The Unknown Virginia Woolf

Since its first publication in 1978, Roger Poole’s The Unknown Virginia Woolf has achieved recognition as one of the classic studies of Woolf’s life and work. Poole revised the conventional view of Woolf as ‘mad’ by treating her breakdown as socially intelligible. The theme of madness was reconceived in order to provide an intellectual biography that traced Woolf’s fear and resentment to her childhood and adolescence. Poole uses the phenomenological concept of embodiment to address the concealed intentionality that lies behind apparently deviant behaviour. He shows how Woolf’s challenge to accepted conventions of communication, in both her life and work, is an appeal for meaning. Long considered radical and iconoclastic, this book now occupies a central place in Woolf, gender, and modernist studies. This new edition includes a specially written preface evaluating recent developments in Woolf studies, literary theory and contemporary feminist criticism.