‘The imagination is largely the child of the flesh’: Virginia Woolf’s Embodied Historicity

‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1930, rev. 1931) stands apart in Virginia Woolf’s profuse essayistic production. Part political essay and personal reminiscing, part sociological reflection and meta-historical exploration, it should be read as one of Woolf’s most visionary experimentations in history writing. In that essay Woolf probes the experiential nature of history writing, the way identity formations and structures of domination are embodied and history is inscribed in the everyday. Such emphasis reminds us that Woolf’s experimental history writing was contemporary to key historiographical turns in 20th century history writing, from the pioneering work of economic historian Eileen Power, to the history of sensibility, or later micro-history. Woolf’s attention to embodied social identity and sustained reflexiveness also allows her to anticipate on later historiographical evolutions, in the works of the likes of Raphael Samuel or, more recently, Yvan Jablonka. Turning to the 1931 essay, as well as sections from her 1926 diary and A Room of One’s Own, the article highlights Woolf’s empiricist history writing and the way it grounds historical self-reflexiveness in the lived and experiential reality of political and cultural power structures.