Abstract
Starting from Virginia Woolf’s assertion in Orlando: A Biography (1928) that “when we write of a woman everything is out of place,” this chapter argues that Woolf’s spatial metaphor foregrounds the gendered nature of traditional prose narratives and the need for new (meta-)narratives for women. As a meta-historical biofiction, Orlando itself offers a model of a trialectical narrative which brings together biography, history, and fiction. Beginning with an engagement with recent theories of biofiction, the chapter is then divided into three sections. The first section discusses the theorisation of historical biographical fiction and borrows the term “trialectic” from cultural geography to argue for a trialectical reading of historical biofiction which can hold in balance the three modes of writing—fiction/biography/history. The second section discusses Woolf’s Orlando and Flush (1933) as meta-historical biofictions which develop Woolf’s innovative thinking about the relationship between fiction, biography, and history. The third section focuses on what has become a biofictional genre in its own right: novels which take Virginia Woolf herself as a character. It reads a selection of novels to show how they move Woolf and/or her characters “out of place” and then warns of the dangers of putting Woolf “in her place.”
This chapter was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Herstory Re-Imagined Conference at King’s College, London, 16–17 December 2019. I would like to thank the organisers for allowing me to rework it for inclusion here.
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Notes
- 1.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 297–98.
- 2.
In using the term “meta-historical biofiction,” I aim to foreground not only the three key narrative modes under discussion—history, biography, and fiction—but also the meta-discursive level of these texts. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” Waugh, Metafiction (London: Routledge, 1984/1988), 2. For an informed discussion of the recent proliferation of genre designations in this area, see the introduction to Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, eds., Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–35. And for an excellent overview of key debates around biography which acknowledges the close relationship between biography, fiction, and historiography, see Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave, 2020). Crucially, Ní Dhúill notes, “metabiography is a way of reading biography,” 4.
- 3.
Alison Light, “Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989): 57–71. See also Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
- 4.
Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1 (2016): 33–58.
- 5.
Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). See also Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 234.
- 6.
Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction, 1–2.
- 7.
Ibid., 3.
- 8.
See Paul Fagan’s chapter in the current volume for a discussion of these two Henry James biofictions.
- 9.
His key writers include Bruce Duffy, Zora Neale Hurston, Lance Olsen, Jay Parini, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Arna Bontemps, William Styron, and David Ebershoff.
- 10.
Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 4, 5.
- 11.
Lackey, American Biographical Novel, 6, emphasis added.
- 12.
Michael Lackey and Todd Avery, eds., “To the Readers,” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 1–2.
- 13.
Michael Lackey, “Usages (Not Representations) of Virginia Woolf,” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 12–14, 12.
- 14.
Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 438.
- 15.
Lackey, “Rise,” 33–58. Lackey’s two exemplary novels here are also by male authors: Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006) and Jay Parini’s Benjamin’s Crossing: A Novel (1997).
- 16.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship in Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1986), 233.
- 17.
Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 222.
- 18.
For a concise introduction see Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010); and on gender, see Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel.
- 19.
Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essay in Life-Writing (London: Pimlico, 2005/2008), 200, emphasis added.
- 20.
Lee, Body Parts, 3.
- 21.
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 3.
- 22.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 300–01.
- 23.
Ibid., 19.
- 24.
Ibid., 314.
- 25.
Ibid., 310.
- 26.
Ibid., 321.
- 27.
Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 234.
- 28.
See Diana Wallace, Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past, forthcoming from Palgrave.
- 29.
Lukács, Historical Novel, 32.
- 30.
Henri Lefebrve, La Presence et l’absence (1980), quoted in Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Lost Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53.
- 31.
Soja, Thirdspace, 15.
- 32.
Ibid., 174.
- 33.
Ibid., 44, 45.
- 34.
Ibid., 5, 10.
- 35.
Ibid., 60.
- 36.
Ibid., 183.
- 37.
Ibid., 29.
- 38.
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998/1999), 70.
- 39.
Lackey, American Biographical Novel, 5.
- 40.
Ibid., 4.
- 41.
Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography” (1939), Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), 221.
- 42.
Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (1927), Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), 229, 234, emphasis added.
- 43.
Monica Latham, “‘Serv[ing] Under Two Masters’: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2012), reprinted in Lackey, Biographical Fiction, 408.
- 44.
Saunders, Self Impression, 467.
- 45.
Woolf, “New Biography,” 235.
- 46.
Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 224.
- 47.
Ibid., 226, emphasis added.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Woolf, Orlando, 294–5.
- 50.
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1940), 153, emphasis added.
- 51.
Woolf, Roger Fry, 200–1.
- 52.
Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 228.
- 53.
Saunders, Self Impression, 449.
- 54.
See Elizabeth Cooley, “Revolutionising Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry and the Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 71–83, for a discussion of Woolf’s parody of the Victorian biographer.
- 55.
Woolf, Orlando, 297–8, emphasis added.
- 56.
Saunders, Self Impression, 444; Cooley, “Revolutionising Biography,” 76.
- 57.
Moretti, Atlas, 70.
- 58.
Woolf, Orlando, 5.
- 59.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Lays of Ancient Rome and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Dent, 1968), 36.
- 60.
Woolf, Orlando, 232.
- 61.
Lukács, Historical Novel, 19.
- 62.
Virginia Woolf, October 9, 1927, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth, 1977), 429.
- 63.
Critics vary in how far they see Orlando as a “biography” of Sackville-West. Pamela Caughie writes that “Orlando is a biography of Vita—a curriculum vitae as it were”: “Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing and the Biofictional Novel,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 25. Monica Latham calls it a “mock biography” of Sackville-West: “‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Virginia Woolf on the Contemporary Stage,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 22. Saunders calls it “biografiction,” Self Impression, 379.
- 64.
For accounts which show how formative the relationship with Vita Sackville-West was for Woolf, see Sherron E. Knopp, “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” PMLA 103, no.1 (January 1988): 24–34; and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), “Chapter 28: Vita,” 484–511.
- 65.
Woolf, Orlando, 318–40.
- 66.
Marie-Luise Kohlke proposes the term “glossed biofiction” for a text which “relies on supposedly non-referential, made-up characters and plots, which are nonetheless extensively modelled on famous historical subjects, their lives, writings and/or art, often with little or no attempt at any effective disguise.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 11.
- 67.
Reproduced in the Oxford edition.
- 68.
I am indebted to Meredith Miller for enabling me to clarify this point.
- 69.
Saunders usefully reads Orlando as “composite portraiture.” Self Impression, 470–76.
- 70.
Julia Novak makes a convincing case for treating Flush as metabiography in “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1 (2015): 83–107.
- 71.
Virginia Woolf, Flush [A Biography] (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), xvi.
- 72.
Kate Flint, “Introduction,” in Woolf, Flush, xliii.
- 73.
Woolf, Flush, 114.
- 74.
Lukács, Historical Novel, 37, 33.
- 75.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929/1977), 108.
- 76.
Monica Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (New York: Routledge, 2021), 3.
- 77.
Brenda R. Silver, “Virginia Woolf Icon,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 239-413.
- 78.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Virginia Woolf and the Triumph of Narcissism,” The Guardian Review, August 17, 2002, 5–6.
- 79.
Philip Hensher, “Virginia Woolf Makes Me Want to Vomit,” Daily Telegraph, January 24, 2003, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586663/Virginia-Woolf-makes-me-want-to-vomit.html.
- 80.
Lee, Virginia Woolf, 769.
- 81.
See Hermione Lee, “Biomythographers: Rewriting the Lives of Virginia Woolf,” Essays in Criticism 46 (April 1996): 95–114; and Latham, Afterlives, 219–22.
- 82.
Latham, Afterlives, 219–22.
- 83.
Silver, “Virginia Woolf Icon,” 410.
- 84.
Latham, Afterlives, 22.
- 85.
Ibid., 16.
- 86.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (London: Harper, 2006).
- 87.
Emma Brockes, “Michael Cunningham: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian, February 27, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/07/michael-cunningham-life-writing.
- 88.
Cunningham, The Hours, 211.
- 89.
Sigrid Nunez, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (New York: Soft Skull, 2019), 38.
- 90.
Ibid., 59.
- 91.
Ibid., 147.
- 92.
Bethany Layne, “The ‘Supreme Portrait Artist’ and the ‘Mistress of the Phrase’: Contesting Oppositional Portrayals of Woolf and Bell, Life and Art, in Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia,” Woolf Studies Annual 21 (2015): 82, 89.
- 93.
Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia (Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, 2008), 177.
- 94.
Claire Morgan, A Book for All and None (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001).
- 95.
Ibid., 70.
- 96.
Ibid., 360.
- 97.
Maggie Gee, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (London: Telegram, 2014), 381.
- 98.
Maggie Gee, “Clinging to the Coat-Tails of Fact,” Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1997, 10.
- 99.
Maggie Gee, interview by Mine Ozyurt Kilc, Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition of England Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 153–62.
- 100.
Gee, Virginia Woolf, 463.
- 101.
Ibid., 475.
- 102.
Ibid.
- 103.
Ibid.
- 104.
Ibid., 440.
- 105.
Ibid., 242.
- 106.
Latham, Afterlives, 32, emphasis added.
- 107.
Gee, Virginia Woolf, 475.
- 108.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
- 109.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929/1977), 108; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar borrow Woolf’s phrase “Milton’s bogey” to explore the shadow cast by Milton over women writers in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979/1984).
- 110.
Latham, Afterlives, 229.
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Wallace, D. (2022). “Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction. In: Novak, J., Ní Dhúill, C. (eds) Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_2
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