"Every secret of a writer's soul, experience of his life, and quality of his mind is written large in his work." -- Virginia Woolf Panken enables us to read this secret language without doing violence to the artistic integrity of the writing. Virginia Woolf's continuing need for maternal protection, her physical symptoms, depressive bent, anorexia, and suicidal leanings suggest her vulnerability, inner struggle, and masked rage. This book delves into the substrate of Virginia Woolf's emotional dilemmas as well as the subtexts of her novels and shows the confluence between her life and art. It brings new insights into Woolf's struggle to come to grips with her confused personal and sexual identity, into her artistic conscience, and into the conditions and motivations of her suicide.

A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

John R. Maze presents a penetrating psychoanalytic reading of Virginia Woolf's novels from first to last. Underlying their elegant, imaginative, mysterious texture there is revealed a network of sibling rivalry, incestuous attraction and exploitation, sexual repulsion, bizarre fantasies, anger, and fatal despair. Woolf's feminism and pacificism, based on her conscious insight into an authoritarian society, were given passionate conviction by her resentment and irrational guilt over her half-brothers' sexual aggression against her as a vulnerable girl. This found its place in repressed animosity toward her idealized mother, whom she blamed not only for failing to protect her, but also for trying to impose the Victorian female sexist orthodoxy. Deeper still was the childhood conviction that her mother was complicit in the fantasied genital injuries—exacerbated later, she felt, by the males in her life—which prevented her from having children, as her envied sister had. Maze's approach not only reveals the intimate processes of Woolf's imagination, but yields a deeper and richer reading of her texts. An important study for all students and scholars of British 20th-century literature, feminist literary criticism, and critical theory in general.

To Virginia Woolf, London was a source of creative inspiration, a setting for many of her works, and a symbol of the culture in which she lived and wrote. In a 1928 diary entry, she observed, "London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets." The city fascinated Woolf, yet her relationship with it was problematic. In her attempts to resolve her developmental struggles as a woman write in a patriarchal society, Woolf shaped and reshaped the image and meaning of London. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theories, Susan Squier explores the transformed meaning of the city in Woolf's essays, memoirs, and novels as it functions in the creation of a mature feminist vision. Squier shows that Woolf's earlier works depict London as a competitive patriarchal environment that excluded her, but her mature works portray the city as beginning to accept the force of female energy. Squier argues that this transformation was made possible by Woolf's creative ability to appropriate and revise the masculine literary and cultural forms of her society. The act of writing, or "scene making," allowed Woolf to break from her familial and cultural heritage and recreate London in her own literary voice and vision. Virginia Woolf and London is based on analyses of Woolf's memoirs, her little-known early and mature London essays, Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, and The Years. By focusing on Woolf's changing attitudes about the city, Squier is able to define Woolf's evolving belief that women could "reframe" the city-scape and use it to imagine and create a more egalitarian world. Squier's study offers significant new insights into the interplay between self and society as it shapes the work of a woman writer. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley "Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology