Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist

by Beth Rigel Daugherty

Overview

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.
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 analyses Virginia Stephen’s development and Virginia Woolf’s achievements as an essay writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399504522
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2024
Edition description:	199,647
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Recently retired from Otterbein Universityin 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One: Student, 1882-1904: Learning at Home

1. Learning at 22 Hyde Park Gate

2. Coming into 22 Hyde Park Gate

3. Venturing beyond 22 Hyde Park Gate

4. Reading and Writing Skills

5. Outcomes: Learning at Home

Part Two: Teacher, 1905-1907: Teaching at Morley College

6. Teaching at Morley College

7. Learning from Morley College

8. Teaching Skills

9. Outcomes: Teaching at Morley College

Part Three: Apprentice, 1904-1912: Writing for Newspapers

10. Becoming a Professional

11. Learning from Editors

12. Essay Writing and Book Reviewing Skills

13. Outcomes: Writing for Newspapers

Conclusion

Appendix 1 Virginia Stephen’s King’s College for Ladies Class Schedule

Appendix 2 Virginia Stephen’s Library

Appendix 3 Virginia Stephen’s Morley College Teaching Schedule

Appendix 4 Virginia Stephen’s Lectures

Appendix 5 Virginia Stephen’s Reviews and Essays

Index

Editorial Reviews

A great part of the pleasure of reading Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship is the knowledge that Daugherty brings to bear on Woolf’s early life through the beginning of her career.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany - Jeanne Dubino

[The book is] an invaluable resource for scholars – not only for Woolf specialists, but also for anyone interested in the broader historical context of women’s education or working-class education in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Literature Cambridge - Mitchell Alcrim

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

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

Marked by impeccable scholarship, this is the only full-length study of Woolf’s acquisition of knowledge prior to her marriage.

CHOICE - Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier