'To read a book well,' Virginia Woolf wrote once in a famous essay, 'one should read it as if one were writing it.'
This course will take you to Virginia Woolf's writing desk to delve into her creative process. We will discover her perspective on writing novels and follow her difficult journey towards finding her unique voice. We will study Woolf's ideas on fiction in their context and see how they affected the writing of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.
How far should a modern novelist rely on tradition? How can she create characters and express emotions? How would she handle a whole novel's design, and craft its sentences?
By reading a selection of Woolf's essays on literature and extracts from her diary, memoirs and letters, we will realise how deeply Woolf thought about these questions, reflecting on her own writing and that of other authors. The original solutions she found to the challenges of writing fiction opened up the novel genre to new and exciting possibilities.
We will read and discuss passages of Woolf’s prose together imagining to be Woolf's 'fellow workers' and 'accomplices', becoming, in the process, more insightful readers of her experimental writing.
This course is part of the Oxford University Summer School for Adults (OUSSA) programme.