Writing with Virginia Woolf, not Afraid

Abstract

I first read the work of British modernist writer Virginia Woolf more than a decade ago and it was life changing in terms of the way I began to approach my writing as an academic feminist. In this chapter, I write for, with and to the promise her writing holds for becoming critical and embodied as autoethnographer. In particular, Woolf’s unmistakenly feminist extended essay A room of one’s own first published in 1929, provides inspiration for finding and fighting for the freedom to think and write as women and to think and write as a woman in particular kinds of ways. Woolf’s stream of consciousness and fluid writing style is explored and played with in this chapter as an approach to autoethnographic writing that might draw attention to the luminous halo of life which lay just beyond the cotton wool of the everyday.

Yet it is clear that she could have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her.

Woolf (1929/2001, p. 69)

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she it to write fiction.

Woolf (1929/2001, pp. 3–4)

For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think this will be great fun to write; & it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come to next.

Woolf ([Diary entry, 14 March, 1927], 1980, p. 131)