“From Whose Face”: Virginia Woolf and the Impossible Task of Criticism

Preface

In 1929, Woolf remarked that “to write criticism is now like keeping my hand clenched.” Just eight years later, she was dreaming of “a new method of writing criticism” that might take the form of an “essay-novel.”

“From Whose Face” explores this very particular Woolfian dream and does so, indeed, in the style of an essay-novel. The door is thereby opened not only to such familiar inter-War figures as the literary critics of Cambridge (F. R. Leavis et al.) but also to such obscure or even fictional figures as a woman and a man from the northern town of Huddersfield. The woman is a millworker with whom Woolf corresponded; the man stands in a public lecture-hall and was wholly imagined by Woolf.

What follows, then, is an attempt to capture something of literary criticism’s extra-mural history or what Woolf calls “criticism […] without rules.” This lawless school of criticism will be seen, in the first instance, to have questioned the rule of form that insists on the essay as the only way to do academic criticism. Woolf’s lawless school will then also be seen to question various other kinds of rules or codes that inform the emergent discipline of English Literature.