This thesis deals with those contemporary novels, known as biofictions, which not only rewrite the lives of historical, canonical authors in a fictional way, but also engage in a dialogue with their precursors’ texts. Biofictions have extended the tradition of life writing and, through the practice of rewriting, have made a significant contribution to reading the past in relation to the present.
Since, in recent years, Virginia Woolf has been the protagonist of many biofictions and several of her novels and themes have been reworked in a variety of different ways, I chose to investigate the reason for her appeal to contemporary tastes. Thus, I focused on her most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, in which Virginia Woolf openly drew inspiration from her own life experience, her memories and feelings, and transformed biographical facts into fiction, so much so that it is certainly a novel about her family, childhood and her struggles to become an artist.
My choice was guided by the awareness that life writing has been reconfigured from a postmodernist perspective, and, since Woolf’s life and work are continuously being rewritten, I wanted to examine whether To the Lighthouse, a personal real life history rewritten as fiction, could be read as an antecedent of contemporary biofictions. Virginia Woolf herself, in fact, engaged with the question of life writing, extended its range and explored the relationship between auto/biography and fiction, a tradition that Postmodernism has further developed. To the Lighthouse uses auto/biography, but extends its limits and turns it into something between biography and fiction. Virginia Woolf borrows elements and events from her own life and “recycles” them to offer her own vision of the world, to the extent that To the Lighthouse can be read both as pure fiction and as fictional autobiography.
The effects of Woolf’s experiments in life writing and of her blurring the rigid borders between fact and fiction are central to those postmodernist novels, which deal with the complex relationship between life and fiction. Her novel is definitely a work of fiction, but I argue that being so full of both life (bio) and personal history, it allows us to draw a connection between her form of life writing and contemporary biofictions.
I hope to contribute to this field by discussing two postmodernist biofictions: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia, which I read not only as an evident rewriting of Woolf’s life, but also as a dialogue, more or less obvious, with To the Lighthouse. In doing so, I adopt an intertextual approach, which places these biofictions in relation not only to Woolf’s life, but also to her novel.
I follow two main routes of exploration: the first is to see how in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf mixes real facts from her life with events and thoughts she only imagines, thus creating a work of fiction. The second is to see how the two postmodernist novels, the object of this thesis, bestride two fields: the bio-fictional, which engages with Woolf’s life, mixes real and imaginary experiences and recreates her thoughts, and the intertextual, which engages significantly with Woolf’s work, namely with To the Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Vanessa and Virginia, with their many references to To the Lighthouse illuminate Woolf’s continuous interest in life writing, which she revealed in many essays and her significant experiment in “using” life in her novel. Thus, they make a contribution to the refashioning of To the Lighthouse: both novels centre around such themes as family ties, personal losses, the effort that artistic creation requires and the value of fame, which are pivotal in To the Lighthouse and adopt Woolf’s pioneering technique of exploring the inner life of her characters. Their books are thought-provoking and raise serious questions about our relationship with Virginia Woolf and, more specifically, with To the Lighthouse
