In June 2019, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio for the International Virginia Woolf Conference, which that year had a theme of Woolf and social justice. I delivered a paper titled, “Time Passes: What Do We Do with Woolf’s Offenses?”
The paper was going to appear in an academic collection, but since that project seems to have been delayed or stalled, I decided 5 years was long enough for this essay to be unavailable, and asked to release it. The editors kindly agreed.
The question of what we do with imperfect figures from the past — what we do with the past at all — is immensely complicated. Woolf doesn’t make it easy, particularly in some of the racist and anti-semitic (despite being married to a Jewish man) statements she made. Hermione Lee dealt with this in an essay 25 years ago that I build off of. But I also consider the often arrogant and self-righteous approach contemporary readers take, readers who are immensely forgiving of their own sins while deciding the past is populated only by saints and monsters.
(I’m almost done with a post about a couple of Woolf essays that also deal with the past. So this is going to be something of a Woolf week around here.)
