"Where am i?"

feminine space and time in Virginia Woolf's the years

Pawlowski

pp. 75-91

in: Attiede Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe, Attie de Lange (eds), Literary landscapes, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

On February 2, 1933, Virginia Woolf abandoned her project to create a new form for her writing, the "Essay-novel," which she had conceived of as a mingling of narrative chapters alternating with explanatory essay. Woolf's experiment to forge two discursive types — fiction and nonfiction, rainbow and granite — into one textual space had, in her mind, failed; but the pressure to continue this work as a narrative embedding of space/time would succeed. For by 1934, Woolf had re-titled The Pargiters, the abandoned earlier work, as Here and Now (Leaska, 1977, p. xv), a working title which sounds the keynote of the emergent work as a representation of human existence in space and time: here in the present, fleeting moment. By September 15, 1935, after trying out a number of provisional names, Woolf had decided on a title: "And The Years (that name is fixed; dropped like a billiard ball into a pocket)" (Woolf, 1982, p. 342). The new title, whose very plurality implies the passage of time, captured the shape of the book, arranged into chapters each named for the year in which its events occur. Early in the first chapter, "1880," Woolf would introduce the dominant theme and visual pattern of ceaseless change in time and space: "Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky" (Woolf, 1965, p. 4).²

Cited authors

Woolf Virginia