Freedom of Thought in Woolf's Essays. Sat. 6 April 2024
Virginia Woolf Season IV: Woolf and Freedom. Live online.
Lecture 8. Freedom of Thought in Woolf’s Essays with Professor Beth Rigel Daugherty
Lock up your libraries if you like;
but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set
upon the freedom of my mind.
– Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Beth Daugherty writes: We will study a range of essays representing the whole span of Woolf’s career as an essayist. In these writings, she demonstrates three types of freedom of thought: the freedom of the author’s mind to move, the author’s freedom to think freely about anything, and the freedom to think offered to the reader. In this lecture, I will consider how Woolf’s essays move, what they say, and what and how they stimulate. Or, their method, content, and effect. Below are some of the questions I will explore.
From its beginning as a genre, the essay gave permission to the writer to wander, ramble, digress. As we read these essays, how do we see Woolf moving? From what to what to what? What reasons do we discern for those movements? What strikes us about her freedom to move around within an essay? What do her movements illustrate about the mind, any mind?
The essay has also historically engaged with topics from everywhere: the self (physical, mental, emotional); the personal (family, friends, fears); the silly (embarrassments, a piece of chalk); the profound (life’s meaning, love, death); the world (the ocean, a garden); the political, cultural, or social (government, art, rights, change); and much more. Anything and everything has been and is within its purview. As we read these essays, what topics does Woolf tackle? On the surface (literally) and below the surface (metaphorically)? What positions does she take? What seems unexpected or unusual about those positions, if anything? What freedoms does she exhibit?
Finally, the essay gives a writer a way to communicate directly with a reader, and it often explores uncertainties without dictating. As we read these essays, what happens within our own thinking? What questions or possibilities or ideas have opened up for us? What does Woolf encourage us to think about? What does she suggest, teach, imply, illuminate? How have our own minds moved?
Set essays by Woolf - please aim to read these 6 essays in advance
• ‘Street Music’, in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 27-32.
• ‘Visits to Walt Whitman’, in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 205-08.
• ‘Trousers’, in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 3, 312-14
• ‘Street Haunting’, in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4 ,480-81; also in Bradshaw, ed., VW Selected Essays; Bowlby, ed. A Woman’s Essays, vol. 2.
• ‘The Censorship of Books’, Woolf, Essays 5, 36-40.
• ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 6, 242-48; also in Bradshaw, Bowlby 2
We have published the set essays on our Blog pages, along with a selection of other Woolf essays.
Optional further reading
• Virginia Woolf, ‘Thunder at Wembley’, Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 3, 410-14; also in Bradshaw, Bowlby 2
• Virginia Woolf, ‘Why?’ in Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 6, 30-36; also in Bradshaw, Bowlby 1
• Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Essays’, in Cambridge Companion to VW (2010), 89-106.
• Thomas Karshan, ‘What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murray (OUP, 2020), 31-54.
• Two pieces on ‘Street Haunting’ by essayists
Marilyn Abildskov, ‘Reading Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”’, in Understanding the Essay, ed. Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter (Broadview Press, 2012), 163-75.
Tracy Seeley, ‘Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and the Art of Digressive Passage’, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, 15.1 (Spring 2013): 149-59.
Saturday 6 April 2024
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Summer Time
Morning/lunchtime in the Americas. Please check the time in your time zone.
Price
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students, CAMcard holders
£27.00 Members of the VWSGB
All prices include VAT at 20%.
Beth Rigel Daugherty is retired Professor of English Literature at Otterbein University, Ohio. She has written many works on Woolf including Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist (2022), reviewed on our Blog page.