"Intimate, Irreticent and Indiscreet in the Extreme": Epistolary Essays by Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf

Abstract

Why, when telecommunications has largely replaced written correspondence and women are now respected for writing books rather than letters, do two major women writers return repeatedly to the form of the epistolary essay? Both Virginia Woolf, a British modernist, and Christa Wolf, a contemporary GDR writer, have adopted this form as a self-conscious rhetorical strategy for the critique of a dominant ideology.' Their essays not only problematize the theoretical issue of woman's relation to the letter, to the literal, to literary language as the discourse of the canonized male author; they also foreground the historical tradition of women as letter writers. This simultaneously theoretical and historical focus forces the feminist critic to consider two