Hours in a «Large and Quite Unexpurgated» Library: Virginia Woolf’s Early Essayistic Apprenticeship

This essay takes into account Virginia Stephen’s relationship with her father’s library and, more specifically, it focuses on the influence that such a bookish inheritance exerted on her career as a literary critic and essayist. It was precisely in the premises of this remarkable library that Virginia’s long-lasting interest in nonfiction first awakened: in the 1890s, together with her siblings, she founded the Hyde Park Gate News, a handwritten amateur newspaper. She then went on to become a professional literary critic, following her father’s footsteps in the London literary public sphere. Rather than tracing the symbolic presence of the (paternal) library in her fiction, my analysis aims to contemplate the paternal library microcosm as a sort of secular temple where the writer’s intellectual Bildung could take place without the many restrictions to which a young woman, even one coming from such an eminent family, was inevitably subjected.