Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- 1 Those Soul Mates: Virginia Woolf and Michel de Montaigne
- 2 Changing Titles/Transforming Texts?
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Changing Titles/Transforming Texts?
from Part I - ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- 1 Those Soul Mates: Virginia Woolf and Michel de Montaigne
- 2 Changing Titles/Transforming Texts?
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The words hang like a collar round my neck. It is not only that to write of women & fiction would require many many volumes; one can see, even from a distance, that the subject is dangerous.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Women & Fiction’, The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's OwnIt is the words of the title, ‘Women & Fiction’, that constrain Virginia Woolf's narrator, and it is these words, not surprisingly, that must be ‘slipped from [her] neck’ if she is to continue writing. But for the narrator, ‘the need of coming to some conclusion, on a subject that indeed admits of none, bent [her] head to the ground’ (4). When this passage appears in A Room of One's Own, it is slightly transformed, for the need to come to a conclusion ‘on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed [her] head to the ground’ (AROO 5); it is this aspect – ‘all sorts of prejudices and the passions’ – perhaps, that called forth the dangers of this subject.
Along with her talks at Newnham and Girton, and her essay, ‘Women & Fiction’, these manuscript versions make up another of Woolf's four attempts to address this subject. The essay version, written for Forum in March 1929, has a very different response to the words of its title:
The title of this article can be read in two ways: it may allude to women and the fiction that they write, or to women and the fiction that is written about them. The ambiguity is intentional, for in dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art. (EV 28)
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- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language , pp. 40 - 54Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010