ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historians’ histories that Woolf inherited and how the knowledge of their embedded discourses challenges the usual representations of her position vis-à-vis tradition. I consider the reasons why Woolf actively engaged in conversations with the dominant discourse of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century historiography – a crowded and heterogeneous field of knowledge. I then disentangle the reconstructed master-narrative of nineteenth-century historical thought encapsulated in the label “whig historiography” from its more complex version. My aim here is to recover Woolf’s own, apparently less heterogeneous, conception of “historians’ histories” and the political strategy that underlies it.
