It is rare to find an area of Virginia Woolf’s work that has not had, in some form, critical attention. Yet this thesis is the first study, of any length, which takes aunts in Woolf’s writing as its focus.
This thesis starts by asking the question, why are there so many aunts in Woolf’s writing? This initial enquiry leads to a consideration of the position of aunthood in British culture during Woolf’s lifetime, and argues that the discourse surrounding the 1907 Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act is emblematic of the aunt’s unique position between inside, and outside, the family. Using this historicist research alongside existing poststructuralist Woolf scholarship, this thesis develops a new way to read Woolf’s innovation in narrative form. It develops a theory of the materteral which takes into account the aunt’s specific historical position at the time, and Woolf’s personal conception of aunthood as expressed in her private writing as well as her fiction. Using this understanding of the materteral this thesis traces the trajectory of aunthood in Woolf’s work, whether it manifests in character (Helen Ambrose, Eleanor Pargiter, and Lucy Swithin to name a few of Woolf’s aunts) or, as this work argues is particularly pertinent for Woolf studies, in narrative voice
