'To read a book well,' Virginia Woolf wrote once in a famous essay, 'one should read it as if one were writing it.'
This course will take you to Virginia Woolf's writing desk to delve into her creative process. We will uncover what it is like to write a novel from her perspective and follow her difficult journey towards finding her unique voice.
'For this is certainly true – one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event – meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.'
How far should a modern novelist rely on tradition? How can she create characters and express emotions? How would she handle a whole novel's design, and craft its sentences?
By reading a selection of Woolf's charming essays on literature and short extracts from her diary and letters, we will realise how deeply Woolf thought about each of these questions, reflecting on her own writing and studying other authors. The very original solutions she found to the novelist's 'difficulties' opened up the novel genre to new and exciting possibilities.
After understanding Woolf's ideas on fiction in their literary and historical context, we will see how they affected the way she moulded her novels Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse. We will read and discuss passages together imagining to be Woolf's 'fellow workers' and 'accomplices', with the aim of becoming, in the process, more insightful readers of her experimental writing.