"This Loose, Drifting Material of Life": Virginia Woolf and Her Experiments in Life-Writing

“My God, how does one write a biography?” and “What is a life?” These were Virginia Woolf’s words in a letter to her friend Vita Sackville-West in 1938, echoing her life-long interest in the art of biography and the very essence of life. Woolf’s connection to biography runs deep and can be traced back to her father’s role as the editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Furthermore, her close association with Lytton Strachey, renowned for his unconventional biographies such as Eminent Victorians (1918), prompted her to explore the genre of life-writing. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how biography shaped her development as a life-writer and to delve into her own experimentations with the genre. I will begin by looking at the Victorian landscape of life-writing and the following emergence of the “new biography” movement, led by prominent figures such as Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. In the last chapter, I will discuss two of Woolf's most experimental works, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), both subtitled “A biography”. Here Woolf skillfully blends factual accounts of the lives that inspired her with fiction. Orlando is a fantasised biography of Woolf’s close friend Vita Sackville-West, whereas Flush tells the life of the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning through the eyes of her dog. These fictitious biographies provide Woolf the creative freedom to mix genres, crafting a form suited to her artistic objectives.