'A New Tradition': Virginia Woolf and the Personal Essay

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's fairly gained prestige as a novelist has tended to eclipse the fact that for more than two decades of her professional life -from 1904 to 1922- she was primarily a reviewer and essayist. These literary manifestations have been most often regarded by the critics as secondary or incidental to the rest of her oeuvre. The present paper aims to vindicate the relevance of the essay as part of Virginia Woolf's artistic genius, and develops a two-fold argument: on the one hand, the importance of the essay in the consolidation of Woolf as a professional writer; on the other, the substantial contributions which Woolf made to the genre, which resulted in the invention of a new genre, namely the "personal" essay. In her essays Woolf reformulated the positivist conception of authorship and readership, rejecting a position of power and authority on the critic's side. Moreover Woolf challenged the traditional definition of the essay as expository prose in favour of a flexible form particularly suited to express personal opinion and thus to encompass the multiplicity of human experience. Such arguments were largely to influence Woolf's perception of the relation between creative writing and the essay, as well as to contribute to the modification of the latter in the direction of narrative