Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Bronts [Hardcover]

In her feminist polemic, A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf famously wrote of the (comparatively recent) literary tradition of female writers: we think back through our mothers if we are women. Woolfs major literary mothers were those women novelists writing during the Victorian period and earlier.Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Bront?sexamines all of Woolfs writings on the Bront?s, across a wide range of genres: juvenilia, novels, literary essays, feminist polemics, diaries and letters. This proves particularly fruitful as Woolf herself was both a creative artist and a literary critic. As a woman, she was ambivalent towards the Victorian world in which she spent her youth: emotionally she remained in thrall to it; but intellectually she developed the modernist novel. After Woolf ceased to write publicly about the Bront?s, she continued to engage with them through the Hogarth Press, which she had founded in 1917 with her husband Leonard. She then chose to publish books on the Bront?s whose approaches to them she supported. Newman approaches her subject in a Woolfian way: that is, she avoids dogmatism and aims to open up discussion of the lives, works and afterlives of the Bront?s as mediated by Woolf, rather than closing it down to one particular interpretation.Hilary Newmanis an independent scholar.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Outline of the Book
Chapter One: Familial Similarities of the Bront?s and Virginia Woolf
Chapter Two: Shared Life Experiences of the Bront?s and Virginia Woolf
Chapter Three: Personal Comments on the Bront?s and in Virginia Woolfs Fiction
Chapter Four: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf as Critics & on Charlotte Bront?
Chapter Five: Virginia Woolfs Essays on the Bront?s
Chapter Six: A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas
Chapter Seven: Bront? Critics Published by the Hogarth Press
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author