Mary Jean Corbett

Drawing on her letters, diaries, and memoirs, this interdisciplinary study of the fiction and criticism of Virginia Woolf offers a new account of her multiply mediated outlook on her mid- and late-Victorian predecessors. Through biographical, literary, and cultural analysis as well as archival research, it reconstructs the varied networks in which members of her immediate and extended families participated, demonstrating the imbrication of these networks with those of earlier and later generations, including the Bloomsbury Group. Illuminating how Woolf’s point of view on the past changed over the course of her career, it explores the impact of her writing on modernist constructions of the late Victorians, while also situating the concerns and circumstances of her feminist elders as continuous with, rather than sharply separated from, Woolf’s own persistent preoccupations.