against patriarchy. Regarding the radical issue of homosexuality, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings[22] offers an interpretation of Woolf as “the mouthpiece of Sapphism.”[23] The book, containing thirteen scholarly and personal essays, adopts the latest lesbian-feminist criticism not only to decipher Woolf’s complex lesbian codes, but also to illuminate the discussions of Woolf’s reaction to writers whose books have implicit lesbian and gay topics. In the more recent book The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf,[24] Jane Goldman offers a visionary aesthetic for a feminist reading of Woolf’s work. In the much wider scope of an artistic and cultural context, Goldman signals two crucial aesthetic moments in Woolf’s life: the solar eclipse of 1927 and the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. Woolf’s aesthetic concerns, according to Goldman, are always related to political and feminist interests. Furthermore, she considers Woolf’s writing a “feminist prismatics” through which Woolf expresses her vision of Modernism and its relationship with art history.

        Also important to Modernist feminism was the emergence of British psychoanalysis. The British Psycho-Analytic Association was founded in 1913 and the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis was published from 1920. Sigmund Freud’s Standard Edition was also published from the 1920s to the 1930s by Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Therefore, the connections between British Modernism and psychoanalysis are inevitable and the results noteworthy. While discussing Woolf’s feminist aesthetics demonstrated in her Modernist novels, it is unavoidable to mention the psychoanalytic approach to observe her characters’s mind. An interesting phenomenon of Woolf’s studies, thus, offers a possible link between psychoanalysis and Modernist feminism. In Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis,[25] Elizabeth Abel shows how Woolf nurtures our understanding of women’s psychologies by using both Kleinian and Freudian theories. Abel foregrounds the important construction of gender and argues the competing developmental narratives of Freud[26] and Klein from the mid-1920s on recapitulating the spirit of motherhood. From another psychoanalytic angle, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf,[27] Nicole Ward Jouve looks at the concept of psychoanalysis in relation to Woolf’s madness. This landmark collection of essays provides new readings of Woolf’s nine novels, her letters, diaries, and essays in terms of aspects of Modernism and psychoanalysis. The book also reflects a change in Woolf scholarship, especially addressing feminist approaches that explore the meaning of subjectivity.