The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth
There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury
Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis.
James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The
English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use
of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962).
The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either.
his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on
subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the
subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus,
Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists
that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life,
not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him
a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and
historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective
and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that
dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
