ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to examine aspects of the early career of the English novelist Virginia Woolf, drawing primarily on Howard Gruber's (1974, 1989b, 1989c) approach to the understanding of creativity that views the individual as a unique "evolving system" engaged in a series of goal-directed activities. The various enterprises Woolf engaged in preceding the publication of her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room, in 1922 are detailed—including her early literary influences and activities, family background, "organization of affect " ( Gruber, 1995 , p. 400), development of expertise, and network of writing enterprises. The method utilized here was a blending of the idiographic account of Woolf 's resolution of the problem she set for herself of re-fanning the English novel (in a departure from the realism of, for example, Hardy, Austen, and Dickens) to capture the stream of human consciousness. This idiographic account and nomothetic findings of germane psychological research (e.g., expertise and the psychology of writing) provide a network of constraints that serve as a kind of framework for an analysis of aspects of the creative process (see Tweney, 1989b).
