ABSTRACT
In the Good Housekeeping essays, Virginia Woolf goes much further and is not simply interested in Ruskin's style. This chapter argues that within the essays lies the figure of John Ruskin that Woolf's photographic method reveals. Woolf's silent and extended dialogue with Ruskin thus provides the main connecting link between the six essays on London and illuminates them while giving its full meaning to their intermedial method. Woolf goes back to the Victorian art critic and political thinker's work to voice her agreement and disagreement with his conception of architecture, aesthetics and politics while loosely shaping her own utopia. Neither mentioning Ruskin's name nor acknowledging her debt to him, Woolf inhabits his work and transforms it, using his photographic method and playing it against him, hovering between homage to the great Victorian and disrespect for him, de-authorising him to better impose her own voice and voice her own politics.
