Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) has long been recognised as a towering presence in British Modernist writing, with her celebrated novels of the 1920s and 1930s, including Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and the Waves (1931). But how did her literary career begin? This course focuses upon her first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), in which she embraces the conventional style of the time but also hints at the later development of her experimental modernist fiction. We will explore her first steps as a novelist, as well as considering some of her short stories and essays written in the same period.
To get the most from this course you should read the two set texts before you come to Cambridge, and be prepared to revise and re-read them while you are here. In class, we will undertake some close textual analysis in the Cambridge tradition, which helps in understanding the very precise ways in which Woolf employs language and therefore, in turn, helps students to grasp the richness and complexity of literary texts. We will set the works in context by considering Woolf’s life at the time she was writing these two novels, and we will also consider her ideas about women, education and marriage.
You might like to read Jacob’s Room (1922), the novel which immediately follows the two texts we will be studying (and any other novel by Woolf), to give you an idea of how her novelistic style evolves and develops. Her earliest two novels have previously been regarded as immature and constrained by conventionalism, but they are now attracting increasing attention as recent scholarship opens them up to new readings.
Learning outcomes
- To gain a greater knowledge of the two primary texts and an understanding of their historical context.
- To become familiar with some literary-critical ways of thinking about Woolf’s work.
- To develop students’ skills of close analysis and sensitivity to tone, style and genre.
- To be able to discuss the reading in the seminar group and to contribute usefully to general debate about the issues of the course.