Virginia Woolf's Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader?

Abstract

In this carefully constructed book, Juliet Dusinberre explores Woolf's affinity on many levels with the early modern period and her sense of being reborn though the creation of an alternative tradition of reading and writing whose roots go back to the Elizabethans and beyond. Dusinberre offers a critique of Woolf's ideas through a discussion of particular writers--Montaigne, Donne, Pepys, and Bunyan, Dorothy Osborne and Madame de Sevigne--and of the literary forms of the essay and the personal letter and diary, forms traditionally associated with women. Questions about printing, the body, and the relationship between amateurs and professionals create striking connections between Woolf and the early modern period. Virginia Woolf was extraordinarily daring for her time in making her assumptions about culture explicit. In Virginia Woolf's Renaissance, Juliet Dusinberre reveals a new Virginia Woolf, more radical, energetic, and socially aware than the popular image of a Bloomsbury aesthete, who constructed a Renaissance for women to which she herself could not belong.