"Can prose be dramatic?"

: Practice, performance, and Virginia Woolf's dramatic prose

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s prose is more commonly compared to poetry than to drama. However, in her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’, Woolf poses the possibility of a dramatic prose. This thesis explores how far Woolf was to realise this possibility.

Building on a small body of extant scholarship, the thesis reveals Woolf’s lifelong engagement with various forms of dramatic activity and suggests various ways in which those activities shape her innovations to the prose medium. Its focus is therefore not so much on the finished products of Woolf’s published prose works as on the processes, or practices, which she carries out in the course of composing them. Read closely, these practices reveal Woolf’s published works to be the products not simply of her individual ‘genius’, but more complexly of a varying and interwoven assortment of interlocutory and collaborative activities.

The introduction reads ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ alongside other essays by Woolf on drama to establish first what Woolf means by the terms ‘drama’, ‘dramatic’, and ‘dramatic prose’. Chapter 1 examines Woolf’s diarising as a form of rehearsing, and argues with reference to the work of Constantin Stanislavsky that Woolf practises the writing of fictional characters in her diary. Chapter 2 considers Woolf’s reputation as a famed ‘talker’ and posits, with reference to the work of Jacques Copeau and Michel Saint-Denis, that Woolf would improvise characters when in conversation with family and friends. Chapter 3 reads Bloomsbury’s theatricals as parts and products of a continuous performance practice which exists outwith its textual record, and argues that Woolf’s play Freshwater (1923; 1935) can be read in this context not as a side project, but rather as a major work through which Woolf’s development of theatrically influenced, collaboratively constituted literary forms can be traced.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Emma Sutton (Supervisor)