“He’s the Test(imony)”: Edward Gibbon and Virginia Woolf’s View of History

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Virginia Woolf’s view of history by taking Edward Gibbon as a locus of historical reflection and refiguration. Starting with a reinvestigation into the Gibbon episode in The Voyage Out, it argues that Woolf’s primary aim is to equate history as an act of reading and thereupon a sort of reader-oriented text. The reader’s powerful autonomy in historical reading foregrounds the textuality of history. This article turns then to explore the ways in which Woolf maneuvers the writing style of Gibbon and infuses it into her historical writing through the prism of imagination. The literary and reconstructive attributes of historical writing indicate the subjectivity of history. Finally, this article adumbrates the retrospective trajectory of Woolf’s mode of thinking in history. By virtue of Gibbon’s great doctrine of the continuity of history, Woolf forges a continuous connection between the present and the past as well as the future. Valorising Gibbon as both an allusion and an influencer, this article problematises the widely acknowledged nineteenth-century traditions or twentieth-century philosophies thought to be assimilated or anticipated by Woolf; instead, it defends Woolf’s receptive and revisionist stance vis-à-vis the eighteenth-century historian as a legacy and correspondingly outlines her triangulated view of history.