Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives

Monica Latham is a Professor of British literature at the English Department of the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She obtained a PhD in 2003 from Université de Nancy, France. Her thesis analysed the genesis of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, and was entitled ‘De Melymbrosia (1908) à The Voyage Out (1915): l’invention allotropique du projet woolfien d’écriture’. Since then, Latham has published over sixty articles on modernist and postmodernist authors in many international journals and academic publications. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015). She is the co-editor of the series ‘Book Practices and Textual Itineraries’, ‘Biofiction Studies’ and ‘Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks’.

• Introduction: ‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Catching the PhantomBiography, fiction and biofiction: from ‘bastard’ to ‘hybrid’Visions and designsPostmodernist truthful (mis)representationsFrom truthful fictions to travesties of truthGoals and perspectivesChapter 1: Bioplay(giarism)sThe ‘little cut-and-paste job’‘The play’s the thing’Virginia’s feminist companionsThe last song of the nightingaleVirginia and Vita: a year in loveChapter 2: Detecting WoolfIn the shadow of WWI: Virginia as a feminist sleuthWho killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five!Chapter 3: Virginia’s DaughtersVirginia’s long shadowVirginia’s biological progenyChapter 4: Vanessa and VirginiaA tale of two sisters Vanessa and her sister: ‘twinned always’ Vanessa and Virginia: ‘psychically Siamese’Vanessa and Virginia: a biofictional spin-offChapter 5: Polarity, Pairs, Peers and ParallelismsRiding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘sixty’s gate’Adeline and VirginiaMandril and the marmosetChapter 6: Biofictive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf / Virginia DallowayA cameo appearanceMrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown: death, birth and survivalChapter 7: Bloomsberries ReimaginedLytton and VirginiaVariable geometries: squares, circles and trianglesBloomsbury legaciesConclusion: Posthumous Lives: ‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’Biographical Woolfs and fictional VirginiasA summing-up of Woolf’s afterlivesBiofiction as critical interpretationVirginia Woolf legend: keeping the myth alive