“I must not settle into a figure”: French Portraits of Virginia Woolf in the Shadow of Proust and Joyce

Abstract

This essay analyses two significant and often interrelated aspects of Virginia Woolf’s reception in France throughout the 1920s and 1930s: its being essentially mediated by the connections that Bloomsbury maintained with Paris, and the fact that it was overshadowed by the fame of Proust and Joyce, who occupied pride of place on the French intellectual scene. Such comparison significantly contributed to the delineation of Woolf’s public image abroad and seems to justify the author’s unease about the circulation of a stereotypical portrait of herself, which would hinder her personal investigation into the fictional form.