"Selves into Relation": Virginia Wolf and the Conversational Essay

Abstract

Although better known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf started her professional life as a woman critic: as a woman, she strove to overcome initial suspicions that her sex, youth and inexperience could arouse in the editing and publishing worlds; as a critic she encountered the opposition of her male contemporaries for subverting in her essays established critical values which Woolf did not wish to perpetuate. Within Woolf’s critical work, there stand —most often neglected by scholars— her “conversational essays”, a literary form that emphasises the spontaneity of oral speech as well as dialogic plurality, reaching back in a long tradition from Plato to William Hazlitt, Michel de Montaigne and Oscar Wilde. The use of conversation, itself a hybrid poised between written and oral discourse, allows the voices of outsiders and raiders to emerge: Woolf proposed the conversational essay as a countercanon to what she defined as the “massive masculine achievement”. It is from this process of exchange and collision that truth bursts forth, knowledge is developed and inclusion and insularity finally overcome.