ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf is one of the twentieth century’s most recognisable and celebrated authorial figures. Eighty years after her death, she has become an established ‘canonical superstar’ and remains a solid ‘household name’. Woolf has persistently gained literary and cultural currency and is now a powerful icon claimed by feminists, gender theorists, political activists and avant-garde writers and artists. This chapter considers biofictions about Woolf as contemporary rewritings and re-interpretations of her biographical and fictional hypotexts. It explores how contemporary authors use, shape and incorporate the profusion of extant auto/biographical material about Woolf – one of the most completely documented authors in Western literature – in their fiction to produce seamless hybrid literary artefacts which present alternative ‘realities’ or simulacra of Woolf’s life. Besides Woolf’s modernist aesthetic innovations, her own experimental biographies and essays in which she discusses the genre of the ‘new biography’ anticipated the emergence of biofiction.
