Alphabetical Woolf

ABSTRACT This article explores Virginia Woolf’s practice of dismantling words into individual letters and their connection to her conception and understanding of the alphabet linked to her study of Greek, the foundation of her linguistic world. Its prominence in her writing, from The Voyage Out to Between the Acts, where a barn resembles a Greek temple and English words fall apart, is fundamental to grasping Woolf’s aesthetic. Greek became, in fact, the resource and repository of her rhetorical style and self-conscious awareness of the construction of words that exists throughout her writing. Isolating letters also emphasized the visual dimension of texts Woolf valued from her typesetting at the Hogarth Press. Constructing and deconstructing individual words was a physical activity. Returning her words to their literal roots in her novels created a theater of composition. “What is Greek for?” Woolf asked in Jacob’s Room, “if not to be shouted from Haverstock Hill in the dawn” (JR 59)?