- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Report to the Memoir Club
Report to the Memoir Club
Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- Chapter:
- (p.57) Report to the Memoir Club
- Source:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Author(s):
Marina Warner
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter examines Virginia Woolf's “contrariness” with respect to authority, class, and the British Empire by bringing her into conversation with Voltaire. Woolf 's opening rejoinder, “But, you may say,”, anticipates an unspoken objection, forestalls opposition, and summons an unseen reader or audience, whose thoughts and words she is confident she can know almost before they do. In fiction, the writer projects herself into the minds of her characters and thinks with them, ventriloquizing beyond her own boundaries. In such polemical and confessional writings as A Room of One's Own (1929), someone is lurking at the edge of Woolf's consciousness. To shed light into Woolf's “contrariness,” the chapter describes the background to a piece of work-in-progress, with the working title Inventory of a Life Mislaid, and includes some paragraphs from it.
Keywords: contrariness, authority, class, British Empire, Voltaire, A Room of One's Own, consciousness
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
