Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Textual Archeology
world, the spirit going out of me. Th en for the fi rst time in months a sleep so
profound it was as though after weeks, I slept for 29 hours. (101-2)
A touch of youthful drama in this account nevertheless focuses the moment when
the writer’s life ends, the body of Woolf’s work becomes fi nite, and the thesis is also transformed
into a full and complete study. Th e nature of the writer’s death also becomes a lens
for future interpretations of text and meaning.
Reactions to the completed thesis were positive. Mass’s professor and teachers expressed
amazement at her study’s insights. C. J. Waldock, Professor of English, described the thesis
as “a remarkable piece of work—she completely understood Woolf, the fi rst to accomplish
this. In many ways this study was an advance on any criticism of VW that had up to that
time been published, and I hope still that it may appear in print” (Reference and Letters).
Correspondence had begun between Mass and Leonard Woolf in August 1941 and led to
the possibility of the Hogarth Press publishing some version of the fi nal work (Woolf, Letters).
Th ere was also an expectation that an academic career would unfold for Mass.
“It was the high point of my life,” Mass says (Unpublished Autobiographical Notes
102). Waldock had written to her “Eventually you will become the fi rst lady professor
of English in the history of the University…” (quoted in Unpublished Autobiographical
Notes 103). None of this happened, and indeed it was another twenty-fi ve years until the
appointment of Dame Leonie Kramer to that position, when I was a student in the same
department. Life for Nuri Mass took a diff erent path, including responsibilities for a family
which she supported, a kind of a breakdown after fi nishing the thesis, and certainly a
massive loss of confi dence. She put academia on hold for the duration of the war, and took
a trainee editorship with a publishing company, Angus and Robertson in Sydney.
Reading the thesis, Virginia Woolf the Novelist, in 2006, a vigorous and original critical
energy is immediately apparent. It is structured in three sections. 1. Woolf’s Philosophy
(dealing with her ideas and infl uences), 2. Woolf’s Art: Prose and a Poet’s Vision (mainly
focussing on her method), and 3. Th e Novels (focussing on continuous and gradual development
from one work to the next). Th ere is little repetition over these broad distinctions.
It has depth and broad sweep, and allows for a conversation about the unity of the whole
life’s work on its own terms. Principally Mass sees Woolf as a “writer of fi ction” (Th esis 1),
and so does not include Th ree Guineas or A Room of One’s Own in her main texts, regarded
more as polemics at that time. By focussing on the novels in unfolding continuity, she
fashions a portrait of the writer which is centrally imbedded in the texts. It takes on in fact
the texture of a kind of imbedded biography. Mass sees Woolf as a hopeful writer (with
the exception of Between the Acts), restoring something to literature after “the trials of disillusionment
since the war” (Th esis 89). Even though this is written in 1941/2, it is clear
that Mass understands Woolf’s war as World War 1, and that people saw the Great War as
a trauma still aff ecting life well into the 1930s. She presents Woolf as a very diff erent kind
of modernist, not like the male modernist writers. She compares her favourably against
Lawrence and Joyce (Th esis 212), and establishes her originality from them, invoking and
supporting the idea of a gendered modernism. More research can later establish some of
the wider reading by Mass which informed these positions.
In Th e Voyage Out, she sees Woolf making clear her position, “feminist, atheist, rebel,
a declamation” (Th esis 226). Mass claims, “It gives the voice to the rage of a new genera-
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