Virginia Woolf and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers: Victorian Legacies and Literary Afterlives

By Anne Reus

This book examines Virginia Woolf's influence on the literary afterlives of nineteenth-century women of letters including Jane Austen, Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bront , George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward through her journalism. Woolf's responses to her literary predecessors provide new insights into her self-positioning within the literary canon and the interplay of biographical innovation and Victorian legacies in her non-fiction. This study demonstrates that Victorian narratives and tropes of female professionalism continue to shape Woolf's representations of nineteenth-century women writers even at the heyday of her Modernist fame. It contextualizes the overt feminism of A Room of One's Own within Woolf's more ambiguous literary biography to argue for its status as a transitional, post-Victorian body of work.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474485626
• ISBN13: 9781474485623
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"