'More forms, and stranger': Virginia Woolf's feminist imaginative historiography

Virginia Woolf's approach to writing about history in her prose takes the form of feminist imaginative historiography. I define feminist imaginative historiography as a method of writing about history that values the use of the imagination and, because it does so, allows for historical writing that both imagines women into history and keeps open the possibilities for the identity of "woman." The valuing of the imaginative allies Woolf's approach with that of amateur historians, many of whom in the nineteenth century were women. The categories of "amateur" and "professional" history were defined in the nineteenth century during the process of history's becoming a professional discipline so that the approach and subject matter of amateur history were left out of professional history. Woolf's prose also anticipates concerns of contemporary feminist historiography. Orlando experiments with a feminist form of biography and shares connections to the imaginative method of science fiction and fantasy. A Room of One's Own surveys various approaches to writing women's history to suggest that what is needed is precisely a feminist imaginative historiographical approach. The Years suggest a method of writing social history in a way that can be both generalized and precisely focused. Between the Acts is a subversion of nationalist history that examines the role of sexism in propping up England's nationalist mythology. Woolf's textual forms resist the idea that there is only one appropriate form for writing women's history and aim to open up the possibilities of these forms so that questions of what constitutes history and what encompasses the identity of "woman" keep being asked.