Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

From All This Diversity…
Th e experience and experiment of writing Orlando marks a culmination and turning
point in Woolf’s critical thinking on biography. Woolf’s later essay tempers the optimism
of “Th e New Biography,” and reacts against the vision of a malleable biographical subject
and an equally malleable genre. “Th e Art of Biography” opens by questioning a fundamental
precept of Woolf’s “new” biography. Is biography, in fact, an art? Exploring the
rules of biography and what the genre cannot do, Woolf off ers a new conclusion: the biographer
is not an artist but a “craftsman,” and if biography is treated as an art, the art “fails”
(CE4 227, 222). Writers must make a choice between the “worlds” (CE4 226) of fact and
fi ction, and they must remain within the limits of their chosen discourse. Foregrounding
the call for biographical integrity that had remained latent within “Th e New Biography,”
Woolf closes down the potential for generic experimentation and for the diverse and heterogeneous
representation of the subject. No longer joined in perpetual marriage, Woolf
tells us that the “life” of biography is very diff erent from “the life of poetry and fi ction”
and, although the biographer should be ready to “admit contradictory versions of the
same face,” the integrity of the subject must be maintained: Woolf argues that “from all
this diversity it will bring out, not a riot of confusion, but a richer unity” (CE4 227, 226).
In contrast to the violent image of revolution that lay behind the project of Orlando,
Woolf now cast off such anarchy in favour of generic and subjective unity. Th e biographical
subject was to be fi xed, surrounded, and safely contained by the biographer’s “outline”
(CE4 227), a limiting function of narrative.
However, in continuing to look to a future form of biography, Woolf does not exclude
the potential for creativity, generic and subjective. Returning to the argument put
forward in “How Should One Read A Book?” Woolf reconstructs the reader as a biographer’s
“fellow-worker and accomplice” (CR2 259). Th e biographer’s craft must be used to
select and produce the “fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders” (CE4 228), to
create an outline fi lled in by the reader’s active imagination. Ultimately a “new” biography,
an untwisted representation of the biographical subject, was not to be achieved within the
genre of biography itself, but through a creative exchange marking the process of reading
biography.
Notes
1. For example, Kathryn Miles argues that “Th e New Biography” is the “original theoretical rubric” behind
Orlando (212).
2. For example, see Bernard’s fi nal dramatic soliloquy in Th e Waves: “Yet I cannot fi nd any obstacle separating
us. Th ere is no division between me and them” (222).
Works Cited
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin, 1990.
Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Th eory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.
Miles, Kathryn. “‘Th at perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’: Searching for ‘Th e New Biography’ in Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando.” Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference
on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace UP, 1999. 212-18.
Minow-Pinkney, Makikow. Virginia Woolf and Th e Problem of the Subject. Brighton: Harvester, 1987.
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