Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Essay on Virginia Woolf, Philip Tew - Woolf On Woolf

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WOOLF ON WOOLF

According to Suzanne Nalbantian, “Woolf was closely exposed to biography writing by two dominant male figures in her life: her father and her husband.”¹ One senses that Woolf reacted by becoming fascinated with recreating aspects of herself, and doing so critically, in many places within her texts. Even if Clarissa Dalloway is not a self-portrait, she represents Woolf's reflections on her own physical embodiment and her mental processes. Woolf could be cruel about her own image and pathology, as in this description of Clarissa: “She had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen,...

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1. Introduction
2. About Virginia Woolf
3. Woolf At Work
4. Woolf's Era
5. Woolf's Works
6. Woolf On Woolf
7. Woolf As Studied
8. Copyright

1. Virginia Woolf