Virginia Woolf’s Letters: Writing in the Making

This dissertation means to explore the aesthetics of Woolf’s epistolary writing. For Woolf, letters become a vast field, a free space for experimenting her original theories of writing, developing her unique techniques and perfecting her style of modern writing. They also provide a space for finding her authorial voice, position and self. Delving into the six volumes of Woolf’s private letters, we first explore how they depict the author’s daily life, its wealth and intensity. Through her exchanges with her numerous addressees, Woolf redefines the epistolary genre: apart from their informative function, letters offer artistic descriptions of life and people, which are composed by Woolf in a specific manner, often fuelled by various other arts—painting, cinema, music, or drama. Such a representation transforms the most private epistolary genre into a public, dialogical and inter-medial genre. Intimacy and self-protectiveness, together with a desire for self-exposure stimulate Woolf to develop a style of “central transparency”—her figurative or suggestive method that enables her to express emotion and represent herself.