Postscript: Angels and Harpies

Abstract

This book opened up by making a case for aligning Woolf’s work with that strand of European modernism that has come to be known as ‘essayism’. Defined mainly in the writings of Lukács, Musil and Adorno, the notion of essayism has always carried with it a critique of modernity as the triumph of rationalisation and the culmination of a linear, progressive vision of history. When understood in this sense, essayism becomes effectively indistinguishable from the Marxist critique of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and might therefore suggest a certain compatibility of intents between that critique and Woolf’s historiographic project. But the point of this inquiry has not been that of substituting one critical framework (Marxism) for the feminist approach that has dominated Woolf studies in the last three decades or so. Essayism was used here as a critical angle capable of articulating and addressing the question of Woolf’s relationship to literary history, both in terms of the history she wrote and in terms of the history that has been written about her. In their turn, Woolf’s writings on history, women and the essay were deployed to read critically and help to contextualise the idea of essayism that is linked to the Marxist critique of modernity.