ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, ‘Detecting Woolf’, focuses mainly on Ellen Hawkes and Peter Manso’s The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of Espionage with Virginia Woolf (1983) and Stephanie Barron’s The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2009). The authors use the belligerent contexts of WWI and WWII for these detective, political thrillers which spring from Woolf’s denunciation of war, fascism and patriarchy as voiced in Three Guineas. Woolf’s pamphlet remains a detectible palimpsest and orients the characters’ actions in two biofictions that offer a portrayal of Virginia in keeping with Woolf’s feminist credo and political inklings, but in contrast to her high modernist narrative signature. Both contemporary authors rely on genre fiction to rehabilitate the historical figure’s image and debunk the pervasive legend of Woolf fostered by popular culture as a mad, frail, suicidal genius.
