Consciousness and Group Consciousness in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In a letter written in 1919, George Eliot’s centenary year, Virginia Woolf confessed to her correspondent: ‘I am reading through the whole of George Eliot, in order to sum her up, once and for all, upon her anniversary’1 — a typically extravagant and irreverent statement, mocking the centenary convention. Despite the tongue-in-cheek attitude evident here, Virginia Woolf is touching upon a natural desire, which a centenary prompts, to gain some firm perspective on a writer’s work. I hope that the following consideration of consciousness and group consciousness in Virginia Woolf will allow me to trace a current of thought and feeling which runs throughout her writing, and to suggest a placing of Virginia Woolf’s work in the kind of historical perspective which a centenary celebration might encourage us to consider. I intend to explore an idea which links Virginia Woolf clearly to a current of thinking which was of great importance in her lifetime, but which has since been somewhat neglected, or obscured, or treated in only a fragmentary way. As the discussion will be of an aspect of her work which her contemporaries, her first reviewers, seized upon, then perhaps my argument should be seen as an effort of recovery; an attempt to look afresh at one aspect of the wave of critical commentary which has accompanied Virginia Woolf‘s work from the very beginning of her career as an imaginative writer.