‘Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History’ —Introduction
Résumé
To give a history to a species, a population of human beings or a social category is necessarily a political gesture. Throughout her career Virginia Woolf was preoccupied with this gesture and with the cultural and political issues that it implies. As we celebrate the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway the 'action' of which takes place on a day in June 1923, five years after the end of the First World War, it is only right to place its author in the long genealogy of those who have shown a deep interest in history and its writing. To examine Woolf's relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history, be that the history of her own time, of the past, women's history or literary history, leads us to counter her image as a disengaged highmodernist aesthete, thereby allowing her complex artistic and intellectual persona to emerge, that of a changing, pragmatic and self-reflexive figure 'thinking back through [her] mothers' (Woolf 2000, 57) while negotiating her own presence among male predecessors and contemporaries.
Although 'Bloomsbury was born and bred Victorian' (Rosenbaum 2003, 21) and some of
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