‘The People’ of Virginia Woolf: Populism and Tradition

In Virginia Woolf’s last years, while continental fascist movements were employing the language of populist nationalism, Woolf launched her own investigations into ‘the people’ and how populist discourse has functioned in English literary history. Through her unfinished essay “Anon,” and her final novel Between the Acts, Woolf explores populism and history across several vectors. First she interrogates the values and burdens of a millennia of literary history that was, as she put it in A Room of One’s Own, ‘the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people.’ Another is the powers and dangers of writing ‘We’: when does it promote solidarity, and when only homogenisation? Finally, she explores the simultaneous centrality and marginalisation of ‘the people’ in English history: not quite the powerful, but also not the eccentric or obscure, ‘the people’ serve as a silent but troubling force in her accounts of the past. What unites all these projects is her formal evocation of the rhythmic waves of assemblage and dispersal, best dramatised in the several instances of congregation and dissolving of the audience in Between The Acts.