Virginia Woolf’s and Jean Rhys’s Embodied Writing

Eret Talviste’s talk will draw from her recent monograph, Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment, and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), to explore how both authors understood writing as a deeply embodied practice. Beginning with their diaries, letters, and autobiographical texts, the discussion will then turn to selected novels and short stories to demonstrate that Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernism is grounded in the visceral and the earthly. Their work will be considered retrospectively through Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, particularly its final stage, the ‘School of Roots’, which, like the writing of Woolf and Rhys, is earthbound, fleshly, and joyfully attuned to the materiality of life—even when that life is rendered as text.