Book News: A deep dive into Virginia Woolf's education

Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist

BY BETH RIGEL DAUGHERTY

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399504515

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-virginia-woolf-s-apprenticeship.html

This study takes up Woolf’s challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father’s library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen’s learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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Weaving together Virginia Stephen’s homeschooling, her teaching and her writing for the newspapers, Beth Rigel Daugherty demonstrates how these three strands shape Virginia Woolf’s essay persona, her essays, and her relationship with her readers. She also shows why Virginia Stephen’s apprenticeship compels Virginia Woolf to become a pedagogical essayist. The volume publishes two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time and mines rarely used archival materials. It also includes five appendices, one detailing Virginia Stephen’s library and another her apprenticeship essays.

This is the first in a two-volume study of Virginia Woolf’s essays that analyzes Virginia Stephen’s development and Virginia Woolf’s achievements as an essay writer.

Drawing on deep research into the social history of women’s lives and of education, Daugherty shows with superb attention to detail how Virginia Stephen’s early experiences of teaching and of being taught nourished the seeds that flowered as Virginia Woolf, "an essayist compelled to teach." This is impeccable and important scholarship. -– Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University

This electrifying magnum opus illuminates Virginia Woolf’s formative experience of teaching working-class adult students while starting her own career as a freelance book reviewer. Beth Rigel Daugherty shows how helping and identifying with novice learners influenced Woolf’s nonfiction aesthetic. Over many subsequent years, Woolf made a striking attempt to write essays in ways that would welcome ordinary readers.

Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship launches a new era in the way Woolf is assessed and will stimulate scholars, teachers, and writers in the broad and burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction. Deeply researched historically and biographically, it contributes beyond Woolf studies to the fields of memoir, personal essay, journalism, and pedagogy. Warm of manner and lively of style, it has a bold and ambitious purpose: to help us see Virginia Woolf anew as a working, learning, growing person and writer. Woolf emerges as someone deeply concerned with connecting with others regardless of their class and gender, thereby attempting to transcend the limits of her family, her heritage, and her time. Showing this is the book’s larger, remarkable achievement. – Richard Gilbert, MFA, nonfiction author, teacher, and publisher

Recently retired from Otterbein University in Ohio, Beth Rigel Daugherty taught modernist English literature, Virginia Woolf and Appalachian and Native American literature along with many thematically focused writing courses for 36 years. Falling in love with Virginia Woolf and her essays while at Rice University, she has been presenting and publishing on both ever since with peer-reviewed articles in edited collections; editions of the “How Should Read a Book?” holograph draft and Woolf’s fan letters in Woolf Studies Annual; and, with Mary Beth Pringle, the Modern Language Association teaching volume on To the Lighthouse.