The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf

The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf – Diane F. Gillespie

The violation of boundaries between the arts is often cited as a characteristic of modernism. Although Virginia Woolf’s interest in painting is a well-established example, The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf offers new insight into the importance of Woolf’s relationship with painters, their theories, and their works. The collection also reveals for the first time the great impact that the arts – photography, cinema, dance, and music – had on Woolf’s writing. In these eight essays Gillespie has brought together some of the most exciting new scholarship in this area to show how similarities and differences among the arts helped Woolf define her own verbal experiments. Receiving formal inspiration, she nevertheless evolved ways to prevent form and, at the other end of the continuum, sentiment, from obliterating general emotion and, to some extent, social commentary. In all these other arts, Woolf found ways to challenge the largely masculine traditions of literature. She also discovered more indirect ways of creating characters in her fiction, particularly in depicting the complexities and ambiguities of ordinary people. As much as the volatility in the art world of her day excited her, however, and as much as the limitations of language sometimes frustrated her, Woolf consistently asserted the primacy and inclusive nature of her literary art. This collection of essays, which provides unique insight into the Bloomsbury Group, will be of interest to all readers of Virginia Woolf’s fiction and to students of modernism as well.