By Chloe Mansola
Author Biography:
Chloe Mansola was born and raised in Greece and moved to Edinburgh in 2019. She graduated in July 2023 from the University of Edinburgh with an English Literature MA with Honours. Since May 2023 she has been working as a sub-editor for Manifesto Press and is a barista at Fettle. She finally finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall recently, devoured Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength a few weeks ago, and just read, really loved, and learned a lot from war reporter Aris Roussinos’ Rebels. She is about to get her masters degree in Journalism.
Read the full essay here:
The topic addressed is Virginia Woolf’s life-writing – which is approached as an investigation into her own and her family’s selfhood - with exclusive focus on a selection her essays, letters, diary extracts, and unfinished writings, including Moments of Being, The Platform of Time, The Modern Essay, The Decay of Essay Writing, and The New Biography. The discussion of Moments is partially informed by Freud’s concepts of ambivalence and screen memories. Two sets of secondary sources are used; scholarship on Woolf’s life-writing by Marcus, Pollentier, and Rosenbaum, and scholarship on the essay form in my second chapter, by Dillon, Hardison, and Mintz. The essay discusses the nature and significance of the essay form and draws on these readings in order to conclude upon the ways the essay form is relied upon by Woolf to best express her interests and concerns around the development of selfhood. The essay argues that the level of self-examination achieved by Woolf in my primary sources is aided by being written for the essay form, due to both the nature of the essay, and Woolf’s aim of self-dissection in life-writing.
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