English Studies Conference: Carole Bourne-Taylor (Oxford University), “The journey is everything”: Virginia Woolf’s Continental Adventure

A consciously European writer with ‘the zest of travelling’ and 'a taste for edginess', Virginia Woolf found in France a ‘congenial civilisation’ (an antidote to what she perceived as the ‘insularity’, ‘domesticity’ and ‘homeliness’ of England), where she could reject (just like Montaigne did) the notion of a being-in-stasis. Her appropriating the Montaignean motto signals her rejection of dogmatism and doxa, as well as a parti pris in favour of process and open-endedness. If the sheer strangeness of a foreign language (anticipating Barthes's own exhilaration) and landscapes spurred her spirit of experimentation – Proust was her ‘great adventure’ after all – it was Montaigne who provided her with a an epistemological model and writing protocol.