ABSTRACT
My aim in this chapter is to reconcile Woolf the modernist critic with Woolf the historiographer and foremother of feminist literary history. To do so, I begin by disentangling the threads of her legacy as a reviewer, essayist and critic, those threads being themselves woven into the evolution of literary history and general history in the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. I then examine several of Woolf’s critical essays to assess the specificity of her practice as a critic and a historiographer. This practice, I argue, is both framed by a specific context – here the construction of the story of English literature at the end of the nineteenth century – and the result of a strategy consisting in breaking down illusory boundaries (between practices, periods, literary categories) and redrawing new affiliations.
