California Woolf Essay

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In this essay I wish to discuss how Woolf brings history and fiction together in Orlando to reveal the limitations of Victorian historiography and biography. Orlando doesn’t focus on literature’s preoccupation with history but focuses on fiction’s engagement with the discipline of history itself,it illustrates the ways that narrative fiction challenges the authority of information documented by professional historical biography in the twentieth century. The perspective that I have chosen to examine the novel from is a historicist one. I have done so because I think that Woolf was a novelist who was engaged with the socio-historical milieu in which she lived and that her Victorian upbringing had a significant influence on her writing.; a …show more content…
Her grandfather was Victorian historian Sir James Stephen, Regis professor of modern history at Cambridge and her father was Leslie Stephen, the first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Asides from these prestigious connections Woolf was also friends with,and briefly engaged to, Lytton Strachey, who was a highly unorthodox biographer. It is reasonable to assume that all of these factors had an influence on the young Virgina Stephen; perhaps none more so than her father, who was a significant late Victorian historiographer and biographer. However Woolf was very aware of the patriarchal and exclusive way in which history was written. Therefore Orlando does not transcribe a life that fits into Leslie Stephen’s DNB standard easily; specifically for two reasons, firstly the subject of the biography is female and secondly Orlando is concerned with both the internal and the external experience. Woolf uses elements from traditional biography and envelops them in fictional narrative ,to paraphrase Woolf herself she combines ‘the granite and the rainbow’. by doing so she illustrates how narrative fiction challenges the authority of information documented by professional historical biography in the twentieth

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