Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontes

Virginia Woolf's writings on the Brontës, across various genres, are explored in "Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës." Woolf's ambivalence towards the Victorian world and her development of the modernist novel are discussed, as well as her engagement with the Brontës through the Hogarth Press. Newman aims to open up discussion rather than close it down to one interpretation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 15 June 2024
Publisher: Lexington Books

Virginia Woolf's feminist polemic, "A Room of Ones Own," famously explored the literary tradition of female writers, highlighting the influence of their mothers on their work. Woolf's major literary mothers were women novelists writing during the Victorian period and earlier. Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës examines all of Woolf's writings on the Brontës, spanning various genres such as juvenilia, novels, literary essays, feminist polemics, diaries, and letters. This approach proves particularly fruitful as Woolf was both a creative artist and a literary critic. As a woman, she was ambivalent towards the Victorian world in which she spent her youth, emotionally remaining in thrall to it, but intellectually developing the modernist novel. After Woolf ceased to write publicly about the Brontës, she continued to engage with them through the Hogarth Press, which she had founded in 1917 with her husband Leonard. She then chose to publish books on the Brontës whose approaches to them she supported. Newman approaches her subject in a Woolfian way, avoiding dogmatism and aiming to open up discussion of the lives, works, and afterlives of the Brontës as mediated by Woolf, rather than closing it down to one particular interpretation.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 238 x 159 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781666940220