"Unsolved Problems": Virginia Woolf and Archives of the Mind from Early Fiction to A Room of One's Own

“Unsolved Problems”: Archives of the Mind DRAFT Cindy L. Taylor

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Cindy L. Taylor

“Unsolved Problems”: Virginia Woolf and Archives of the Mind

10th Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at

Austin: “What We Read: Materiality, Narrative, Text”

11 – 12 October, 2013

In this presentation, I will discuss Virginia Woolf’s relationship to constructed,

elaborated, and imagined archives and biographies in work spanning various phases of her

career. I will describe how Woolf uses all of these techniques to inform and enrich both fiction

and nonfiction writing (and the Woolfian grey area between). Specifically, I will discuss Woolf’s

application of fictive biography in three early short stories, two of which remained unpublished

until 44 years after her death, a technique which would flower fully decades later as the semi-

biographical fantasy Orlando. I will also describe materialist concerns with the nature of the

archive that Woolf, herself elaborated within those works of fiction. I will then discuss her

application of these fictive biography techniques to non-fiction purposes in the groundbreaking

pacifist-feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own. I will detail some of the ways in which these

modes and devices are influenced, and in a sense inspired, by Woolf’s own encounters with

physical, social, and educational exclusion from the sanctioned archives of her day, and by the

limited and severely slanted nature of the data offered by those repositories. I will also catalogue

her responses to gaps and lacunae in women’s history and archives of women’s records and

lives, which are included in the fiction and nonfiction resources I have selected.

In light of contemporary issues surrounding the surfeit of available data and the


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authenticity, transparency, and accuracy of contemporary archives, I will consider whether

locating a mental archive that is “more truth than fact”1 remains a valid rhetorical approach.

I will argue that the materiality of the archive – its exclusionary, forbidding, even

impenetrable nature, as well as issues of curation and resource allocation – affect the availability

and accessibility of women’s historical records. I will explore ways in which materialist issues of

access, privilege, and archival selection remain critical today in the search for the female subject.

Before discussing Virginia Woolf’s uses of archives and archival records, and the access

issues associated with archives, it may be best to offer an official definition of these terms.

According to the Society of American Archivists (SAA): “archives are the non-current records of

individuals, groups, institutions, and governments that contain information of enduring value…

Researchers use them both for their administrative value and for purposes other than those for

which they were created.” Meanwhile, “the primary task of the archivist”, according to SAA, “is

to establish and maintain control, both physical and intellectual, over records of enduring value”.

Problems of what constitutes “enduring value”, who makes those decisions, and how and to what

extent access to those permanent records is granted, constitutes the core of a never-ending debate

whose stakes extend far beyond archival practice to intersect broadly with history, literature,

government, and education. The materiality of the archive is profound in generating what we

read and how we read it: as Foucault says, “the archive is the first law of what can be said”2.

Unsatisfied with the available archives of her day, or literally excluded from them, Virginia

Woolf often created her own archives, collection practices, and uses of those materials in order

to express wholly new ideas in original ways.

1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1989) 4. 2 Michele Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge


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The materiality of the formats in which archival records may be expressed influences

both access and what can be said, as well. The SAA lists the following records formats that are

represented in “the modern archival repository: photographs, film, video and sound recordings,

computer tapes, and video and optical disks, as well as the more traditional unpublished letters,

diaries and other manuscripts.” Of those media that existed during the span of her professional

writing career (1904 to 1941), Woolf puts them all to work to inform and “stiffen” her essays and

pamphlets with culled but very real data, while granting structure and poignancy to her fiction by

harnessing imagined examples of archival materials towards her own rhetorical ends.

The first of modes or uses of the archive or archival materials which I will discuss is

Woolf’s application of what I will call “fictive biography”. Because most, if not all, biographers

rely on archival materials to re/construct the lives of their subjects, this technique is relevant and

intimately tied to Woolf’s relationship with archival materials. This technique, which begins as

experimentation in early, short stories such as the unpublished “[Phyllis and Rosamond]”, “[The

Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn]”, and 1909’s “Memoirs of a Novelist”, later develops as a

supportive mechanism in the landmark essay A Room of One’s Own, and culminates elaborately

in her late career in the form of the pseudo-biography Orlando. Simply defined, when faced with

multiple lacunae, unreliable records, and physical or functional exclusion while seeking out

material archives that speak to the work of women authors, Woolf finds it necessary, even

preferable, to construct the histories of literary women imaginatively, rather than factually.

Woolf began experimenting with the technique of fictive biography at a surprisingly early

stage in her literary life, just two years after her first foray into professional writing (a series of

reviews). [Phyllis and Rosamond] and [The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn] both written in


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1906, remained unpublished until Susan Dick edited the first comprehensive collection of

Woolf’s shorter fiction in 1985i. Working from unrevised holograph drafts, Dick presents both of

these stories in the raw, enabling the reader to see Woolf’s methods and how they begin to

diverge from the standard fiction of her day.

To the extent that most fiction deals with the lives of more or less imagined people,

cannot all novels, short stories, and plays be thought of as “fictive biography”? Perhaps, but

within the first page of [Phyllis and Rosamond], Woolf provides a clue to her project of framing

the issue using an archival device: “Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the

details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such

a record of how the door keeper at the Globe…passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our

Lord 1568. And as such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut

more prominently across the stage, it seems worthwhile to take as model one of those many

women who cluster in the shade (17)”. Virginia Woolf, at the age of 24 when these stories

flowed from her pen, was steeped in the genre of biography. Her late father, Leslie Stephens, had

labored during a good part of Virginia’s childhood on The Dictionary of National Biography, an

exhaustive catalog of the (mostly male, mostly upper-class) individuals whose life stories were

deemed most worthy of preservation in Victorian Britain. In [Phyllis and Rosamond], she is not

only directing attention to the dearth of women in the biographical and archival record, she is

suggesting that women writers may fill that void with the only material available to them: fiction.

Following her introductory framework, Woolf proceeds with the tale of two sisters, their

claustrophobic upper-middle class lifestyle, and the glimpse they are able to catch of an

alternative, though to us mild, bohemianism. But this story, like a length of fine lace, is made to

be riddled with holes. Each page is rife with intentional lacunae in form of silences, absences,


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failures, and gaps in the lives of the young protagonists, and is shaded with tropes of darkness

and sequestering. Women are “obscure figures”, existing in the “dark and crowded place behind

the scenes”, upon whom novelists and historians have only begun to throw a “partial light” (17).

Phyllis’ description of she and her sister’s station in life elicits the phrase “What a Black Hole!”

from the more sophisticated Sylvia (28). The sisters are frequently unable to speak or are simply

unheard: the words “silent” and “silently” and phrases such as “nothing to say” appear repeatedly

throughout – when the two do speak, we are told that “their talk is not very edifying” (19).

Negations abound in the description of the girls and their lives, including a lack of physical

beauty (18), knowledge and education (21, 27, 28), and social strength (23, 24). Failures are

commonplace, too, including Phyllis’ lackluster reaction to her suitor (21), while tropes of

constraint and exclusion are used liberally: “she sat and watched, feeling like a bird with wings

pinioned (26)” and “they sat thus...like people shut out from some merrymaking in the cold and

the wind, invisible to the feasters within” at the party of the modern Tristram sisters. It is the

lacks, constraints, and failures inherent to Phyllis’ and Rosamond’s roles as young women bound

to the Victorian family system that separate them so distinctly from the free and more public life

of their counterparts, rather than their own individual shortcomings. I believe that the gaps and

silences throughout [Phyllis and Rosamond] were intentionally posed as an apt metaphor for the

lacunae in the historical record and life writing of, by, and for women. As Anna Snaith writes,

such short stories as [Phyllis and Rosamond] and [The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn], should

not be thought of as juvenilia, but as “central to her ideas on life writing and women’s history”

(“A View of One’s Own”, 127) and rather a tangential experiment, “such rethinking of

biography is crucial to Woolf’s feminism” (129).


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[The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn], written in the same year (1906), further solidifies

and extends the technique of the fictive biography and moves the use of fictive archival materials

to the forefront as devices to illuminate Woolf’s themes of unrecognized women’s lives in the

historical record and their subjugated place in Western society. Taking on not one, but two

identities, Woolf speaks through a first-person narrator named Rosamond Merridew – a historian

who specializes in knowledge of the land tenure system in Medieval England. Although she has

gained some notoriety in her field, access to source materials has become a problem for

Merridew as a private historian who lacks the government’s buying power when approaching

private landowners regarding their records. Creative and dedicated, Merridew models the kind of

do-it-yourself archival sleuthing that Woolf, herself, will later use in reality to support her

groundbreaking pacifist/feminist pamphlet, Three Guineas. Woolf here introduces the genre of

the review as a device: Merridew tells us that her critics believe she should avoid certain

“digressions” which they evidently feel are injurious to what should be a strictly factual history

of land tenure. The historian tells us, however, that she has “not scrupled to devote several

pages” to an attempt to describe, “vividly as in a picture”, the everyday life of the common

Medieval family, going about its daily business (34). Woolf shares this tendency to paint a

picture verbally, and likewise does not scruple to do so within her non-fiction works such as A

Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Clearly, she does not see these as the useless

“digressions”, but rather as an in integral and vital component of the rhetorical project.

Anticipating her own male critics, Woolf has Merridew flout their revealing complaint that she

has “no materials at [her] side to stiffen these words into any semblance of the truth”. Although

she would like nothing more than to “put the whole question of right and wrong, truth and

fiction” behind her (35), she is quick to point out that her resort to imagination in her historical


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writings due to a dearth of archival materials which speak to her subject matter. This may point

to a frustration which Woolf was already experiencing in accessing materials to inform her own

work 25 years before she begins to solve the problems masterfully with her self-directed

scrapbooks archives, which I will discuss later in reference to Three Guineas. As Dean Baldwin

points out, the idea that “history as conceived and written by men places too much emphasis on

statesmen and generals and too little on the lives of ordinary people” (9) was one that Woolf

expressed throughout her life.

In [The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn], the narrator’s undaunted search for primary

source materials to fill out the lacunae in the history of the unheard masses of Medieval

commoners and women, stops by a picturesque country house and talks her way into the family’s

private archives. The bulk of these consists of the estate’s business and land records going back

to the 15th Century, which are highly prized and avidly read by the estate’s current owner, Mr.

John Martyn. However, it is the 15th Century diary of Joan Martyn that becomes the focal point

of the narrative, with the second half of the short story dedicated to “reproducing” a portion of

the journal without commentary. Tellingly, while John Martyn has read the Journal, he dismisses

the document’s perhaps too typically feminine format (“I never keep a diary myself,” he

comments), and redirects Merridew quickly to the household accounts of another male ancestor,

saying, “now this…is more interesting to my mind”. The value – or lack thereof – placed on the

Journal retains its interest today: once discarded by an undervaluing archivist, whether public or

private, a record ceases to exist, a voice is silenced, and what can be said becomes more limited.

Conversely, the lack of value placed on the Journal may have facilitated Merridew’s close

examination of the document – when she asks to take it home with her to study in detail, her host

agrees easily, “O very well,” he smiled, “but I don’t think you’ll find anything out of the way in


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her…as far as I can see, not remarkable—“ (45). By privileging the narrative of this

“unremarkable” woman (the Journal is the only one of Martyn’s archives to be quoted or

reproduced in the story), Woolf clearly suggests a new set of values for historical and life-

writing, and by extension, a new value to be placed on women and their contributions.

I believe that the failures of [The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn] exist primarily in the

journal section, which encompasses a variety of stylistic, if not factual, anachronisms and

contrivances. However, as Baldwin reminds us, the unfinished piece was never published during

Woolf’s lifetime, and would surely have been reworked extensively had Woolf completed it and,

presumably, overcome many of those difficulties. However, as extant, the lack of historical

accuracy may tend to undermine Woolf’s defense of the conflation of fact and fiction.

Nevertheless, as Louise A. DeSalvo’s analysis reveals, it is the story’s thematic and structural

successes which cause it to retain its value. Woolf “paints her picture” well of Joan Martyn as a

woman, despite spirit and intelligence, functionally circumscribed by her social role and

confined to private life. Imagery of incarceration and limits abound in the Journal portion: “the

whole world is barred away from us”, “safe within Hall gates”, she imagines their land rolling

like waves, “against our iron gates”, and it is necessary for she and her mother to “keep much

within our own lands” (45). As in [Phyllis and Rosamond], darkness and the inability to speak

out are common tropes. To remain safe with the men of the house away, she and her mother

“may not burn the tapers after the church bell has struck 8 times,”(46) and when the time for bed

comes, they must “feel our way up the great stairs, and along passages,” in complete darkness

(47). When her older suitor comes to call, Joan curtseys and remains largely silent, “I could not

pretend to add anything to what my mother said,” (50); when her father asks her what she is


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writing, she is overcome with confusion and, “stammering that it was a ‘Diary’”, covers the

pages with her hands (60).

Was Woolf’s aim in doubling the fact/fiction devices to create a sense of false logos (i.e.,

to add authority to a fictional document by referencing a fictional authority), or simply to over-

determine the theme of undervaluation of women’s history and perspectives? At any rate, Joan

Martyn presents a “double fictional autobiography” as Anna Snaith has dubbed it (“Virginia

Woolf, Public and Private Negotiations”, 58), revealing her own life’s experience in both the

childless-by-choice narrator who struggles to gain professional notoriety while refusing to

compromise the blend of fact and fiction with which she paints a more vivid picture for her

readers; and the young woman straining against the bonds of traditional societal roles. In any

case, Woolf grounds the narrative in the materiality of the archives: she describes a forlorn and

jumbled sort of inner sanctum where the estate’s archives are kept: Tables are “heaped” with

papers and walls are lined with ledgers (40); tellingly, the room is decorated thickly with “dead

animals, raising lifeless paws” (41). The records Merridew examines are hefty “parcel[s] of

yellow paper” that are “not bound or held together in any way, save by a thick cord of green silk

with bars at either end; such as you use to transfix bundles of greasy documents”. (41) The

neglected state of the archives prompts Mr. Marytn to offer Merridew a duster “before

desecrating [her] white skin”. The Journal itself is undifferentiated from the household records in

its method of preservation. These images hint vividly at Woolf’s project to resuscitate, indeed

“save” the women of the past from these dusty and lifeless prisons, where few if any may hear

their voices. The fact that she invents both the specific archival record and the life which it

records may speak simultaneously to the dearth of such extant records (and/or lack of access to


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them), and to Woolf’s desire to create a vivid picture of what a woman’s record is or could be –

and then to elevate the value of that document.

Moving ahead three years, we find Woolf again exploring themes of public versus private

life, women’s life-writing, and multiple framing genres in Memoirs of a Novelist, written in

1909. Susan Dick tells us that Memoirs of a Novelist was intended as “the first in a series of

fictional portraits” (296). Though she submitted it to Cornhill magazine, the story was not

published in her lifetime and the portrait project, such as originally conceived, was shelved.

However, the author’s interest in fictional life-writing and reclaiming the histories of obscure

women, albeit fictional ones, would not be abandoned – culminating perhaps most spectacularly

in the imaginative flight of fancy, Orlando: A Biography. Memoirs of a Novelist is a story

pretending to be a review, of a biography, about an author, of Victorian novels – all of which are

purely fictitious. This veritable Russian nesting-doll of a short story is humorous and dry, but it

is much more. Rebecca McNeer describes it as a “literary signpost” pointing the way to the fully

realized Orlando and its study of the lyrical exploration of the intrinsic problems of biography

(6). If so, then Memoirs is a witty and surprisingly mature elucidation of those problems. As in

the previous two stories discussed, on close inspection, Memoirs does contains germs of non-

fiction, most of which take the form of autobiographical revelations. McNeer details several

points of comparison between Woolf’s life and that of the fictional subject, which suggest the

author’s use of Miss Willatt as a distancing device to discuss her own true thoughts regarding her

father’s death, her relationship with her brothers, the death of her mother at a young age, and her

selection of writing as a profession in order to curb a certain restlessness (8). Or perhaps the

Narrator, rather than Miss Willatt, is Woolf’s alter ego? Propounding her ideas on women’s life-

writing, women and fiction, and the problems of biography in general (“What right has the world


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to know about men and women? What can a biographer tell it? (69)”, the Narrator does so in the

format of a review – a genre in which the 27-year old Woolf is already an accomplished

professional. Still in her salad days as a writer, without a novel to her name [true?], the Virginia

Woolf (then Virginia Stephens) of 1909 continued to reserve her evolving social, political, and

feminist views, and tended to keep her infamous barbed wit blunted for the moment. The

propriety and restraint she exhibited at that time in her actual reviews of literature from fiction,

to biography, to histories for various periodicals were unnecessary when approaching a fictitious

subject. Thus the Reviewer/Narrator may say about biography and women’s life-writing in

general what the Reviewer Virginia cannot say publicly about a specific biography, or its subject.

Indeed, despite Woolf’s “perpetual preoccupation” with life-writing, to quote Hermione

Lee, she only produces one full-length, factual biography in her career, that of friend Roger Fry –

and that, very late in her career (1940). Memoirs may be considered an early progenitor of

Orlando, in as much as both are satires of the biography genre – ironically, it is the wildly

imaginative Orlando, with its nearly timeless, ageless, gender-switching protagonist that comes

closest to the “truth” of a real human being that Woolf seemed to be feeling for.

Rebecca McNeer described four weaknesses of the genre of biography as it existed in her

time, which she asserts Woolf deplored and used Memoirs of a Novelist to illustrate: 1) the

tendency to moralize or deify the dead; 2) artistic failure to interpret and shape fact into a life-

like mould; 3) use of meaningless “filler” material to close gaps in the subject’s life events; and

4) “the overall difficulty of writing biography at all” (6). These shortcomings were magnified

when the subject was a woman. In Memoirs, the archive clearly breaks down. The obscurity of

women’s lives, even those of professional women, is a theme that Woolf returns to vividly here.


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Let us peel the layers of the generic onion that is Memoirs of a Novelist: In the first layer,

the Narrator presents her critical impressions in the format of a review; Miss Linsett occupies the

next layer – she is the author of the book being reviewed, a posthumous biography of her friend,

Miss Willatt; and finally, the subject of the biography herself, an author of romantic Victorian

novels. All of these women seem hung about with an air of obscurity, despite the fact that all

can, presumably, lay claim to being professional writers. But as Hermione Lee tells us, “Virginia

Woolf has a passion for the ‘lives of the obscure’, and for marginal, unvalued literary forms like

memoirs, letters, and journals” (13). The Narrator observes of Miss Willatt, “it is likely that her

name is scarcely known to the present generation” (70). Nor are her books easily accessible, but

rather, “lie with the three volume novels of the sixties and seventies upon the topmost shelves of

the little seaside libraries, so that one has to take a ladder to reach them, and a cloth to wipe off

the dust” (70). Indeed, the biography itself can be found in a similarly obscure condition. These

forgotten, neglected records of women’s life work are resurrected by the Narrator – but not to be

lauded. She plunges through Miss Linsett’s biography with critical brio, examining its many

flaws with a mix of bemusement and irritation. These faults in their turn suggest problematic

patterns peculiar to women’s life-writing at that time: censorship and a lack of factual

background material on the subject herself, or on her female progenitors. Both can be directly

related to women’s representation, or lack thereof, in the archival record, and by extension, in the

biographical, and historical record which is informed by it. If the archive determines what can be

said, it does so first by determining what can and will be remembered.

The Narrator makes it clear that Miss Linsett is not a gifted biographer – or a particularly

insightful person or sensitive friend. Is it the equally poor quality of Miss Willatt’s novels,

perhaps already laughably dated by the time of the author’s death, that relegates her memoirs to


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this ham-fisted biographer? Or is it the simple fact of her gender partly to blame? Miss Willatt’s

brother, we are told, is approached with the suggestion that “someone” should writer his sister’s

biography – but he demurs from the task himself, delegating the project to one of her female

friends who could be relied upon for her discretion and good taste. This choice is symptomatic of

the first problem specific to women’s life-writing: censorship. In the first chapter of her

exhaustive and highly sensitive 1996 biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee asserts, “”the

inhibitions and censorships of women’s life-writing is one of [Woolf’s] most urgent subjects. It

was still possible for her to say, in 1927, out of her reading of history and biography, ‘Very little

is known about women’.”(13) In the era of Memoirs, an Edwardian review discussing a late-

Victorian biography of a Middle-Victorian author, there is little chance for candid revelations.

Indeed, “delicacy” was a Victorian by-word and tantamount to a pre-emptive species of verbal

censorship, which is anterior to written censorship, because in life-writing, what cannot be

spoken of cannot be known. Due to the markedly stricter social rules women were compelled to

follow as compared to men, and their exclusion from the public realm, far fewer details of their

lives can be known, and those that are known are considered less authoritative (e.g., the letter or

diary as compared to the public record or the official transcript) and therefore less worthy of

either quoting, or perhaps keeping at all. Said letters and journals of the nineteenth and early

twentieth century, despite their private nature, tend also to be so restrained and resort so

frequently to euphemism and innuendo that they sometimes seem to generate almost more

questions than they answer. The result of all of this censorship is vast lacunae in women’s

history, biography, and the primary source materials. In stories like Memoirs, and later in some

of her most influential essays, Woolf boldly proposes that those can and should be filled using

imagination, conjecture, and intuition – rather than leaving the female subject (as Woolf herself


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puts it) a mere “wax work…preserved under glass” as they emerged at the hand of the

conventional biographer (74).

With her vivid, sometimes sensitive, often humorous examples in Memoir, Woolf seems

to endorse her Narrator’s resort to conjecture as an alternate form of biography. “If we may

theorize” about Miss Linsett’s impetus for writing the biography, the Narrator proposes on the

very first page of Memoirs, she feels justified in doing so because Miss Linsett has “cloaked her

motives under large phrases” (69). Likewise, due to the dearth of reliable source material, Miss

Linsett herself is forced to “imagine” the shy, young Miss Willatt’s first ball – however, because

we have only her brother’s remembrances to go by, the Narrator is perhaps justified in believing

that her own guesses about Miss Willatt’s experiences on the occasion are equally valuable as

those of Miss Linsett. Miss Linsett’s prudish concealment and refusal to elaborate the juicer

aspects of Miss Willatt’s experience (such as falling in love) are described by the Narrator

(perhaps acting as a direct mouthpiece of Virginia Woolf) as “most provoking” (73). The

resulting unsettling blanks create a tale so lifeless that one, “unconsciously begins to confuse

Miss Willatt with her remains” (70). In other cases, however, the gaps occur not due to Miss

Linsett’s obfuscations alone, but are partially a result of the lack of primary source materials

available to the biographer regarding either the young female subject (prior to her entrance into a

more public life as a novelist) or her fore-mothers (who were presumably proscribed by their

social position as women from the type of public life which leaves the most concrete,

authoritative, and accessible records). Ms. Linsett must fill in the gaps somehow, even if the

information at her disposal is less than relevant: Though she “takes thirty two pages to cover’ the

first 17 years of Miss Willatt’s life, the Narrator tells us, “she hardly mentions them” (70). The

biographer has little to tell about Miss Willatt’s mother; and yet, the activities of several male


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ancestors, uncles, and brothers are detailed. We are left to guess whether there is not much

known about Miss Willatt’s female relatives, or if there is simply (in the biographer’s opinion)

not much to say. At any rate, Miss Linsett’s lack of diligence or interest, in investigating the

history of her subject’s early female influences and background results in the author having to

resort to “imagining” the effects of her mother’s death on the 16 year old Miss Willatt. Woolf is

well-equipped to “imagine” something like those feelings, having lost her mother at age 13.

However, Miss Linsett says only, “we can imagine how the lonely girl, for even the loving

companionship of father and brothers could not fill that place…”, however, Woolf has her

Narrator point out, “we know nothing of Mrs. Willatt”, making it a meaningless sentiment (71).

As the Narrator discusses Miss Willatt’s fiction, we see that she was constrained by the same

limitations – reluctant to fictionalize her own experiences, she instead “invented Arabian lovers

and set them on the banks of the Orinoco” (75).

At some point, all of Miss Linsett’s imaginings seemingly inspire the Narrator, who

begins to “take the greatest liberties with her text” in order to fill the many lacunae to her

satisfaction (74). The result, Woolf seems to argue, can hardly be less accurate or less pertinent

than the many ‘disguises’ which the biographer forces her subject to wear (74). Thus, Woolf

seems to endorse a method of imaginative, speculative readings of biography, which can be

adopted by any reader, taking her Narrator as an example of the technique. This method involves

taking the biographer’s hints and clues to the obscured subjects as mere points of digression, or

‘talking points’, if you will – the result being a more imaginative, but infinitely more lifelike,

“biography of the mind”. In the mere eleven or so pages of the fictitious Review, the Narrator

feels moved to conjecture frequently, sometime in great detail, on scenes or themes not fleshed

out to her liking, ranging from Miss Willatt’s first ball (71-72), to her true feelings towards


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philanthropic work and the death of her father (75), to Miss Linsett’s own psychological motives

for lingering on details of the death scene. In these cases, the Narrator introduces her conjectural

materials with phrases such as, “no doubt” (69), “we can imagine” (71), “we can only guess”

(72), and “we must guess” (73). At times, even the Narrator’s powers of imagination break down

in the face of Miss Linsett’s patchy narrative, as when the Narrator attempts to picture the older,

successful Miss Willatt at home, visited continually by her the many young acolytes. “What did

they look like and do, what did they want from Miss Willatt and what did they think of her in

private?” the Narrator rhetorically asks us (78). It is too late to find out now, she reflects, because

they all “have been rolled into the early irrevocably” (78) and presumably no records of their

thoughts exist to consult. Thus, because the archive has failed to collect or preserve the wanted

source materials, and the biographer has failed to diligently ferret them out, the savvy reviewer

or common reader is given permission to create her own “archives of the mind.”

Although elements of fictive biography may be identified in fiction across Woolf’s entire

oeuvre (for example, Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed as a system of interlocking biographical

sketches bounded by the unity of time), I believe that the technique is not fore-grounded in such

a literal manner again until almost 20 years after Memoirs of a Novelist was written. By then, the

cross-generic hybrid was ready to bloom with full and spectacular vigor in the form of Orlando:

A Biography. In one of literature’s most open secrets, Woolf fancifully, yet powerfully, re-

imagines her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West as an adventurer who crosses historical eras

and genders with equal brio. I could scarcely presume to add to the extensive literary analysis

focused upon this radically modern novel from its date of publication (1928) right through to the

21st Century. Instead, I will satisfy myself with one small observations directly related to

archives and the three short stories previously discussed: unlike those early, unpublished stories


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of imaginative biography, Orlando does owe some of its lineage to real archival materials,

including illustrative images included in support of the text. The particular two decades which

passed between Memoirs and Orlando, not coincidentally, some of the most radically

transformative in European history – containing as they do The Great War. The censorship and

inhibitions which had created vast gaps in women’s life-writing as explored in the earlier three

stories, were ameliorated perhaps by 1928, but certainly were still very much in evidence.

Perhaps that is why Woolf continued to make use of archives only as a jumping off point in her

ambitious pseudo-biography. In a letter to her lover dated 9th October, 1927, Woolf explains her

choice of Sackville-West as the focal point for this experiment, “your excellence as a subject

arises largely from your noble birth,” (Trautman 231). No biography, regardless of approach, can

succeed without compelling source material. Maria DiBattista tells us how Woolf commandeered

Vita Sackville-West’s family history and “ransacked” her written works, including the history

which Sackville-West wrote of her family’s ancestral home, Knole for materials (xliv). Woolf

uses historical facts taken from real archival source materials by the Sackville family as

touchstones within the fantastical narrative, which technique I believe assists the more incredible

flights of fancy (such as Orlando’s sudden gender change) to pass off unchallenged by the

reader. Another use of actual archival materials Woolf used in Orlando are a series of 8 images

which help to illustrate the text, five of which depict Orlando him(her)self in various

incarnations through the centuries. Beginning with images of paintings and later moving to

photographs, for example, the image captioned Orlando as Ambassador is actually a 17th century

portrait of Lionel Sackville, 7th Earl & 1st Duke of Dorset, while the next image, Orlando on her

return to England, is a handsome photographic portrait of the young Vita-Sackville West. Three

of the five portraits of “Orlando” are in fact photos of Sackville-West. This shift subverts the


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genre of official portraiture and the statements its sitters attempted to make. The early, male

subjects appear stiff and pompous in their elaborate clothing. Perhaps this is a hint of the idea

Woolf would draw out in Three Guineas a decade later, that the male of the species is as addicted

to his finery, if not more so, than the female. Images such as these suggest that the archive may

not only be the first law of what can be said, but the first law of what can be seen. Presumably, it

was easy enough for Woolf to find numerous portraits of well-dressed, self-important aristocratic

within Vita’s line of male ancestors to represent Orlando in his early years. Sackville-West, by

contrast appears elegantly confident in her official portraits, and modernly casual in the final

image: Orlando at the present time, a snapshot taken in the country with two of her dogs in 1928.

Woolf’s selections from the image archive comment successfully not only on the contrasts

between male and female, but the shift over time from Elizabethan to modern English society.

The old problems of women’s biography in particular, censorship and a lack of factual

background material on the subject herself, are solved by simply annihilating them. Censorship

is attached by not so much saying everything as showing everything (there is relatively little

dialogue in Orlando, instead the imagery and action are exceptionally vivid). Gaps still exist, but

rather than occurring due to prudish or squeamish tendencies of the biographer, Orlando skips

over periods of time simply because the Narrator seems bored, “It was now November. After

November, comes December. Then January…” and so on until a year has passed. A lack of

factual material on the subject or her female progenitors is also eliminated by the ingenious

devise of making her subject live for four centuries, and switch genders from male to female

during the period of history in which women begin to experience greater freedoms and have a

limited role in the public realm. Further, Orlando is an inside joke: in diametric opposition to the

goal of most conventional biographies, this work is not interested in informing the reader of just


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who is whom – if the players are unknown to the reader by reputation alone, a good editor (such

as Mark Hussey, who gives us 63 pages of notes in his 2006 Harcourt edition) may be wanted to

lend clarity. Packed with ambiguity, Orlando leaves the reader unsure “whether to regard it as a

biography, or a satire on biography; as a history, or a satire on history; as a novel, or as an

allegory,” as Aiken puts it (234). I believe that by setting up stepping stones of archival fact, and

then taking vast imaginative leaps over them, Woolf succeeds in Orlando, as nowhere else, in

creating a true hybrid between biography and fiction.

Shortly following the publication of Orlando, Virginia Woolf was asked to speak at

Newnham and Girton colleges on the topic “Women and Fiction”. The resulting explorations

into avenues ranging from access, to privilege, to the resources needed to have a voice, are all

guided by a pronounced feminist compass, which Woolf had by then developed and honed to an

incisive degree. Published in 1929 as A Room of One’s Own, the essay soon became, and has

remained one of feminisms great manifestos, however, I believe that its explorations into the

triangulated nature of truth, fact, and fiction may have universal applications. Certainly, this is a

vast territory, much of which falls outside of my project here: However, I will discuss one sub-

point in detail: how Woolf explicitly ties her interests in fictive biography to the lack of archival

reference materials about women, and the lack of archival access to women.

Woolf begins her talk (and, here again, we are not dealing with only one genre, for the

work before us is an essay in the format of a speech), by deconstructing what may have been

meant by the topic of Women and Fiction: it could mean: “women and what they like; or it might

mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is

written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together,”


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(3). Settling on the latter, she describes beginning the process of beginning her project and

feeling almost immediately the impossibility of producing, at the end of her labors, the “nugget

of pure truth” that is surely what her hearers hope to gain (4). This trope of “mining” for

“nuggets” of truth, which the traditional academic world holds is there for the uncovering if one

simply knows where to dig and is diligent enough, is that that she will return to, and subvert,

later in this and other narratives. Her conclusion, that “a woman must have money and a room of

her own if she is to write fiction,” (4) leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and

the true nature of fiction unresolved” (4). She urges her audience to adopt critical-listening by

drawing their own conclusions while considering the “limitations, the prejudices, the

idiosyncrasies of the speaker (4). As she begins to describe the train of thought which led her to

her thesis, Woolf’s methods are as postmodern as are her indefinite, dialectic conclusions.

“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact (4)”, she ventures, and thus introduces her

methods of fictive biographies and archives of the mind formally into a serious nonfiction essay.

One reason she gives for the necessity of this step is censorship, “when a subject is highly

controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. (4) ” Other

reasons she will shortly explicate in her (semi?) fictionalized narratives include lack of access

and lacunae in the archival record of women and their contributions, conditions, and voices.

Her use of a imaginative amalgam, called “Oxbridge” as site of some key incidents in the

narrative allows criticism of not only Cambridge and Oxford simultaneously, rather than one

institution specifically, but becomes a stand-in for any and every traditional, sanctified,

fetishized institution of androcentric learning. Likewise, she tells us, even she is merely herself:

the “I” of the narrator is “only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being, (4)”; in

short, she could be any woman at any time or place. Woolf further emphasizes this lack of fixed


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identity by saying, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any other name

you please – it is a matter of no importance” (5). The female narrator may not necessarily have

an identify, but Woolf seems to suggest that that does not necessarily prevent her from having a

voice.

While walking on the “Oxbridge” campus, the narrator inadvertently wanders off the path

straight into an object lesson. The college Beadle rushes out to intercept her, “horror and

indignation” (6) written on his face. It is literally a turf issue: only scholars and professors are

allowed upon the grass, the path is for visitors like herself. Woolf, attaining young womanhood

at the end of the Victorian Age, had not been offered the opportunity for university study to

which her brothers Thoby and Adrian, and her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, had

all been given free access. In that way, she was representative of most women of her time and

social class. The incident with the Beadle has caused her to lose her train of thought, which fact

reveals that the grass is not just grass: it represents the right to think, to cogitate uninterrupted.

Despite her lack of formal educator, the Narrator is well-read and soon the edifices of

“Oxbridge” begin to inspire thoughts of some of the great writers who had passed through those

halls. Recalling an essay written by Lamb about a manuscript he had seen there, her fancy lightly

turns to thoughts of archival materials. It occurs to her that she is only is only a few hundred

yards away from the library where that very manuscript and myriad other similar gems are

preserved – perhaps she would take a look? However, as she attempts to enter the institution, a

kind of black-clad guardian angel of the library intercepts her at the door, telling her that,

regretfully, “ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or

furnished with a letter of introduction”. (8) Enraged, Woolf makes her narrator swear never to

attempt entry of that institution again. Perhaps that is part of the impetus behind her rejection of


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the “treasures locked safe within its breast”, in favor of what would become an infinitely more

modern, imaginative approach to thinking, access, and truth.

She next visits the British Museum, saying, “if truth is not to be found on the shelves of

the British Museum, where, I asked myself...is truth?” (26) She is not barred from entering there,

but once inside there are other difficulties. “Have you ever noticed how many books are written

about women in the course of a year? Have you any notion how many are written by men?” (26).

Here, the difficulty came not in access, but in a massive overload of information in which finding

a cogent fact about women, let alone a document actually produced by a female on the topic of

women or writing, is tantamount to the proverbial needle in a haystack. She nonetheless must

start somewhere and is soon brought the “avalanche of books” (28) which she has requested.

Here, another access issue raises its head: unlike the male student by her side, she has not had the

benefit of being “trained in research at Oxbridge” and therefore lacked the ability to extract

“pure nuggets” of essential truth from the tomes at hand (28). At the time of her essay, women

had been admitted at Cambridge for just shy of sixty years, however, they were segregated from

male students and their degrees were titular only. Not until 1948, seven years after Woolf’s

death, would women be admitted to full membership in the university. Oxford was already

admitting women to full membership, but had been doing so for only eight years prior to Woolf’s

essay.3 In both cases, a wave of anti-woman feeling, so well documented in Woolf’s later Three

Guineas pamphlet, continued to obtain, demonstrating that access is more than a matter of

simply being physically or legally allowed through the gates. Many fathers who could afford to

send their daughters to college were reluctant to do so on social grounds. Woolf allows her

bitterness to break through the bounds of her narrative in several places (the scene at the

3 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/at-last-a-degree-of-honour-for-900-cambridge-women-1157056.html


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Oxbridge library doors being the most marked), a fault for which she would hypocritically

admonish Charlotte Brontë. But Woolf is perhaps more effective when applying cool, clear irony

to douse her pompous subjects. The young student utters “little grunts of satisfaction” as he

extracts truth from the tomes in front of him, this imagery subtlety inspires the reader to picture a

kind of pig-scholar rooting through the academic muck to discover the fact-truffles and call them

to the attention of his professor/master. “This kind of truth is the traditional academic one…”

Michéle Barrett states, “here, as elsewhere in her writings, her attitude towards professional

academic life was critical in the extreme” (120). I believe that she begins here to privilege her

own style of searching for knowledge by shifting the metaphor of the barnyard animal from

scholar to the knowledge itself, “if, unfortunately, one has no training in a university, the

question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither,

(28)”. She and untrained others like her are, she seems to suggest, are at least the shepherds, even

if not always successful ones, rather than the “grunting” inmates of the farm. Disillusioned and

disowned by the “capital T Truths” of the prevailing male hegemony, Woolf becomes more

interested in “internal truth as opposed to externally validated truth…” posits Barrett, and her

method relied upon “making the truth visible” (121). Woolf was therefore ready to disavow the

formal archive, library, and portrait gallery in favor of archives of the mind – and the vivid,

compelling pictures she was capable of creating with them. Whether her project for those images

was fiction, non-fiction, or dwelt in some cross-generic grey area in between was of increasingly

little concern. “Lock up your libraries if you like;” Woolf proclaims in A Room of One’s Own,

“but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind” (76). Near

the close of the Oxbridge scene, Woolf reflects, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out;

and I though how it is worse perhaps to be locked in” (24). In the process of archival


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(re)construction, upon which she is now poised to begin, Woolf demonstrates how the subversive

archive is more powerful than the sanctioned one, for the very reason that it lacks a power

structure to define or limit it.

Woolf details the fact that she has made a worthy attempt to discover factual information

on women and fiction, and also upon what she believes to be the inextricably linked question of

the reasons for women’s material poverty, within the available historical records, biographies,

and conventional archives. However, as she discovers, woman is glaringly absent, “History

scarcely mentions her,” as she puts it (44). While European history bristles with the halberds and

pikes of innumerable wars, the female subject, limited to a private life uninteresting to male

scholars, “never writes of her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her

letters in existence (45).” Woolf is not commenting on the lack of effort which women

historically took in writing, or their inability to do so, but presumably, the would-be archivists of

the day did not deem those records of “enduring value” and thus failed to “establish and maintain

control, both physical and intellectual”, over those records of women’s lives. The result is

ringing silences and vast gaps in the historical record. And, because those archival materials are

no longer extant, the gaps cannot be filled, Woolf argue, without imaginative materials. I will

pause her a moment for a digression before discussing the significant fictive biography which

Woolf uses to illustrate this thesis in A Room of One’s Own. I assert that there is a clue in A

Room to a project in culled or, if I may “DIY” archives which would occupy much time and

thought over the decade which followed, and would inform and shape one of Woolf’s most

influential nonfiction works: Three Guineas. All these missing facts about women’s historical

lives must “lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books”; the life of the

average Elizabeth woman, for example, “must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it


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and make a book of it. (45)” She demurs to tackling the project herself, however, in A Room,

calling it “ambitious beyond [her] daring” (45). However, in the 1930’s, she would do just that,

and more, with her extensive scrapbooks of materials related to war, women, society, peace,

imperialism, power, and examples of the rhetoric, facts, and figures attending the build-up of

fascism and the march towards World War II which engulfed that decade. I will discuss that

project further in a moment. But for now, let us spare a thought for Shakespeare’s sister.

Although Woolf laments that, “nothing is known about women before the eighteenth

century (45),” she evidently feels that she knows enough to conclude that, “it would have been

impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in

the age of Shakespeare (46).” In this she partially agrees with a bishop whom she quotes as

writing to the newspaper to forefront his opinion that no woman past or present could have the

genius or ability to writer the plays of Shakespeare. From what little she has been able to piece

together about Elizabethan women’s lives from official records (they “had no money

evidently,…were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, 46)”;

could not own property; and were subject to beatings of various intensity at the hands of their

husbands”), Woolf avers, “it would have been extremely odd had one of them suddenly written

the plays of Shakespeare” (46). But Woolf is not content to let that glib, icy statement hold up

her point alone: she instead uses her scene-painting skills to portray a memorable, though

fictitious example of what might had happened had one of them tried. “Let us imagine, since

facts are so hard to come by,” Woolf begins in a manner reminiscent of the fairy-tale threshold

mechanism of “once upon a time”, “what would have happened had Shakespeare had a

wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith” (46). While William is free to become educated, travel

alone, start a family upon his own choosing, and enter his choice of professions – the theatre,


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where (I beg your pardon in saying), “the rest is history”. Judith must remain at home and is not

sent to school. She could likely read a bit, but had little time and no encouragement to do so. She

refuses an unwanted marriage in her teens, braving her father’s beatings. At that point, she runs

away from her and tries her luck with the theatre – but with disastrous results. Laughed at by the

theatre staff, she is not allowed past the stage door. Alone now in London, without an income,

she cannot even eat in a tavern or walk the streets at night. Haunting the questionable

environments of theatres of the day, she proves unable to retain her respectability and becomes

pregnant by an actor, and subsequently ends by committing suicide (47-48). Her painful history

told in just two short pages, Woolf tells us that Judith “lies buried at some cross-roads”

unmarked and unremarkable (48). In the absence of real biography or primary source materials

(which, if they existed, would no doubt have been considered too shameful to preserve), her

thesis must rest on the life-like, though ultimately evanescent shoulders of Judith. For however

near or far Judith’s story rests from the (unknowable) truth of some real Elizabethan girl, Woolf

feels confident in venturing “to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing

them, was often a woman. (49)” Our Narrator is quite comfortable with the triangular

relationship she is building between herself, fact, and fiction: “this may be true or it may be false

–who can say?” she asks after discussion the attribution of anonymous ballads to female

authorship (49). Speaking in 1929, Woolf acknowledges that, “there are almost as many books

written by women now as by men, (79)” and that those include not only novels, but histories,

theory, and travelogues to name a few. However, considering the obscure, lacy lineage upon

which the woman writer had to build her literary contribution, Woof opines that it would be

another hundred years before she might live up to her potential (94). With no actual,


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documentable Judith Shakespeares to remember, women writers should, Woolf tacitly suggests,

feel free to conjure their own.

From the contemporary standpoint, however influential Woolf’s results, some of her

techniques remain problematic. This includes her method of simply making archival materials

out of whole cloth when no suitable materials were extant. Biographer Hermione Lee describes

several corners of Woolf’s opus in which biography, fiction, and feminist manifesto intersect, the

results often problematizing the “relative merits of archival and imaginative research”.4 Woolf

subverts the masculine value of “scientific objectivity”, as does her historian in The Journal of

Mistress Joan Martyn, by elevating the tools of fictive biography and referencing fictive archives

to achieve an outcome that is “more truth than fact” (A Room of One’s Own, 4). The glissement

of that slope between fact and fiction, though a field upon which Woolf plays adeptly, may leave

readers unsure of their footing. She seems to hint strongly that the sanctioned histories,

biographies, and news accounts of the dominant male cannon play no less fast and loose with the

facts. Does she succeed in deflating the privileged position of those hallowed sources? Partially –

but I would assert that she will do so more definitely in the later Three Guineas (which it is

beyond the scope of this paper to discuss at length), in its exhaustive catalogue of examples of

the warmongering, privilege, and masculine spectacle that were ubiquitous in the European

culture of her day. She supports those examples with a self-assembled archive of media

clippings, letters, pamphlets, and photographs collected in the format of a series of notebooks

(Pawlowski 117 - 118). If Virginia Woolf can’t go to the archive, she will make the archive

come to her.

4 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) 14.


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While Woolf’s foregrounding of the experiences of women in A Room of One’s Own is a

project as desperately needed as it was radical, coming as it did just one year after women had at

last won the struggle for universal suffrage in Britain (selective suffrage for women meeting

certain property and age restrictions had occurred in 1918), I assert that the techniques she uses

are nonetheless problematic for a few reasons. She amplifies the voices of women within the

public discourse – but of which women? Woolf has, both during her life and after her death, been

exposed to (in my opinion) justified criticism for her elitism – or to put it more bluntly,

snobbery. For example, in A Room of One’s Own, she expounds on the impossibility of the

working classes producing a brilliant poet, “The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for

two hundred years, a dog’s chance…a poor child in England has little more hope than had the

son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into the intellectual freedom of which great writings

are born.” (108). Or again, while discussing in one of her diaries the newly released Ulysses and

its author, she slides into an elitism that might be amusing, were it not so persistent, “An

illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught workingman, and we all know

how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating” (A

Writer’s Diary, August 16th 1922).

Hermione Lee recounts Woolf’s awkward and ambivalent relations with servants, and her

mixed but ultimately paternalist dealings with the Women’s Co-Operative Guild – a working-

class women’s group for which she at times taught courses and organized lectures (322, 323,

355-6). Despite being immersed in their society in the home and Guild, Woolf never feels

comfortable enough to give working-class women a voice of their own in her writings. Despite

these difficulties, I assert that Woolf’s techniques of using “archives of the mind” are valuable

methods with which to fill lacunae, amplify new voices, and subvert privileged narratives.


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Perhaps one of the best proofs of that assertion lies in discussing the persistent merits of these

techniques in our own time.

Do fictive archives and imagined biographies have a place amid the contemporary

practices and problems of multiple, conflicting, and unsanctioned archives existing side by side

in cyberspace, and real space, with sanctioned and official archives? To deconstruct that

question, let us first examine the state of sanctioned archives today. Archives and their holdings

have proliferated exponentially in recent years, including not only the traditional public

repositories operated by governments, museums, and public universities (for example, Austin’s

own internationally renowned Harry Ransom Center), but also those operated with varying

degrees of open or closed access by medical institutions, private schools, corporations, clubs and

unions, and myriad other institutions. The sheer volume and scope of these holdings is staggering

to contemplate: the National Archives of the United States alone, for example, boasts

“approximately 10 billion pages of textual records; 12 million maps, charts, and architectural and

engineering drawings; 25 million still photographs and graphics; 24 million aerial photographs;

300,000 reels of motion picture film; 400,000 video and sound recordings; and 133 terabytes of

electronic data”.5 Further, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) makes

millions of records publicly available online The number of archives worldwide is impressive:

Wikipedia provides links to the websites of 130 National Archives from Albania to Ukraine,

NOT counting those in the US (with 7 national archives, 50 state archives and 13 Presidential

Library archives listed) and Britain (with 111 public archives listed). All of those are public

archives and do not, of course, touch upon the thousands of private archives worldwide at

universities, corporations, and newspapers to name a few types of venues. Archives or

5 http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html accessed September 13, 2013


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collections dedicated to Woolf, herself, are collected by several institutions including the

National Archives in London, Sussex University, the Berg Collection at the New York Public

Library, Cambridge University, Smith College, the University of Reading, Washington State

University, and the Archive of the International Virginia Woolf Society at Victoria University

Library, Toronto. It may not be an exaggeration to state that Woolf had fewer archives which she

could access in her day than there are archives dedicated to her at present.

Considering Virginia Woolf’s experiences as an upper-middle class, British woman

attempting to access archives and locate records specific to women’s history and experiences less

than a century ago, we are compelled to review the changes not only in general archives, but in

women’s archives in particular. In general, the answer to “how much has changed” is “a lot” –

there are, for example, three major archival institutions devoted solely to collecting, preserving,

and curating women’s records specifically. Those include the World Center for Women’s

Archives in New York, the Aletta Institute for Women’s History in Amsterdam (once known as

the International Archives of the Women’s Movement), and the International Museum of

Women in San Francisco – the earliest of which began to emerge in the late 1930’s.6 Anke Voss

details the struggles of pioneering women’s scholar Mary Ritter Beard to establish and archive

that would allow source material specific to women’s history to be preserved and maintained in

an effort to make heard the hidden voices of women, which led to the creation of the Sophia

Smith College collection at Smith College (Voss, American Archivist, Vol. 74). Further, women

are not the only traditionally marginalized group to lay claim in recent years to an “archive of

their own”: the National African American Archives and Museum in Mobile Alabama and the

African American History Archives of the Western Reserve Historical Society for example, in

6 Miller, Moon, and Voss.


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addition to myriad smaller collections within larger archives (such as the African American

Women Collection of Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript

Library, to name only one). Of course, that is to mention only a few examples of archives

specific to the records of only one culture in only one nation.

In the face of awe-inspiring amount of data, is there any way of reasonably arguing that

continues to be necessary to resort to fictive archives and biographies in the search for the female

subject (or any other marginalized subject), today? Does locating a mental archive that is “more

truth than fact” remain a valid rhetorical approach today? I would argue that materialist issues of

access, privilege, and archival selection have far outlived Wolff’s life span. A common lament of

Woolf scholars of a certain age (those researching in the 1960’s) involved the apparently

draconian archival practices of then Curator of the Berg Collection, John Gordon. Brenda Silver,

for example, discusses her daunting experience with this “librarian of the old school who seemed

to think the contents of the archive belonged to him” (V.W. Miscellany Number 65, page 3). Of

course, far be it from me to cast aspersions on the New York Public Library, however, it may be

worth noting that even today, the Berg’s gatekeeping functions can be a little daunting. “For

admission to the Berg Collection,” we are told on the web page for the Berg Collection of British

and American Literature: Access to the Collection, “please contact [email protected]. Describe

your research topic, summarize your research to date, cite the items you wish to study, and

explain why they are necessary for your project. Please allow up to two business days for a

reply”.7 This is followed by five tightly-packed paragraphs describing the limited hours, myriad

rules and exclusions applying to collection access, including a statement that the general public

is, for all intents and purposes, not allowed access to the collection. Perhaps this will serve as an

7 http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/70767 Accessed September 13, 2013.


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example of ways in which access continues to be defined, controlled and constricted by

traditional institutions. These concerns are often material in nature: the delicate condition of the

records; the lack of resources to scan everything and place it on-line; the concerns of those who

bequeath, lend, or entrust records to these institutions. In any case, I believe it is well to

remember that modern archival practices have not altogether erased the privileges of geography,

culture, education, and socio-economic class.

But, one might argue, what about all those millions of records on-line? Growing by the

day, these impressive archives must surely provide everything an individual, even one with the

most subversive rhetorical project imaginable, might need to make their case or support their

rhetoric? Why should archives of the mind be useful in a post digital-revolutionary world? In this

case, I would submit that it is issues of authenticity, transparency, and accuracy which of

electronic archives raise present barriers of their own. Is a Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare more or

less authentic than a given Wikipedia post? Catherine C. Marshall raises issues of “Digital

Copies and a Distributed Notion of reference in Personal Archives”, considering the multiple

instances, iterations, versions, and transformations of digital files, and the lives those files may

take on when displayed on the internet (e.g., the effects of metadata, etc.), how do we know what

is the definitive or authoritative version? Transparency is an issue when we consider the dual

censorship which takes place in curating digital files: once when the record is accessioned and

again when it is chosen for placement online. Does the judgment of the archivist tend to err on

the side of caution when deciding what to omit or redact when scanning online content? Is

Woolf’s account of her experiences of limited access more accurate than the official policies

recorded by the institutions she visited (or tried to visit)? Is today’s female student at a Muslim


33

university to be believed that she has been denied access to her own institutions library, or is the

institution to be believed?8

Additionally, it is an important, though I find increasingly overlooked fact to note that not

everyone actually has ready (or any) access to the internet – rural, low-income, and certain

disabled users all find barriers to accessing records online. Further, all the records that the World

Wide Web’s combined servers can hold will do an individual no good if he cannot read or if she

has never had the opportunity to learn how to conduct research. For millions of the most

marginalized individuals, the “first law of what can be said” remains an inaccessible and

forbidding tomb of knowledge, which continues to leave them without a voice.

Regardless of the number of women’s archives which may exist now or in the future,

curatorial decisions made in centuries past created unfillable gaps in women’s history and lives.

The decision of an Elizabethan heir to destroy his mother’s diaries upon her death out of a sense

of “delicacy”, or the choice to toss the records of a Victorian women’s club as irrelevant, or the

decision to sacrifice certain records to the demands of limited space or funding because their

originator was not a prominent or famous man, constitute just a few examples. We thus not only

cannot know what these “lost” women said, thought, and did, but in some cases we cannot know

even that they existed – and we never will. Nor are those dark days of lack of diversity within

the archival profession thoroughly behind us. The Society of American Archivists’ Statement on

Diversity available on their website (archivists.org) tells us, “diversity is one of three high

priorities identified in SAA's strategic plan”.9 However, as Elizabeth Adkins confessed in her

8 http://bulletinoftheoppressionofwomen.com/2012/02/21/women-students-would-overcrowd-aligarh-univ-library/;

http://www.islamicinvitationturkey.com/2013/06/09/saudi-arabia-bans-womens-entry-to-library/ 9 http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-statement-on-diversity


34

2007 Presidential Address to the Society entitled “Our Journey Towards Diversity and a Call to

(More) Action”, “SAA has been working to address diversity concerns for more than thirty-five

years, sometimes effectively and sometimes not so effectively”.10 In any case, what diversity

may exist in the archival profession today cannot compensate for the irreversible curatorial

decisions made by privileged agents in past centuries or decades. In that sense, does not Woolf’s

decision to conjure Judith Shakespeare remain valid?

Despite the far greater share of the biographical record taken by women today, in

comparison to Woolf’s lifetime, representation issues have hardly been erased. The scholar or

writer is, as Virginia Woolf well know when she wrote A Room of One’s Own, not a pure artist

floating in a perfect bubble of creative experience – he or she is instead constrained by all of the

practical, economic considerations such as market demand and available capital for the writing

and research processes. In short, we must research what sells, what the public wants, or what the

wealthy patron of the fellowship or other grant believes is important. Archival professionals,

although they often strive to place themselves above those constraints, live in the real world just

as do we all. The archive is a market, too – what users demand and funders support does make a

difference, whether we would like to believe so or not.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf articulates her thesis early on, “a woman must have

money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great

problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved” (4). I have

discussed Virginia Woolf’s use of constructed, elaborated, and imagined archives and

biographies to inform and enrich her approach to those problems within fiction, nonfiction, and

10 http://www.archivists.org/governance/presidential/adkins.pdf


35

hybrid formats. I have culled some of Woolf’s own critiques of the materialist nature of the

archive, including her encounters with physical, social, and educational exclusion from the

sanctioned archives of her day and assessment of some of the lacunae that existed in women’s

records. Finally, I have considered whether resorting to the use of “archives of the mind”

remains a valid rhetorical approach. I have argued that the materiality of the archive – its

exclusionary, forbidding, even impenetrable nature, as well as issues of curation and resource

allocation – continue to affect the availability and accessibility of women’s historical records. I

believe that for women, and indeed for any traditionally marginalized group or scholar pursuing

excluded viewpoints, the fictive archive and imaginative biography remain valid rhetorical

responses to the incomplete, partially inaccessible, and historically curatorially compromised

nature of the archive.

i Dick, Susan. Dick, Susan, ed. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. New Edition. San Diego: Harcourt

Brace & Company, 1989. Print.


36

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